I can sing a rainbow, too.

Diatoms posing as chromosomes - well, being chromosomes (coloured things).

Here's me playing with bent light and trying to make a reality out of coloured squares when I really should be filling in funding application forms, which is psychologically identical to trying to scale the north face of a brutalist cold-storage unit in Cumbernauld wearing flip-flops.

Oh well, back to the grind-nose....

comic relief

Did I tell you that my hobby is illustrating legislation for laffs?

This is from the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 .

just because I can't see it doesn't mean it's not there...

This is from one of the boring dusty-looking slides I've been growing. Lovely dust! And covered in all kinds of Diversity!

I'm besotted with the beauty and charm of the tiny diatoms. I bet they taste nice. I bet they are juicy-fresh-tasting and sugary-salty like a lovely cucumber salad in a delicious crispy coat. Now surely any mollusc would fancy snacking on that for a light starter.

Still, not much use for my purposes. Perhaps it's time to raid the Winogradsky column...

Huxley reveals snail, snail reveals Huxley

So I gave the slide to Baby Snail to see if it was to his taste.

Underneath is a copy of Huxley's nice 'Diagram exhibiting the disposition, nervous system, etc., in a common Snail (Helix). '

Baby Snail tucked in with gusto and devoured about a quarter of the dinner in a matter of minutes then charged to another part of the slide and just sat there for ages.

"What's up? Overeaten? Feeling sick? Poisoned even?"

Baby snail couldn't say, at least not in a way that I could understand. And neither could any of my interwebs, either, because they are interested in the eating habits of others only from their own perspectives. Who is to care whether a snail feels nausea? Plenty out there deny a snail feels at all. Many who deny a snail an autonomous sense of being-in-the-world due to a lack of "soul" or the right kind of CPU. These people I have no time for, whether they call themselves religious or rational; they are actually mean-spirited narcissists who allow their understanding of the world to be governed by "if-I-can't-see-it-it's-not-there" and "if-I-can-see-it-it-must-be-true-in-an-absolute-sense". Now this is very wrong and stupid of them but perhaps nobody spent quite enough time playing peek-a-boo with them when they were babies so they are more to be pitied than blamed.

slide show

Just having a look at what is actually on that crusty slide I grew, to see what I could see... lots of fungal hyphae and fruiting bodies, yeasts, bacteria, algae, what you'd expect really...

Shop shop!

Gotta make some money, gotta eat, gotta fund my fun projects - here's my new Etsy shop.

I'll be selling lovely works on paper. I hope...

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Amoeba.

Amoeba who?

Amoeba about to do something goood.


Putting together some drawings of some nice local amoebae.

See, I've been hassling the local waste-water treatment facilities for a good while now, trying to get access to their works with a view to making some lovely art, ideally in collaboration with them.

"I'm particularly interested in your Activated Sludge processes, and your Anaerobic Digestion Tanks," I'm saying. "I'm intending to make a series of beautiful paintings celebrating the wonderful co-operative interactions both of the communities of micro-organisms and of the humans involved in this social processing of our waste.."

The nice people at Veolia Water collapsed into helpless giggles when I eventually managed to find someone to speak to, said they couldn't let me in to the Seafield sewage works out of concern for my health & safety, but haven't ruled out the possibility of this happening elsewhere... perhaps.... one day...

I also got in touch with Edinburgh Council Scientific Services labs who do tests on the various sludges and waters. They pooh-poohed the idea out of hand.

However I intend to carry on undeterred.

This pretty picture, by the way, is available for sale at the knock-down price of £140 + p&p (unframed) , all proceeds to go towards funding a Park-Roberts-bacteria based collaborative pile-on we're cooking up , of which more later. If you would like it, do let me know.

growing paints

And so far the only takers for the growing on glass job have gone for the dilute fertilizer-skimmed milk powder combination happy meal...

bit of a wash-out

Prototype is a cheap print-out of a drawing by T. H. Huxley pinched from the net at very low resolution, I didn't seal if off well enough so it is growing on the inside instead...