baboons

An image from A Journey around My Skull, a wonderful blog on illustrated books I recently discovered via twitter. More where this came from...

more on dogs and the post

Re: post below: how did I manage to forget about the legendary dogs-and-cats like antagonism between canines and mailmen? That puts a whole new spin on things!

dog as social media?

My stamp-collecting father wanted to visit the National Postal Museum while we were in DC last weekend, so we went! (By the way I would recommend the place for kids - and for kidlike adults.) For some strange reason, though I often feel like my life depends on e-mail, facebook, and now (maybe) twitter, I haven't thought much about - or have simply forgotten - the social and affective dimensions of good old regular mail.

Affect and sociality are very much front and center at the museum. The poem engraved above the entrance makes it pretty unmistakable:

Messenger of Sympathy and Love
Servant of Parted Friends
Consoler of the Lonely
Bond of the Scattered Family
Enlarger of the Common Life

* Evidently this is only half the poem - the rest is here

So, the mail is like... dogs? Indeed dogs are everywhere in the museum: from the various incarnations of Owney the official USPS mascot (in bronze, in kid's books, as stuffed animal, and just plain stuffed!) to canine figurines in a cute postal diorama. I don't have anything smart or interesting to say about this curious conjuncture of mail and dogs, but will keep thinking about it. In the meantime, some images that caught my eye:

animal - technology

I happened to be looking through the comics artist Anders Nilsen's blog (as compensation for not having read nearly enough of his print work), and came upon this eerie and beautiful image by his friend and collaborator Todd Baxter:

The encounter Baxter stages here - between the curious, gently nudging tapirs and the somewhat ridiculous shipwrecked astronauts, lumbering around with their age-of-plastic milk crate - reminded me of the recent finale of Battlestar Galactica, where space-age humans also find themselves, unexpectedly, in the midst of wild animals. But of course, I mean "reminder" only in the sense that Baxter's diorama is an elegant counter-example to the absurdly unreconstructed, colonial safari vision that BSG foisted upon us.

Here's another image I found on Baxter's own website:


Revised March 29, 2009, 2:21pm EST.

they have a plan

In its series finale, Battlestar Galactica revealed itself to be Journey of Man...

... and Out of Africa:


Here I thought the final season of BSG would be about letting go of old illusions - nationalist, civilizationalist, humanist - and about the difficult but necessary work of building a new society - one that would be human, cylon, hybrids thereof - from the rubble of mutual all-out war. Up until the end I thought the show was sticking to its guns: with the almost socialist-realist backdrop of 6's and 8's calking Galactica together with cylon resin; with the restructuring of political representation from the 12 colonies to the ships in the fleet, which also means the inclusion of cylons in the political process; with Adama ordering an altruistic mission to rescue the Pearl-like cylon-human child Hera from the bad (ethnic-absolutist) cylons. But no!

poodle ESP

An irresistible photo: from the archives of Duke Parapsychology Laboratory, now Rhine Research Center, subject of an interesting-sounding recent book.

RIP John Hope Franklin, 1915-2009

Duke has a nicely put-together memorial site that documents Dr. Franklin's life and work. The photo here is by Derek Anderson, from this 2007 Independent Weekly article.

Updated with water-marked image 3/29/09