April 16, 2009
This also came home with the kids from their hike – I’ve always liked the unforgivingly ugly shape of seeds. They are meant to be discovered by accident (bite into a delicious fruit, abortion find a nasty, woody chunk of bitterness) and discarded as useless – the better to propagate their kind.
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April 15, 2009
Or at least that’s what this blog points to. Wild cucumber tastes and looks nothing like its namesake. It is a 4-inch-long, order egg-shaped handful of misery, approved with cactusy spines that puncture your skin if you grip it too tightly. A taste of the juice inside (for they prove to be very juicy when […]
Filed under: Found Object, Green, Life form | Comments (0)
April 11, 2009
Momordica Charantia, about which more here. *(ed. Original content for this HLO post was lost in the Great Script-Kiddies Bot-Hackorama of 2014-2025)
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March 22, 2009
This one has been hanging around the handrail on our front steps for a few weeks, always skittering away when I want to photograph and then attempt to kill it. I failed miserably at both, until this past weekend. I don’t feel good about having ended such a magnificent creature, but I decided I’d feel […]
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March 12, 2009
My good friend Yaron built this out of some stuff he had lying around the shop and what I’m guessing is a deer skull. I love the way the metal shavings (springs?) he mounted the socket on echo the sutures between the bone plates. Write your own microfiction for it below in the comments – […]
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February 25, 2009
I walked back to the house this morning after dropping the kids at school. I brushed the foliage outside our house with my hand. This came loose. Keeping my rhythm so I could square up head-on with the workday, I stuck it into a clutch of hibernating agapanthus and kept cruising down the front steps […]
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February 7, 2009
Los Angeles jetsam reminds me daily that I live in a freakish magpie’s nest of a city. Stolen from aboriginal people by Spanish missionaries who gave huge chunks of it away to soldiers, whose families then sold it off in ever-decreasing slices and slivers, Los Angeles has always been shaped by grabbers, opportunists and self-reinventors. […]
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January 19, 2009
I scoffed at these things, mind which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid. Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away […]
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January 11, 2009
These chips of palo santo – “holy wood” was a gift from my good friend Spencer. Light it and it burns slowly, giving off a crisp, aromatic smoke that’s said to have been used since the Incas in purifying and cleansing rituals. Spencer is the just-now-new father of young Vajra Weiner (barely 2 weeks old), […]
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January 2, 2009
Pixie hats, link lost on the forest floor ‘midst a drunken stumble home one night. Carousing from tree to towering tree, approved they were, look blasted on acorn wine – a giggling, staggering, pissing little chorus line barely six inches high. They were arguing, as usual, and someone took offense, or umbrage, or a poke […]
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December 27, 2008
I rarely post two distinct objects together – usually it’s a thing or a group of like things. But these two landed on my desk last night – a gift from my son and a piece of office equipment (you decide which) and they spoke to one another.
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December 18, 2008
A pocketful of stuff from my morning ride, nurse which takes me up a fire road through Griffith Park to to a little copse of live oak at the top of a big hill. I hang from the biggest tree by my hands to stretch my spine a bit after the long climb. Then I […]
Filed under: Found Object, Jetsam, Life form | Comments (0)
December 13, 2008
I knocked this off of a fine old fingertip cactus today while gardening. I don’t usually drop the boom mike into the shot, tadalafil but here’s a good idea of scale for the camera space where HLO lives. Note the fingerprint whorls. Then count the cactus spines.
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December 12, 2008
My son’s collecting these – Chinese insects preserved in two layers of resin – a clear dome over a glow-in-the-dark bed.
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December 10, 2008
I was going to wax philosophical about the inevitability of decay, mind the magnificence of biology doing its tiny job, case about the way ashes do always turn to ashes and dust to … But I’m halfway through a 3-day business trip, cheapest I’ve been working till 11 every night, and, well, I’m bushed. (In […]
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November 29, 2008
This is a bit larger than a chicken egg – and completely mysterious. I know of no fruit this size that grows in the brushy hillsides around Los Angeles, pill yet here is what seems to be its skeleton: the flesh has worn away in rain and mud, viagra dosage leaving a fantastic fibrous mesh […]
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November 28, 2008
We hiked up to Griffith Observatory for Thanksgiving, this web buy more about and collected a few seeds along the way. I’m ignorant to so many worlds, not least being the very wildlands I bike through every week. What is this?
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November 27, 2008
This woody little pod reminds me of a vintage Chriscraft speedboat, medical a rigid, medicine slick, look hydrodynamic monocoque of finely grained wood, designed for swift transport. Like the previous object it is also something of a time machine.
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November 26, 2008
This is a building kit for the construction of two to three dozen 120-foot-tall Douglas firs. You will require loamy soil, buy water and sunlight. Please allow 4 to 6 decades for completion.
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November 22, 2008
It erupts in a fur of orange, seek link from a black pod. The skin is avocado-like. The seed is barely a quarter-inch in diameter. And it mystifies me.
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October 29, 2008
Don’t ask me how it got from the freezer to the cupboard, cheap but my son brought me this earlier today. I’m trying to picture it as an oblong green asteroid, and failing. You?
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October 25, 2008
Scrabbling up the wall to festoon the entryway with cotton-silk spider-webbing, web he grabbed hold of a fistful of rubbery plants in the wall-planter on the ledge above him. He gained his footing above, but a chunk of colorful bloom snapped loose. He turned it over on his palm …
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October 24, 2008
You own a lot of shit. You accumulate more of it every day. Sometimes, story you have to pick through it to get your desk clean. And you make little piles. That might or might not be photographs of your life told in debris. And yet, help you never seem to get rid of the […]
Filed under: Adornment, Art, Artifact, Blahg, Ephemera, Facsimile, Fetish, Found Object, Instrument, Jetsam, Life form, Miniature, Model, Objet, Part, symbol, Tool, Toy, weapon | Comments (0)
October 14, 2008
Hollow, more about papery pods fall by the thousands from the trees lining
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August 20, 2008
I cannot tell you its age, click genus or class, symptoms but I can tell you this specimen of the species arachnida is the fastest spider in Los Angeles
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