These are the heroes of Birkensnake 6.

  1. Editorial Heroes
  2. Book Arts Heroes
  3. Financial Heroes
  4. Also Financial Heroes
  5. Further Miscellaneous Heroes

Editorial Heroes

Book Arts Heroes

Financial Heroes

  • Dalmatian aficionado and noted baritone Zach Thiessen got his start in fashion while working as a cameraman on the MTV reality series The City. Enchanted by and increasingly intimate with the glamorous world of Diane von Fürstenberg that he filmed on the show, when MTV cancelled The City Thiessen elected to stay in New York to develop his ideas about box pleats. He is currently working to revive a number of obsolete men’s accessories for conservative social clubs.
  • Shannon McCormick does not go by her given (or any) name, because she does not want to de-nature the transcendental with a transcendent (subject or object). Absolute immanence depends on, and belongs to, nothing other than itself.
  • Jonathan Redhorse owes his energy and sex appeal to a robust regimen of dietary supplementation and power-lifting. His patented “Beetle Bars” contain wild-crafted beetles, which are high in protein and provide essential minerals. The Beetle Bar comes in carob, honey, and prawn. Just one gives you the boost you need to play harder and last longer.
  • Karl Wieser has been penpals with a number of Frankfurt School philosophers, including Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Pollock, and he continues to correspond sporadically with Jürgen Habermas. He is an avid tennis player and composes operas using the twelve-tone technique, including the opera “Klaatu and Gort.”
  • Former Bishop of Toledo Clay Banes has taken over operations at his late brother’s vineyard, Asp & Knave Wines. A cobbler by avocation, he has recently patented a design for a soleless sandal.
  • Skeletal remains discovered bricked into a chimney in a Colonial home near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, have been dated to the 1770s, triggering fresh speculations that George Washington did indeed die during the Revolutionary War. The skeleton belonged to a man in his mid-40s. Like Washington, he stood 72 inches tall. The skull was fitted with a partial denture made of ivory. If archaeologists positively identify this skeleton as George Washington, the historical record, not to mention our national mythology, will need to be dramatically revised. Nathan Golding, an American history professor at Harvard University, has long held the minority position that our first president was Gallahananigan, the Foxglove Seamstress, a Washington lookalike who stepped into Washington’s shoes to keep up morale during that bitter winter of 1777. “The Foxglove Seamstress was in the right place at the right time,” said Golding. “What’s more, he was a rhetor, a trained orator, and by all accounts an excellent mimic. He set something in motion and there was no going back.”
  • Cindy Kang graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a degree in parapsychology in 1992. She is a Dianic and current member of the Thistledown Coven. She is nearly finished with her first book, a guide to the magickal psychocosm, which brings together ten years of her research, drawings, and dreams.
  • The last time Shya logged in to World of Warcraft, he typed “/played” and saw that he had clocked 3 years and 31 days as Belandra the night elf alone. He doesn’t have a problem with that.
  • Every year Joe Kraus reserves 10% of his income for the purchase of lobsters, which he releases in the Hudson River. He purchases the lobsters from Food Emporium, because Food Emporium lobsters are the “saddest little monsters of circumspection” he has ever beheld.
  • Milan de Vries founded a Shaker community at Lord’s Stone Lake in Canterbury, New Hampshire, in 1998. The Lord’s Stone Lake community is one of two active Shaker communities today and follows the Millennial Laws and the teachings of Mother Ann. The Lord’s Stone Lake community produces and sells several crops and products, principally Shakers’ White Marrowfat Bush Beans, Shakers’ Sarsaparilla Syrup, Shakers’ Apple Sauce, and Shakers’ Slat Back Chairs, Without Arms, for Dolls and Show.
  • Alice Kao is a PhD candidate in Canadian Civilization at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation explores masculinity and working-class identity through an analysis of the music of, and the fan culture surrounding, the rock band Rush, with a focus on the early and middle years (1968-1981).
  • Janalyn Guo is certified in hypnotherapy and EMDR. She is a Pisces with a Cancer moon and currently the caretaker for five reptiles adopted from Reptile Rescue: an iguana (Ralph), two bearded dragons (Penny and Delphine), a crested water dragon (Ike), and a corn snake (Bennet).
  • Zetetics is organizing a class-action lawsuit for people who consumer-tested the Coca-Cola Company’s “Coke Minus” without being informed of the severe health risks associated with use of the product. “Coke Minus,” which was never released to the public, has −250 calories per serving and is part of a new category of “active” diet drinks. Zetetics, who had to have his tonsils removed after drinking only four liters of “Coke Minus,” considers himself lucky. “I feel sorry for the people who didn’t have tonsils,” he says. “They had no buffer and they lost a lot more.”
  • Many people who claim to have been abducted by aliens report harrowing ordeals during which they are held on spacecraft and subjected to medical examinations. Not so with William Flesch, a twenty-six-year-old man from Santa Cruz, California, who came forward with his story on October 15th of this year. Flesch claims the being who took him forcibly from the parking lot of the Surfing Museum transported him through space and time to the first Thanksgiving. “Most of the time I was gone, I was still on Earth,” said Flesch. “But it was, you know, a different century.” He said the aliens participated in the feast, speaking English and greeting some of the pilgrims by name. “I’ve never been to Massachusetts other than with the aliens,” Flesch continued. “Now I’d like to visit Plymouth Plantation and see how it’s changed.” He is looking into crowdsourcing options to fund his trip.
  • Jedediah Berry is an actor whose screen debut came in 1986 when he played Hatchet Man #6 (uncredited) in John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China. He also co-starred in the short film 8 Minute Abs as Crunch as Guy #2. Most recently, he played Edouard Manet in the regional premier of Manet as part of the 2013 Dorset Theater Festival in Dorset, Vermont.
  • Diana Arterian taught photography abroad for over a decade and still has many Finnish friends. She now lives in Briscoe, Texas, where she performs as one half of the alt-country band 4-H.
  • Travis Vachon was a pupil of On-yumishi Kanjuro Shibata XX, master bowmaker and former Imperial Bowmaker to the Emperor of Japan. He still practices kyudo with his daughters. He works as a debate coach and commutes to his job in Denver from a cabin in Nederland that he built himself using oriented whole-tree beams that he harvested from his property.
  • Born Korska Hod, Jolene Kiernan adopted her alias after her features were burned beyond recognition by Drow poison. She still seeks the dark elf who scarred her, and with her lifemate, Charles Kiernan, processes unguents for the World Serpent Inn Spa in Lower Ocerot.
  • Corinne Teed is a machinist and trout farm proprietor working on the prototype of a tool she calls “The Trident of Fish Command.” The Trident of Fish Command isn’t for use at the trout farm; it’s suited for sportfishing in deep water. Teed expects to have the Trident ready for market by 2016.
  • After a successful career in journalism, 이수미 went back to school for biology and now works as a staff mycologist at the Pentagon. He recently translated Eleanor Cameron’s beloved novel The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet into Kyrgyz.
  • Danimal Rampant is a lucid dreamer and plant psychic who consults with botanists, gardeners, and commercial growers worldwide, helping them to understand the needs of their flowers. “I flew Dan to Santa Barbara and had him sleep in the greenhouse by the odontoglossums, which were really failing,” said John Fichu, of Superior Orchid. “In the morning, he told me exactly what to do for them.” “He can hear them singing,” said Mackenzie Walters, of A Rose is a Rose. “The roses sing rhyming songs about what they feel and he listens to them when he dreams. My Blumenschmidts hated the staff shirts. As soon as I ordered new shirts, the mildew disappeared.” Rampant is available for consultations and offers a sliding scale for people with suffering plants who do not have the means to pay the full fee for his services.
  • Christine Gardiner recently carbonated a small lake in upstate New York, to the delight of local children. “It was really no big deal,” said Gardiner, who made the carbonating apparatus herself. “It was like making a really big seltzer.” The lake’s water is exceptionally cold, which helped it retain the CO2. Gardiner was noncommittal about what she would carbonate next. “Most likely a slightly bigger lake,” she said.
  • A descendent of Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, Patricia Scott felt welcome in Berlin when she traveled there this summer to train with parkour and free-running greats from all over the world. Scott combines a fast and aggressive parkour style with inline and quad-roller skating stunts, and she felt that her unique approach to the sport was well received. “They’re more philosophical about it in Europe,” she said. “They appreciated what I was doing.”
  • George Oliver is a nephrologist and proud father of four. In his free time, he kippers fish using an old family recipe. By his best guess, he has hand-split over two hundred thousand herrings since he began seriously kippering in the late ’90s. He also plays a decent game of squash and is a competitive runner, winning many races for his age group. He plans to compete in his first ultra-marathon this spring.
  • Harold Wells is deeply disgusted by the Tyrol and has never been back. He runs a scientific glass supply house in Bristol, England
  • Jules is a hermit with a heart of gold and a passion for canaries. She lives in a ceramic cone in Merck forest and holds visiting hours every third Saturday for those interested in learning more about asceticism, cone living, or basic canary care.
  • Dawn Montague, the president of V-Cheese, the world’s leading vegan cheese producer, has hired a professional cheese taster to help improve the taste and texture of V-Cheese’s Italian line. “At V-Cheese, we care about all the same things that cheese makers have cared about since time immemorial,” said Montague. “We care about external surface, undercrust, color, density, odor, aftertaste. If people say our V-Romano smells like Shrinky Dinks and tastes like a yeast infection, we say, well, that’s not good enough. We can do better. I am confident that Mr. Ruocco is going to help us get our products to a new level.”
  • Bait shop owner Anji was devoured in her shop early yesterday morning by thousands of nightcrawlers that escaped from an open refrigeration unit. Nightcrawlers rarely attack large prey, and rarely move in packs. Most zoologists speculate that the worms were infected with a fungus, although some believe that the worms had interbred with a bone-eating tropical species of nightcrawler, which has been discovered farther and farther north as climate patterns change.
  • In 2010, Cherry Phosphate was elected President of the International Porlock Society, the youngest President to helm the society since its inception in 1797. His acceptance speech was notably brief: “And all for love,” he said, “and nothing for reward.”
  • Christopher Holden is a fighting robot developed by a team of Korean scientists and engineers to premier at the 2015 World Expo in Milan, Italy. He has a “brain” composed of 32 qubits that allows him to “learn,” and performs at Grand Master level in several martial arts, including Judo, Brazilian jujitsu, and Jogo Do Pau. His face and body are modeled after popular Korean actor Lee Minho, who told reporters he considered it “an honor” to be involved with the project.
  • Jill Meyers has survived several natural disasters and a train derailment and somehow still manages to feel like the universe is on her side. She is most grateful for her left profile, her triplet daughters, and her award-winning zinnias.
  • jen jr. is principle flute with the Moroccan Royal Philharmonic orchestra. An accomplished horsewoman, she has ridden in fantasia performances in the Maghreb and has been a visiting instructor in dressage at Cazenovia College, Northwestern College, and Mount Holyoke. She loves cooking for her family and friends.
  • A Floridian by birth, Brian Torrey Scott feels most at home in peninsular settings. He has lived in West Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Italy, and currently resides in Jutland with his schnauzer Erskine.
  • Lee Mellon is working to end the human race without violence through visualization. He visualizes the non-human past and the non-human future and slowly brings these two visions together until they meet in the present. It is his hope that massive multi-species visualizations of this kind will actuate an energetic erasure of humans from the planet. Most of his days are spent in this pursuit.
  • THE CENTURION developed his death ray by improving upon the simple techniques used by Archimedes during the Siege of Syracuse over 2200 years ago. Not only can this death ray ignite wax-coated enemy ships, it can incinerate wooden and brick houses within a 500 ft radius. Humans may combust if the ray is aimed directly at them. The Centurion does not condone the use of the death ray for property damage or death.
  • The Carriger family doorknob emporium, The Knobbery, has been a Park Slope landmark since 1923. Michelle Carriger travels widely in search of rare and beautiful doorknobs and has expanded The Knobbery’s inventory. The must-have door knob of 2013? “We’re selling a delftware doorknob,” says Carriger. “It’s quite popular. Also, we’ve begun working with a small producer who crafts knobs out of sea glass and driftwood. Really, it depends on your door and the effect you’re going for. We don’t believe in one knob fits all.”
  • Faced with increasingly crowded urban downtowns, city planners are turning to Laura McDermott, former Classic Tetris World Champion, for advice on how to make the best use of open corridors. McDermott has consulted with officials in Hong Kong, London, Tokyo, Seoul City, New York City, and elsewhere. “No one conceives of space quite like Laura McDermott,” confirmed Naoki Inose, Tokyo’s governor. “She sees every available cubic unit and can estimate what can fit where.” McDermott enjoys spatial problem-solving, but in her day-to-day life she prefers the peace and quiet of open country. “I live in the desert,” she says. “I step out my front door and there’s miles of nothing. In my line of work, you need to come home to that.”
  • JBW’s novella, Ambergris of the Black Tiger, won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Science Fiction in 2011. The novella is loosely based on W’s experience of falling into a lava tube in his native New Zealand.
  • xm holds the world record for the catpaddle, the cuttlestroke, and the kelp. She currently resides in Hartford, Connecticut, and blogs at catpaddle.wordpress.com.
  • Beloved pet caricaturist Dragon … Fly has released a new book, Friends Forever, a collection of charcoal drawings of pet mummies discovered in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs. Fly’s fans will delight in this timeless cast of mongooses, monkeys, cats, dogs, bald ibises, grebes, albatrosses, fennecs, and sand deer.
  • By day, Teresa edits a film composed of car chase clips from movies and television shows that will be sold as a DVD exclusive with the Aston Martin Rapide S, which features a center console with a twin-screen entertainment system and wireless headsets for backseat passengers. By night, she drives for DJ Cherry Slider. She’ll sleep when she’s forty.
  • Unstuck is an activist organization spearheading a campaign to raise awareness of the state laws that permit game wardens to commit warrantless inspections of private property. Game wardens perform constitutionally unlawful searches and seizures every day. If you live in California, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, or Wyoming, your home may be raided by game wardens at any moment without any burden of proof that you are in possession of wild birds, wild quadrupeds, protected fish or reptiles. Please contact your congressional representative and tell them to end the special exemptions that allow game wardens to flout the US Constitution and terrorize their constituents.
  • Todd Warfield writes the popular humor column “I Dropped the Kids Off at the Pool.” He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Kaya Dame, also a humor columnist, and her unmarried brother.
  • GreggMPLS led haunted mine tours in the Nevadaville ghost town outside Central City, Colorado, before he moved to the Big Apple to open The Slaughterhouse, a year-round high-impact horror & gore house for adults only (21+) located in the bloody heart of the Meatpacking District. Those people who toured the Nevadaville mines may recognize Patsy the donkey, now an animated corpse, wandering on the killing-room floor braying fire. Don’t run too fast! Open elevator shafts, geysers of blood, zombie butchers, flying meat cleavers, and monstrously engorged maggots will greet you around every corner of The Slaughterhouse.
  • Jason Quinn Roderick Corace is an architect specializing in glass houses with polyhedric cupolas and inner frameworks of glass surfaces. The glass house allows for twilight and dawn effects and for the opening of the closed structure to the sun, moon, and stars, and alters the tenant’s relationship to the environment. Culture itself will change when glass replaces wood and brick (clear glass and also colored glass fibers).
  • Jolena Hayward, Esquire worked in a government primate lab where she helped perform experiments upon twelve human-ape hybrids (“humanzees”). When her conscience no longer permitted her to stand by while humanoid creatures suffered unspeakable abuses, she left the lab to devote herself to publicizing this well-guarded secret. She estimates that there are over 5,000 humanzees in primate labs nationwide. Please help her spread the word. (Jolena Hayward is not her real name)
  • Oysters Verenson de Leroy is a dish created in 1973 at the Colony Hotel in Kennebunkport, Maine. It is an oyster and parsley puree with a cream base and can be spooned from its ramekin or sucked through a straw. It was named after Bjorn Verenson and Carlita de Leroy, servers in the hotel restaurant, whose hatred of oysters was well known.
  • C. Cottone is the author of the #1 Kindle Single “Mixed Moss.” She moderates a chat room for fans of Stephen Fry and lives quietly with a man in a kilt.

Also Financial Heroes

  • Theric Jepson
  • Elliott
  • Chris Harris
  • Doug
  • Ryan Forsythe
  • Sarah E. Pace
  • Stuart Ross
  • Dog Butter
  • C Petrilli
  • Jori Ketten
  • Dana Levy
  • Toni Müller
  • Tina Connolly
  • Kate Wyer
  • Nick Jackson
  • Matt Briggs
  • Molly McIntyre
  • Tracy Z
  • Cindy M. Gonzalez
  • Laird Hunt
  • Carrot Quinn
  • Bruce Russhellion VIII
  • Camille Robles
  • c. p. griffin
  • Max Krafft
  • Ashley Roach
  • Pierce Gleeson
  • David Moscovich
  • Jessica Hallock
  • niina pollari
  • Alec Koumjian
  • Eric Blix
  • Justin Lee
  • Jan Adrian
  • Jen Tynes
  • Jon Ezell
  • Projective Industries
  • Carolyn Chamberlain
  • Elise Morrison
  • Donald Deeley

Further Miscellaneous Heroes