UNLIMITED WONDERFUL

MY ‘WIFE’ JUST SAID SHE FINDS THE UPSIDE DOWN DEVIL SATAN TREE ATTRACTIVE!! I DON’T WANT HER SOUL DRAGGED TO HELL! PLEASE PRAY THAT SHE WILL BE RESTORED TO THE TRUE CHRISTIAN CHRISTMAS TREE AS COMMANDED BY OUR LORD IN THE KING JAMES BIBLE!!!!!!

Written, illustrated, designed and laid out. The two things left to do are proofread it sixty-thousand times and send the PDF to Blurb. If all goes well and the creek don’t rise, you will be able to order your very own copy from Wednesday 1 December.

Hooray, it’s my birthday! I’m about 348 years old now. This weekend I literally spent A While putting together a gift for you, so that you could be happy on my birthday. You know how I’m making a book and it’s going to be for sale in a couple weeks? Also, hand-coloured prints. You probably didn’t know about that. The thing is, I like the idea of people giving me money for a thing I made. I like that a lot. I also like happiness for free, so I took some of the illustrations from my book, the one you can buy in a couple weeks, and I made a 20 page activity book just for you.

Ta da!

It would have been fun to print it and post a copy to you, but making books for the entire Internet would cost at least a hundred pounds. That’s a bit much. You will have to download it. Would you please download it because it’s my birthday? It’s 20 free pages of sheer undiluted joy (if you stretch to count the front cover and the advertising on the last page as sheer undiluted joy). It’s so joyfully silly, I laughed out loud more than once while I was making it. Here is the link:

http://bit.ly/Flock-Activity-Book

I promise it’s just a 5MB PDF that you can download from Google Docs, not a virus. If you think it probably is a virus, you can send an email to jqgill / at / gmail / dot / com with the subject line: ‘Hey, Jeff, I think you are a big fat liar and that download link is actually a virus, so could you email me the attachment instead so that my antivirus software can check it out?’ and I’ll pop it right over to you.

Also, after you download it and determine that it is indeed nifty, maybe you could tell a friend or two so they could download it too. Later you and your friends could get together for a colouring party or something, especially if one of your friends has one of those crayon boxes with the built-in sharpener.

Thanks for making my birthday happy.

Seeds can be understood in several different ways, but one of the most useful is to think of them as a medium for information storage. Like other media, they will reproduce the information they contain under some specific set of conditions; just as a DVD stores information in one form but will present it in another — for example, a movie — when you put it in a DVD player and press the start button, a seed stores information in the form of DNA, and will present it in another — a plant — when you put it in appropriate soil and add sun and water. What sets seeds apart from DVDs as a far more sophisticated information technology, of course, is that when you play a movie, the movie doesn’t manufacture new DVDs for all your friends, much less shuffle the movie just a bit in every generation, in a way that tends to produce a better plot and snappier jokes as time goes on.

Seeds, by contrast, do an exact equivalent of this. This is why when you tap a seed envelope against your hand and send a single seed rolling out onto your palm, you’re holding two billion years of stored information. That’s how long, according to current palaeontology, the process of evolution has been shaping the genetic code of living things related to the ones we encounter today, and every generation across that unimaginable length of time has contributed something to the shaping of the little packet of genetic material, nutrition, and protective layers we call a plant seed.

—John Michael Greer