2020 Coloring Flounder

Wow! It seems like just a few days ago I was talking about Ferrebeekeeper’s 10th anniversary, but I guess that was actually back at the beginning of April…  back in the world before the quarantine.  Anyway, in that long-ago post, I mentioned that Ferrebeekeeper’s 2000th blog entry is coming up (if you can believe it) and we would celebrate with some special posts, pageantry, and little treats.  Boy I really failed to follow up on that, and now today’s post is already our 1999th…

But there is still plenty of time for a Ferrebeekeeper jamboree (“jamboreekeeper”?)! Let’s start the festivities today with a special gift for you: a free flounder PDF for coloring:

2020 Coloring Flounder with Invaders

If you don’t feel like downloading the PDF, there is the black and white drawing right up at the top of today’s post.  It features a timely flounder for 2020–a big invader flounder with dead black eyes and a pitted lifeless surface of desiccated craters and impact marks.  Upon the flounder are alien shock troops…or maybe cyborgs? (…or maybe they are more familiar political militia). Space seeds and mysterious cardioids float down from the night sky onto a writhing landscape of burning Gothic cloisters, ruined mechanized battle equipment, and little refugees (and wriggling, beached flatfish of course ).

In some ways, this chaotic picture is not what I wanted for a celebration (where is the lavish garden party flatfish PDF already?), but in other deeper ways it is perfect for this moment of international floundering. Anyhow, you didn’t really want to color more ribbons, jewels, and roses did you?  Well maybe you actually don’t want to color at all, but if you do break out your pencils and crayons, send me a jpeg of your efforts at wayneferrebee@gmail.com and we will post a little disaster gallery! And, as always, keep tuning in! There is more excitement for our big MM celebration…or there will be, as soon as I dream it up…

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Losar

Happy Losar!  No—I didn’t hurl a confusing insult at you–today is the Tibetan New Year Festival “Losar.” Although it is putatively a Buddhist version of the Chinese New Year, Losar predated the arrival of Buddhism in Tibet and it is on a somewhat different place in the calendar than Chinese New Year. According to scholars, the festival traces its origin back to a late winter/early Spring incense festival of the ancient Bon religion (which has so indelibly colored the Buddhism of Tibet).

Losar is also known as Shambhala day to adherents of Tibetan practices who believe it should feature mindfulness exercises and meditation (as well as other spiritual rituals and self-care practices).  As with Chinese New Year, there are elemental animals which represent every year: and they are more-or-less the same as in the Chinese calendar, but with a different flavor. For example, instead of calling this year, “the year of the fire rooster.’ Tibetans call it “the Year of the firebird” which is the same…and yet oddly different.

Losar began on Monday February 27^th and ends March 1^st, so enjoy it while it lasts and enjoy the year of the Fire rooster/Fire Bird.

Patriotic Turkeys

Patriotic Turkey Wearing Stars (by AnthroAnimals from Zazzle)

I promised a Fourth of July post, but one of my old friends came back to New York for a weekend after a decade abroad, so there was catching up to do (plus eating cherries and watching decorative explosions in the sky) and I missed writing a post.  The recollections of erstwhile times reminded me that this blog has changed quite a bit too–we used to feature a lot more posts about turkeys–magnificent American fowl which dominate the poultry-yard, the dinner table, and the month of November,  I decided to present a retro-post of patriotic turkeys as a belated Independence celebration–the founders never really meant for Independence to be celebrated on the fourth–so maybe we can respect their wishes with these star-spangled red-white-and-blue birds.  Happy July.  It doesn’t get better than enjoying some decorative birds in summertime!

Any purists who are tutting disapprovingly about how turkeys should stay in their lane ought to be reassured that I will blog about them plenty when November rolls around. I’m really fond of the big galoots!

Countdown to One Thousand

Ferrebeekeeper is quickly coming up on its 1000^th post (this one, which you are reading is the 990^th). Before we get to the thousandth post, we’re going to have a special top ten countdown to look back at some of the highlights of all the topics we have covered so far. Then I’ll write something really super special for the millennial post! After that, it will be Halloween-time, which always features some of our best material…so it’s going to be a great autumn! However, before we get to these thrilling special events and celebrations, I wanted to address some of the issues raised by this blog and also ask the readers a few questions.

Most importantly, what is the purpose of this blog…or any blog? I actually started writing Ferrebeekeeper merely because a friend set it up for me. Also my blog-hero Andreas Kluth (who has seemingly stopped writing his blog, now that his book is published) recommended blogging as a way to organize one’s thoughts, feelings, and creative impulses. Ferrebeekeeper has 29 topics (you can see them right there to the left) and I try to write about one of them each day. Sometimes I can combine several—like when I write about Chinese snake art, or Ancient Egyptian bee-crowns. Those are happy days! Other days I can’t think of anything that fits any of the listed topics—so I write something random and chuck it under “uncategorized.”

So I started this blog to share interesting and meaningful things with you–and that is still my wish. I want to use it to push forward my ideas about art, science, and human progress. I also want to keep this blog exciting and relevant—and growing. Yet now I am also stumbling about accidentally on the threshold of a career in journalism. Writing articles a certain way in exchange for money is causing me to reassess the purpose and future directions of Ferrebeekeeper. The media world has been changing with vertiginous rapidity. Sadly, for someone who is a technophile with dreams of space colonization, I have minimal web-savvy—so I didn’t get into the blogging game until the golden age of blogs had passed. Yet the idea of blogs is uniquely powerful and democratic. Ferrebeekeeper is a sort of one-person magazine about life, art, science, and history. Yet when one compares it to a real magazine, the differences become abundantly clear. Magazines are made to make money. They are large corporate entities with marketers, logisticians, and advertisers (in addition to all of the artists, writers, and editors who make the content).

Instead of a whole team of highly paid artists, illustrators, writers, editors, marketers, and photographers working together to churn out exciting highly produced content, there is just me in my pajamas trying to create a daily post [editor’s note; he doesn’t actually have pajamas…or, for that matter, an editor]. I do the best I can, but some days the research does not pan out and the topic ends up a bit flat (like, erm, cough, this bland post about the color viridian).

Of course a few blogs (or tumblers or twitter accounts or whatever) are making it big. If you specialize, you can sell to special advertisers. My friend always tells the story of his cousin the Korean food blogger who was able to retire from her day job of being trapped in a beige cubicle. All she does now is write about delicious Korean food every day as sponsors fight each other to giver her money! Can you imagine?

 

Argh! Why didn’t I write about Korean food?

But I suppose the point of writing a blog isn’t to seek out wealth and fame (which is what twitter and reality TV are for). Instead I write this blog to explore the world (the universe?) in two ways. The first and most obvious is that I have to find out something every workday and write about it. Some posts, like the ones about parthenogenesis, brown dwarf stars, or alternation of generations are especially interesting and challenging. I am forced to learn all sorts of new things to write effectively about science, history, and geography. However, even the rapidly slapped together “list” posts of mollusk mascots or gothic clocks offer precious and unexpected insights into what is beautiful, intriguing, and meaningful. There have been points where I felt like everything was going to come together in some amazing epiphany–Chinese painting, turkeys, invaders, art, astronomy, and history would all become the same thing and I would understand the world. That larger understanding of how everything fits together always ends up eluding me, yet writing helps me try to weave wildly disparate threads of knowledge into a coherent weltanschauung.

The second way that this blog allows me to explore the world is through the readers who are always making unexpected connections, or asking questions. Since I can not travel the globe in person, I do so through this blog. Intelligent people from all sorts of different countries have written comments to me (and, according to the analytics tool, even more of you are reading). I am poor at quickly responding to people’s submissions, but I always try to respond cogently.  Please keep writing comments!  I know that wordpress makes it hard to respond, but I really esteem your input.

I guess the point of this blog is you–the readers! Of course, like all writers, I want to be read and to reach more like-minded souls! The fact that someone is actually reading Ferrebeekeeper is what makes it different from being a diary or a weird set of notes. I am constantly thinking about how I can make this effort more appealing while not selling out and using misleading click-bait to write about worthless celebrities.

Although Katy Perry always manages to sneak in somehow.

It comes down to this paradox. This blog is not about selling something (although I guess WordPress sometimes puts ads on it), yet I do want it to be better and reach more people—which involves selling myself more effectively. What can I do to improve? How can I make this space better for you? Please write to me with your concerns, suggestions, and comments.  Working together, we can make the next thousand posts even more astonishing and beautiful!

Fireworks!

Happy Birthday to the United States of America!

In past years we have celebrated Independence Day with an historic picture gallery, possible national animals, and an essay concerning the lackluster national mascot, Uncle Sam. This year, let’s return to the basics: recreational explosives, or, as they are more commonly called “fireworks”. Blowing things up artistically in the sky has been the preferred method of celebrating this nation’s birthday since the 18^th century.

Fireworks were first made in China, but today they are almost entirely manufactured in, um, China. As such, Chinese symbols and names are a big part of fireworks. This is lucky for ferrebeekeeper since snakes, poultry, bees, wasps, flowers, and badass mammals like tigers, cats, and wolves are mainstay names for mass produced fireworks.

I live in Brooklyn, and I can’t buy fireworks (much less light them off). Nevertheless the best part of fireworks is looking at the packages and fantasizing about the awesomeness which is just a spark away. Here is a gallery of firework packages which fit in Ferrebeekeeper’s topics array. Bees and birds are the best represented since not only do they fly but they are also beautiful and dazzling. I especially like the egg-laying hens which shoot exploding “eggs” out of their tail feathers. Unsurprisingly there are plenty of flowers, snakes, tigers, and hissing cats, but I was surprised to find pine trees, crowns, and octopus fireworks. Naturally outer space was featured, yet sadly there were no fireworks named for gods of the underworld (although I did find some “banshees”, which almost count).

 

Wow! I’m sorry we can’t wait for dusk and light these all off, but local laws prohibit that (as does the nature of reality). Enjoy the colorful exploding anemones in the sky at your local show and have a lovely weekend of feasting and drinking with your family and friends (and, for my international readers, I guess just keep savoring the world cup…your own national fireworks celebrations should be just around the corner).  Fireworks remind everyone that life is brief and it isn’t safe, but it is beautiful and amazing!

Huzzah!