This Saturday at 8 p.m., I’ll be playing the Logician in The Mighty Theater’s one-night-only production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, a long, funny play about… well, conformity, drinking, logic, and rhinos, among other things. The show’s in Peekskill, at the Paramount. Here are the full details. And here is LoHud’s sneak-peak. Those in the Hudson/Westchester/MetroNorth region, check it.

FUN FACT: Rhinos are perissodactyls, or odd-toed ungulates. Looking up “perissodactyl” on Wikipedia yielded my new favorite sentence of the week, my emphasis:

In contrast to the Ruminant Artiodactyl ungulates, perissodactyls are hindgut fermenters; that is, they digest plant cellulose in their intestines rather than stomach.

At which show one may enjoy five-dollar all-thee-can-imbibe sangria and beer.

This event will be all ~10 kinds of fun (+/- 1 standard margin of error of fun), not to mention the first Heavy Jamal show in a year, featuring songs never before heard by the public.

Sangria Dance Party ft. the Mangoose and Heavy Jamal
Friday, April 24 at 8:30 p.m.
293 Monroe St. #3, Brooklyn

PS - the HJ show starts after the Pomp & Circumstance party, if you are going to that (as I am).

PS2 - The penguins are coming to destroy us. Be warned.

From “Taxing, a Ritual to Save the Species” in the New York Times:

The more closely knit an animal society is, and the more interdependent its members, the higher the rate of taxation. Among bell miner birds of Australia, for example, pairs of breeding adults are assisted at the nest by several youthful helpers, usually male. The helpers provision the couple’s fledglings with a steady supply of lerp, sugary casings secreted by plant-sucking insects.

Let me pause here to appreciate not only lerp itself—a most vivid and terrifying substance, “secreted by plant-sucking insects,” as opposed to, say, plant-tickling or plant-massaging insects—but also the men and women of Noblest Science who venture forth to learn of the lerp, to love the lerp.

Our article continues:

And though some scientists had wondered whether lerp wasn’t basically a junk food, offered up to the young bell miners as much for show as for substance, researchers report in the March issue of Animal Behaviour that lerp is, in fact, as important to the fledglings’ growth as is the meatier arthropod prey supplied by their parents. By all evidence, the helper birds are honestly “paying to stay,” trading a valuable currency for the right to remain within the aggressively guarded precincts of a bell miner breeding colony, with the hope of better times and personal propagation opportunities ahead.

The only response I have upon reading of colonies of lerpers is:

FUCK yeah, cilantro. You know how humans do.

We may or may not pay taxes because our ancestors shared the mammalian equivalent of lerp, but we definitely share salsa now (in part) because of you, cilantro. You and your leafy green cool refreshing mintacular steez.

The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.

—Norbert Wiener, Philosophy of Science (1945) (with A. Rosenblueth).

Courtesy my brother G., an aphorism about the best command-model for cat-thinking-about: Think about the cat you actually have. Problem of cat-concept solved.

This brings up the hilarity of phenomenology in general: What is the best (the only) description of a thing? The thing. (The thing beyond description. Chillin in its own little multiverse of thing-ness.)

Applies also to music: “What’s DOOM’s new album sound like?” “Well, you know—[insert comparison to other DOOM albums], [insert me humming a few bars]. It’s good.” Which is not to say that I wouldn’t enjoy going into figurative overdrive to describe DOOM’s work—only that my description would be inadequate for someone with little or no experience of paratactic/rhizomatic rap music about food, cartoons, and rap music.

This is all to say: I anticipate eagerly the new DOOM album, and if I have to paint a cat, I guess I have to paint my own cat, even if neither of us knuckleheads is happy about that situation.

Video/design expert and friend Patrick Davison designed Hello Cthulhu; lunchboxes and mousepads soon to come. H.P. Lovecraft was a top-notch bastard; this image would have probably driven him to an early (and soon unearthed) grave:

Writer and friend C.J. Hauser draws single-panel cartoons, every single day.

In terms of “famous” cartoonists and other drawers, I must note Partially Clips and Achewood (again), which have severely influenced my own stances toward talking animals and fourth-wall destruction.

Robot.

But here’s the twist: Robots, apparently, desire to be soldiers.

Whereas my cat would no doubt be content to play the robot pur sang—mindlessly spinning and cleaning and freaking out when I pour water on him [it?]—the poor robot whose job he’d so heartlessly steal would be an ethical soldier, one capable of making “the right choice” about when to unleash a devastating hail of armor-piercing minigun rounds onto children, compact cars, noisy televisions, life-size cut-outs of Adnan “Crazy Cheeze” Sabri, &c.

To clarify my position on ethical robotic devastation, I should add that attempts to trick-out the ethics of human soldiers have so far led to nada; as my man Philip Zimbardo points out on TED, the adoption of the uniform of an “ethical” government has—since the slave-Imperium of Roma, since the slave-empires of Sumer and Egypt long before—provided only a smokescreen, a chance to faux-ethically rationalize away our wars.

Perhaps robots can do us one better. Or perhaps we might pass the job of soldiering on to the noble (and highly irrational) cat. While certainly unethical, any given cat-soldier would also be pissy and libertarian, unable and unwilling to coordinate with the next—thus preventing the formation of a feline SkyNet or Matrix. Wars would be shorter and center around the control and distribution of fish-guts and whole milk. And—when the cats (individually) took command of the Roomba factories—the hardwood floors of the world would look a lot shinier, a lot faster.

(Paritur pax catto?)