Sometimes a new technology makes you appreciate how good the status quo was. Emojis--often illegible at the point sizes suitable for text--remind me of how nice and practical the alphabet is.

Yuja Wang:	If a beautiful male pianist wears tight pants, I'm not going to think, "What's in those pants?"
Fiona Maddocks:	Really not, Yuja?
Yuja Wang:	OK, maybe.

Rabbits eat your plants.

So do other creatures, and not always predictably. I had an incense cedar tree that went untouched for 14 years, then we had a drought and somebody ate all the foliage off it. I mentioned this a while back, saying "I think a career as lumber is in its near future." I only recently got around to machining some of its wood and found it surprisingly tough, the hardest softwood I've ever worked with.

Arizona cypress must not taste good. I didn't bother caging an AZ cypress sapling I've been growing (mentioned in the same blog posting linked to above) because nobody ever eats that stuff. But just this year a jackrabbit has taken to, well, not so much eating my cypresses as pruning them. The rabbit chews off pieces and leaves them scattered around. I think it's his idea of an art installation. The cypress sprigs do enhance the look of my driveway, not that the pic below does them justice--but that's the nature of installation art, it always comes across better in person.

From Politico a few days ago:

CORRECTION: An earlier version of the story misidentified the fictional character name Bannon uses to refer to Jared Kushner as Frodo, a “Lord of the Rings” reference, rather than Fredo, a reference to “The Godfather.”