Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 7

messages everywhere

Today it was the laundry basket's secret code that I felt tempted to decipher:

[image error]

It's like writing you see in a dream and then struggle to write down as you wake up.

I went for a walk in the woods on New Year's Day with wakanomori--our destination was a beaver pond. It was late: we had to walk briskly to get there and back before dark. On our way we met an older man coming in the opposite direction. He had a polished, painted walking stick. I admired it, and he said he'd painted it himself--the moo...

Donal Trom y Greg Abbott ... en Leticia Colombia?!

It's been quite a while since I posted twice in one day, but one of my friends in Leticia sent me these, and they were too good not to share.

[image error]

[image error]

comments

seen along the way

Yesterday I was walking to the post office, and I came across one of those plushie reindeer antlers that people put on their cars as a seasonal decoration. It was lying by the side of the road.

"Either the car was a male, shedding late, or a female, shedding very early," I mused. [Reindeer antler facts here ! Learn the truth behind the social media posts!]

Later I passed a small silver glint. A dime.

"Hey! Hey!" the dime called. "You're just going to walk by and leave me here, as if I were a PENN...

The meaning of life for a male anglerfish

sovay linked me to a story from 2012, "Aquatica," by MC Clark, in which a male anglerfish's effort to avoid his own biological drive and the blandishments of a female anglerfish lead to profound conversations. Really gripping story that creates a full, meaningful vision of the anglerfish life cycle--which is one of those life cycles that seems really alien from a mammalian point of view. It's easy to sympathize with the male anglerfish's desire to outrun biological determinism, but it's not mere...

intangible cultural heritage

UNESCO has conferred the status of intangible cultural heritage on casabe, flatbread made from cassava. It was nominated by several countries of the Caribbean including Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Honduras ... but I remember fondly from Leticia, Colombia. ( link .... but I just heard the story on NPR, so later this evening you can go there, too.)

The Ticuna word for casabe is dowü.

Here are some photos of my tutor's mom kindly letting me help with making one. You can make it with grated cassava, wh...

at the supermarket

The cashier was friendly, chatting with people as they came through. The woman ahead of me was buying just icing in a squeezy tube--two tubes of it.

"You decorating cookies? I love decorating cookies!" the cashier said. The customer allowed as to how she had a special recipe for cookies that used cake batter, and yes, she'd be decorating them, and the cashier seemed genuinely thrilled to hear it.

This cashier, she was quite pretty. She wasn't super young--not a high school student or a college-age...

variations in the Anglosphere

The ninja girl has been teaching English in Japanese public schools for ten years now. She's got an American mother (me) and an English father (Wakanomori), and she's lived in both places, though primarily in the United States. It means she's familiar with words and songs and games from both England and the United States... but native English-speaking English teachers in the Japanese schools come from other parts of the Anglosphere as well, and it can make for interesting conversations when they...

Wednesday reading and to-reads

I'm reading too many things to do them all justice, and then interrupting them with other things, but the things I've spent most time with are

--More of Life Is Not Useful, by Ailton Krenak. The first essay was good; I felt more at sea in the second and now the third--I can't quite follow the logic of where he goes all the time, and sometimes there are jargonish phrases that I don't get. Even so, there are moments I like very much.

This, for instance, is both serious but also amusingly expressed:...

kittens doing kitten things

Only these cats are doing kitten things in the heart of the Amazon. The video was sent to me by my friend and tutor--she said I could share it. The Siamese cat is the mother, Mia. The white kitten is her adoptee, named Squiper. The black one is Luna, and the tabby is Anastasia. Apologies for the blurriness; for some reason it got formatted large-style rather than phone-style.



comments

Two remarkable (longish) short stories

I don't read half as much as I'd like to, but now and then things spur me to read something and then wow! Amazed and delighted.

The first is a novelette in the December 2024 issue of Clarkesworld: "Lucie Loves Neutrons and the Good Samarium," by Thoraiya Dyer. It's an intimate story about a lesbian couple, Lucie and Izzy, both scientists (respectively from Tahiti and Australia, but living in France), and Miron Król, the Polish astronaut who fathers their baby. A nuclear war is going on in Europe...