Salty, Lakey

So the important part first: My sister Kate is going to be reading her story "For Dad" at the National Undergraduate Literature Conference in Ogden, UT. She'll be reading at 10:15am on March 31 at Weber State University. Those of you from the future may remember Kate as the cultural cornerstone of the Singularity, a charismatic force about as important to society as Bill and Ted were to their futures. Those of you stuck here in the present may remember her as Paperboy in my student movie, "Soft for Digging." Those of you in Argentina may remember her hiding in trees and fighting crime (pictured). Those of you in Utah (I'm looking at YOU Jeff's mom...) stop by and hear her, it's a great story.

And now on to the REALLY important part. There's this thing in the world called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. It's a process using pulsed magnetic fields to cause "virtual lesions." It basically shuts down a very specific part of the brain. It can cause mystical / hallucinatory experiences. But even better, it can make you temporarily better skilled at specific tasks. Magnetic beams aimed at your head could give you Rain Man type skills at the casino. They could temporarily improve your drawing skills. We may already live in that Bill & Ted future.

Stanislaw Lem died today.

Be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes.

but how does it taste?

In book news- I've seen the close-to-final draft of the interior pages for "The Squampkin Patch," and they look great. I'm very excited about the flip-book animation along the bottom of the pages.



But more importantly- the discovery of new deep sea monsters continues. Last September, news broke of the first live giant squid captured on video. And now, French divers have discovered an arctic hairy lobster so strange that they had to devise a new genus to classify it under. I can only assume that this is the work of a divine, interventionist force responding to all the recent evolution/ID malarkey. Or that same deity responding to D.F. Wallace's latest collection of essays (I'm imagining Him saying "Consider THIS, smart guy."). In either case, Kiwa Hirsuta, welcome to the world.