On 20 August 2026, the Garda station in Wexford published one of the strangest sentences ever to appear on an official Irish policing account. It concerned a suspect roughly seven feet tall, wearing a red and white striped hat, and it read: the Cat in the Hat was not in your driveway while you were out, and he is not currently hiding out in Curracloe.

The Gardaí were not being whimsical for its own sake. They were doing triage. For several days, residents across County Wexford had been seeing videos of a hollow-eyed, life-sized version of the Dr Seuss character standing in driveways, peering through windows and loitering at the edges of doorbell camera footage that looked exactly like their own doorbell camera footage. Some of them had rung the emergency line. The Gardaí explained the mechanism plainly. It is, they said, essentially an AI prompt that places the character into images and videos of familiar places.

That is the whole story in one sentence, and it is worth reading twice. Not a hoax about a crime. Not a rumour about a stranger. A prompt. A machine instruction, executed in seconds, that inserts a fictional menace into a landscape the viewer recognises as home.

Within five weeks, that prompt had produced school lockdowns in Michigan, extra officers at middle schools in Colorado, felony charges in Ohio, four arrested girls in Louisiana aged between thirteen and fifteen, and a Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigation in British Columbia. It had produced a real teenage girl, in West Kelowna, being followed through her own neighbourhood at nine o'clock at night by someone in a costume.

The obvious way to write about this is as a story about fakes getting better. That framing is wrong, or at least it is the least interesting thing that is true. The Cat in the Hat is not a convincing fake. Nobody who looks closely believes a nine-foot cartoon cat is standing on the lawn. What collapsed in 2026 was not the cost of deception. It was the cost of dread: shareable, localised, ambiguous, atmospheric dread, manufactured on demand and aimed at a postcode.

And the institutions built to answer this have spent thirty years learning to ask one question. Is the threat credible? That question has quietly stopped being the operative one. The operative question now is whether the fear is consequential. Those are not the same question, and almost nothing in the machinery of schools and policing is designed to tell them apart.

How a 2003 Box Office Failure Became a Found Footage Monster

The origin is disconcertingly banal. On 30 June 2026, a TikTok account posted a clip lifted from the 2003 live action adaptation starring Mike Myers, set to unsettling music and captioned with something bleak about prom and overdoses. The film has always had a slightly wrong quality about it, an uncanny prosthetic face that reads as menacing the instant you strip away the score and the gags. The clip took 4.4 million views in a week before it was deleted.

Momentum came from an ordinary piece of entertainment news. Propstore announced that the original Myers suit was going to auction, with estimates in the tens of thousands of dollars. A physical artefact, photographed under gallery lighting, hollow at the eyes. One post showing the costume was viewed more than fourteen million times in three weeks.

Then the aesthetic mutated. Users stopped posting film clips and started posting evidence. Grainy night footage. Shaky handheld. Ring camera framing with the timestamp in the corner. The character appeared in driveways in Limerick and Cork, on streets in Dublin, Manchester and Leeds. In some versions it carried something that looked like a knife. The generative step is what made this different from a decade of creepypasta: the background was not a generic suburb, it was a suburb that looked like yours, because a person in your town could feed the model a photograph of an actual road and get back a clip of the thing standing on it.

British forces caught up around 25 August. South Yorkshire Police confirmed they had received no reports concerning the character or, they added, his associated Thing One and Thing Two, and then made a more serious point that has been largely overlooked: fabricated police statements about the Cat were circulating too. If you see posts online providing policing updates and advice, the force said, please check that they are from an official policing account. The hoax had already learned to impersonate its own debunking. Cheshire and Cumbria issued their own clarifications.

None of this was costless. One sixteen-year-old told the BBC she had been totally freaked out after watching the videos in the early hours and had asked her mother to collect her from a sleepover. Multiply that by a country. Then notice that nothing illegal has happened yet.

The Cat Crossed the Atlantic and Acquired a Target List

What arrived in North America in late August was a different object wearing the same hat.

In Ireland and Britain the content was ambient. It threatened nowhere in particular. In the United States, within days, it acquired specificity, and specificity is the thing that converts folklore into a criminal offence. Posts named schools. Then they named towns. Then they named individual students.

In Hutchinson, Kansas, police and high school officials became aware on 31 August of posts under the trend directing ominous threats at students. Investigators identified the account holder as a fifteen-year-old pupil at Hutchinson High School and charged them with two counts of criminal threat. The department's framing of the offence deserves attention, because it is the clearest statement of the new logic anyone has produced: even if the posts were intended as a joke, it is unlawful to cause others to fear for their safety.

In Grand Junction, Colorado, a post suggested that someone dressed as the character would turn up at West Middle School and at random homes. On 28 August police increased their presence at West Middle School and Grand Junction High School. Working with Mesa County Valley School District 51, they established that there was no credible threat to students, staff or the community. On 31 August they arrested a fourteen-year-old Grand Junction High School pupil, charged him with harassment and with interference with staff, faculty or students of educational institutions, and released him to his parents. The posts, the department said, are intended to cause alarm and fear in individuals.

Read those two sentences in sequence. No credible threat. Arrest made. That is not an inconsistency. It is the entire shift, stated in official language, in a single press release.

In Berwick, Louisiana, four girls were arrested after officers traced multiple TikTok accounts to local pupils. Three, aged fifteen, thirteen and fourteen, were charged with terrorising. A fourth, fourteen, was charged with cyberbullying. Police Chief J. P. Henry put the rationale in terms of consequence rather than intent: once you hit post, you do not get to decide how seriously law enforcement takes it.

In Worth County, Georgia, the school district announced on 2 September that two high school pupils had taken part and would face disciplinary action alongside legal consequences. In Pasco County, Florida, a twelve-year-old was accused of making written threats to kill. In Wilmington, Ohio, a juvenile faced a felony terroristic threat charge. In Pawnee, Oklahoma, a post targeting the middle school reportedly included a list of around thirty-five named pupils; police obtained subscriber data from TikTok and made an arrest. In Jessamine County, Kentucky, Nicholasville police charged a juvenile with assistance from the FBI. Constantine High School in Michigan went into a precautionary lockdown.

By early September, more than ten juveniles had been arrested across the United States. By the time The Guardian reported on the trend on 13 September, the pattern had hardened: content that began in Ireland and the United Kingdom in August, spread through Snapchat and TikTok, and in its North American form frequently carried threats aimed at specific schools, specific communities and named individuals.

Law enforcement drew the line about where it should be drawn. FBI Special Agent Nathan Head stated the position exactly: just posting the video itself is not a crime. Greg Mays, a deputy commissioner at Tennessee's Office of Homeland Security, described the addition of a named target as the point where it crosses the line. Baldwin Park Police Department in California warned that any threat directed toward our schools, students, staff, or community will not be dismissed as a joke or prank. Laredo police put the arithmetic bluntly: a few seconds on social media can result in a police investigation, school disciplinary action, and potentially serious criminal consequences.

And then the thing that complicates every comfortable analysis. On 24 August, in West Kelowna, British Columbia, a person in a Cat in the Hat costume allegedly chased a teenage girl through a neighbourhood at around nine in the evening. She got to safety. The individual has not been identified. Corporal Devon Gerrits of the RCMP described it precisely: regardless of whether the individual intended the behaviour as a joke, following a young person and causing them to fear for their safety is extremely concerning.

Folklorists Have a Word for This and It Is Not Deepfake

The most useful vocabulary for understanding the Cat in the Hat comes not from computer science but from a subfield of folklore studies that has been sitting patiently on the shelf for forty years, waiting for exactly this.

The term is ostension. Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi imported it into folkloristics from semiotics to describe what happens when a legend stops being told and starts being done: when narrative extends into action in the physical world. Bill Ellis, who received the American Folklore Society's lifetime scholarly achievement award, expanded the framework and gave us the two categories that matter here. Pseudo-ostension is when someone fabricates evidence of a legend, staging the artefacts the story predicts. Quasi-ostension is when authorities and observers over-interpret ambiguous evidence, reading ordinary facts through the legend's lens until the legend appears confirmed.

The Cat in the Hat trend is an industrialised pseudo-ostension engine with a quasi-ostension feedback loop bolted to the output. Generative models mass-produce the evidence. Institutions, doing exactly what they are trained to do, treat the evidence as signal. The signal generates a response. The response is filmed, posted, and becomes fresh evidence that the legend is real, because look, the school went into lockdown.

Andrew Peck, whose book on the Slender Man won the Chicago Folklore Prize, spent years documenting how a character invented on an internet forum in 2009 acquired the properties of genuine belief through precisely this circulation. The end point of that case is not academic. On 31 May 2014, two twelve-year-olds in Waukesha, Wisconsin, stabbed a classmate nineteen times in a wooded park, saying they needed to appease the Slender Man. She survived. Both were found not guilty by reason of mental disease.

The precedents keep arriving at the same conclusion. In autumn 2016, creepy clown sightings that began in Greenville, South Carolina produced school lockdowns across Ohio, additional patrols in three southern states, and more than a dozen arrests, the overwhelming majority of reports being hoaxes. In February 2019 the Momo challenge reached peak intensity after the Police Service of Northern Ireland posted a public warning on Facebook and British schools relayed alerts to parents. The Samaritans said at the time that they were not aware of any verified evidence in this country or beyond linking Momo to suicide. Children's charities concluded that the warnings themselves were doing more damage than the thing they warned about, teaching children to fear something that did not exist and, in some cases, prompting them to go looking for it.

Here is what is genuinely new in 2026, and it is not the psychology. The psychology is old. What is new is the supply curve.

The Thing That Actually Changed Is the Price of Dread

To stage a clown panic in 2016 you needed a costume, a location and nerve. To make Slender Man photographs in 2010 you needed Photoshop skills and hours. Both of those are meaningful frictions. They limited the number of people who could contribute evidence, and they limited how localised that evidence could be.

Generative video removed both limits at once. By 2026 the leading systems produce high definition clips with synchronised audio from a text prompt, at per-second costs measured in cents, available through consumer subscriptions priced around twenty dollars a month. The interesting figure is not the realism benchmark. It is the marginal cost of the tenth clip, and the hundredth, each one set on a different street.

This is why the standard deepfake framing misleads. The Cat in the Hat is not trying to pass as a photograph of a real event. It is trying to pass as a plausible artefact of your neighbourhood at night, which is a much lower bar and a much more effective payload. Photorealism is not required. Sufficient ambiguity is. Grain, motion blur, a doorbell camera's fisheye distortion and a two second glimpse do most of the work that fidelity would otherwise have to do. The uncanny quality of the source material, a prosthetic cat face from a commercially unloved film, is a feature. It reads as wrong in a way that a well-rendered human would not.

And crucially, the artefact is cheap enough to be disposable. That changes the economics of participation. A child does not need to believe in the Cat to make one. They need ninety seconds and an idea about which street to use.

Retired Lexington police special operations sergeant Jason Rothermund, who now runs an AI consultancy and was interviewed about the Kentucky charges, offered the assessment most likely to age well. This is just, in my opinion, the tip of the iceberg.

Verification Takes Days and Propagation Takes Seconds

The asymmetry at the centre of this is not mysterious. It is arithmetic.

Establishing that a video is synthetic requires, at minimum, an analyst, a tool, a chain of custody and time. Grand Junction took three days between increasing patrols and making an arrest. Pawnee had to serve a request on TikTok and wait for a phone number and an IP address. Meanwhile the clip itself moves through a school's Snapchat groups in under an hour.

Worse, the people we are implicitly asking to perform the verification cannot do it. A University of Florida study published in February 2026 tested participants against synthetic face images and found their accuracy statistically indistinguishable from a coin flip, while a convolutional neural network on the same images reached ninety-seven per cent. The same research found that people did better than the machines on video, which is a genuinely interesting result and should be reported honestly, but better than a machine on video is not the same as good. A 2025 iProov study of two thousand consumers found that only one in a thousand correctly identified every synthetic and genuine item they were shown.

Children are, if anything, worse positioned than adults, and the specific shape of the problem is confidence rather than gullibility. Ofcom's 2026 report on children and parents found that fifty-six per cent of thirteen to fifteen year olds said they were confident they could spot AI-generated content, and forty-seven per cent of sixteen and seventeen year olds said the same. When those confident children were tested, a quarter could not correctly identify the AI-generated image in front of them. Forty per cent of thirteen to seventeen year olds said they would trust an AI-generated news article as much as, or more than, one written by a human journalist.

Layer developmental psychology on top. Joanne Cantor spent her career at Wisconsin-Madison studying how films and television frighten children, and one of her most robust findings is that the reassurance adults instinctively reach for, the phrase tell yourself it is not real, only becomes an effective coping strategy as children get older. Below roughly seven or eight, telling a frightened child that something is fictional does comparatively little to reduce the fear. Older children fear real and abstract dangers more; younger children fear the thing that looks and sounds scary, regardless of its ontological status.

Which means the primary institutional response to this entire episode, saying clearly and repeatedly that the Cat in the Hat is not real, is a strategy whose effectiveness is inversely correlated with how young and frightened the audience is. The Gardaí were right. It was also, for the youngest children in Wexford, not the intervention they needed.

Credible Threat Is the Wrong Question Now

Every school safety protocol in the English-speaking world is organised around an assessment of credibility. Is this a real threat from a person with intent, means and opportunity? It is a good question. It was designed by serious people to prevent both massacres and the over-punishment of children, and it works.

The problem is that it is now answering a question nobody is asking.

Consider what happened at West Middle School. The threat was not credible. Police said so in writing. And yet a school district deployed additional officers, hundreds of children spent a day under visibly heightened security, a fourteen-year-old was arrested and charged, and parents across Mesa County spent a weekend frightened. Every one of those outcomes occurred on the correct side of the credibility determination. The determination did not prevent a single one of them.

This is the asymmetry that ought to reorganise how we think about the problem. The institutional response is not a defence against the payload. The institutional response is the payload. A lockdown is a spectacle, generated at no cost to the person who triggered it, that converts an ambiguous clip into a community-wide event with photographic evidence. The cheaper it becomes to trigger, the more attractive it becomes to trigger. Any system in which a nine-second video reliably produces a police deployment has, whatever its intentions, published a price list.

None of which means the institutions should stop responding. That is the trap, and it is worth naming, because it is the argument that ends with a school failing to act on the one post in five hundred that mattered. The Pawnee post named thirty-five children. That is not folklore. That is a target list, and the correct response to a target list is a police investigation, regardless of whether the accompanying image was rendered by a diffusion model or drawn in crayon.

The question is not whether to respond. It is whether the response can be made proportionate and quiet enough that it stops functioning as a reward.

Threat Assessment Already Knows How to Do This

There is an unexpectedly hopeful piece of this, and it lives in the least glamorous corner of school safety research.

The Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines, developed by the forensic clinical psychologist Dewey Cornell and colleagues at the University of Virginia in 2001 and recognised as an evidence-based programme in 2013, were built around a distinction that turns out to be exactly the right tool for 2026. CSTAG asks teams to classify a threat as transient or substantive. A transient threat is an expression of anger, a joke, a piece of bravado with no sustained intent to harm. A substantive threat involves a genuine intent to act. The classification drives the response, and the response for a transient threat is explanation, apology and resolution rather than exclusion.

Controlled studies in Virginia found that schools using the model markedly reduced their use of exclusionary discipline, and, notably, showed little or no racial disparity in outcomes, in a domain where disparities are otherwise routine.

Read that framework against the Cat in the Hat and something clarifies. Threat assessment never actually depended on the authenticity of the artefact. It depended on the intent and capability of the person behind it. A synthetic image does not break the model. It only breaks the shortcut that many schools and departments substituted for the model, which is: scary content equals serious threat equals maximum response.

The trend is, in that sense, a stress test that reveals which institutions were doing threat assessment and which were doing threat reaction.

What the Response Costs the Children It Protects

There is a strong temptation to treat institutional overreaction as costless caution. It is not.

Research conducted by Georgia Tech's Social Dynamics and Wellbeing Lab in partnership with the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund analysed nearly twenty-eight million social media posts from communities in the ninety days before and after school active shooter drills, across 114 schools in 33 states. In the aftermath, the analysis found a forty-two per cent increase in language associated with anxiety and stress, a thirty-nine per cent increase in indicators of depression, a twenty-three per cent rise in health concerns and a twenty-two per cent increase in expressions of fear of death. The effects persisted for at least ninety days. Everytown's own recommendation, notably, is to prioritise threat assessment programmes over student-involved simulations.

That study concerns drills rather than lockdowns triggered by hoaxes, and the difference matters: a drill is announced and a lockdown is not, which if anything suggests the hoax case is worse rather than better. But it establishes the principle that the security response has its own psychological cost, borne by the same children it protects.

The resource drain is measurable too. The K-12 School Shooting Database recorded 853 swatting incidents in American schools between January 2023 and June 2024. Researchers working on the costs of hoax threats have estimated the emergency response to a single school incident at upwards of a hundred thousand dollars once policing, investigation and lost instructional time are counted. Those are officers not attending actual emergencies, and hours of teaching that do not come back.

And then the cost that should trouble us most. In this episode, the people arrested were twelve, thirteen, fourteen and fifteen years old. Some of them wrote target lists. Others reposted a scary cat. The charges range from harassment to felony terroristic threats. Criminal records attach to children at the age at which the capacity to anticipate consequence is, developmentally, still under construction. A system that cannot distinguish the child who threatened thirty-five named classmates from the child who shared a clip to a group chat is not a safety system. It is a lottery with a custodial prize.

The Honest Complication Nobody Wants to Write

The clean version of this article says: it was all fake, the institutions panicked, the children were criminalised for a meme. That version is false in an important way.

A costumed figure really did follow a teenage girl in West Kelowna. Posts really did name individual pupils. The Pawnee list really did exist. Whatever share of the trend was ambient folklore, some non-trivial share was targeted intimidation, and a viral aesthetic provided it with both a delivery mechanism and a deniability script. I was only doing the trend is a remarkably efficient defence.

This is the oldest dynamic in moral panic literature working in reverse. Usually the panic manufactures threats that do not exist. Here the panic manufactured cover for threats that did. Any policy proposal that treats the entire phenomenon as harmless will, sooner or later, wave through the post that was not.

It is also worth being honest about the evidential thinness of parts of this story. Much of the reporting on origins traces to a handful of viral accounts and cannot be independently verified. Claims that the character was linked to violent incidents circulated widely and were, as far as any police force has confirmed, baseless. Gardaí in Wexford stated that no reports of a costumed individual had been recorded on their system at all. We do not have a reliable count of how many schools altered operations, how many lockdowns occurred, or what the aggregate cost has been. We have a fortnight of local news reports, which is not a dataset.

What Does Not Work, and What Might

Three responses are already being proposed and are not going to work.

Banning the platform. The content moved between TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram Reels and Facebook within days, and it was generated by tools that are neither hosted nor moderated by any of them. A ban relocates the trend and adds the glamour of prohibition.

Media literacy as a standalone intervention. It is necessary and it is not sufficient, and the Ofcom data explains why with unusual clarity: the children most confident in their ability to detect synthetic content were meaningfully often wrong. Teaching detection to an audience that cannot detect, against generators improving faster than curricula are revised, produces false confidence, which is worse than calibrated uncertainty. Cantor's work adds the developmental caveat: for the youngest children, it is not real does not do the work adults think it does.

Maximum charges as deterrent. Deterrence assumes a calculating actor. The evidence from the clown panic, from Momo and from every school hoax wave since suggests the population involved is mostly children with poor consequence modelling and an audience.

What might work is less satisfying and more boring.

Proportionate and deliberately undramatic response protocols. If the institutional response is the payload, then reducing the spectacle reduces the incentive. Investigating quietly, notifying parents by letter rather than emergency alert, and declining to lock down where a threat assessment team has classified content as transient are all available today and cost nothing. Several departments effectively did this, determining no credible threat while increasing routine patrols.

Decoupling threat assessment from content authenticity. Whether an image was generated should inform the investigation of who made it, not the classification of how dangerous the author is. CSTAG already models this. It needs to be the default rather than the exception.

Provenance infrastructure, with realistic expectations. Article 50 of the EU AI Act, which applies from 2 August 2026, requires that synthetic content be machine-readable as such and that deepfakes be disclosed, with penalties reaching fifteen million euros or three per cent of worldwide turnover. The AI Omnibus agreement, however, gives systems already on the market before 2 August 2026, which is every tool that produced this material, until 2 December 2026 to meet the marking obligation; the disclosure duties are unaffected. The C2PA Content Credentials standard and Google's SynthID watermarking have converged into a dual-layer approach now adopted by OpenAI and others, with more than a hundred billion files watermarked since 2023. The limitations are well documented and should be stated plainly: C2PA metadata is destroyed by a screenshot, SynthID survives compression but carries almost no contextual information, and neither resists a determined adversary. Provenance will not tell a frightened fourteen-year-old at midnight whether the cat outside her window is real. What it can do is shorten the verification loop for the school and the police force from days to minutes, which is the loop that actually matters.

Platform duties with teeth. The UK's Protection of Children Codes came into force on 25 July 2025 under the Online Safety Act, carrying fines of up to eighteen million pounds or ten per cent of global revenue, and require services to assess and mitigate risks to children by age group. A trend that demonstrably frightened children across two jurisdictions is a reasonable early test of whether those duties mean anything operationally.

Graduated legal responses for minors. Ireland's Harassment, Harmful Communications and Related Offences Act 2020, commenced in February 2021, criminalises a single threatening or grossly offensive communication sent with intent to cause harm, with a maximum of two years on indictment. The tools exist on both sides of the Atlantic. The gap is not legislative. It is the absence of a settled institutional practice for the child who shared rather than authored.

The Cat Was Never the Point

Return to the question underneath all of this. What happens to a child's ability to know what is real?

The honest answer is that it degrades in a specific and slightly counter-intuitive way. Children are not becoming credulous. Ofcom's data suggests something odder: they are becoming confidently unreliable, which is the epistemic state most resistant to correction. And they are learning, from direct experience, that the reality of a thing and the consequences of a thing have come apart. The Cat was not real. The lockdown was real. The arrest was real. The fourteen-year-old released to his parents in Grand Junction now has a lived understanding that a fiction produced a police record.

That is the lesson the episode actually teaches, and no media literacy module can unteach it, because it is true.

For institutions, the implication is narrower than the anxiety around it suggests. Schools and police forces cannot adjudicate what is real at the speed the content moves, and they should stop organising their response around the pretence that they can. What they can do is assess persons rather than artefacts, respond in proportion rather than in spectacle, and refuse to treat every child holding a phone as either a victim or a suspect.

The Gardaí in Wexford, in their odd little Facebook post, got closer to this than most of what followed. They did not lock anything down. They named the mechanism, said the cat was not in the driveway, and went back to work. It did not stop the trend. Nothing was going to stop the trend. But it treated the public as people who could be told how the trick worked, which remains, on the evidence, the most durable defence anyone has.

Sources and References

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23. Emma Brown and others, “Scary clown rumors, threats feed hysteria, leading to school lockdowns, arrests”, The Washington Post, 5 October 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/scary-clown-rumors-threats-feed-hysteria-leading-to-school-lockdowns-arrests/2016/10/05/1adf27c4-8b0b-11e6-bff0-d53f592f176e_story.html
24. European Commission, “Guidelines on transparency obligations for providers and deployers of certain AI systems”, Shaping Europe's Digital Future, 8 May 2026, concerning Article 50 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/guidelines-ai-transparency-obligations
25. Ofcom, “Statement: Protecting children from harms online”, Protection of Children Codes of Practice, in force 25 July 2025. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/statement-protecting-children-from-harms-online

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

In Summary: * Closing out this Tuesday with quiet music playing in the background, and the night prayers and meditations ahead. Peaceful. I like this.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 228.40 lbs. * bp= 144/85 (66)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 03:20 – 1 Reese's pb cup, * 06:30 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 11:45 – pancit, white bread and butter, beef chop suey, fried rice * 16:20 – 1 Reese's pb cup, 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 02:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 03:10 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 03:30 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to music, nap * 12:00 – watch old TV Shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 15:00 – called one of my banks, taking care of business * 17:00 – listening to relaxing music, evening and night prayers and meditations

Chess: * 09:30 – moved in all pending CC games

it’s cold outside, it’s black, and it’s raining

I’m having cough some asthma allergy attack no doubt, and I’m inside on the bed with the dogs

And all is well

A few days ago, on the road we saw a toad big as a soccer ball. We had to swerve to avoid running it over,

But it made it

I don’t think I’ll ever see such a big toad in my life again

Isn’t life strange?

Where's Wordo? Level 1- Apartment Party

I was a big fan of the Where's Waldo books when I was a kid. And this gave me an idea, what if there was a literary version of Where's Waldo? Essentially, a large, chaotic scene is described, and you must locate “Wordo” within it. But I can't put Wordo's name, because you could just control-F to find him. So instead, you must infer where Wordo is from what's going on. So, here is the first Wordo Challenge. He is located somewhere at a busy party in an apartment in NYC, and doesn't quite fit in. Let's see if you can find him:

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Just inside the double front doors, where a row of winter coats and denim jackets has been heaped onto a standing rack that looks too elegant for the abuse it is enduring, three people have made a kind of annex out of the entryway, one woman in a silver slip dress balancing a coupe glass in one hand while she retells, for the second time and with greater confidence than accuracy, the story of how she once got stuck in a freight elevator in Tribeca with an avant-garde cellist, one bearded man in tortoiseshell glasses nodding solemnly even though he is clearly watching the room beyond her shoulder, and another guest in a cropped leather jacket crouching to retie the lace on a tall boot while still somehow managing to keep up her side of the conversation; beyond them the loft opens suddenly and theatrically into the main living area, where exposed brick, black-framed factory windows, and a ceiling webbed with pipes and pendant lights make everything look self-consciously raw and expensive at once, and about fifteen people have distributed themselves across the space, seven sunk or perched along a deep sectional couch whose cushions are being shared by a pair of women debating whether a certain downtown gallery has become too commercial, a man in a moss-green suit explaining the difference between natural wine and ordinary bad wine to a listener who regrets asking, two friends passing a phone back and forth to examine photographs from somebody’s Fire Island weekend, a person sitting cross-legged at the corner of the sectional and laughing too loudly at stories they are only half hearing, and a compact man in a rugby shirt leaning over the back of the couch to contribute occasional opinions nobody seems particularly invited to receive, while around them another eight guests remain standing in loose knots beneath the blue flicker of a wall-mounted television that is silently cycling through a playlist of glossy music videos, one cluster of three near the credenza discussing a startup that may or may not involve AI, one pair by the windows arguing about whether Bushwick is over, two more by a tall rubber plant comparing mutual acquaintances from Pratt, and a lone guest near the speaker stack swaying half a beat behind the song and staring, as if in private thought, at the editing cuts in a video where sequined dancers keep appearing and disappearing inside a mirrored tunnel; past the couch and the orbit of the television, the dining area has been transformed from anything remotely domestic into a standing-room buffet zone, its long table stripped of all ordinary function, the chairs dragged back and leaned against the walls at uneven angles as if the room itself had shrugged them off, the tabletop crowded with platters of skewered vegetables, little toasts crowned with whipped spreads, a bowl of citrus segments glistening under the track lighting, trays of dumplings under linen napkins, and an aggressively curated arrangement of olives nobody is touching, while a separate folding table has been dressed up as a bar with bottles of mezcal, gin, vermouth, tonic, soda, sliced limes, sweating buckets of ice, and a hand-lettered sign attempting to dignify the situation by calling it a spritz station; nine people are hanging out in this zone, including two women in sharply cut black outfits who are talking with the intensity of old friends who have just remembered they dislike one another, a broad-shouldered man with a chain necklace reaching over the hummus to steal a cube of cheese while pretending he is only looking for a napkin, a guest in a vintage band tee carefully constructing a drink with the concentration of a chemist, a couple who keep drifting apart and back together again as each is intercepted by different conversations, a flushed young man insisting that the playlist was better an hour ago, a narrow-faced man in a pale short-sleeved shirt tucked neatly into tan trousers who is holding a paper plate with a single carrot stick on it while listening to two people discuss a club in Greenpoint, and two strangers near the bar who have entered that immediate overfamiliar stage of party conversation where they are already discussing childhood pets; the kitchen remains visually part of both the dining room and the living room, as open as a theater set, and the large elbow-shaped island at its center is burdened with even more food, stacks of small plates, bowls of chips, half-cut lemons, serving spoons, and a leaning arrangement of flowers that seems to lose petals every time somebody brushes past, while a couple of caterers occupy the practical heart of the space, one sliding fresh crostini onto a tray and the other with sleeves rolled up assembling something involving smoked salmon and cucumber with relentless speed, and among them hover five guests who either genuinely want to help or want to perform the idea of helping: a woman in a crimson blouse refilling her water directly from the sink, a lanky man in a knit polo asking where the trash goes while holding nothing that needs to be thrown away, a guest with slicked-back hair pilfering one shrimp at a time each time he thinks nobody is looking, a woman perched on a counter stool explaining in great detail why she never cooks, and another guest opening the fridge, apparently on a mission for more ice, and then pausing long enough to scan its contents with the anthropological curiosity of a museum visitor; down the hall, Guest Bedroom 1 has become an accidental side lounge where three people have made themselves comfortable amid a neatly made bed, a chair draped with somebody else’s blazer, and a dresser topped with framed photographs turned anonymous by distance, one person seated on the edge of the mattress and speaking in a low confidential tone to a second who lies on one elbow as if receiving state secrets, while a third stands by the lamp with arms folded and periodically glancing toward the balcony door, and just beyond that sliding door the small balcony holds three more people in the bright pinprick atmosphere of the smokers’ enclave, one exhaling toward the street, one shivering in a sleeveless top but refusing to go back in, and one using the party below as raw material for instant character judgments; by Full Bath 1, with its white subway tile and overstretched pocket door, one person is inside, audible but unseen as cabinet doors open and close and water runs for longer than anyone in line thinks necessary, while two guests wait outside, one checking his reflection in the dark screen of a phone and smoothing his eyebrows with a thumb, the other leaning against the wall with shoes already off and held by their heels in one hand, looking like they have either had the best night or the longest week; a large storage room that doubles as a laundry room has somehow attracted its own tiny salon of two people chatting among shelves of detergent, spare paper towels, a vacuum cleaner, and boxes whose labels have long since become inaccurate, one of them perched on an overturned crate and talking earnestly about moving to Los Angeles while the other, standing near the washer with a plastic cup hooked through two fingers, keeps asking practical questions that make the whole dream sound less glamorous and more expensive; the master bedroom, larger and softer than the rest of the loft and made faintly golden by a pair of bedside lamps, contains five people hanging out on the bed itself in varying states of collapse, two sitting upright against the headboard comparing tattoos, one lying flat and waving a hand now and then to emphasize a story, one kneeling near the foot of the bed to rummage through a tote bag for a charger, and another sitting on the floor with back against the mattress, absently peeling the label from a beer bottle, while in the attached bath two more guests have claimed the mirror, one blotting lipstick with a square of tissue and the other attempting to resecure an earring while squinting at her own reflection; through the master’s glass doors stretches the large balcony, where seven people are strung along the railing and outdoor chairs in the cooler air above the city, somebody pointing downtown as if the skyline belongs to them personally, somebody else telling a story that requires repeated reenactments of a disastrous first kiss, one guest alone at the far corner scrolling through messages, a pair discussing whether to leave for another party in Brooklyn, another pair sharing a cigarette despite neither seeming to smoke regularly, and a final figure resting forearms on the rail and watching the traffic below with the fixed concentration of a person who may actually prefer the anonymity of streets to the effort of rooms; Guest Bedroom 2, much smaller and dimmer than the rest, has become a refuge from the party’s performed brightness, and it contains only one person seated cross-legged on the rug petting both a dog and a cat who have apparently elected this room as neutral territory, the dog stretched long and content beneath a hand scratching behind its ears, the cat tucked partly under a chair but pushing its head into the offered palm, while the solitary guest, still in a velvet blazer too formal for the task, murmurs to them with the patient seriousness usually reserved for children or diplomats; the office door at the end of the hall remains locked and untouched except for a couple of coats that have slid from the entryway overflow and been draped over the knob, everyone having accepted that whatever work life or secrets are inside have been temporarily exiled from the evening.

Duty over Love... For love Sometimes you are The princess and sometimes You must play The girl

Sometimes you are The prince and at others Just the Pauper

Truth Beauty Freedom Love

Most of all... LOVE

As Wesley said To his Buttercup

As You Wish

---

A life lived in fear is a life half lived

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Please give me the gift of the spirit in my heart and the spirit Of dance in my feet.

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#poetry #osxs #sketchbook

2024-11-10 00:54:10

wrinkled pages

Finished on Sunday: Three Moments of an Explosion, a collection of short stories by China Miéville. I had found a hardback copy in a charity shop which cost me a pound. Given my literary tastes, Miéville's work should very much be my cup of tea — but it hasn’t worked out that way. I was put off by my first taste of his work, when I read Kraken about fifteen years ago (which, to this day, remains the only book I’ve read on a Kindle). I actively disliked it: there was something about his authorial voice that I couldn’t warm to. The inexpensiveness of this copy of Three Moments seemed like the ideal opportunity to give his writing a second chance.

While I got along better with it than with Kraken, reservations remain. The title story, for instance, is one of several very short pieces in the book, none of which impressed me. To my mind, the volume would have been better had they been omitted. Elsewhere, Miéville's ‘voice’, as it sat & ‘sounded’ in my mind again often had something about it I found off-putting. There were a some exceptions: the slick satire of ‘Dreaded Outcomes’ delighted me; and I relished the old-school style of ‘The Design’, the tale which closes the book. Of the other stories I enjoyed, a couple (‘The Dowager of Bees’ and ‘The Bastard Prompt’) could have been the basis for intriguing X-Files plot-lines. The horror stories in the collection generally failed to fully connect, with ‘The Rabbet’ the only one of them to properly get under my skin. Miéville’s imagination is undeniably fertile, though some of its productions teetered awkwardly past the furthest points to which I could suspend my disbelief. These were cases less fit for Mulder & Scully than perhaps for Professor Quatermass, or even Doctor Who.

Miéville’s new novel The Rouse was purportedly twenty years in the making and runs to 1,264 pages. I shan’t be rushing to buy it, but if a cheap copy should turn up in a charity shop in years to come, I may take a look.

---

My latest music acquisitions were likewise very inexpensive ones. Seeing a CD copy of Manu Chao’s Próxima Estación: Esperanza reminded me I used to like his song ‘Me Gustas Tu’. Picking up the disc, I saw the song was on there so decided to buy it. It’s a pretty good record — a warmly uplifting Bob Marley-influenced feel suffuses much of it — just perhaps a little too much of it for my taste: a tad more variation of mood would have suited me better.

On a neighbouring shelf to the Manu Chao album, an early ‘90s CD issue of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers With Thelonious Monk. The music here is wonderful; the recording and/or mastering, regrettably less so. The bass — played by the curiously-named Spanky DeBrest — is often all-but inaudible, undermining my enjoyment of the performances. The absent bass is apparently a known flaw in the original stereo recording, so I’ll have to try to get my hands on one of the more recent mono remasters. For an example track from the record (with audible bass) try ‘In Walked Bud’.

---

During the same visit to Chepstow when I bought the CDs (which were £1 each), I also found a dainty-looking ornamental glass vase (Fig. 40) which set me back another £4.

As if to offset these relatively thrifty acquisitions, I squandered (via ebay) a rather larger sum on yet another box of old stationery: some ‘Milano’ paper and matching envelopes from Pineider. The set is second-hand, but unused (Fig. 41). The Florentine retailer seem like an Italian equivalent to the likes of Smythson or Cassegrain, with a historic focus on providing personalised stationery to a wealthy clientele. The box contains only 24 sheets of A4 paper with as many envelopes. The paper is laid, watermarked and straight-cut; and the envelopes are lined with white tissue & discreetly embossed with a Pineider logo. There’s no claim of the paper being rag-based or hand-made: one might hope that, given the asking price, it might at least be one or the other, but who knows.

---

Cheese of the week: Bluemin White from Shepherds Purse Artisan Cheeses in Yorkshire. This mould-ripened offering is encased in blue-grey penicillium roqueforti rather than white p. camemberti, yet it isn’t a properly blue cheese, as the small truckles are left unpierced so that the mould can’t readily infiltrate the paste. The hint of blue provided by the rind does however add a certain extra tang to what is otherwise a subtly delicious brie-like number.

Tomatoes are next. I've picked the second crop, and it's tomato: the most-grown, most-photographed, most-argued-about plant in the garden and the field. Starting now, I'm building tomato diagnosis the same way I built the first one.

The problems between here and a tomato model

The lookalike exam. Early blight, septoria, and late blight read almost alike at the stage where catching them matters most – a pinhead spot on an oldest leaf. Telling them apart from a photo, early, is the whole job. Everything else is plumbing.

Real photos, not textbook photos. Field tomatoes grow in crowded, backlit canopies with dirt-splashed lower leaves. Textbook single-leaf shots are easy. The photos growers actually take are the ones that have to work.

Trust is per-crop. Whatever the lab proved on its first crop, tomato doesn't inherit it. The model earns trust in the field, against the hard cases, or it doesn't earn it at all. Starting from zero is the price of doing it right.

It ships when it clears the same bar the live crop cleared, and I'll post the real numbers as they come.

Watch it happen at plantlab.ai/platform, or get notified there when tomato's status changes.

PlantLab had its name from day one, and the name was the plan: a diagnosis lab for plants, all of them, eventually. One crop is live today. Tomato, apple, grape, and leafy greens sit on the public roadmap. The long game is a lab that carries what it learns from one crop into the next.

A lab, not an app

I built the first model because I needed the answer myself. A general-purpose chatbot looked at my plant and said calcium deficiency. It was light burn. The opinion arrived instantly and was wrong in the way that matters: confident and useless.

That failure set the bar for everything since. The problems worth catching are lookalikes – deficiencies that impersonate each other, pests that impersonate deficiencies, stress that impersonates both. Trust gets earned on the hard cases, not the easy ones. An app can answer for one plant. A lab keeps a discipline that has to hold for every plant after it.

The long game: crops that teach the lab

Each crop the lab takes on teaches it something the next one needs. Reading leaves at the pinhead stage on one crop is exactly the skill the next crop needs on day one. Calibrated confidence is a habit, not a feature: a result that says “I'm 40% sure, watch it” instead of guessing. Habits travel. So do reading each plant on its own and the honesty about uncertainty.

What the lab learns on tomato will make the grape work faster. What it learns on grape will make the leafy-greens work faster. That is the compounding bet: not one model, one crop, one market, but a lab whose judgment gets broader with everything it reads.

What doesn't carry

Each crop's lookalikes are their own exam. The answers don't transfer, and neither does the reputation. A grower's trust in what the lab does for one crop is not a blank check for the next. Every crop earns its own track record, from zero, in the field, against the hard cases. The second crop doesn't get the first crop's reputation for free.

The roadmap, plainly

The crop roadmap is public at plantlab.ai/platform: one crop live today, four more on the roadmap. The labels mean exactly what they say. Live means a deployed model doing the work. In development means work has genuinely started. Planned means intended, not started. No dates, because a date is easy to publish and impossible to keep honest.

The name was the plan. The lab grows into it.

To paint is to invite you into my dream, realms where anything is possible. Soft edges of understanding and experience rife with hope and the unexplored. We are there together, artist and lover interpreting the form and color in our own time and understanding. Sometimes delighted, sometimes sad, sometimes confused. Each experience personal and every journey differing.

Writing is inviting you to the knife’s edge of my reality, now, moments past or futures imagined. A moment or experience revealed in the precise detail of invention or observation. You come into my mind and you feel the pain and the joy, the tears and the exultation as I feel. We are bound on that journey in experience, feeling and understanding.

Music takes the precision of writing and combines it with the abstract qualities painting to create ethereal moments exploding with experiential thrill. Music is poetry. Music is painting. It is wide and narrow, dark and bright, loud and quiet.

2025-01-17 15:28:55

—

I'm reawakening my creative self.

As I've often said, entrepreneurship is my art. It's about the only creative thing I'm good at. Last year I took a bit of a sabbatical (which was perfect timing given the birth of our little girl), but I'm ready to start coming out of it.

I need to get used to expressing my creativity again, as I'm sort of out of practice, and I'm still wrapped up in my new life as a dad. That in itself has forced me to give creativity time and space and not to force anything. But that changes today. I'm giving myself permission to lightly explore some creative ideas as a way to warm up that part of my mind.

It feels good. Weird, as it has been a while, but pretty damn good.

#personal

GitBook.io är en webbaserad plattform för att skapa, organisera och publicera dokumentation och kunskapsmaterial. Tjänsten är särskilt populär bland företag, utvecklare och projektteam som behöver samla information på ett strukturerat sätt och göra den lättillgänglig för användare eller medarbetare.

Med GitBook kan man exempelvis skapa användarmanualer, produktdokumentation, guider, API-dokumentation, FAQ-sidor och interna kunskapsbanker. Informationen organiseras i sidor och sektioner, vilket gör det möjligt att bygga upp allt från en enkel guide till en omfattande dokumentationsportal. Dokumentationen kan publiceras offentligt på webben eller skyddas så att endast behöriga användare får tillgång till den.

En viktig funktion i GitBook är möjligheten att samarbeta kring dokumentationen. Flera personer kan arbeta med innehållet, kommentera och granska ändringar samt använda versionshistorik. Plattformen har stöd för Markdown och kan synkroniseras med GitHub och GitLab. Det gör att utvecklare kan arbeta med dokumentationen direkt från sitt vanliga kodflöde samtidigt som andra medarbetare använder GitBooks visuella redigerare.

GitBook innehåller även AI-funktioner. GitBook Agent kan hjälpa till att skapa, granska och hålla dokumentation uppdaterad, medan GitBook Assistant kan låta användare ställa frågor och få svar baserade på informationen i dokumentationen. Publicerat innehåll kan dessutom göras mer tillgängligt för AI-system genom bland annat Markdown, llms.txt och MCP.

Tjänsten passar därför bra för exempelvis ett företag som vill bygga ett hjälpcenter för sina kunder, ett utvecklingsteam som behöver dokumentera ett API eller ett projekt som vill samla instruktioner och teknisk information på ett och samma ställe. GitBook kan även användas som en intern företagswiki där rutiner, processer och annan kunskap samlas och hålls uppdaterad.

En av fördelarna med GitBook är att man inte behöver bygga en egen webbplats eller ett eget system för dokumentationen. Plattformen kombinerar redigering, strukturering, publicering, sökning och samarbete i samma tjänst. Det gör GitBook till ett praktiskt verktyg när information behöver vara lätt att hitta, enkel att uppdatera och tillgänglig för rätt målgrupp.

Här är ett exempel på hur Gitbook kan användas.

The pillar of cloud would not move away from before the people during the day, nor the pillar of fire at night.

I noticed driving home that the clouds were odd. In the land of big sky, you get used to every sort of cloud.

North of the city, out over the land toward the Red River, a huge plume of clouds covered the sky at least out to the Oklahoma border. It was kind of glorious, but the color was off. Instead of the usual blue/grey the clouds had a sickly yellow tint to them. Even some dark grey floating around.

It wasn't until I got a few miles closer that I could see the column connecting the clouds to the ground about 15 miles out.

It was an impressive fire, and thankfully out in the middle of nowhere. Though I doubt the terrestrial animals felt like it was the nowhere.

Coming over the bridge where I like to watch the sun set into the railroad tracks, I spotted this crusty old cowboy hat. Pulling off to capture it, I saw that it was well-worn, but not end of life. Some farmer is going to be plenty ticked off that he lost his favorite straw hat.

I left it there so when he comes back, he'll be able to reclaim it.

Standing there in 108º heat, with the sun cooking my back and the smoke burning my nostrils, I was stricken with how beautiful the moment was.

It turns out even hell has a good side.

Given the choice, most sane people would choose a beautiful mountainside with trees and lush grass. Or maybe a beach bungalow where the waves could lull them to sleep.

And I like those things. I think I'd choose them from a lineup. But the old adage 'bloom where you are planted' came to mind. There is good and bad to every place people dwell, but it absolutely floors me that there can be beauty in destruction.

If you gave me an unlimited budget and a capable team as well as all the time I needed to turn someplace into a paradise, I wouldn't choose something where most of the work was already done. Give me a Death Valley, a Badlands or a Dust Meridian any day.

Imagine the thrill of looking back over 20 or 30 years of terraforming and trying to convince people the place was once one of the most avoided locales in the world.

I ran into this heat map a few weeks ago. It shows distance in miles of how far away from a national park you are.

Now, you'll note that NY, FL panhandle and a few others are either red or yellow, indicating that maybe they're ugly places to visit. Nope. Just no parks designated by the federal government.

The streak from Galveston Texas to Minnesota is pretty telling. They don't call them the flyover states for nothing.

Unless you like sunsets. They're pretty glorious.

But imagine turning that corridor into one of the most attractive places on earth.

Now that's a task I could get behind. And I bet you could too.

HOW?

The funny thing about places nobody wants to be? You can get away with pretty much whatever you want. Without making a big deal of it, what if someone planted a few hundred thousand sequoias while no one was looking?

And I'm not saying Yellowstone is going to blow North America off the map, but a little tectonic action out here sure does have the potential to create some new and stunning vistas.

Fire is always gonna' fire. Burn it all down. But you know what? Some pretty damn amazing things come in the wake of destruction.

Look at Mount St Helens.

The richness of the soil in the aftermath is hard to deny.

And I think this applies to us emotionally as well.

We all go through periods where our worlds end. Losing a hat or two, or maybe our heads entirely. A paddock or the whole continent of our heart burns away.

And we, just like the land, are not done.

We're just prepped for what comes next. And sometimes, impossibly, what comes next becomes more precious than what was there before.

Honestly, I'm kind of counting on it.

So, let's stand here for a minute and appreciate that old hat.

Soak in the heat. The smoke. The scorching earth.

Hell has a strange way of making the land fertile again.

There is simply no telling what is going to grow here next.

Let's hope together that it is more glorious than we could have imagined.

---

Song of the day:

This Too Shall Pass – Okay Go – Of the Blue Color of the Sky (2010)

You know you can't keep letting it get you down And you can't keep dragging that dead weight around If there ain't all that much to lug around Better run like hell when you hit the ground

---

#music #essay

Black Queen by herself.

I won this game, part of a club-based CC tournament which started on 29-June, a few minutes ago when my Black Queen checkmated the White King on her 35...Qh3#. The position of pieces at game's end is shown above, and our full move record below:

1. e4 a6 2. Qh5 g6 3. Qe5 f6 4. Qc3 Bg7 5. d4 Nh6 6. f3 e6 7. e5 Nc6 8. Bd3 f5 9. Ne2 O-O 10. Nf4 b5 11. Nh3 Nf7 12. Ng5 Nxg5 13. h4 Nf7 14. O-O d6 15. Qxc6 Bd7 16. Qc3 dxe5 17. dxe5 Bxe5 18. Qc5 Bd6 19. Qd4 c5 20. Qc3 c4 21. Be2 Bc5+ 22. Be3 b4 23. Qxc4 Rc8 24. Bxc5 Re8 25. a3 b3 26. cxb3 Rc6 27. g4 Qxh4 28. b4 Ne5 29. Qf4 Nf7 30. Nc3 e5 31. Qc4 Be6 32. Nd5 Kg7 33. gxf5 Qg3+ 34. Kh1 Nd8 35. Rg1 Qh3#

And the adventure continues.

Your wonderful works are evident in creation.

They rise above the landscape, blaze with color, or stretch toward the sky. We stop to admire them because they are impossible to miss.

And then there are the small things.

The things we walk past.

The tiny flowers growing beside a path. The moss tucked into the cracks of a stone. The intricate veins of a leaf. A seed no bigger than a grain of sand, carrying within itself the promise of an entire plant.

They don't demand our attention. They invite it.

The Texas frogfruit is one of those quiet wonders.

At first glance, it is easy to overlook. Its flower heads are tiny, its stems slender, and it often grows close to the ground, mingling with the ordinary vegetation around it. Nothing about it seems designed to stop a hurried person in their tracks.

But stop.

Lean closer.

Look at it as though you have never seen a flower before.

Suddenly, the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

What appeared to be a simple little flower head reveals itself as a miniature constellation of petals—white and lavender blossoms arranged with almost jewel-like intricacy. Tiny forms overlap one another, each one contributing to the beauty of the whole. There are colors and textures and patterns that the casual glance completely misses.

It is a bejeweled spectacle hiding in plain sight.

And perhaps that is part of what makes small things so beautiful.

They require us to slow down.

The grandeur of a mountain can overwhelm us from a distance. The brilliance of a sunset can stop a conversation. But the beauty of a tiny flower asks something different of us. It asks us to become attentive.

To bend down.

To look again.

To discover that there is more here than we first imagined.

Creation is full of this kind of hidden magnificence. The closer we look, the more there is to see. A single flower is not merely a splash of color; it is an intricate architecture of petals, pollen, stems, shadows, and delicate relationships with the living world around it. A leaf is not merely green. A drop of water is not merely wet. Even the smallest seed contains a mystery far greater than its size suggests.

Smallness, it turns out, is no indication of insignificance.

In fact, some of the most astonishing things in creation are almost absurdly small.

We live in a world that trains our attention toward the large. Bigger achievements. Bigger houses. Bigger landscapes. Bigger experiences. Bigger lives.

But nature has another lesson for us.

Pay attention to the little things.

There is beauty in what doesn't shout.

The Texas frogfruit doesn't need to be magnificent by human standards. It doesn't need towering stems or enormous petals. It doesn't need to be rare or famous. It simply exists as what it was made to be—and when we take the time to truly see it, we discover that it is astonishing.

Maybe that's a lesson worth carrying with us.

How many beautiful things do we miss because we have decided, too quickly, that they are ordinary?

How many moments pass unnoticed because we're looking for something bigger?

How many tiny gifts surround us every day, waiting not to be found, but simply noticed?

The practice of paying attention changes the world—not because the world suddenly becomes more beautiful, but because we finally become awake to the beauty that was already there.

A tiny flower by the roadside becomes a cathedral in miniature.

A patch of sunlight becomes a painting.

A bird's song becomes a reminder that the world is still full of wonder.

And a little Texas frogfruit, easily passed by, becomes a jeweled spectacle.

Perhaps creation has always been speaking this way.

Quietly.

Patiently.

In small things.

We only have to stop long enough to look.

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#museum #milepost

The 17th century French diplomat and cryptographer Blaise de Vigenère published a treatise on fire and salt. The title is literal — Traicté du Feu et du Sel — and the premise acts as alchemy at its most reductive, where the whole of transformation is compressed into a simple binary: two principles, two substances. Vigenère’s text, however, is actually stranger than its title suggests. It is not really about fire or salt. It is about the impossibility of speaking about anything for the first time. And the implication that an idea, once spoken, cannot be controlled or contained and may perpetuate beyond its source in ways its speaker never intended.

The treatise opens with Pythagoras. Not Pythagoras directly — no one has Pythagoras directly — but Pythagoras as received through tradition, “held to have made more profound search, and with less incertainty penetrated into the secrets as well of Divinity, as of Nature.” Already the syntax demonstrates the author’s argument: Vigenère is reading Pythagoras, who is reading the Mosaic tradition, who is reading — what? The mind of God, presumably, but even Moses received the law on tablets, which is to say, in written form, which is to say, as a text that was already a mediation, rather than a direct link to the mind of God — a shared consciousness. The chain has no first link.

This raises the question: are there other links in this chain lost to time? Or, better still, how do we trust any source of knowledge when its origins are so obfuscated or enigmatic?

Vigenère builds an elaborate scheme of attribution: Pythagoras borrowed from the Hebrews. The Egyptians and Chaldeans borrowed from both. Scripture conceals philosophy within ritual. Every source, when you press it, reveals a prior source beneath. Vigenère moves through these layers with the confidence of a man who has spent decades in the archives of other people's reading — which he had, literally: before writing on alchemy, he spent years translating and annotating classical texts, and before that, a foundational cipher of modern cryptography. He was a man professionally devoted to the idea that every surface meaning conceals a deeper one, and that the concealment is both method and feature rather than flaw.

This is the treatise's subtle radicalism. Vigenère never claims to have discovered anything himself. He does not position his text as a source but as a commentary — on Pythagoras, on Moses, on Mark 9:49 (“every man shall be salted with fire”), on a chain of prior readings stretching backward into a darkness he treats as generative rather than empty. And the remarkable thing is that his commentary feels enriched rather than diminished by its secondariness. Each layer of mediation adds a new context and texture. Vigenère reading Pythagoras is not a degraded copy of Pythagoras reading Moses. It is a new act of understanding that could not have existed without the distance spanned.

There’s also a serious epistemological claim, not just a historical curiosity. What Vigenère demonstrates — almost against his own intentions, since he would probably have said he was simply recovering ancient wisdom — is that knowledge does not degrade as it passes through commentary. It transforms. It acquires texture, context, contradiction—and, yes, flavor, the way fire and salt season food. This suggests that scholarly annotation in this method comes from within rather than passively from outside, the way a river that continues the rain that feeds it without becoming the rain itself.

We still seek originals. We distrust commentary. But this is precisely what Vigenère's chain of attribution makes impossible to sustain. There is no moment in his treatise where a source appears without already being a reading of something else. Moses is already interpreting. Pythagoras is already annotating. The “darke sentences” in which ancient knowledge arrives are not failures of transmission but the very form that deep knowledge takes — because what matters is not the content in isolation but the relationship between reader and text, the transformation that occurs when one mind meets another across the distance of centuries and tradition and language.

This is, I think, the secret argument of the Traicté du Feu et du Sel, hidden inside its alchemical metaphors the way Vigenère says philosophy is hidden inside scripture. Fire transmutes rather than destroys. Salt seasons the object, changing its nature through contact rather than merely preserving it. Some of these passages — on preservation, on the spaces between — I recognize all too well.

Commentary is the fire that transmits, not destroys. And what emerges from that intersection is not a diminished copy of some lost original but something new: knowledge that has transited a human mind, becoming something new but not altogether different from what had entered.

Perhaps there are no original texts. Perhaps all we have across the whole of human history are the ongoing commentaries of others past — some survived, some lost. Provenance falls away when meaning lives in interpretation alone. All of which would otherwise be impossible without someone first having named the unnamable, the sacred unmentionable somehow spoken. And once spoken, renders the anomalous more familiar.

#Philology

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Notes:

1. My copy of Vigenère’s Traicté du Feu et du Sel is an English translation from roughly 1649. Though I find his ideas intriguing, I cannot speak to his traditions, nor the potential differences between the English and French versions of the text.

2. The alchemical opus transforms the practitioner alongside the substance in the vessel. The lapis is not just produced but undergone, meaning the text is already a record of anomalous experience: knowledge inseparable from the encounter that produced it.

3. Can anomalous experience even be articulated in the raw moment, becoming meaningful only through layers of interpretation and introspection afterward? Could mediation be the process by which the darke sentence reveals what was latent beneath the letter, rather than a distortion of it?

4. Might some knowledge require encryption to survive transmission, as Vigenère's cipher requires a key and his alchemy requires a veil? Is it possible that indirection serves not to obscure but to protect what cannot be stated directly?

5. Both alchemy and anomalous experience are relational: the alchemist needed the soror mystica, the student needed the master, the work could not be done alone or in full daylight; and the witness exists, not to verify the event empirically, but to receive the account and become the next link in the chain of knowing.

6. Alchemical transformation is irreversible: one does not un-calcine, nor reverse the nigredo. Could anomalous experience operate similarly, reorganizing the knower so permanently that the distinction between encounter and ordinary learning dissolves? Where does ordinary dream end and extraordinary vision begin?

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By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.