• 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.

It’s Julian Merrow-Smith‘s birthday tomorrow, or today, or it was recently his birthday, depending on when you read this. Happy birthday, Julian. Julian is a painter, as you can see from his website. I have two of his paintings and chances are you don’t, and won’t for some time, because the New York Times gave him a nice write-up. To find the article, you must go to the “Multimedia” column on the right and click on “Currents”, where there is currently a paragraph with something about 19^th century art.

I don’t know how long this story will be available on-line, so here is a screen-shot:
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That is Julian on the bottom, two of his paintings on the top. Ruth, who knows Julian, has all the details here. Congratulations, Julian.

[Note: Apartment Therapy mentions him and gives this link for the NYT article, no idea how long that will last.]

I was sitting on the toilet yesterday morning taking a crap when I heard two people outside running down the sidewalk yelling at each other. My first thought was to calculate the probability that it was another family drama, a husband (or wife) who for whatever reason decided that going after his (or her) wife (or husband) with a kitchen knife was his (or her) best option (as opposed to people catching runaway livestock or grandparent); and to examine the ethical implications for me, like is one required to help even when one is not yet finished on the john?

My second thought was how funny life is at times, how our world encompasses every scale and class of experience simultaneously, each superimposed on the other. Here was one person possibly having an unforgettable, life-changing experience, and just a few meters away someone was being chased down the street by a maniac.

1. Anything out there so much better than Moveable Type 2.63 that it would be worth the trouble of changing over?

2. I’m sick of this site design but too lazy to do anything about it (and too busy) and too lazy to pay anyone else.