Tonight I was clicking through the latest Looney Labs weblog update and ended up looking at their collection of weirdo Christmas trees. In 1993, they did one with Magic cards, which immediately brought me back to when the game was good. And this year's tree is covered with, essentially, NASA trash.

But I'm looking at the one for 1996, which they say was decorated in "space cones." And they provide a picture of the cones, but I just can't see the cone shape. I see these crystalline silver things. They look thin, metal. The text blurb notes that they really had no idea what the widgets were for, and I can't imagine a use for them as well. They're space cones, no doubt intended for some wild astronaut experiment.

I scroll around the page - for some reason I chose to read the tree stories in no particular order - and when my eyes come back to the cones tree, it hits me that I was looking at the negative space between the orange cones. Maybe I was tired, and the geometric-ness of the little image was confusing my vision... the room was dark, except for the computer screen, and I'm finding more and more that I have trouble adapting to changes in light. So that could have contributed to it, I guess. (I've poked Clark in the face plenty of times when I've had to go into his room at night because he's up and crying... my eyes just do not adjust to total darkness with any speed. Often I sneak in to get him back to sleep and never actually see him, except in a very dim shadow as I'm leaving the room.)

I photoshopped up a little blurred version, so you might understand what I saw. Let all the orange blend into one solid shape, and you're left with these oddly shaped pointy bits of gray and black. I even considered that the orange was the packaging that kept the space cones from breaking in transit.

Strange how the brain works. Or doesn't work, in this case.