ghost cheetah

moth, ghost

When I was a kid I had a deathly fear of moths. I had seen an episode of a Twilight Zone-type horror TV serial in Hong Kong, in which a moth, possessed by the vengeful ghost of a murder victim, haunted its/her murderer. I have no memory of how the haunting worked in the plot - especially given the physical limitations of the lepidoptera. All I remember is a backlit close up of a moth at rest with folded, mottled wings, and an eerie female voice-over intoning... something.

Perhaps I don't even really remember that. But for years I hung onto a vague but tenacious belief that moths were so many human spirits in insect form, flitting through the night or, worse, perched silently on one's bedroom walls, nursing some unreadable, malevolent intent.

Also in the flying ghost category: ghost pigeons.

president dog

From the flickr photostream of the comic artist and illustrator Andrice Arp.

in the spirit of the inauguration

Courtesy of the hubster, a bit of fun with Paste Magazine's obamacon generator.

dogs of tongli

A few random pictures of dogs we encountered in Tongli, an old canal town outside Suzhou that's been turned into a "living museum" type tourist site. A large banner at the entrance to the city announces itself as one of Ten Most Glamorous (有魅力) Places in China - a rather weird bit of over-exertion that doesn't really jive with the groggy, half-heartedly kitschy feel of the town.

Here's a stray hanging out in front of a tourist shop:


This dog belongs to a shopkeeper who sells cakes and sweets:


A portly little guy on his late morning stroll, keeping clear of us:

sounds of shanghai

Circa 4:00 am, dogs snarling near Nanjing Dong Lu.* Reminds me of my crazy dogs back in the states, safely - but may be not too happily - sheltered in the kennel.

* Link added Dec 31, 2008: serendipitous flickr find, not my pics!

goat, monkey, dog

A happy find from a google image search loosely inspired by the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn's 2007 essay "How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Nature and the Politics of Interspecies Engagement":


Kohn's elegant and brilliant article is about conceptions of animal sentience among the Runa people of Ecuadorian Amazon, especially Runa beliefs in the profound, intricately textured awareness that different non-human species - for example, dogs and pumas, dogs and agoutis - have of each other. The article abstract is here. I think I searched for "dog" and "Ecuadorian Amazon" and this photo came up.