Icing on the cake

Here is an awesome dessert-themed claymation I found on Cake Wrecks. I really admire people who have the patience and talent to create something so meticulous and time-intensive because I have absolutely no patience! I am so incredibly fascinated by the details that have been carefully sculpted in every single frame and I really appreciate how much caring and craftsmanship was put into this endeavor.

The 24-Hour Ant

Earlier this evening, I was channel surfing and decided to watch the Discovery Channel solely based on the fact that I heard Sigourney Weaver's voice. Ever since I was a kid and first saw the Alien quadrilogy, I have been a huge fan. It turns out, she is the narrator of the Planet Earth series. This particular installment was called "Jungles" and described animals including the gliding leaf frog, the emperor tamarin, and what locals from Nicaragua to the Amazon call the "hormiga veinticuatro" or the "24-hour ant". This so-called "24-hour" ant is more commonly known as the Bullet Ant.

Apparently, the Bullet Ant is named the "24-hour ant" because once a victim is bitten, to quote the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, "waves of burning, throbbing, all-consuming pain continue unabated for up to 24 hours". Please bear with me, I promise that this has some relevance to wonder. Another curious fact about the Bullet Ant is that it is only found in humid lowland rainforests from Nicaragua south to Paraguay. A jungle dwelling ant. And what else also inhabits these rainforests? A parasitic fungi of the genus Cordyceps, Cordyceps unilateralis. Now is this making more sense? Oddly enough this specific fungus is found in the same jungles as the Bullet Ant. The spores of the fungus attatch themselves to the external surface of the unsuspecting ant and enter through the trachea. They then start to grow inside the ant's body cavity, consuming the soft tissue, but not the vital organs.

When the fungus is ready to release it's spores, the mycelia, the large vegetative sprouting part of the fungus, begin to grow in the ant's brain. The fungus forces the ant to climb up a plant and clamp its mandibles into a leaf or stem, securing it to it's final resting place. The fungus devours the ant's brain which in turn kills it and the fungus then sprouts from the ant's head. When the fungus is mature, the fruiting bodies release capsules full of spores into the air which spread the spores over the surrounding areas, ready to infect other unsuspecting ants.

Doesn't this sound a lot like David Wilson's stink ant? I find it incredibly wonderous that something so coincidental as hearing Sigourney Weaver's voice on Discovery Channel could bring about such a relevant and interesting find. Go to: http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/planet-earth/planet-earth.html, for more information on Discovery Channel's Planet Earth.

Something old, something new, something borrowed

Here are just a few pages from my sketchbook. I am using this page as an art blog, so I figured that I'd better put some of my art up...

Analogue

I guess it's just hard for me to believe that 2009 will be the first of many years in which I will never see him again. It's freaking me out. I mean, it's really messing me up.

I am trying to feel and act like I normally would, it's just not working out that way. I just walk around like I am in a daze. I'll just start crying for no real apparent reason, in my head I just keep saying over and over, "He is dead. He's really dead." It's like my brain won't shut up for five minutes without reminding me.

I had my first dream about him the other night though, since he died. It was really scary because he was in the hospital for an overdose, but he was getting better. And then his nurse gave him 2.5 mg of percocet and he died. While I was there.

I've decided that I am going to write a story for him, about him. I guess this biography is a little late, but I think it's been a long time coming. I've always felt like I had so much to say about him, even though some of it, most of it, isn't exactly praise. Right now though, I am just trying to organize my thoughts. I took the first step in really starting to put things down on paper though. I've decided on a preliminary name: Analogue. I think it really suits him. He was always so stubborn, opinionated, and unwilling to change for anyone. I guess that's really where we went wrong; we were definitely too similar.

I hate writing all of this in the past-tense because it's just another indicator that he's really gone. It's not just a bad dream, an awful joke anymore. It's real. And I am scared because he was always my constant. No matter what, he was always there. And now he's gone forever.