Finally, an Illustration Friday-type thing for writers like me! And you? Maybe! Much as I love browsing the IllFri, not being able to draw hampers my ability to take part by 100%. But I can write. So take a look at the Ten Word Wednesday challenge. You get ten words you have to incorporate into a poem. I jotted the words down on my notepad and went to the nearby SCup and came up with this- a poem loaded with fun and horror, if not literary merit (required words in unobtrusive grey):

Again, the ancient abomination awakens
virile vileness, destruction distilled, poetic putrescence
an ode to obscenity, reality’s requiem
its carapace a spiked and spiny agglomeration of illogical hues
the interstices of a thousand incisors crusted with remnants of exotic nourishment
neutronium-eyed, its stomach a black hole, a pulsar for a brain
it roars and the soundless vacuum shudders
the celestial spheres stop spinning, dismayed
as the unvanquishable avatar of avarice and annihilation
arises from the ooze, emerging from the dark matter that was its lair
in answer to an inexorable summons from the lesser dimensions
a tiny sprite, wingéd and naked, whistles a trill
and giggles in glee when her puppy comes running

Anyways, I just have to tell you how much I love Sinéad O'Connor's "Emperor's New Clothes." Thanks to XM Radio for introducing it to me. No thanks to FM radio for hiding it from me.

Some words from the artist who made me the beautiful paleo-art you see to your right- the mighty Wenzmaster!

"My real name is Renzo Rivadeneira. The "wenz" thing? Well, let's just say it's a long story. I am an Art Director and I have loved to draw since I was a child :3
I got started on drawing thanks to X-Men comics. I remember the day I bought my first comic book; that day everything changed! My influences range from classic American comics, passing through to Manga and Anime - I would imagine that all of this mixing has resulted in my own style - the Wenz style. :)
I would love to make my own comic book with my own characters and watch them on Cartoon Network.
Finally, don't forget that Peru is a country full of creative artistic talent and GREAT food!"

Be sure to check out his gallery, especially Snow Jumping, which was the picture that first drew me to him. And remember, he is available for commissions.
While you're over at deviantArt, you can read my new poem Working Outside in Winter, inspired by my last week at work. I wrote it for a Seasons writing contest.
Speaking of Peru, I finally got around to watching Kronk's New Groove today. It was pretty good for a Disney sequel, which usually are pooey. It helped that all the voice actors came back. As much as I love visuals I'm finding more and more that voice acting can really kill an animated movie for me. Although in the case of Cars, which we watched last night, the voice acting and visuals were completely fine, it was just the insipid story that ruined it.

Polar bears and woolly mammoths were contemporary, though just for a very brief period. Mammoths came out of Africa nearly 5 million years ago, and then died out probably around 10,000 years ago, though the most recent mammoth remains, from Wrangel Island, date to as recently as 3700 years ago.
Polar bears evolved from grizzlies about 30,000 years ago. Which possibly makes them the youngest species of megafauna on the planet, though I don't know for sure. Wood bison might be younger (but are they a species or a sub-species??), or some other beast. Anyways, the point is, for about 20,000 years polar bears and woolly mammoths frolicked together on the tundra.
Did you know woollies are more closely related to African and Asian elephants than the two types of elephants are to each other? Crazy eh? And there's a population of grizzlies on Alaska's ABC Islands (Admiralty, Baranof and Chichagof) that is more closely related to polar bears than mainland grizzlies. Thus it seems likely that maritimus evolved from this isolated population of horribilis.
I'm not a geneticist so I only have a murky grasp of how they figure those things out.

Very briefly (I have one more shift this week so it's past my bedtime), allow me to introduce you to Renzo Rivadeneira- Wenzmaster! I asked him to draw Homie Bear riding a Woolly Mammoth, since I believe it is a paleontological fact that bears and mammoths were good friends back in the Ice Age. As you can see, they liked ice cream! Though ice cream is rarely preserved in the fossil record.
Maybe when I get home I'll post some more info on my Peruvian artist friend. He is available for commissions, btw.

Whatever happened to the Neanderthals? They used to dominate Europe- imagine a social predator with the mental capacity of a modern human coupled with the brute strength of a gorilla. Common wisdom says they died out around 30,000 years ago, possibly at the hands of Homo sapiens- though another theory suggests they were ill-adapted to the post-ice age climate. National Geographic has a news item that suggests Neanderthals and sapiens interbred, and that the Neander population was genetically absorbed into ours. The bottom line is, we don't really know what happened to them.
What if they survived much later than the fossil record shows? Everyone knows the fossil record is more of a broad spectrum tool rather than a precise measuring rod. A difference of, say, 25,000 years is miniscule in geological terms. I've always thought this little throwaway paragraph in the Bible was intriguing:

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown. Genesis 6:4

Certainly the massive Neanderthals would have seemed godlike to the much smaller sapiens. To me, the cryptic nature of this passage suggests two things- that the Nephilim were fairly common knowledge and wouldn't have needed to be explained much beyond that description, and that whoever they were, they interbred with "humans".
What do you think? I'd be proud to have a little Neanderthal blood in me.

I'm home for the first time in two weeks! It's just how I remember it. Tomorrow or the next day I think I will treat you to my ruminations on sasquatches and Neanderthals, but until then join me in congratulating my good friend Zimmy for being awarded a well-deserved Daily Deviation!


Waiting For Judgement- COLOR by *zimeta08 on deviantART

You can check out the interview I did with her a few months ago.
PS- I am graciously accepting PS3s if you have any to spare. Also HDTVs too please. Not much sense without Hi-Def. Heck, I'll accept PSPs, even. I'm very generous.

Yay for Jasper!
We had a pretty nice weekend in Jasper. The photo above is from our ill-fated expedition to find the sandstone hoodoos and tunnel-like notch through a cliff towards Pocahontas. It was ill-fated because we trudged through kilometers of hard, crusty snow looking for said landmarks, only to turn back in defeat and see them, plain as day, right near the start of the trail. So many things depend on angle and perspective. Oh well. Next time.
Our main focus was just relaxing and getting away for a while, and we accomplished that masterfully. There's a mammoth tusk on display in one of the storefronts so that was really all I needed to make me happy. Oh yeah and the black wolf we saw on the drive out. The bears, of course, are having a rest.

Another work week done. It was kind of a crazy one, too, but I won't bore you with the details. It's enough to say that everyone went home safely. Sometimes that's all you can ask for.
But now I'm on days off! Tomorrow Michelle is coming out here and we will then head to Jasper to take advantage of the off-season rates and just spend some quality time in les montagnes. That's Japanese for the mountains. Which reminds me that I'm reading Will Ferguson's Hitching Rides With Buddha, in which he hitch-hikes across Japan. One of his rides confidently asserted that he was going to North America to climb every one of the Rocky Mountains.

"Every mountain? Are you sure? I mean, that's a lot of mountains. Jeez, there must be . . . "
"Every mountain," he said, and looked over at me with a cross look, as though I weren't holding up my end of the conversation.

It's a great book, and Ferguson is a great writer, he's even from Alberta, so check him out if you get a chance. I love reading about all the characters he met while hitching. I met some too when I thumbed my way across Canada, maybe I'll try to remember some stories to tell you. Anyways, have fun in Jasper! Oh wait, that's me who's going.

The Edmonton Journal is having a poetry contest, judged by our very own Poet Laureate, Alice Major. You can enter one, and only one, previously unpublished poem. So I am having trouble deciding which one to enter- I suppose I could write one for it but between work and my other writing projects on the go I doubt I will have time. Since rhyming poems aren't taken seriously by anyone these days, I won't enter any of my funny little rhyming couplet poems. So I need your help and advice- I have narrowed it down to one of the following non-rhymey poems, and would appreciate your feedback as to which one I should enter.
First, there's E=mc², one of my favorites. I wrote it in anticipation of the trip gabrielle and I took that I mentioned a few days ago.
Then there's Love Poem, With Robots. I like it because it has my traditional fun whimsical element, but is also a semi-seriously romantic poem.
Finally, my favorite poem, but maybe one that's a little too strange for this contest: Cadaverous Cattle.
Thanks for your feedback- even if it's to say that I suck!
And when you're done, go check out this Japanese video that purports to show a Megalodon , and decide if it's really the ancient terror of the deep returned to life (they occasionally dredge up unfossilized Megalodon teeth, you know!) or just some other, more mundane species of shark. Either way it's pretty crazy.
And a local man says he has a sasquatch on tape! The next holy grail of cryptozoologists will be a video of a bigfoot wrestling a megalodon. And maybe I should write an epic poem about this titanic match and submit it to the Journal.

DeviantArt's Nashya is featured in a new book, Mangaka America. In fact, that's her art gracing the cover! But she isn't the only artist in it, it's got a bunch of other American artists of the manga style. Not that I really see her art as being specifically manga, but that's alright. It's enough to know that it kicks ass.
You might recall that I commissioned Nashya to make the artwork for gabrielle's blog, so head over there, admire the art, and say happy birthday to her- it's not too late because here on our side of the world it is still her day.
Isn't it cool how the book cover matches the polar bear?

Due to the International uh . . . what's it called? Dateline? My brains is all fuzzy because I am still awake from yesterday. Well, it's actually tomorrow down in New Zealand right now. Whoa timewarp- definitely a paradox. Which means it's time to celebrate the birthday of one of my best mates, the vampirenomad! Happy birthday! A little over two years ago we packed up the Woodsy Crypt, said farewell to F.A.N., threw a couch over the balcony, left Ted in charge and made our way to Malaysia and New Zealand. After a few months I came home and eventually got married, while gabrielle lived up to the nomadic part of her nickname and stayed behind. I've been going through my journal trying to find a good story to tell from the trip, but there's too many. Wedge. Why Wedge was Named Wedge. Why He Could Have Been Named Leak. Barefoot cinema patrons. The town square hexagon in Dunedin. Whales. Dolphins. Sea turtles. Dangerously inept diving-school classmates. Fell beasts. One Rings and One Ringgits. Coppelia. Tongariro. Hobbiton. "Hey it's a gay bus tour!" and "Oh, my mates stayed behind to do each others' hair". Kura Tawhiti. The Twizel Office of Development (as well as its famous bakery where the menu is apparently just for show). Cheep birds. Kea birds. Sheep- so many sheep. I could go on and on and not even scratch the surface of the good times we had- and that's not even getting into the Woodsy Crypt era. Happy Birthday Lt. Nixon! I still haven't located Private Blythe- he remains MIA. Winters out.