A warm and fuzzy tree

In Santa Cruz, people knit sweaters for trees.

See below.

Advice needed for DIY mollusk puppet

Trying to make a reasonably sophisticated-looking mollusk puppet for an art project that is due in the coming weeks. It must be made out of cheap, easily available materials. It needs to have large and bulging eyes, a moveable mouth, etc.

Send me advice or links off-blog if you've got them. (Nope, I'm not kidding.)

The Literary Orange: a literary conference at UC Irvine

Just wanted to let you know that I will be speaking and signing books at the 2011Literary Orange, a literary festival in Southern California. I know it's a little early to get the notice out -- it's not happening until next April -- but I'll send reminders out before then on Facebook and elsewhere. It will be great to see everyone. I will be part of a travel-writing panel. Check the website in early fall for the full line-up. Last year the keynote speakers were Karen Joy Fowler and Dean Koontz.

Do you suffer from an irrational fear of chickens?

Disclaimer: There is some chance that the chickens described in a previous blog entry could cause Alektorophobia.

Review: chicken ranch vending machine surpasses expectations (four stars out of five.)

Cactuseaters review: Glaum egg vending machine. Aptos, California.

The Glaum chicken farm egg vending machine exceeded expectations, combining good nutrition with wholesome family entertainment and overall dollar value.

Here's what you should do: drive down Highway One from Santa Cruz and take a left on Freedom Boulevard, then take another left on Valencia. Soon, on the right, you will see the chicken farm, and signs pointing to the vending machine, which is open all the time. Seriously. You could drive up there at three in the morning.

Anyhow, make sure to bring three crisp dollar bills (no quarters.) Insert the bills into the machine. Suddenly the curtain (blocking a small window) will go up, and 10 dancing chickens will emerge. They will sing. They will dance. They will wiggle their small, feather-covered butts to the tune of a loud Benny Goodman song. The song will go on for a very long time. You will notice that some of the chickens are dressed in patriotic colors. Then, when the song is over, the nearby vending machine will give you 24 huge eggs, which is a good deal. On the down side, the machine will hand the eggs to you on a large and awkward pallet without any cover, forcing you to drive home very carefully, watching for speed bumps, lest any of those eggs rolls out and splatters all over you.

I give this tourist attraction four out of five stars, though some people seem to disagree with me. I saw a grouchy woman pull up, slam her three bills into the machine, grab her eggs and drive off, leaving those robot chickens singing and squawking into the nothingness.


I will post pictures at the soonest available opportunity.

to Southern California Cactuseaters readers ...

I will be taking part in a big literary event in springtime down in So.Cal (where lots of family lives.) Will post more when it's official. Sorry to be vague, but it will involve a discussion of travel writing, plus book signing and more.

Congratulate them when you see them

My parents have just gotten back from their 60th(!!!)wedding anniversary cruise. (That really puts things in perspective, in this day and age when people can't even buy futons together anymore.)

In other news, my visit to the Glaum Egg Vending Machine (featuring a group of dancing robot chickens) was a big success. Will post pictures when I figure that out.

The most exciting weekend I've had in a long, long time

This weekend, I met a live bat, and now I am about to visit the famous Glaum Egg Vending Machine.

Full report soon.

Huge rattlesnake

I just saw the biggest, juiciest rattlesnake ever in Rancho San Antonio. I stood in the middle of the path and tried to direct people away from the snake. I warned everybody that the huge snake was on the right side of the road and that they had "better watch out." The trouble is that everyone thought I meant my right side of the road, so they did the opposite of what I told them and walked left instead of right, straight into the coils and dripping fangs of that rattlesnake.

If I had to guess, about 15 people walked straight into the jaws of that snake because of my attempt to help them out. It probably chomped and maybe even swallowed every one of them. (sorry, everybody.)

My bear encounter.

On Sunday, while strolling through the mountains, I almost walked right into a black bear yearling with white-and-cinnamon fur and a hulking Mama Bear, who was jet black, and right on the side of the trail near Crescent Meadow.

Someone warned me in the distance. "There's a bear!'' According to several witnesses (I have blanked out everything that happened next)I put my hands up to make myself look bigger and took small steps backward, away from the bears, who were only 20 feet or so away from me. After a while, they snurfled around through the bushes and took off.

I am not bragging about this at all, but it's worth mentioning because I've made such a mess of my bear encounters in the past.

It just goes to show that people can learn from their mistakes.

But I have no proof of this. I know that someone videotaped the whole thing but I don't have any way of reaching them (no contact info.)

Cactus Eaters review on Oh Ranger, plus Save Me From the Disgusting Ants

Here is the most recent review -- and thanks to the reader who sent this in today. (I'm counting on you guys, since I don't have much time to trawl through the Internet these days.)

In other news, disgusting ants have entered my residence and they keep trying to carry me off so they can feed me to their ant queen.

When I wake up in the morning, I am exactly one foot closer to the door than I was when I went to sleep. This means the ants are trying to carry me off incrementally, in the hope that I won't notice until it's too late.

Anyhow, if you have any non-toxic solutions, please let me know. It's getting really bad.

Reading list

Colum McCann -- Let The Great World Spin.

Steve Almond -- Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. The Toto lyrics chapter just about killed me.

Daniel Okrent -- Last Call. This book is a riot, and it's the most precise and engaging book on the subject. Now nudging its way up the bestseller list.

Dan Chaon -- Await Your Reply. Identity-theft nightmare. Will make an insomniac out of you.

David Howard -- Lost Rights: The Misadventures of a Stolen American Relic Real-life historical crime caper. Gripping and real. See blog entry below.

Rebecca Skloot: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

John Richardson: My Father The Spy. Your parents' secret career.

Dave Cullen: Columbine. Everything you thought about Columbine turns out to be wrong.

On order: Beth Raymer, Lay The Favorite. The last time I saw Beth Raymer, it was four or five years ago, and she was giving an hilarious reading from an excerpt of the as-yet-unfinished manuscript. Now it's out, and soon it's going to be a movie directed by Stephen Frears. (movie should be out next year)

Bad service: "This is not Baker's Square!!!"

Every once in a while, I am going to post brief stories about the truly horrible service I've experienced or witnessed in local restaurants. Feel free to send in if you have a tale to tell about exceptionally bad service. Meanwhile, here are two stories.

Not so long ago, I took my parents to a fancy downtown restaurant that is known for its home-made lemonade, its chicken entrees and its snide owner. My father complimented the waitress on the lemonade. "That is very, very good,'' he said. "Do you give free refills?''

"No!'' she said. "You think we serve refills for free here? This is not Baker's Square!''

My father took this in stride -- in fact, he thought it was pretty funny. Just to show that there were no hard feelings, when the waitress came back, he decided to give her some good-natured ribbing. When she asked if he would like some dessert, he said, "Thank you very much, but I think we'll go out to Baker's Square instead.''

"They put lard in their pies!'' she snarled.

On another occasion, I was standing in line at a high-end coffeehouse in the same city. A man was at the front of the line. He ordered up an orange juice. The man behind the counter came back a few minutes later with a container of murky liquid.

"Is that orange juice fresh-squeezed?" the customer asked.

"Fresh-squeezed compared to what?'' the barista replied.

On hiatus

Quite busy.

Sorry I haven't returned your email.

Today is National Doughnut Day!

Do your part. Do it for Rue McClanahan.

Kara Levy makes her Huffington Post debut!

Way to go to my friend Kara Levy. Here she is, reading a prize-winning fiction story that is now featured prominently in one of the world's most popular media blogs.

Indie bookstore isn't dead after all

I was upset to see that a former haunt of mine, Bookworks in Aptos, California, seemed to be kaput. I used to spend hours in the store, guzzling coffee, reading the magazines and buying just enough inventory to upgrade myself from "loiterer'' to "frequent customer.'' Stopping in to browse through this charming store, I saw some ugly brown wrapping on the windows last week, along with a notice saying that the space was being turned into, of all things, a bike store. (I love bikes, but this area has bicycle outlets the way Haight-Ashbury has creperies and stinky bong emporiums.)

Fortunately, the store has merely moved, although it's smaller than before.

Street poet bids farewell to Cactuseaters in SF (edited version. I wrote this in a hurry.)

Before relocating, I chatted with Lynn Gentry, the famed street poet of Haight-Ashbury, about leaving town. Among other things, I explained to him the staggering amounts of lead in my Victorian apartment (up to 45 times the permissible levels of lead according to the SF Health Department.)He sat down at his typewriter and came up with this nice farewell verse:

"Calls come suddenly and time is too late
to dawn upon minds that wished for so much more but
beauty sits so fragile; who could have known yesterday
the mystery that calls us to protect oursevles
From the dreams of ourselves where questions sit
in mind but little girls sit in view
about to turn two
and we turn our back on fantasies to realize paradise.''

Good one, Lynn Gentry.

David Howard's Lost Rights and Daniel Okrent's Last Call

I've been hearing from readers asking for more information about the Lost Rights nonfiction book and David Howard's Lost Rights book tour. Here is all the info you need. Also, make sure to get your hands on Daniel Okrent's highly entertaining portrait of Prohibition, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, another book that has been making the rounds this month. Amy and I did a bit of research work on Last Call, and it was very exciting to see it arrive in bookstores.

Lost Rights --- David Howard charts the strange journey of a stolen American relic

Who stole the Bill of Rights? I'm not speaking metaphorically here. One of General Sherman's infantrymen pilfered one of the fourteen original copies of the Bill of Rights in the North Carolina statehouse. The stolen relic (a real-life National Treasure) changed hands again and again as it made its way across America. The longtime journalist and author David Howard received a rave from Publishers Weekly for this highly anticipated book, which hits stores this summer. I had the privilege of reading this one in an early form, and I can tell you that it's a jaw dropping combination of investigative reporting and narrative, with memorable characters and so-strange-it-could-only-be-true situations. PW gave it a starred review and named it as the nonfiction pick of the week.