Speaking of refrigerator magnets, daughter Isabel has a fresh crop of Isabel's Copper Refrigerator Magnets ready for the holiday season.

We have quite a few of them ourselves. In fact last year, Isabel gave me a set of her magnets with one for each of my book titles; they're mixed in with the others. These little guys are holding up the plot diagram of Mathematicians in Love formerly known as Crazy Mathematicians.

I'll be getting back to my novel that soon, but meanwhile I'm revising my Lifebox tome. Actually, revising is somewhat dull and stressful, so I'm in fact blogging, and now the sun's coming out, so maybe I'll go for a bike ride. When you're revising, you're facing the gap between what you dreamed of doing and what you actually ended up with.

Great wind and rain last night. When we first moved to California, I was surprised to hear people call this kind of weather a “storm”. The temperature drops to 50 and you get half an inch of rain. Whoah! Not like the twister suckin' the steeple right offen a church like in this newspaper photo hyar. The woman's hair is nicely gnarly, no? You're seeing her from the back, and a stray vortex is pulling the loose hair up. If we could see air currents, we'd be so amazed.

That sideways picture on the fridge is an image of a canvas by our friend Ronna Schulkin Pearce.

And, as long as I'm pitching things, surely your holiday gift list should include a copy of Frek and the Elixir, my best book ever? Here's a typical satisfied reader…

Yesterday we went to a tea party given by some of Sylvia's co-workers and friends. I dressed up like a professor — I'm thinking Alan Turing in the faculty locker-room here.

And I drank a lot of tea. (Picture from a Celestial Seasonings refrigerator magnet — every object is bloggable!)

I switched from coffee to tea about a year ago, and have come to really enjoy it. Hard to get a good cup in a restaurant, obviously Lipton's has nothing to do with it, but even if you get the good bags, its tricky having the right amount and temperature of water. Making tea is a somewhat alchemical process. But when you get it right you can kind of taste the caffeine. It tastes like electricity.

I get that line from a scene in William J. Craddock's 1960s San Jose novel, Be Not Content, where they're eating brownies with LSD in them and one of the characters named Baxter says he can taste the acid, it tastes like electricity, and the narrator remarks, “We should haver realized this was a bad sign,” and then Baxter goes into a hideous freakout. I can't find the book right now, it's somewhere in my house, I paid a pretty penny to get a used copy last year. Well, when it turns up, I'll blog it.

And now back to revising The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.

Ever since this summer, my novel Master of Space and Time has been under option for a movie directed by Michel Gondry starring Jack Black. This book had nice covers in both the hardback edition

and paperback editions.

It's out of print now, but a new edition with yet another great cover will be out soon from Thunder's Mouth Press, an Avalon imprint.

The movie is by no means a done deal; neither my agent Marty Shapiro nor I have heard anything new about it for months. But I’m thinking of it today because I got a link to Charles Eicher’s blog where he’s ruminating about the possible deal and speculating about my thoughts, it was flattering, but it felt odd reading it.

Meanwhile I’m laboring on a revision of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. I though it was done, but now after setting it aside for two months and coming back to it, I’m seeing it needs a lot of polish, and am a little uptight about how much work I have left.

Today Rudy, Jr., and his friend Penny stopped by, along with Rudy’s dog Slug. Penny rented a van to move some of her stuff. I love how the flash make’s Slug’s eyes look.

This pose of Slug’s is called Prairie Dog.

Sylvia and I went down to the annual Los Gatos Christmas Parade, a cozy event where pretty much anyone who wants to can form a group and march or drive down the main street.

Some guys who call themselves the Los Gatos Camel Herders — I think it's that old Mason/Shriner thing of enjoying dressing up in Eastern garb, in other words, these guys are probably not Moslems. Do people in the mid East ever have parades where they dress up like Westerners?

The Bubble Angels under I forget what aegis.

Los Gatos Meats, which is place that will butcher up your deer meat for you, had a float with some reindeer on it, reminding me of those pigs in chef’s hats that you see all over the South. I wrote a story called “The Men In The Back Room At The Country Club,” about a guy who becomes a kind of pig-chef, cooking humans for aliens, and it is supposed to appear in Infinite Matrix some day.

And some born-again types, even in yup Los Gatos. I looked up John 3:16 to see if it has anything to do with camping, but no, it doesn’t. Would you go in this tent?

Is a minister who pressures his flock to vote for an anti-human regime really any different from a deer who leads his fellows into a slaughterhouse? Budda-boomp.

Aw, I promised myself I wouldn't talk about politics in here, and just listen to me. Maybe the minister of the church with this tent-float is a really good guy, you never know. And certainly it's nice to have God in your heart, yes. But, look, when I go camping, I want trees and streams. Nature is, after all, the cosmic ur-religion, all on her own. Hail Gaia!

Today’s big news is that my San Jose State University computer science student Harry Fu has gotten three-dimensional Belousov-Zhabotinsky-scroll cellular automata (3D BZ CAs for short) working for his Master’s degree writing project.

Way to go, Harry. Nobody’s ever seen three-dimensional CAs before except on supercomputers or using special hardware, especially not 3D BZ CAs, and our man Fu has these mofos working as a Java applet running Open GL!!!

Note the spontaneously forming scrolls. The first 3D BZ CA picture shows a 3D version of the Hodgepodge Rule, and this one is the 3D Winfree Rule.

Gnarly much? Live mushrooms, vortices, jellyfish.

So how can you, too, run Fu’s applet? I’ve updated these links on March 12, 2011. You can go to Fu’s Welcome to CA 3D page for an overview.

And then proceed to o Harry Fu’s CA3D download page, which walks you throug three steps

(1) Make sure you have the latest and greatest version of Java, this would be version 6 today. Anyway, go and get the JRE (Runtime Environment) for your Mac or Windows system. You don't need the full developer’s kit, just the JRE.

(2) Get JOGL (Java bindings for Open GL).

(3) Run Fu’s application, ca3D.jar.

Geekin’ OUT! And lovin’ it. You realize, of course, that your brain is a 3D BZ CA?

********

What else I did yesterday.

After meeting with Fu, I walked over to downtown San Ho and skated on this cute rink beneath the palms right beside the Fairmont.

And then I went into the ADMISSION FREE San Jose Art Museum. Frankly, the art there is more interesting to me than anything I saw in Milano. I think spending so much psychic time with Peter Bruegel cured me of feeling like I have to care about religious art at all anymore. But that’s another topic.

Is this great, or what? It’s “Desire for the Other” by Brian Goggin, also the creator of that amazing Defenestration building in San Francisco at Sixth and Howard, with all the furniture jumping out the windows. In this piece we see an airport-lounge-style sofa devouring a wing-back armchair. Note the bulge of its last meal in its gut.

This last picture shows a piece by Tony Oursler, a really slimy looking object, it’s a curvy fiberglass shape with a video of eyes and mouth projected onto it, the mouth is babbling. In general I despise art that makes noise in a museum, as IMHO it’s unfairly detracting from the many silent works here. But other than being noisy, this is a really cool work.

Of course it would be gnarlier if it used 3D BZ CAs. If they ever make a movie of one my WARE books, I really hope they use 3D BZ CA projections for the bodies of the boppers.