Famous designer and illustrator Bran has been helping me with the redesign here. Thanks, Bran. There have been many changes to improve your reading experience, you may have noticed some of the more profound ones, which I hope were not too jarring or disconcerting, such as moving the “about” information to the top of the sidebar.

All that’s left, once the archives finally finish rebuilding, will be to add a list of favorite posts, which might help the casual visitor go straight to some of the more attractive stuff here rather than wade through a lot of… you know, I love all of my children equally, but some people coming here for the first time might think, gosh, he writes about fish a lot.

Two or three of you are new readers, I think, and the other two have been reading me for a longer time. I’d like to ask you a favor: in the comments here, or in an email, please let me know if any of the content here has stuck in your mind (sorry!) or if there is anything here you have especially liked or would recommend, or if you have any, you know, favorites.

Thanks in advance. The email account I check most often is metamorphosist at gmail dot com.

[Added later: Little-Known-Facts are here, more or less]

Beta’s room was overdue for a paint job. She and Alpha picked out the paints, since Beta knew what she wanted and Alpha is able to visualize colors, unlike me. Then I went to the hardware store with the paint swatches and bought way more paint than I needed from a really good saleswoman, just in case, you hate running out in the middle of a job at midnight although who paints at midnight haha just in case, including a can of this transparent gold effect stuff just in case the matte paint I got rather than the semi-gloss option turned out to be too dull.

Then Alpha and I went somewhere while the girls cleaned out Beta’s room, I had assumed that would mean putting all her stuff into the hallway but turns out it meant loading it all into Gamma’s room meaning neither girl can use her room until the job is finished. Then on Sunday, because I had orchestra rehearsal (“okay Mig, this tricky part here you just play the quarter notes along with the little kids too”) on Saturday, I started painting.

The creamy yellow went on ceiling and top half of the walls, the dark red on the bottom half of the wall. The yellow covered with just one coat, the red took three.

Of course it was too dull. Luckily I had a can of gold effect stuff. I tried that last night.

It turns out there’s a reason they advise you not to paint rooms at night. I couldn’t see a goddamn thing. I had reading lamps and shit shining on the walls but it’s a glittery see-thru gold effect that you can only see, apparently, by daylight so it was like painting with invisible ink. Tried doing it with a brush, but that looked like hell so I tried a roller but that looked even worse, then Alpha came in and tried brushing some on because she thought the brush looked way better but I was all like You expect me to paint an entire room with a one-inch brush? and What are you doing painting anyway I’m the painter you choose the colors, that’s the deal plus I was really insecure because it was looking like shit, what I was doing, and hers wasn’t looking any better.

I ended up rolling it all on and then calling it a night. Hoping that in the morning, when the transparent gold effect paint had dried, the roller lines would magically have disappeared.

But they didn’t. Luckily Alpha had bought a second can of transparent gold effect. I had planned to roll that on tonight, in the hopes that it would average out okay, but she called me on my way to work this morning with the suggestion that I do it in the morning, by daylight, such as tomorrow before work. Apparently there is a window of opportunity where there is sufficient light now that it’s “spring” before I leave.

Meanwhile Beta’s junk is all over the house and Gamma’s sleeping in the big bed, or downstairs on the guest bed with her big sister, only last night she was in the big bed because Beta was in Vienna for some reason, and spent the night with someone in town.

• Between one and three days following the highest spring tide, the grunion lays its eggs in the sand at the high-tide mark on Southern Californian beaches.

• The grunion does this at night.
• Because it does this at night, no one has ever really seen a grunion, so this is all conjecture.
• Nevertheless, there the grunion eggs are in the morning, two to three inches below the surface of the sand. So somebody must put them there, why not a grunion?
• It’s the simplest explanation for the phenomenon.
• Sometimes the grunion comes home at the end of a hard day at the end of a hard week to find that a pipe is leaking in the cellar, and its father-in-law is down there calmly mopping stuff up while its wife and mother-in-law are in the kitchen drinking wine and getting upset about the plumbing emergency.
• For grunions, if no one gets upset, it’s only half the party.
• Grunion plumbing always springs a leak on the weekend, when plumbers charge between time and a half and double time.
• Grunions like snow, a lot, but it’s March already. Enough is enough.
• Grunions live for the weekend, although a grunion weekend lasts only like about a few hours.
• The average length of a grunion is somewhere between five and six inches.

• Monkfish prefer deep water, as deep as 2000 feet.

• Monkfish can distend their jaws to eat their prey, which includes fish, turtles and sea birds.
• Since they eat birds, monkfish can theoretically transmit avian flu.
• Speaking of avian flu, monkfish think the collective noun “a murder of crows” is finally starting to make sense.
• Young monkfish appear innocent and can lie so convincingly that father monkfish fall for it every time, and only mother monkfish can see through their stories.
• Mother monkfish attribute this ability of young monkfish to father monkfish’s habit of telling them Luegengeschichten.
• Monkfish is sometimes called “the poor man’s lobster” due to its taste.
• Monkfish is rarely sold in stores with the head still attached.

• The herring is about 16% fat.

• In winter maybe a little more.
• The herring is a social animal, living in schools, and quickly dies when left to its own devices.
• No matter what a herring eats, it makes it look delicious.
• A herring tries to do the right thing, but ehn, nobody’s perfect.
• A herring can sleep, but not like humans sleep.
• When a herring hears something interesting in a radio show about a bar for melancholy people at the National Gallery in Berlin called the Black Cube, that the depressed think about themselves and the melancholy think about other things, such as infinity, it tries to convince itself that it sees infinity in a shy black-haired boy, or some ice, or its wife and kids.
• Now that a herring has had its first orchestra rehearsal, it hears orchestral music totally differently: rather than hearing all this music, it hears the bass section, and the cellos, and the violas, and the violins, for starters, and it’s beautiful, especially if it’s baroque.
• Although a herring’s capacity for self-pity approaches infinity, it is quickly brought back to earth when a neighbor hangs himself in his (the neighbor’s, not the herring’s) cellar, leaving a sick wife and two kids.
• Or when a teacher at the music school who has to get chemotherapy tells his students he’s taking time off to go on a long journey.