Fish for Friday

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

This summer, follow Osprey and Atlantic Puffin families right on your screen. Streaming from Maine, Audubon's live cameras are your window into the world of birds. You’ll see eggs hatch, chicks fledge, and surprise events along the way.
    Register for bird alerts, and you'll get updates when anything exciting happens in the nest.

Only 109 wolves are left in the Southwest,
according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

According to Defenders of Wildlife, between 2010 and 2012
poachers slaughtered an estimated 100,000 elephants for their ivory.
That's roughly one elephant killed every 15 minutes.

Palace Regaleira - Portugal

"Piano prodigy Joey Alexander takes jazz world by storm." [Jeremy D. Goodwin, The Boston Globe]

Watch and listen to Joey Alexander perform jazz! Introduced by Billy Crystal [9:03]

I think Joey Alexander learned a lot from Michel Petrucciani, a French jazz pianist who has since died of injuries to his fragile bones. Here's Petrucciani's really fine interpretation of "Round Midnight." [7:52]

Nanosecond photo:

I wanted to be sure you saw this new poll from the New York Times: "Poll Shows Americans Favor an Overhaul of Campaign Financing." [Nicholas Confessore & Megan Thee-Brenan]. They just completed a broad and extensive poll of Americans' attitudes on the influence of money in politics, with some remarkable findings:

• More than four in five Americans say money plays too great a role in political campaigns;
• Two-thirds say that the wealthy have more of a chance to influence elections than other Americans;
• This is true across the partisan divide: Republicans were almost as likely as Democrats to favor restrictions on campaign donations;
• Despite all this – almost no one in the poll ranked money in politics as the most important issue facing the country.

Having a bad day?

An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are shown a pasture with a herd of sheep, and told to put them inside the smallest possible amount of fence.
    The engineer is first. He herds the sheep into a circle and then puts the fence around them, declaring, "A circle will use the least fence for a given area, so this is the best solution."
    The physicist is next. She creates a circular fence of infinite radius around the sheep, and then draws the fence tight around the herd, declaring, "This will give the smallest circular fence around the herd."
    The mathematician is last. After giving the problem a little thought, he puts a small fence around himself and then declares, "I define myself to be on the outside!"

Have you ever wondered...how pretzels are tied en masse?

Without stopping to take a look around, we can sometimes miss the transition of our surroundings from summer to autumn. Photos that compare various locations before and after they change into their autumn colours are revealing.
    Besides the nip in the air, the scarves, and the delicious autumn fruits and vegetables, the changing leaves are probably the greatest sign of autumn that there is. Chlorophyll, which is the green pigment in leaves that produces energy for trees, gradually breaks down in the fall, revealing the many other colors that also exist in leaves. That's where we get the rich browns, oranges, yellows and reds that we associate with the season.

Apartment Building Facade

Poet's Walk, Central Park, New York, USA

Hitachi Seaside Park, Japan

A new suburban housing development opens, Bellflower California 1953

Wouldn't have the heart to buy anything and mess up their work!

During the French Revolution a priest, a lawyer and an engineer are about to be guillotined.
    The priest puts his head on the block, they pull the rope and nothing happens – he declares that he's been saved by divine intervention, so he's let go.
    The lawyer is put on the block, and again the rope doesn't release the blade, he claims he can't be executed twice for the same crime and he is set free too.
    They grab the engineer and shove his head into the guillotine, he looks up at the release mechanism and says, "Wait a minute, I see your problem...."

Limerick of the week:

The marriage of poor Kim #kardashian
was krushed like a kar in a krashian.
    Her Kris kried, not fair!
    Why kan't I keep my share?
But Kardashian fell klean outa fashian.

[Editor's Note: Tweeted by Salmon Rushdie while he was comparing the works of Philip Roth on Twitter, in response to Joan Didion's wry comment: "Hey, why are you talking about literature and art, don't you know there's Kim Kardashian gossip to attend to?"]

Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean