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Happy April Fool’s Day! Welcome back! (Or maybe, actually, you should be saying that to me). Regular readers will recognize that Ferrebeekeeper went on a little blogging sabbatical during the winter of 2023 and has been MIA these last 3 months. What happened? Is this blog done for? And, if not, where are we headed now?
Well…After a dozen years of blogging, my brain had run out of new content. Also, the world hardly seems to care about blogs or flounder paintings or aesthetic essays. To be honest, the constant drumbeat about how much better AIs are at making art and writing essays has filled my heart with unease and unhappiness. My blog is a devotional sacrament to the Goddess Athena. I certainly don’t make any money off of it. If making it feels like a chore, then what is the point?
But then I read some of this vaunted AI content and looked at some of this art which is so much better than human art. The computers definitely have some skills (particularly at digital art which they can churn out even faster than RISDI students popping caffeine pills), but the tone, themes, and overall gist are incoherent. Maybe Dan Claymore’s robot-run false paradise is still a long way away. Additionally, the human-created websites which are flourishing, are even more problematic. I can’t hide under my bed feeling sorry for myself while FOX, Reddit, and lying “influencers” have the final say in human affairs. So…here we are back again.
This is actually the 13th anniversary of Ferrebeekeeper (Here is the confusing and contradictory first post, in case you want to start there and read straight through the subsequent 2,256 posts between there and here). As with my very first post, this new post doesn’t say very much…but it says I will be posting more things here again. We will talk about A.I and politics then. For now, enjoy the spring day (but don’t take any wooden nickels or open any cans of spring snakes).
Happy Winter Solstice! I am sorry about 2022. I meant to blog more, and answer everyone’s comments, and write a consolidated treatise defending liberalism against the neo-fascists who are everywhere, and post my new monastic orchid illuminations, etc., etc., etc. Alas, not everything got done the way I wanted and now it is the darkest night of the year (the real end of the year, in my book, although I guess there is a week or so of Saturnalia before 2023 truly gets here according to the calendar).
We will work on all of this next year (and much more besides) but before sending the year off, I wanted to share some pictures of my sacred tree of life (an annual tradition). Look! it has even more cephalopods, turkeys, waterfowl, and ancient mammals (plus all of the animals I could get my hands on from every other branch of the great zoological family tree too).
My flounder art (sigh) was about trying to reposition the natural world at the center of what humans find sacred: the religions of Abraham treat the natural world as contemptible–and we are all suffering because of it. Sadly, the fish gods I made did not grab people’s attentions despite their portentous deep-sea secrets. However a few holiday guests have stared at the holiday tree of life for a looooong time before brushing away some tears–so perhaps it actually does get the point across to some degree.
And of course, I saved the best thing for last! My late feline life companion, Sepia (wipes away a few tears of my own) did not enjoy the public eye and so I did not put her in my blog. My present housecat, Sumi Cat, feels much differently and likes to be the constant center of attention. Here are some pictures of her loving little face to help you stave off the primordial darkness (although, ironically, black cats are always hard to photograph and doubly so on the darkest night of the year). Sumi and I hope that you are safe and warm and happy this holiday season! May your dreams come true and may the great tree of life always bloom with fulsome new growth!
We will talk again before 2023, but for now, season’s greetings and good (longest) night!
Oh wow! Finally a whole new year! And it certainly couldn’t come fast enough! Every new year brings big questions, and, after the struggle and strife of the past year, 2021 features even more questions than usual.
That is why, as part of a long-promised rebranding effort, we here at Ferrebeekeeper are re-introducing and relaunching some projects which have thus far only existed in beta version! Most significantly, we would like to introduce….
[lights go out]
[Nereids rattle sistrums]
[Balding Nereus slowly beats enormous drum atoll as a mermaid’s keening song pervades the salty air]
[the world goes completely silent and then fireworks explode like enormous magenta and aqua jellyfish. Triton blows a blast on his conch as Poseidon strikes a huge gong]
Behold! The Great Flounder reborn!
Uh, here is the link!
If you follow that link, you will arrive at the new site of The Great Flounder Oracle, an online oracle who knows all of the secrets of the primordial depths! Merely write down the innermost queries of your secret heart and the ancient behemoth of the briny depths will answer with terrifying truths of the watery abyss*
And not only can the Great Flounder provide access to otherwise unknowable wisdom, if you follow the link at the bottom you can visit my online web gallery, and ultimately reach a greater trove of ancient wisdom…this very blog! (kudos to you, by the way, for getting in on the ground floor). Ferrebeekeeper is attempting to amalgamate the various creative and journalistic endeavor closer together into an amalgamated media portfolio (is this a concept? probably?) Expect to see more artwork here in the near future (yesterday’s large drawing was a start in that direction). Or, if you follow my Instagram or Twitter profiles expect to see more references to eclectic multidisciplinary knowledge!
Too be honest, my mind tends to wander off down apparently random pathways which are revealed to be part of a much larger universal picture only in the fullness of time. Hopefully trying to anneal my creative efforts together, will make that picture larger and brighter rather than occluding it beneath the seafloor sands!
Whatever the case, I need all of your help to make this web community even better and so please, please provide your comments and ideas in the space below. Every year my new year’s resolution is to reply faster and more comprehensively to comments (which are the life’s blood to a writer) and every year I fall short of my desires, but not this year! This year I really will make it happen! Let me know what you think about the new Great Flounder and this site too! [more contests? more free downloads? more disquieting political commentary). YOU be the judge!
And, speaking of you, I wanted to again thank you for coming back here again and again. You really are the best reader I could ever hope for! Best wishes for a safe and happy new year! Together we can piece it all together and finally launch off to a glorious and magnificent future worth having!
Happy 2021! I will see you here again on Monday and we can start sorting out the direction of this terrifying albeit promising new calendar.
[*or the closest approximation which computer programming and hack fortune writing can provide.]
Thank you to everyone who played our celebratory contest! I hope you had fun looking at the images and thinking about what they are or where they are. We will quickly go through the correct answers–or at least we will list my best understanding of what is correct. At the end I will announce the proud winner of these exquisite mint-condition Zoomorphs toys and we can start to fumble towards the logistics of getting you your toys, hooftales…er I mean “mysterious contest winner”.
Wherever possible, I have linked back to original articles and posts, so, if you have a moment and are curious about these strange places and things, why not click all of the links and continue voyaging through vast realms of life, time, and art!
OK, here we go with the answers:
THINGS:
1.
A Song Dynasty (or ‘Sung” Dynasty…if that is how you Anglicize 宋) ewer not wholly unlike this one or these later Mongol ewers.
2.
A parasitoid fairy wasp (Mymaridae family) upon a human hand
3.
A Melo Pearl, the world’s rarest and most expensive type of pearl!
4.
Whoah! It’s an ancient Visigoth votive crown from the fabled treasure of Guarrazar!
5.
A Chiton, the armored mollusk
6.
Aww! It’s an adorable school of tiny little glass catfish.
7.
Roses, tulips, irises and other flowers in a wicker basket, with fruit and insects on a ledge (Balthasar van der Ast, ca 1614-1619) oil on panel. (Here is a Ferrebeekeeper post about Van der Ast).
8.
The Cap of Monomach, a treasure of the early tsars. I still think Putin wears it sometimes. Hell, he’s probably wearing it right now!
9.
It is the brain of an Etruscan shrew, arguably the smallest mammal. The arrows point to the trigeminal nerve (black arrows) and optic nerve (blue arrows).
10.
Hahahaha! These are Polish chicken chicks. Look at that expression! The poor li’l guy does look a bit down.
11.
A lituus, a mysterious Roman divination device.
12.
The underworld deity Xolotl, the scrofulous salamander deity of Aztec mythology’s weird death realm.
13.
The “Borghese Vase” a colossal Ancient Roman Urn which was one of the treasures of the Garden of Sallust
PLACES:
1.
The Faroe Islands (Photo by Tom Glancz)
2.
A Masai giraffe walking by Lake Manyara Tanzania
3.
Standard Poodles in the Ohio Valley
4.
The Halászbástya in Budapest. Hungarians have such amazing statues!
5.
A welwitschia plant in the Namib Desert
6.
The Giant Wild Goose Pagoda of Xi’an, Shaanxi. I need to write a post about this one in the future!
7.
Ovid Among the Scythians (Eugène Delacroix, 1862) Oil on Canvas
I find it strange that this fantasy piece about Scythians (and poets) was painted during the American Civil War.
8.
Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania
9.
The world’s largest potash fertilizer plant at Lop Nur, China
10.
The Planet Venus, sans clouds. Sigh…someday…
11.
The Armenian cemetery in Julfa, Azerbaijan…desecrated and bulldozed in the 1990s
12.
A colossal snake swimming in the Trans-Saharan Seaway of Mali during the Eocene
13.
The Site of Eridu, humankind’s first known city.
I can’t believe how well our contestants did! I am not sure I could have identified any of these…and I have written about most of them! There were a few humorous stray answers, but even the answers which weren’t a hundred percent right were still clever and well thought out. Our Ferrebeekeeper mental Olympics thus ends with the following champions:
Gold: hooftales
Silver: Vicki
Bronze: eekee
Everyone is a winner (although Hooftales gets the zoomorphs and the national anthem of the hooftales homeland is currently playing as we wipe away proud tears). I enjoyed putting this together and revisiting these concepts! Should we do another one at some point? Should the images be harder or easier or what? Talk to me below (Hooftales, we will figure out how to get you your prize) and thanks again for playing and, above all, for reading!
Today we feature something completely new for Ferrebeekeeper–a contest! This challenge will test your acumen, breadth of knowledge, and grasp of cultural and biological material. And this is not just for bragging rights (although those are certainly to be had); there is an actual prize–a good one. Hopefully this contest will also simulate the joys of travel and the delight of discovery in this sad & locked-down era.
Here are the rules: below are 13 images of things and 13 images of places. Whoever is first to identify these images most correctly will win the prize–an original, unopened mint-condition box of “Safarimorphs” mix-and-match animal toys which I made when I was a foolish young person who believed that success could be had in America without selling out to a huge monopolistic corporation an entrepreneur. Zoomorphs the company died a hideous death…but not because the toys lacked quality. Even to this day, strangers still hunt me down on the internet trying to find if there are any toys left. [Sean Connery voice] This is one of the very last boxes in existence so think carefully about your answers!
Unfortunately there are some problems with web contests, like Google’s search-by-means-of-image feature (which is for losers, but will probably work). Worst of all, I can’t imagine where to put the answers (my email sometimes plays havoc with unknown incoming messages) so we are going to have to put them in the comments below. If you don’t see your answers at first, don’t worry, I will approve them in the order they come in (assuming you don’t cuss TOO much), but it does mean that other contestants can see your answers too, so consider carefully before posting! Also, there could be multiple right answers–a featureless arid plain could be “The silk road”, or “Kazakhstan” or “a desert” or “The Northern Hemisphere” all of which are right, but some of which are more right. Our highly qualified and morally unimpeachable judges will determine the MOST right answers by means of secret deliberation to which there is no appeal.
The contest ends next Tuesday when I will announce the winner and give my own answers. The number refers to the image immediately below it. Good luck and thank you for playing (and thank you even more for reading). Speaking of reading, there are some hints for a lot of these in Ferrebeekeeper…somewhere in those 2000 posts before last week, so maybe you should browse the archives. OK! Here are the images:
THINGS:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
PLACES:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
You probably know them all already…but at least the images look quite strange and impressive with this white box gallery format. Post you answers below and good luck! Let me know if you have questions and thank you so much for everything.
Welcome dear readers! Happy 2000th post! The number 2000 is special because…uh…[checks notes] it is the largest number you can express with Roman numerals using only two unmodified characters: “MM”. Wow! How about that?
Really though, all kidding aside, the number 2000 is special here solely because of you. Without readers, what would be the point of writing? Even the most lustrous pearl is unremarkable if it is never in the light!
I was going to write a thoughtful post about the future of Ferrebeekeeper–which would really turn out to be an uplifting post about how we can work together to regain some optimistic energy and frame some lofty goals for a brighter future (lately such ideas have been thin on the ground in the ecological, political, and economic dystopia we have crafted for ourselves). Unfortunately (yet perhaps appropriately) my internet connection failed. Comcast came and sort of fixed the problem and told me that using the ancient modem which they rent to me only allows me to access a tiny fraction of the bandwidth they charge $100.00 a month for! As soon as I am done with this post I need to write a complaint to my congressperson about the fact that I live in one of the most densely populated and ethnically diverse neighborhood in the Western hemisphere and yet there is only one (bad) “choice” for broadband.
Anyway, because this post is already late, I am going to save the larger philosophical musings about the future for, um, the future (but the immediate future while we are still celebrating this milestone). To really celebrate the day, here is a gallery of adorable baby animal pictures lovingly hand-stolen from around the internet. That baby otter is especially cute!
Now in the real world maybe I wouldn’t trust that Pallas’ cat kitten with any of these other babies, but fortunately here they are safely held apart by digital means.
Now obviously this is a bit of a softball post so that we can all finish up and go into the garden and enjoy the beautiful June evening while the fireflies are out. Yet in a larger sense this combination of complaining about monopolistic technological hegemony, lauding the beauty of our fellow earth creatures, and then escaping into a paradisaical starlit garden is significant!
What is the significance you might ask? Well I am afraid you will have to keep reading to get the answer! But you should stick around regardless: I promised contests, pageantry, and heartfelt musings to mark this milestone and we are going to have all of those things! Before we get to them though I really want to emphasize how much your attention and comments have meant to me. In our world of millionaires, nanoseconds, and terabytes, a prosaic number like 2000 doesn’t seem like a lot, but writing 2000 miniature (or not-so-miniature) essays makes one appreciate that number afresh. I never would have written so much without you.
Thank you.
And, of course, I will see you back here tomorrow!
Happy April Fish Day! Usually the internet is awash with heart-stopping pranks and false information on April 1st (and every other day, come to think of it…but April Fool’s Day is especially bad), however this year, I am hoping that the pandemic and the quarantine will cause people to tone down their practical jokes a little, especially since we have seen what false information can do!
Joking aside, April Fool’s Day is certainly a very special day here at Ferrebeekeeper! The blog started on this day in 2010. This is the 10th anniversary of posts about snakes, crowns, underworld gods, art, mollusks, and Gothic things. And we have sure had a lot of snake gods and dark squid! Today’s post is post #1959. Pretty soon we will have to have another special anniversary when we get to #2000.
For that 2000th post I will really do things up with guests, pageantry, special events, and prizes! The 10th year anniversary is a bit more solemn though. When I started, everyone was a blogger: great herds of us roamed the internet, bloviating about everything. Yet now I am one of the last of our kind. I feel like a Peter Beagle novel or a CGI dragon voiced by Sean Connery…
I guess everyone else left because they weren’t getting famous or making money with their writing or something, but blogs are not about remuneration! A blog is an obeisance to Athena. Like life, it is a search for meaning, truth, and fellowship.
And writing certainly helps the writer struggle with truth and meaning (although it might not always help the poor reader, and for this I apologize). Even among people who love ideas, thinking is hard. If you had to remember a list of phrases or items you would write them down so that your brain could concentrate on understanding and contextualizing the thing which you were immediately working on. Writing about ideas is like that but in a much larger and more open-ended way. It helps you realize the quest which you didn’t realize you were on. I will write more about this in the weeks to come, because thinking about my favorite things for a decade really has led me to some realizations about the subjects which I care about most…but we will get back to this in subsequent posts!
Additionally, my blog has also led me to fellowship. Over the years, so many people have posted such lucid and fascinating comments and questions. Forgive me if I didn’t respond correctly (or at all–for everyone asking to use images which I don’t own) but I appreciated every comment and I appreciate every reader. It is crazy to think I have friends I know and yet don’t know in Augsburg, Australia, and Alabama. From the streets of Brooklyn to the Drakensberg to the foothills of the Himalayas to Matsumoto there are people all over Earth who are curious about the same things I am! What a gift it is to know that! Likewise, thank you for the priceless gift of your precious time and attention. Thank you all so much.
I don’t have a real post for today, but when we got to a thousand posts I posted a list of the ten most popular posts from among those thousand. For this occasion I am going to selfishly post a list of my favorite posts from the last decade. To be honest I don’t really love hierarchy or numbers, so this isn’t a listicle. In no order, here is a glob of the posts I liked best (perhaps you will notice a hidden theme lurking in them like a hungry flounder hiding among the pebbles and sand dollars…or maybe not).
Anyway…Here is a list of my personal favorite posts
- Otherland
- Mono no Aware
- Fish Dream
- Santa
- Apollo and Marsyas
- The Orange Mirror
- Concerning Fear
- Man and the Animals
- The Little White Parrot
- Good Rats
- Colonies on Venus
- The Undead
Thank you again for everything. Please let me know if you have any complaints, suggestions or [shy blush] compliments for the things you like. We will be back soon with the 2000 post jubilee and, of course, we will be back tomorrow talking about the affairs of the world.
Sincerely,
Wayne
Once again, it is time to head back to the wild forest cwms of my ancestral homeland. I will feed LG some corn, walk the golden fields and green forests, and visit my mother’s kinfolks who dwell on the other side of some truly hospitable mountains. It is going to be lovely. Brooklyn’s urban lifestyle is nonpareil, but sometimes one must escape Flatbush for a bit.
Of course abandoning the old blogstead is not without peril! As soon as Ferrebeekeeper announced these travel plans, economic indicators started blinking red and the market began screaming in protest. Evidently, without Ferrebeekeeper’s weekly posts, the yield curve inverts and the world economy comes undone.
Therefore, I am once again turning over the reins of Ferrebeekeeper to the experienced hands of Daniel Claymore, the great speculative fiction visionary whose now available sci-fi epic stares unblinkingly at the wonders and horrors of our AI future. Perhaps he will elaborate on these dark prognostications in some of his posts, or maybe he will take you back to the fish markets of Tokyo, or to the sketchbook of Japan’s greatest movie director, or to places yet unknown.
At any rate, I am sure he will take you on a soaring journey…of the mind. Also, he will have to bear sole responsible for the world economy for a week. So please give a hearty welcome to Daniel Claymore! Make sure to comment a lot (oh, and please let him know if you have deep connections to the world of science fiction publishing). I will see you in a week!
Happy April Fish Day! The French manifestation of April Fool’s is much nicer than the rather horrid Anglo-Saxon version. There is still room for farcical fun, as friends try to affix colorful paper fish to each other’s backs (although, admittedly, wearing a pretty fish is no substitute for being badly frightened or lightly injured in an American prank).
Anyway, I was thinking about these fish, and it gave me an idea for camouflaged sculptures that blend in with the surroundings. One of the secret strengths of the flatfish (which have become an artistic fixation of mine lately) is that they are capable of changing color to blend in with their habitat. Unfortunately, this is usually a muddy seabed, which never really allows turbot, sole, plaice, and such like flatfish to explore their frivolous fashion side. With this in mind I set about building a flounder mold to make some “crouching turbot…hidden flounder” sculptures. Unfortunately I only managed to craft a handful of prototypes, and I was unable to position them to maximum photographic advantage in the concrete jungles of early Anthropocene Brooklyn (yet). However we can get to that later. Check out these streetfish I made for April Fish Day!
![20190331_190901[1]](https://ferrebeekeeper.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/20190331_1909011.jpg)
I couldn’t find anything made of shiny steel to put that last one on top of, but fortunately my friend and erstwhile roommate Jennifer was wearing some fashionable silver footwear to help the poor fish feel at home!
![20190331_190839[1]](https://ferrebeekeeper.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/20190331_1908391.jpg)
This is just the beginning of this project and we’ll see some more exotic streetflounder in the near future (as soon as I find some more disposable containers for mixing plaster) but in the meantime, happy April Fish Day! Let us revel in the beauty of spring! Additionally, this is the ninth anniversary of the founding of Ferrebeekeeper, an event steeped in mysterious lore. Celebrate the happy occasion by dropping me a line or telling me what you would like to see more of! I, personally would like more comments, and, to that end, I promise I will be better about responding quickly and cogently. Thanks again for everything. My readers are the best!
Don’t change that channel! Long-time readers who glance at the top of the page may erroneously think they have stumbled into a different blog, but nothing could be further from the truth. After many years of happily blogging with our old banner (the inimitable moralizing masterpiece “Beer Street and Gin Lane” by William Hogarth) Ferrebeekeeper is moving to a painting specially made for this blog. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the presence of mind to actually paint the image to fit the strange squashed aspect ratio of WordPress blog banners, so most days you will have to content yourself with looking at a central slice of the full image (click here for larger resolution).
For today though, here is the entire work. You can see some of the various themes of Ferrebeekeeper represented in this strange floating flatfish. A hive of industrious bees works away collecting the pollen from a colorful garden as a gothic angel wielding a farm implement watches from the sky. A stern bee-like woman with a Canadian waterfowl and a garden snail watches the bees work beneath a jeweled crown of gold and a celestial star (which represents astronomy). In the right side of the sky, a pigeon flies up into the clouds (perhaps startled by the green serpent). The central fish hovers above a sunset sea where a Chinese junk sails on to a historical Gothic city (near-future blogging plans include a great deal more writing about metropolises of the past, present, and future).
I omitted my favorite theme “Deities of the Underworld” in favor of the large central flounder itself. As you may have gathered, the flatfish is currently of paramount symbolic import in my work and represents topology, ecology, history, and the ever-changing life cycle. At the more outre range of these meanings, however, the benthic fish is a sort of emissary between the world of life and the dark gods beneath (an interpretation sharpened by humankind’s merciless depredations of the bottom-dwelling fish). The new banner is also an attempt to bring my various pursuits more closely together: a sort of “branding” exercise if you will (I also hope you will kindly forgive this vulgar language borrowed MBA programs–I usually try to speak more coherently and elegantly, but lately I have been feeling somewhat at-sea and I am willing to borrow some terminology and concepts from these execrable rogues). Speaking of cross-branding, you may want to check out the great flounder oracle! Ask it questions, and the sagacious fish answers with the truth of the deep!
I hope you like my new banner. Like most artwork not made on a computer it looks better in the real world, but at least it suits the theme of the blog. As always, let me know what you think and get ready to read more about cities (and maybe see some more enigmatic fish-themed art). Thanks again for reading and I will see you here tomorrow!
ferrebeekeeper 