My other blog

Eli McMullen (American Artist, born 1992)

"Dusk Fall", 2024.

Acrylic & Gouache on Panel, 6" × 8".

Today's animal of the day is the Blunt-Headed Tree Snake (Imantodes cenchoa)!

Photo credit: Geoff Gallice

Also known as the fiddle-string snake, this species of arboreal snake can be found in the tropical rainforests of Mexico as well as both Central and South America. They can reach a maximum size of 4 ft 11 in long and are known for their long, slender bodies with comically large heads. Their eyes are also incredibly large compared to the rest of their bodies, and take up nearly 26% of their total head space. While this might look really goofy, it actually helps improve their vision significantly compared to other species of snakes, which are known for having very poor eyesight. Most other snakes rely mostly on their sense of smell as well as vibrations to detect predators and prey, but since the blunt-headed tree snake needs to be able to clearly see the branches of the trees it's climbing, they need to have better vision than the average snake. The slitted shape of its pupil even allows it to look down without moving its entire head, which most snakes are unable to do.

Photo credit: Max Hofmann

Blund-headed tree snakes are active mostly at night, which is another reason they need good eyesight, and will forage through the vegetation in search of prey. Their diet consists mostly of lizards, but they'll also often go after frogs and have been known to eat eggs when the opportunity presents itself. Females tend to be larger than males, meaning that they can take on larger prey. Size isn't the only difference between the sexes. In fact, the populations in the north and south actually seem to exhibit two very different types of sexual dimorphism. Northern males tend to have longer tails than southern males and both types of females, while southern females tend to have much larger heads.

Photo credit: Laurent Hesemans

The brick on the building is an old sandmold standard-size flashed burgundy brick and a plain buff mortar in a flush joint. If I were to match these, I would use Belden Brick's Belcrest 740 bricks. Those aren't available in standard size, but the modular size they're made in will work because it's the same height. (Matching size exactly doesn't really matter for columns or other projects where the brick isn't going to be laid directly into the existing brick wythes (in fact, the bricks on the columns are a bit longer and a bit less tall than the bricks on the house)). I'd match the mortar with Heidelberg's Old Colonial, the go-to for matching older structures, from their Flamingo colored mortar series. Heidelberg's premixed Old Colonial could also work.

The brick on the columns is just over 8 inches long and just under 2 1/4 inches tall, so it's a weird size. They may have been "seconds", meaning the factory screwed up and had to sell them at a discount. That would explain the mismatch -- mighta been a 1970s Landlord Special. Nonetheless, they're beautiful bricks. A rusty brown color with ironspot texture ("ironspot" is somewhat literal: the clay and/or shale is mixed with actual flecks of metal, usually manganese these days I think, that melts in the kiln and makes a sort of glaze of freckles on the surface of the brick!), laid with an almost-matching red mortar.

In my AP Art class, there was a girl who was just starting to experiment with mixed media. At this point she was still playing around, trying to decide what direction she wanted to go with her portfolio. So one critique day, she brought in an abstract canvas with some rhinestone highlights and painted and real peacock feathers. She loved sparkles and peacock feathers so she thought she’d try introducing them a *little*. And after everyone had given some input, the teacher gave her his advice, VERY roughly paraphrased here:

“So here’s the thing… I do not like this style. These are just elements that do not speak to me personally, but I see that you like them, and you’re doing interesting things with them.

“My biggest critique is, I only merely *dislike* this piece. I want you to make me HATE it. Go crazy with the things that you like. Don’t hold back trying to make it palatable to people like me. Because I am NEVER going to like it. And if the audience does not like it, it should drive them crazy seeing how much YOU love it.”

Her portfolio was chock full of neon colors and glitter and rhinestones and splashes of peacock feathers and it was a delight. Our teacher despised every piece lol, but she got great marks and I think even won some awards. And more importantly, she was happy and proud of the results. Because she didn’t limit herself by trying to appeal to people who were never going to enjoy what she enjoyed.

So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.

If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)

how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?

I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)

Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:

If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you- even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news... It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin- ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.

Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially

Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain. Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.

-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.

Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:

Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions. August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.

The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process. By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164. Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.

Or, less scholarly:

Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.

By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.

I am writing this because some people have this cute number of people they have slept with that they get to sheepishly disclose at doctor appointments and I can’t. I don’t. Just like I can’t even count the number of times I was molested or raped. This is because from early on I had no idea what was sex and what was assault. This boldface line was fucked up for me when my body did disturbing things like respond with desire to the touches of others that repulsed my head, my heart, and my soul. It was also fucked up by all of y’all—by a society that glorifies rape-trial melodrama: you know, the ones where the victim is put on trial for the actions of their own perpetrator, their own audacity to exist, and the absurdity of the ass-backward criminal justice system.

I am writing this to ask you not to use the term “survivor” or “thriver” around me ever the fuck again. This neoliberal bullshit wherein I am left to clean up someone else’s mess and to make y’all feel better about it.

I am writing primarily though, about a trope, an archetype, a joke that won’t die, a goddamn law in this society: that victims of child sexual assault become sluts and sex workers—especially sex workers. While such arguments have been smartly tackled by queens like Maggie McNeil and Charlotte Shane, I am writing to argue: OF COURSE WE DO.

Of course we swing from poles, mimicking the playgrounds of our deranged childhoods.

Of course we cloak ourselves in synthetic cheetah skins, like some postindustrial selkie our own skin stolen from us.

Of course we dress like schoolgirls, attempting to reclaim a precious time of growth that was so rudely interrupted.

Of course we literally fuck authority—rich men who make this world turn (to shit): bankers, CEOs, lawyers and judges. What other relationship with them could we expect to have?

Of course we are vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation, because we don’t know who the fuck to trust in this world, and have been failed by those who were meant to keep us safe.

Of course we become creators and curators of playtime, of elaborate scenes and fantasies. Playtime was stolen from us when we were young, so we understand it best.

Of course we are going to mercantilize this shit in a capitalist system.

Of course we learn to mistrust cops and FBI agents and social workers and drug counselors and nurses and doctors, agents of the prison industrial complex, and the even larger shadow it casts: the nonprofit industrial complex. You have been taking our kids, sending us to jail “for our own good,” and leaving us there to die for years. Such failures happened before we met these agents of the state—though this is often quite young in our lives—when we learned the devastation inherent in legitimized forms of unearned power.

Of course we position ourselves as close as we can to queens. The strange industry of sex (an industry that is as strange as any other in late-stage capitalism) is, of course, not entirely made of victims of sexual assault. In it you will find masters of the mysterious energy of sex. We needed to be close to those who turn that which hurt us into something magnificent and dazzling.

Of course there will be those hustlers willing to extend the alchemy of this hustle to the furthest logical point, whores like Rachel Moran and Gloria Steinem, who are making millions off their own suffering—and mine. While my blood burns at your twisted logic of prohibition (that which they call “abolition”), my heart breaks because your healing has become a handmaiden to the very systems seeking to destroy our lives.

To all the queen-goddesses out there: you sluts, you whores—I hope that I can someday unlearn this pain to walk among you with such glitter and grace. Thank you for your guidance.

To myself, and my fellow victim-whores: we can stop apologizing for these systems which rendered us their prey. That shit ain’t on us. We do not owe anyone apologies for what was done to us as we heal from it—especially when we as victims are given so few options for doing so. To those prohibitionists posturing as allies: Why must my life be a data point to justify your liberation? What are you going to do to ensure mine, too?”]

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.