Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 161

An ax wight

Ax wights look like skinny six-year-olds, dressed all in dried leaves or cobwebs or bark or discarded plastic bags or bits of cloth. They may have belts made of bits of chrome or old reflective tape or broken mirrors. More salient than any of those details, though, is the giant AX they carry around. Ax wights hang around on forest paths. When hapless hikers come wandering by, an ax wight will ask them rapid-fire and random questions, such as "Do you like raccoons?" and "How far do those train...

Greetings from the Jurassic era

Greetings from genus Equisetum, happily existing on planet Earth from 200 million years ago to the present. "You young whippersnappers with your 'seeds' and your 'flowers' and what-not, when all a body needs is a few good spores. Right, mosses?" The mosses nod in sporific validation.





And speaking of spores, there was an interesting thing on BBC radio the other day about a guy who grows fungal furniture. Here's an article on what has to be the same guy. The furniture is... well, about what I'd...

A chance to watch "Alias Ruby Blade"

A while ago I blogged about the movie Alias Ruby Blade, about the clandestine activity of Kirsty Sword Gusmão in aid of the Timorese resistance during Indonesia's occupation of East Timor. The film is at the Tribeca film festival right now, and you can watch it for free! I'm watching as I type. (Well, I've paused it to type this, actually. But the first five minutes are looking excellent.)

To watch it, you have to create a Tribeca account. If you click on this link for the film, it will tell y...

It's difficult, but it's real

That's a paraphrase from a line in from Taylor Swift's song "Love Story." (Yes! Taylor Swift. True fact: first time I heard the song, I listened with bated breath because I didn't know how it was going to end. I cheered when it ended up with a happy ending. The actual line is, "This love is difficult, but it's real.")

Difficult, but real. I like real, and it makes me even like difficulty. Real is so present, so tangible, so experiential. I'm not talking about gritty-grotty depressing "realist...

Submissions to Not One of Us

Here I'm rebroadcasting sovay 's repost of lesser_celery , the editor of Not One of Us. It really is an excellent magazine.

This is just to signal-boost lesser_celery's recent post: Not One of Us aten't dead, it just had a website glitch for a week. Please re-send all submissions or queries from April 9th through 16th. And then send work no matter what, because they are an excellent magazine.

An assortment of thoughts and pictures

Daffodils are out. I sent this photo to a friend who is studying for her finals.



Then this morning, for some reason, the sign below struck me as hilarious. Context is everything, I guess, but even within the context of this town, to see the sign, you have to be coming from one of the few sections of town that are actually more "thickly settled" than the portion of town you're about to enter. LOL. What the sign really means to say is, "Caution, Weeping Willows"




Figure of speech or amusement par...

Do you have a story for this badger?

Can you tell me a brief story about this badger?

Two other Things from the trip

These come in different mood flavors, so you can take your pick. Humorous good-natured, or oooh, get your mad on.


We were at the McDonald's at the Blandford rest stop on the Massachusetts Turnpike, and I was waiting to pick up food, which is to say, I was lingering at one end of the counter, enjoying the people going up to order and the people so patiently and efficiently filling their orders (it was a good day all around for that: the McDonalds was fully staffed, the people who were working a...

solar array

A nearby town capped its landfill some years ago. It's sat there, an ominous, unusable green plain, with ominous-looking ventilation pipes (like this--they always make me think of rearing snakes) sticking out of it.

Recently, though, it's been transformed. Now its surface is covered by shiny scales, designed to capture sunlight and store it for later use generating energy. Super cool.



Living in the future here...

mango feasting

We practice the Zeno's paradox approach to chores, whereby any chore is divided into an infinite number of subchores and therefore never gets done. Take emptying the compost pot from under the sink. We have a compost bin in the backyard, but rather than take the compost pot directly to the bin, we often (okay, I often) just stick it on the deck when it's full. "I'll take it down later," I say. Sometimes a couple of compost pots end up sitting on the deck accusing me, before finally I ferry th...