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It’s Citroën’s new take on their classic 2CV. Which looked like this:

Mon dieu, they really captured the look, didn’t they? And kicked it up a notch. We spoke earlier of pareidolia, the tendency of we humans to see faces in objects. And boy, do I see a happy face in the new one. The oldster, not quite so much. However both really put out a puppy dog, friendly vibe that you just can’t be grumpy around.

And when you’re happy, you smile and show those white choppers to the world. Which makes me ponder the differences between men and women. You see, to my mind women have it easy. Sure, there’s childbirth and menopause but on the guy side, there’s THIS:

That’s the inside of my bathroom cabinet drawer, one that I access at least once a month, if not more! And when I DO access it, it’s to either grab some toothpaste to shine up my remaining teeth or to lather up my bristly face that’s continually trying to decorate me with a “prospector Joe” look. Scruffy, as Leia once described Han. Now women don’t generally have this need to scrape hair off their faces but we of the male persuasion often are fighting a never-ending battle against facial kudzu.

So anyway, yesterday morning I shuffled bleary-eyed into the bathroom, put some toothpaste on my brush and was raising it toward my mossy teeth when my brain kicked in: “Heyyyyy, did you notice how easily the toothpaste came out? That was kind of weird, wasn’t it? Maybe weird enough to look at the tube in your hand …?”

Yup. Shaving cream. I suppose the story would have been even better if I’d actually started brushing with it but, oh well, them’s the breaks.

Of course snakes don’t have to worry about brushing, not because they don’t have teeth but because they don’t have hands. Which reminds me of my latest adventure in web diving in which I wanted information on what snakes can be found in New Hampshire. I’ve seen a fair number on my property and I thought it proper to know what sort they are and whether any might be persuaded to deal with my chipmunk problem.

Googling “snakes of New Hampshire” brought this up:

The “Brown Snake” is kind of hilarious. I’m surprised they didn’t name it the “Wiggly Snake”. Come on guys, let’s use a bit more creativity. However, on the right … a “Timber Rattler”? Really? Let’s see, from what I recall rattlesnakes have large triangular heads, really evil eyes and, oh yes, a big ole rattle on the back end. Like this fellow I met one day while cycling up Mt. Diablo:

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That “Timber Rattler” doesn’t really look much the part, does she? Out of curiosity, I separated her from the rest of the picture and threw her up on Google Image Search. Which led to:

Looks like the same unimaginative guy named this ones as well (green snake, puhleeze) but the main point is that green snake is WAY more believable than labeling it a rattlesnake. Does this mean somebody grabbed the image off the web, since that left pic is identical to the pseudo-rattler, and then labeled it a rattlesnake to be funny? No idea.

It’s just another warning that you better not believe everything you read and see on the old internet. Yet sometimes what you see is true, even if it seems like it really shouldn’t be. Such as this:

Quick - what time is it?! Who knows?! Such an odd design choice. Dark gray hands on a dark gray dial - what could go wrong? Maybe it’s Batman’s watch and since he’s mainly active at night presumably the glowing Luminova on the hands will let him know the right time. Although it’s still quite unnecessary because Batman knows it’s always the right time … to fight crime!

And at Seiko isn’t asking $50,000 for their stupid watch. At $375 it’s an absurd watch that’s within reach of regular people, unlike a host of bizarre and unreadable creations that lean toward the five to six figure price tags. Like this Ulysse Nardin Freak that requires 174 thousand bucks from you for the privilege of not being able to read the time:

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But of course, there are those who have it

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Not for them is the daily grind for a pittance

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Wealth and success can come from hard work and talent but perhaps more often:

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But really, whether you’re wealthy or not is usually a matter of perspective:

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I walk by a candle shop in the mall and the heavy wallop of artificial scents assaults my defenseless nose. Or I’m walking down the street and a woman with dark hair piled a mile high sashays by and a second later the trailing cloud of acrid “OMG, what IS that smell” hits me. And to think she spent actual money in order to douse herself in whatever soap, perfume or cologne it was. Does she think that’s the way to attract a mate? Or maybe she’s using it to repel potential muggers. In that case, well played lady.

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But the real object of my tirade today is garbage bags. Small ones, used to gather up kitty poop and larger ones for the kitchen trash. More and more the only bags that show up on the shelves are either “febreze” or “lavender” or perhaps “lemon scented”. All labeled as “fighting odor”. Clearly, though, they’re adhering to the old “fight fire with fire”. Having a stink of their own that overpowers whatever it is you’re putting in the bag.

Whatever happened to those nice plastic bags with zero added scent? It’s all a part of the modern assault on the senses that’s driving everyone bananas. Noises to overwhelm your ears and stinks to overpower your schnoz.

This is why I love living in a rural setting. The only sounds are the quiet fall of rain upon the leaves or the sweet songs of sparrows in the trees. Interrupted occasionally by the harsh bray of a pileated woodpecker and interspersed with semi-automatic gunfire. But mostly it’s for the calm of a no-scent atmosphere. One so clear of assorted stinks that you can appreciate the mild perfume of the flowers or be alerted to possible danger by the whiff of smoke.

And how do we perceive the smells and sounds, both good and bad? Through that sack of fat known as our brain. Many people have one and some even use it! I know, shocking, right?

I’m beginning to think that perhaps I should start a third career in cognition. How the old noodle works. Because for sure I have some insights based on real life experiments. Not intentional experiments but whatever, they still count.

Here’s the deal. Like everyone else, I have unwelcome dreams in which weird and unpleasant stuff occurs. And most is pretty standard fare - being eaten by a school of giant piranhas, trying and failing to outrun a fiery river of lava - that sort of thing. However what’s noteworthy for brain study is that there are mental things you CAN do when you’re awake that you CAN’T do when you’re dreaming. Which seems weird to me. You’d think your brain is your brain. The letters of which, when rearranged, is bairn, which is Scots dialect for a baby. And that’s exactly what my brain is acting like when I’m dreaming - like it’s a stuuupid baby.

(Yes, and also Brian so maybe that’s the name of the baby, okay?)

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Anyway, here’s the dream details. I had to teach my class a mathematical lesson (in my dream) and of course I hadn’t prepared my lecture because - nightmare, right? And so I had to fake it. I don’t recall what the fancy pants name for the technique was that I was supposed to teach but I DO remember that it boiled down to solving three linear equations. That’s all. Bing bang boom. Each equation was along these lines:

5x + 8y + 2z = 30

This is a very straightforward thing to solve, not that we need to go into it here, it being beside the point. The POINT is that I hadn’t prepared the lecture and so I needed to come up with something on the spot. So I said, let’s make it simple for myself. I’ll decide ahead of time that the answer is x = y = z = 2. You’ll notice that that works for the equation above. 5x2 + 8x2 + 2x2 is indeed 30. And that’s all I was trying to do in my slumber, the same thing I just did. Multiply two numbers three times and add them up.

And yet I COULDN’T DO IT! I saw the equation in my imagination (which is weird already - having an imagination in a dream) but it was like moving through molasses to do the math. 5 times 2 is … is … ummm … it’s ….

Now I’ll admit that I was co-processing at the time, giving some BS in the lecture as I tried to cobble up the equations that I needed. But no matter that it was my dream and my brain - no dice. Total failure. And that’s a nifty cognition observation. The centers of your brain that “do” mathematics are just off line in your sleep. And isn’t that interesting? Lots of other things are totally operational. Taste, hearing, touch, sight - all the senses. And schools of piranhas and flowing lava. A whole world full of stuff. Just not everything.

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It’s a sad, sad day at Chez Satz because little Buzz has passed on. And for this week’s Letter I felt compelled to write a small remembrance of the big dog in a small body that was Buzzy. So buckle up for some soppy reminiscing accompanied by doggie artwork and cartoons featuring that inimitable chap sometimes known as the Buzzmeister, other times as Baron Barkonanon, but forever more as just our beloved Buzz.

Buzz was a rescue dog, and his entry into our lives was a bit serendipitous. After losing our Shelties four years prior, Lovey and I felt the mutual need for another doggy companion. Upon thinking it over, we decided that a small poodle would be the perfect way to fill the dog-sized hole in our lives. And after some internet searching I found NorCal Poodle Rescue just a mile from us. Perfect! We drove over and described the sort of dog we were seeking. Susan brought out a poodle and it didn’t click. Brought out another. Again, no connection. And a third. It looked like we’d hit a brick wall when Sue mentioned that there was nobody left except a small dog named Max that I wouldn’t want to see. I asked why she thought that and somehow she’d gotten the idea that we weren’t interested in “small” after I’d said we weren’t interested in a tiny teacup poodle. Plus, she told us that when they got him he was so overgrown with mats that they thought he was a poodle but since grooming him they’d come to the conclusion he was a Bichon Frisé,

Come on, Sue. There’s a difference between small and “fits in your shirt pocket” small and who cares if he’s a Bichon or a poodle? If he’s a cute little doggie he deserves to be seen. Bring him out!

And so ‘Max’ was brought out. Susan put him down and without hesitation he ran directly toward me and leapt in my lap, velcro-ing himself to me. In his mind, the choice had been made. I kinda thought so as well.

After a few minutes of petting and cuddling I decided to see how serious he really was. I gave him to Lovey, walked across the patio, squatted down and said “Here Max”. Huh. No reaction. I figured that since Max wasn’t his “true” name, just his pet rescue assigned one, he might be waiting to hear the appropriate one. And so I went through the list. “Here Snowy. Here Rover. Here Roger.” And then I reached “Here Buzz.” BANG. Up he jumped and zipped over and into my arms, happy I’d managed to figure it out. Yay for the hairless ape!

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That first day was a stressful one and Buzz was happy to settle down at the foot of our bed that evening for his first sleep in his new home.

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As usual with a rescue, there was a trial period of a few days to make sure it all worked out well. And on day two Lovey burst into the house after a walk and grabbed me by the lapels. “There’s a problem,” she exclaimed. “He’s insane! I walked him and he started to go nuts. I held onto the leash and he just rocketed around me - I could barely hang on! Around and around! He might have to go back; I think he’s crazy!!”

Not totally convinced, I took him out myself and nothing happened besides calm walking and sniffing. Until … THERE HE GOES! Just as Lovey had described. A manic sprint at the end of the leash, so fast that his legs were a white blur. Here’s a small sample sans leash:

We came home and I hit the computer. Not knowing what to call it, I took a stab and asked Google to find “Bichon crazy running”. And the hits rolled in. Called the Bichon Blitz, it’s common to Bichon Frisés and is also known as “the zoomies”. Not just Bichons get it but I guess Bichons are particularly known for it.

And lest you think he confined it to the outside, he found the inside even more to his taste, with soft sofas conveniently placed to bounce off of.

From the start I was Buzz’s groomer and for years he sported my patented Lion Cut:

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Nothing against the traditional Bichon cut but … it wasn’t for us. Or Buzz.

Maintaining his look was a bear. I’d remove so much hair at a time I often wondered if I could use it to make a second dog.

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The cut eventually degenerated into the Tons of Mats cut. Not the best look, I’ve gotta say. But no matter what the current style was, people only had one thing to say about him:

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However, cute as he was, I’d be less than honest if I didn’t acknowledge his number one sin.

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Boy could he bark. And he never got tired of it. Meets a friend on the street. Bark. Sees me open a window. Bark. Observes any human at all come into the house. Yeah. Bark. And Bark. Annnnnd Bark.

He developed an overpowering, continual, bark that lasted until he couldn’t keep it up. Which never actually occurred because as he got older it seemed barking defined him. Lovey thinks it might have been he was going deaf and barked louder because he thought we couldn’t hear him. No worries there, though. Through a double paned window and down the street I could hear him, no problem.

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Yes, there was no activity that wouldn’t be enhanced by some Buzzy Bark

Over the years we took him to agility classes and let him run wild in the dog park, like this adventure with another white fluffy dog, staying ahead of the speedy brown mutt and returning to the safety of the home base bench.

But his top preference was to just mosey around outside. Sampling the scents of the outside world never got old for him.

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And of course he was always up for sampling the scents of far away places, as long as he was carried there in a dog-appropriate manner, preferably by Lovey.

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Recall when I mentioned that one of the first Buzz things we experienced with Buzz was the Bichon Blitz? It never stopped. He never really seemed to age, actually. Kept his baby teeth for forever and ran like a devil almost all the way to the end. An eternal puppy, the Peter Pan of dogdom.

It was a year ago that the vet detected cancer during a regular health check and told us he’d likely be gone by Christmas. But Buzz defied the prediction and kept going strong. It was only a couple of months ago that we started to see a change. Yet he kept shaking it off and continuing to live life the Buzzy way. Up until this week, in fact. It came on suddenly and we knew that this time was different.

And now he’s gone. You think you’re ready and it won’t hurt but … it still does. I went downstairs at 5 to take him out and his empty bed stared up at me, echoing the emptiness in my heart. He was our little trooper and the neighborhood will be a quieter place but also a poorer place for his absence.

We miss you so much, Buzz, and we’re so happy to have shared our lives with you. And so I’ll end this remembrance with my attempt to capture the colorful character that was Buzz

and leave you with a short video tribute to the best Buzzy there ever was.

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Please, feel free to share.

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Now at this point you’re wondering just what flipped my trigger, right? Well sir, it went like this. I moseyed over to Yelp to see the reviews of my favorite Chinese restaurant. A place currently rocking a 4.3/5 Yelp score, which is pretty good. Yet what did I see near the top? This:

Now first off, the only dish I think rice “literally goes with” is fried rice. Or rice and beans, if this was a Mexican place but … it’s not. Or nigiri sushi!

And of course, it’s not been uncommon back in the olden times that Chinese restaurants routinely brought over free white rice and even those crunchy noodles in a small bowl. Yup, that sure was the case THEN but this is now. Times are tough. Margins are small. So sometimes a restaurant decides to post clearly ON EVERY TABLE that rice isn’t complimentary any more. Two bucks, in fact. An unemotional decision right up there with charging for chips and salsa or not. Or for bread. Or for water. These are the parameters they’ve chosen and there’s not much more to say about it.

Or is there …? Because apparently there is and old Amy said it. A hard nosed, tell it like it is, assessment of good vs bad restaurant pricing. And if you can’t give your customers free food, says wise Amy, you don’t deserve to be in business!!!

So who cares if they’re friendly and welcoming and who cares that their portions are huge and delicious? If they don’t make with the free white rice it’s 1/5 stars for you!

Woof. Feeling entitled, Amy? Get up on the wrong side of the bed?

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It’s a good thing Amy didn’t see this new Seiko watch or she’d REALLY have flipped her lid:

“Companies that make watches you can’t read don’t deserve to be in business!!!,” she’d scream.

However, I’d have to respectfully disagree. Having black hands on a black dial is just the way the really cool people show that they’re above time. It has no mastery over them. They float free beyond the crude constraints of time’s arrow and live life on their own terms.

And pay for white rice if they want some.

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And what else do Fall colors imply? A chance for some new Halloween Satz-carved pumpkins, of course. And the first of the season looks like this guy:

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Who’s REALLY happy about it? The deer who get to feast on the pumpkin once I machete it to pieces and toss it into the woods. Not quite a homemade Lovey pumpkin pie but better than acorns, that’s for sure.

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When people learn that I’ve got bears and bobcats in my backyard they often wonder if I’m concerned about walking around the block. And for sure, you can definitely take your life in your hands by doing just that. But not because of ferocious wild beasts. Because of fluffy labradoodles.

It all starts innocently enough. Hell hound Cute doggie and owner approach us from up the road. The dog looks friendly. His smile is wide, his tail is wagging. Right up until we cross an invisible line and then …

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The growling and snarling is terrifying. And that’s just the noise from my belly telling me it’s lunch time. Half the time the dog is even worse!

“Oh, he’s super friendly, really. I don’t know why he carries on like this,” the owner assures me, her arms quivering as she pulls back on the leash while her dog paws the ground so hard that asphalt flies up in chunks. “He’s <grunt> a little love <gasp> really he is.” Meanwhile Buzz is leaning into the vibe, barking at the top of his lungs, clearly saying in dog-ese “Oh yeah, you call that a bark? THIS is a bark!”

But I shouldn’t pick on doodles. There was an elderly chihuahua around the block, recently deceased, who would erupt into a paroxysm of yips and yelps whenever he came within ten feet of man, woman or forest gnome. Thankfully, he was nearsighted as hell, and had a terrible short term memory, so that once you were beyond his zone of awareness he’d immediately clam up and continue on his quest to sniff every smell the neighborhood offered up.

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I’ve been told these behaviors are all due to “leash aggression.” And I’ve never been sure if it’s the leash that causes the leashed dog to go wild or the sight of a leash on another dog that does it.

You know, I wonder if there’s a parallel in our human race. The old “lemme at him!,” uttered by a guy (always a guy) as his friends hold him back from the object of his ire. And you know that sometimes it’s believable he’s being held back against his will and other times one just knows he really REALLY wants those restraining arms in place. Is it the same for dogs? They feel that they can act aggressively because they know they’re held back by the leash?

I guess the way to test is to unclip their leash and see what happens. Would they leap to the attack or suddenly become a chicken?

And speaking of chickens, I had an interesting eggsperience recently. We tend to buy from Vital Farm, because their ad copy sold me and the eggs really do look like the ones you get from homes with signs out front like: “Fresh Eggs”. Except the Vital Farms eggs lack the chicken poop and assorted grime that the local ones tend to display.

And so I was about to make a two egg breakfast when my finely tuned senses, honed by millions of years of evolution, said “Now just hold on there. This here egg is smaller than this other one.” It was so obvious that I felt compelled to break out the scale and weight them both:

Oh ho! That’s a pretty big difference. So let’s call in Google. Extra-large eggs should weigh between 61.4 and 68.5 g. Thus egg-on-the-left is extra-large. Plain old large eggs weigh between 54.3 and 61.4 g. And so egg-on-the-right is a large.

And what I paid for was 12 extra-large eggs. Oh no!!! I’ve been shortchanged! Which is a non-issue other than it’s the first time in my entire life I’ve ever found an error in the egg packaging. Is this the tip of the iceberg? The sign that the AI revolution is tipping our world into anarchy? I can’t say for sure but I do know that this morning I noticed, mixed in with my coffee beans, a coffee bean twig. Another, never before experienced error in sorting and grading.

It’s looking dubious, folks. Are we witnessing the end of human race or …

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That’s right Jeff,

Jefferson Graham's PhotowalksTV newsletter - Tech & Travel

Jefferson Graham's Photo meets Tech meets Travel updates, Photowalks travel photography, videos and itineraries.

that cartoon is for you.

But you know what’s kind of funny? We don’t really own phones any more. We own app devices.

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Don’t believe me? Check your iPhone’s apps. In the middle of the list you’ll find “Phone”. Yup. Phone is now just one of many apps on your pocket computer, along with Messenger, Tinder and Angry Birds.

Do you think Apple realizes this?

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Yeah, I think they do. You just can’t make this stuff up, can you? But you know what?

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He’s got it right!

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But first: pareidolia. The hard to pronounce effect in which our brains “see” objects, most commonly faces, in random objects - rocks on Mars, the fronts of cars, poorly toasted bread, etc. It’s a feature, not a bug! Back when Fred and Barney were trying to keep from being a dino-snack, it was useful to quickly assess whether you’re being watched by potentially unfriendly eyes. Evolution tuned us to be very good at it.

Consider the majestic condor, soaring high overhead:

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Is it possible that it might be seen closer to ground. Like in … the newest BMW 3 series?

I sure see it:

That last image is a straight superposition of my blue birdie outline onto the front of the new BMW and it didn’t take long after seeing the car for me to say “That’s a condor in front, by crackee!”

Unlike what would be far more persuasive an image to model your car’s front upon. One that embodies power, speed and athleticism. And image of … Aubrey:

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But since BMW chose the lesser option, they should at least be pushing it, I say. Ad copy like: “Soar above the plebian masses in your BMW Condor.” Or, BMW being BMW, your BMW 335i X-Drive M Performance. Those guys do love a long name.

And speaking of names, aren’t names fundamentally odd? For instance, a woman’s name. Ruby. Totally fine. But how about Diamond? Or Peridot. They sound weird. What makes one gem okay and the other not so much?

Or how about last names? Mr. Brown, Mr. Green, Mr. Gray, Mr. White. Seems that all colors are fine, right? Welllll. Mr. Purple? Mr. Beige? Mr. Heliotrope? Nah, those don’t work.

Iris, Rose, Violet and Daisy - all solid names. Sunflower, Daffodil, Carnation - nah.

How do some get the nod and others the cold shoulder? And can we change the status quo? I say yes! Let’s urge everyone we know who’s about to have a baby to strike a blow for diversity and name their child Beige or Granite or perhaps Pancake. Who knows? If we work hard we could soon live in a world that’s free of hidebound tradition and a phone book full of John Smiths. [Note: Yeah, phone books are extinct, I know. But it’s the thought that counts.]

And not that we were speaking about knives but, boy, is this a deal or what?! I found this on the internet and am I excited! Hiroshi, the knife MASTER, is closing his personal forge after 55 years and you can get his knives for up to 80% off! What … a … deal!!!

There is a bit of a problem, though. First off, Hiroshi isn’t actually closing up shop after 55 years because Hiroshi doesn’t exist. A grandfatherly looking AI creation exists and a company in China churning out knives that they’ll happily sell to you at a price far above what it costs to slap them together exits. Cheaply made knives with a totally fake backstory. What’s not to love?

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What’s not to love is flat out lying in hopes of roping in unwary buyers. They could have put out the facts. Reasonably constructed knives at a very low price, from China. But that’s FAR less attractive to the average consumer than acquiring an artisan’s products at a bargain price.

Actually, Hiroshi has a YouTube cousin, shown below:

I call him Straw Hat McGoofybeard and, like Hiroshi, he’s straight out of a server farm’s CPU fever dream. “He” popped up when I asked Google about methods to control spurge, a weed that’s all over da place up here. He’ll tell you all sorts of “tricks” that fix what ails ya for just $5. And you know you can believe him because he’s on tee vee. As long as it receives YouTube.

Yep, it’s gotten to the point that I think I can only trust, as human, people I’ve known about since, ummmm, let’s say 2020. More recent than that and it’s just too risky. And that’s totally annoying.

I know my complaining isn’t going to change anything but I do make a point of telling any humans I meet who are employed by companies that sic their AI creations on me that I find it monumentally unwelcome. A recent example was a service call on an extended warranty for which I received multiple contacts via phone and text from “Julie” who wanted to assure me that “she” was very anxious for me to have a good service experience. “Julie” made sure to text repeatedly telling me that service was on the way and to “have a nice day”.

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After the job the company sent me an evaluation request and my reply went something like this: “John did a great job getting the washer up and running. However your use of bots that are programmed to masquerade as human beings, and which refer to themselves in the first person as if they’re alive is insulting and offensive. Please stop it.”

Just shouting at the clouds, though. Even though avoiding it is super simple. Rather than “Hi, this is Justine with Happy Appliances. I just wanted you to know your service technician John is on his way and will arrive within twenty minutes. I hope you have a great rest of the day” why not just use “This message is from Happy Appliances. Your service technician John is on his way and will arrive within twenty minutes. Have a nice rest of the day”.

See? Same information and I even included the nice day bit. And no pseudo human AI fakery.

You know, that “have a nice day” is so baked into every interaction I wonder if it’ll stick. So much so that when the AI revolution occurs and our new digital masters close the curtain on the human race they’ll do it with a final “have a nice day”. That’ll be how we end. Not with a bang but with a banality:

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No, wait, that’s not true, it just seems that way lately. In reality, cartooning for me generally involves a slight disengagement of the mind so I can let ideas bounce around, all the while keeping a fatherly eye on them for any that show promise. Driving to work is a great opportunity for that, with a digital recorder nearby so I can dictate anything promising.

Sometimes I’ll just ponder on hoary old sayings and look at them from different angles.

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This one attacks that philosophical old saw “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Which is imrho a silly question. Of course it does. Posing the question reveals a level of self-absorption that’s as common as it is unfortunate. The implication is that if WE aren’t there to experience it, it didn’t even occur. Much as the human race likes to think the world revolves around it, it really doesn’t.

Anyway, after pondering such thoughts, I wondered how we could set up a experiment to answer the question. And the way is - no people in the forest but everything else present and accounted for. There’s the fallen tree. And there’s a tree asking another if she’s heard something. If only we had a second panel and could learn the answer.

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What else leads to a ha ha or at least a quiet chortle? Taking a left turn when we’re conditioned to expect a right. Like this:

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A phrase that should end with “will you marry me?” but veers off into funnier territory. Worth noting that what I really wanted to do in this one was dress the girl like something out of the Jetsons. Cartoonist and fashion designer!

This last one is one I sold to the WSJ and for some reason it’s one of my favs. It’s reserved for my lovely subscribers, which you could easily become if you’re not already!:

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Okay, not really. I was drinking coffee at the time and the sentence didn’t rock me to my core - just made me raise an eyebrow. They say “A living remnant of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana” as if it’s a rare and amazing thing, but two thirds of the Earth’s non-water parts can make the same claim. South America, Africa, Antarctica and more are ALL ex-Gondwana lands. Sooooo, why make it seem like Tasmania is somehow super special? Beats me. I guess because the writer thought it sounded cool?

But what’s REALLY cool is the whole continental drift thing itself. Our planet has gone through an amazing array of water/land combos on its journey to our present day arrangement. A few billion years ago Earth was a water world. All ocean - no land. Would have been tough for us to sail on, though, what with the atmosphere being largely nitrogen, methane and carbon dioxide. Not ideal for oxygen breathers. But give a planet a couple of billion years and things can spice up. That’s what billions of microbes working for billions of years can do for you!

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What I find interesting is how continental drift illustrates how fossilized scientific “facts” become, in spite of scientists insisting that there is no dogma, just an open-minded search for truth. Yet Alfred Wegener, as one example out of many, presented quite a complete theory of continental drift in 1912 yet was roundly ha ha’d until the 60’s, by which time the evidence supporting his ideas became impossible to ignore. Scientists are human, after all, and cognitive dissonance strikes deep. When you’ve spent your life professing one thing, it’s hard to admit that it was all baloney.

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Ben Franklin didn’t have to suffer any embarrassment when he made observations that predated Wegener by a couple of hundred years because geology was just one of many areas in which he dabbled and he simply tossed them off as an intellectual bon mot for someone else to pursue if they wished.

Ben’s insights came from his examinations of rock strata in Europe and the New World which led him to postulate that the continents were actually just a thin crust of material and floated on an inner core. They could drift apart or toward and into each other, with one diving under the other and melting as it went. And in support of his thinking, the shape of Africa’s western coast certainly looks like South America’s east coast. As if a single mass had broken apart and drifted away …

And that single mass was Gondwana (or Gondwanaland if you want the long version). Most of our current continents were all part of the single giant supercontinent Gondwana three quarters of a billion years ago. Which made visiting your neighbors easy. Well, kind of easy - it was a BIG continent. But no oceans in the way so you could walk anywhere on it you liked. And then, just as Ben thought, it broke into different pieces which went drifting across the globe, eventually “settling down” into the land masses we have today.

It’s not really at all settled down, of course. The drift is happening right now. Hence the earthquakes that turn up every so often. Stick around for a few million years and you’ll hardly recognize the place.

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in which the thrills and chills of overseeding a lawn were laid bare. And we even had a cute little picture of some baby grass:

Well, now those babies are all grown up:

Eh, not really grown up but at least they’ve started to look like they might actually survive.

So - job done, right?!

Ugh. Wrong. Because after “The Big Seed” event I decided there were areas that hadn’t really been served properly. So I put some more seed down by hand. And then, when after more than a week I saw other areas that looked totally dubious, I put down a third batch, this time carefully placing them in the aerator’s holes and lightly covering them with soil.

Which means … that I have to continue watering multiple times a day to “keep the seeds/seedlings moist”. Otherwise, cough … ack … gasp … they’ll die of dehydration.

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Is this a problem? Wellll, lets say I want to have the sprinkler on for 8 minutes to merely moisten the seed/seedlings. And let’s assume, because it’s true, that I need to place sprinklers at 22 different spots. Then that’s, hmmm, 176 minutes. Plus let’s not forget the time needed to walk back and forth to move the sprinkler from one spot to the next. I’d tell you what it is in hours but it’s too depressing.

But wait, you say. Can’t you run two sprinklers at once? Won’t that save time? It will! However … my well is very weak sauce and running two sprinklers at once will run the well dry if it’s run long enough, by which I mean six hours or so. So … no problem since I’m not doing deep watering and so will finish the watering session before the water runs out!

Except … the pressure also drops when running two sprinklers and the flow for each one becomes so pitifully small I would need to sprinkle in additional locations, raising the total time up again.

Side note - one of the thrills of rural living - no municipal water. I have my own well, that doesn’t look much like this but isn’t conceptually different.

The good side is - it’s my well and I can do with it as I wish. The bad side - it’s my well and so any repairs or improvements are on plate.

Now there is a small, and I want to emphasize its smallness, bright side. If I use the spigot in the back (using my treated house water) and the spigot on the side (untreated well water) I can get enough pressure to run two sprinklers at their full strength. Which means … it only takes me two and a quarter hours of turning on a hose with an eight minute timer on it, walking to the other side of the house, turning on another, finding something to do for perhaps four minutes, then walking back, turning on the first hose for another eight minutes and repositioning the sprinkler, walking around the house …

Of course, I make sure to get up early to get a jump on things so I’m ready to serve Lovey her morning coffee. Barely an inconvenience. Just grab a flashlight and sprinkle away!

And they say you’re supposed to suffer through this nonsense two or three times a day for newly seeded lawns? I need divine intervention!

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A way to say to the world “Look at me! I’m so rich I can have a big plot of green grass whose sole purpose is to look pretty. Nothing so crass as using the land for wheat or potatoes or whatever.”

And like most everything the richie riches do, it filtered down to the unwashed masses and now it’s completely bizarre to NOT have a lawn.

I fought this trend in California. I expunged every single blade of green and transformed the yard into a water conscious garden filled with native (mainly) shrubs and trees. My way of saying “I’ve had enough - no mow!”

But alas, as I’ve related in earlier Notes, I moved to New Hampshire and so acquired so many millions of grass blades that trying to remake the land into grass-free zone was an impossible task. And so I pivoted and embraced the grassiness of it all.

But you know what that means, right? I’m constitutionally unable to “do” something unless I can, as my dad used to say, “do it right”. Which means looking at all the lawns I’ve ever seen and then asking myself “How can I beat them all?” Because, although life isn’t a competition, still, I don’t want to lose …

I tried having some companies help with the process early on but quickly got frustrated with them. When you want it done right, do it yourself and so … research time! Learn all the weeds. Learn all the grasses. (And btw, there are SOOOO many weeds and types of grasses. I’m sure it would have been WAY easier back in the Carboniferous period. Plants hadn’t had too much time to evolve and diverge, am I right?)

But I’m currently living in the Cenozoic and so, yeah, lots of time for plant evolution, not to mention human directed genetic tinkering. However, the information is out there and so … I learned it. And one of the things I learned is that for a happy and healthy lawn, you should aerate and overseed. Which basically means pulling out little Tootsie-Roll shaped pieces of soil and scattering seeds hither and yon. Concentrating on the hither. I could have hired a guy to do the aeration but how to coordinate his schedule with the ambient temps and rain forecast? Answer - you can’t. So … I got myself one, figuring how hard could it be?

Answer - kinda hard. I loaded up various combinations of my exercise dumbbells but it turns out that to get into tight spaces you need to unload, unhitch, more around, re-hitch, reload. And with the illustrated 150 pounds, which was actually 170 for most of the job, it got tiring.

And speaking of dumbbells, I was going to make up a definition of the word’s etymology, saying that they were originally bells without clappers, hence “dumb”, that people used for exercise. And guess what? That goofy made-up explanation is actually true. Bell ringing, which used to be a bigger thing than currently, necessitated practice to build up the strength for the ring a ding dinging and much like practicing bagpipes is a sure way to irritate your neighbors, so was practice bell ringing:

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in the garage in place of the joys brought from midnight feedings and teenage melt downs? Along with the costs that, let’s be real, probably are more along the lines of a Ferrari PLUS a daily driver Porsche.

But that’s the magic of hormones. Without them, the human race would surely have died out long ago. And once those hormones have placed one (or two or …) bundles of joy on our laps, there’s nothing for it but to do the best we can.

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And helping out in that task is a lovely book written by two guys who have between them drunk deeply of life’s heady brew and distilled it into insights that are guaranteed to make you smile. With cartoons!

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But not cartoons like mine. For THOSE cartoons you’ll need to subscribe to Letters from Satz.

No, you’ll get cartoons (and writin’) from the dynamic duo of Jason Chatfield and Scott Dooley:

New York Cartoons

I’ll sketch your kid! (Because robots can’t.)

This morning over my birthday coffee, I read a note from the writer Ted Gioia that ruined the coffee. (But not the birthday…

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a month ago · 18 likes · 4 comments · Jason Chatfield

And NOT ONLY THAT! For a tiny chunk of extra change Jason will supply a genuine Jason original caricature of your own little bundle of energy. Or even two. Or more!

Have I taken advantage of this amazing offer? I have! And I think you should as well. For what could be better than a fantastic holiday gift that’s personalized by a genuine, actual, human being? Down with AI; support the humans, that’s what I say! How say you?

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Well, I must have been channeling Clark because when I tried to cut my nails my clipper shattered! Just look:

And before you try to find some other bogus reason for the material failure other than my having invulnerable nails, let me show you my bottle opener, or rather the remains of it, after I tried to open … a bottle:

That’s the problem with us supermen. You’d think life would be a doddle with superpowers but most of the time we don’t know our own strength and destroy objects designed for mere mortals. Gaze upon my mighty thews and tremble, puny Earthlings!

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Or maybe … stuff is being made crappily? I mean, come on! A nail clipper for which the metal just breaks into two pieces and a bottle opener which literally shatters? What in the world is up with that?

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My wants are so simple. I want tools that last my entire life. Charge me appropriately for high quality steel and forge it properly and let me be on my merry way. But apparently all industries are like the garage door industry. Or rather, the garage door spring industry.

Some years back my garage door spring decided to go sproing. Violently broke into two pieces which luckily were restrained by a steel cable and therefore didn’t do any damage other than to themselves. I called a guy to replace them and he told me he spent years in the company that made the springs. Apparently, back when he started the springs were carefully heat treated so that they’d last basically forever. And the company accountants said “This sucks. The homeowner buys once and then that’s it. How can we fix this?”

And the way they fixed it was to skimp a bit on the heat treatment. Which worked! The springs started to break. Which motivated the company to skimp a bit more. And more.

So now we have springs which are shadows of their former glory. Spring maker is happy! Homeowner is sad :-(

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What do my wonderful subscribers see after this? Well, more Crowtoons, for one, and more breathtaking commentary on things that matter. And of course, the continuing adventures of Nicky:

The key to unlocking it all is to become a subscriber:

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WOW! BIG and wonderful change coming! Amazing!! A BRAND NEW PATIENT PORTAL!!! What could be more exciting than my medical group being absorbed by a bigger group? What could possibly go wrong?!

Yeah, a lot could go wrong. And the completely unconvincing EXCITEMENT that this email is bristling with is just this side of crazy town. Do you think it was AI generated? Could a human being actually believe that using so many superlatives about something so deeply unexciting convinces any reader that good times are coming?

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Is there anyone anywhere who still thinks their health care is A-OK? It would be nice to think so, wouldn’t it?

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But in this climate of reduced revenues everywhere, the downhill slide just keeps going and going …

How about you? Do you have any interesting health care related experiences to share with me this lovely day?

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And if you liked this little Note, please do subscribe! It makes a difference, really it does.

HOWEVER. Take a closer look at their fingers. Three different directions. One Sun - three pointings. Maybe they’re actually pointing at different objects that happen to be in the sky at the same time. A bird! A plane! The Sun!

But all joking aside, why are they actually pointing? Is where to look somehow not very obvious? On what’s clearly a sunny day?

“Where am I supposed to look?”

“Over there. That bright glowing thing.”

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“You mean that pelican? That’s a bird.”

“That’s not a pelican. It’s a gannet.”

“An expurgated gannet?”

“Hey, no Monty Python references!”

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I was sad to see that the article’s writer failed to note the biggest wow of his story and wasted time talking about the Polestar’s efficiency rather than giving us some good Sun knowledge.

Well, he may have failed but I’m here for you with some Sun facts. Did you know that the Sun is a million billion miles in circumference and it’s so far away from Earth that if you laid a 57 million Empire State Buildings end to end you’d have a ton of trouble finding a place to park? Well, it’s true. And now you know.

Or did you already know that …?

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See what you can learn in a court of law?!

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Anyway, back when I was a young ‘un, I spent many hours reading science fiction. MANY hours. Soooo many hours. At my peak I was plowing through a book a day. And of course, one of the first authors I discovered was Isaac Asimov. I certainly didn’t read everything he wrote, because he wrote an absurdly large number of books, but I read a bunch of them.

So naturally I was completely up to speed with robots and the famous Three Laws of Robotics. I recall reading the stories and thinking that they were solidly in the “that’s good stuff” category of writing!

Fast forward to a couple of days ago. Apple TV thrust I, Robot in my face as a ‘you might like this’ offering and, having seen it many years ago, I decided why not see it again. Will Smith in his prime. And lots of Audi product placement!

I enjoyed it, Lovey enjoyed it, and rewatching the movie caused me to do the expected thing. Namely go to the library to get the book I, Robot that the movie was based upon and re-read it. Which I’m doing on this very day. It’s just a collection of short stories and I’m halfway through.

The reason for bringing it up is my immediate reaction to them. Which was one of low level shock and confusion. The writing seemed to me to be at comic book level. As if a kid were trying to write grown up stories but with the life experience of a kid. “Sizzling Saturn, we’ve got a lunatic robot on our hands.” “Suppose you go soak your head. Your nightmares must be in technicolor.” “So help me, Mike, another fool remark out of you, and I’ll take away your rattle and teething ring.” Just how old was the guy writing this?

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By the third story with the same sort of dialogue I decided it was time to Ask The Google. Result: Isaac Asimov - born 1920. And the robot stories were published between 1940-1946. Whoa. Looks like the writing actually was in keeping with his age. First one at age 20, a couple more at 21, and so forth. Who’d a thunk it?

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What’s so interesting to me is that this literary shortfall completely escaped my 14 year old self. The writing and dialogue seemed spot on. Because the guy writing it was a kid (an older kid) and I was a kid. So it all matched up. But now, hundreds of thousands of words later, the difference between them and the scribbles of a mature writing is stark.

I guess this shouldn’t have come as a shock. While the Saturday morning Thundercats cartoon may have seemed high culture to an eight year old, that doesn’t mean it’ll shine equally brightly to the same person forty years later. Maturity can do that to you.

None of which is to suggest Asimov wasn’t a very smart guy. No doubts on that score. But no matter how intelligent or innately talented one might be, it takes time to develop the skills. Even if you’re Mozart. Heck, it took until he was an old man of eight to write his first symphony …

It’s also worth noting that Asimov was consciously writing for adults. Quite different from Bill Finger or Siegel and Shuster. Their Batman and Superman were aimed squarely at the yutes. Now, close on 100 years later it’s considered suitable grown up fare (by some) but back then it was unarguably the yute’s domain.

Yet, even as a kid myself, I recall something akin to my Asimov reaction when I read a reprint of the first Superman comic. This scene in particular stood out to me:

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There used to be dozens of cartoon outlets during cartooning’s Golden Age. The Saturday Evening Post. Punch. Colliers. The New Yorker. Magazines that proudly featured the best of cartoon artistry and which provided a living to those cartoonists who filled their pages. That Golden Age stretched from the late 1800’s until the latter part of the twentieth century. You could see the luster dimming as 2000 loomed and the pace of decline just kept accelerating.

I came into the field as it was contracting but the really heavy blows were still a short stroll in the future. It looked pretty bright for me for a while. I was appearing in almost every issue of the Harvard Business Review and their pay rate for cartoons was barely below that of the New Yorker, which was the highest of them all. Barrons bought regularly and I was a star at The Oldie (the UK’s version of the New Yorker). Cartooning life seemed good.

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And then the Harvard Biz said they’re cutting out all cartoons. Too expensive. Barrons followed suit. Like Jiffy-Pop kernels on the stove, it started with just one or two magazines disappearing as possible venues and quickly grew to an overwhelming rush to the bottom. Sometimes the entire magazine folded and sometimes it was “just” cost cutting. Didn’t matter that historically the first thing newspaper readers would do was turn to the comics page. Paying a cartoonist just wasn’t in the budget.

Air Mail was founded in 2019 by Graydon Carter. He ran Vanity Fair for 25 years and felt he knew how to put together a property that could thrive in the new digital age. Brought in Bob Mankoff, legendary cartoon editor of the New Yorker, to oversee their cartoon content. Physical magazines may have died but Air Mail was going to show that life could continue online. Which, less than ten years later it still is, just with no more cartoons.

Their last two issues were cartoons-free zones, which should have been a strong hint as to what was in the wind. And finally the official word was given - it’s all over. The fat lady has sung her last aria.

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And that announcement is just the latest in a seemingly unending progression. A collapse of the existing venues and the rise of “let’s steal and regurgitate your output” AI agents. It doesn’t take a professional cartoonist to observe “It’s just not funny”.

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Here’s my most recent sale to Air Mail, purchased as part of our nation’s 250th anniversary:

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Curiously appropriate, wouldn’t you say?

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And you know what caterpillars become if they’re lucky enough to make it so far, right? Butterflies. Which leads me to today’s Note. There I was, minding my own business doing a Peloton ride when the instructor decided to mention “the butterfly effect”. As related by him, it’s the scientifically approved theory that when a butterfly flaps its wings in China it can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world.

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I guess this jumped out at me more than things usually do because I did some research in the relevant field back in the day. And so, a short discussion of the butterfly effect(s) and whether these little lumps of butter that fly really do control the weather.

I put that plural in the previous sentence because there was a sci-fi short story (A Sound of Thunder, by Ray Bradbury) published in 1952 in which someone invented a time machine and was selling rides on it back to ye olde days of the dinosaurs so you could shoot yourself a T-Rex. But to avoid contaminating the timeline they’d carefully picked T-Rexes which were about to die anyway and so no harm, no foul. Of course, in reality there’s a lot of foul but it’s ignored for the sake of the story. Anyway, some bozo moves off the approved floating anti-gravity pad (that’s somehow safe) and steps on a butterfly. SQUISH!

Of course, when he returns to the present he finds everything changed from when he’d left because teensy tiny changes stemming from that butterfly’s death built up slowly and over millions of years led to a totally different present. This makes some sense. Perhaps a dragonfly that would have eaten that butterfly didn’t (because it was smooshed) and so wandered further than it would have and was eaten by some other creature that otherwise was about to starve and rather than starving was able to give birth to a baby which then grew up to …

You get the idea.

I’m fully aware that this ‘butterfly effect’ isn’t the one the Peloton instructor was speaking of and is also not the one in general circulation because only huge nerds like me read sci-fi short stories about butterflies and time travel.

The usual butterfly effect has to do with chaos theory. One of the earliest guys messing about with it was named Edward Lorenz and in the early 1970’s the butterfly moving its wings to cause big weather events was used as an evocative analogy to explain chaos theory. James Gleick referenced it prominently in his 1987 book Chaos and it took off from there. I remember reading his book and that was actually one of my inspirations for getting into the field.

As a by-the-way, Lorenz was a meteorologist (as well as mathematician) and was interested in developing computer models to help predict the weather. A noble goal that still hasn’t been perfectly attained, for reasons we’ll now examine.

The interaction of butterfly wings and weather is actually more appropriately called extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. What are initial conditions? They’re simply the starting points for some evolving process. For instance, you might heat a particular liquid to 97 degrees and then drop a chemical in. Imagine as a result the liquid turns blue. Pretty simple, right? But what about if you ran the same experiment but heated the liquid to 98 degrees and the water turned red? You changed the initial conditions (temperature in this case) and the result changed. But maybe all temperatures below 97 lead to blue and all temperatures above 98 lead to red. Then you’d just say, meh, there are two regions, one blue and one red and a clear dividing line between them.

At this point it’s like being on top of a steeply pointed mountain and dropping a ball. If you drop it to the left of the mountain’s vertex it’ll roll to the left and if you drop it to the right of the vertex it’ll roll right and if you place it super carefully right on top of the vertex it’ll balance there.

HOWEVER. Extreme sensitivity to initial conditions is more complicated than this. For our liquid experiment example, it may turn out that 97.4 degrees turns red but 97.6 degrees turns blue. So that’s weird. 97: blue, 97.4: red, 97.6: blue again, 98: red. The initial conditions seem to matter. It’s clearly getting difficult to predict what color we’ll get. We need really precise temperature control.

But what if, even though 97 turned blue, 97.0001 turns red and then 97.0002 turns blue? This is getting stupid. “Insignificant” little variations in the initial conditions are leading to vastly different results.

THAT’S chaos. In a chaotic system, long term predictions are impossible because teensy tiny little variations in your starting point lead to massively different final results. Two evolutions of the system may start from infinitesimally different starting points, and may look similar for a while, but eventually will exponentially diverge from each other.

This is not how ‘normal’ life is usually expected to work. You aim for the bulls eye with an arrow but you hit just an inch low. So you raise your bow slightly and hit the target an inch higher. That’s normal. But if the arrow were behaving chaotically the second shot, even though released just slightly higher than the first shot, might hit somewhere behind you. Hopefully not in anybody important.

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The key thing is that the equations governing the motion are easily expressed. There’s no fuzziness, no randomness in them. Yet the behavior of their solution somehow seems to be random. From determinism we obtain randomness. Weird. And weird was personally good in this case as studying it helped me get my PhD and a modest level of success in academia.

And speaking of success, have you succeeded in becoming a subscriber yet? No? Well, you can just fill in the needed info here and fix that state of affairs:

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Fun fact. This is one of my most-sold cartoons AND what’s on the blackboard are actually some of the equations from one of my more mathy papers. Yay! Got me tenure plus cartoon royalties. Double win!

So it’s not that a butterfly flapping its wings immediately causes a hurricane a few thousand miles away but rather that ANY model of the weather will only be predictive for a short while. The sensitivity to initial conditions that it contains guarantees that your computer models will diverge from reality sooner or later. Generally sooner.

Why don’t we learn about this in high school? Because high school math/science/physics concentrates on linear systems. Systems which have solutions, solutions that can be obtained pretty simply. It’s only in college, and usually grad school, that you’ll encounter nonlinear systems and all their tricks and features.

Yet another reason to stay in academia and avoid that nasty real world!

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Logically a smaller winged bat would flap more quickly. And the video I showed looked so leisurely one might assume the existence of a monstrous prehistoric gigantabat. But nah, it was just the magic of high frame rate, something the newer iPhones do really well. Unlike the case of those new car issues I recently spoke of,

sometimes youth has advantages.

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Why all modern advances don’t work as well as iPhone camera tech does is a mystery.

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Anyway, here’s an example of what sort of video I was taking to capture that bat action, without the advantage of slow motion filming:

Pretty fast flappity flapping. And just think, without the legacy of Batman, which itself is so indebted to bats, I couldn’t have penned this Dark Knight inspired crowtoon.

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But that’s not all! Remember that bat video you watched a few seconds earlier? Well, in its slow motion form, and cropped and trimmed appropriately, it captured a super cool view of Barney the Bat doing the same 180 degree rotate and flip turn that Tom Cruise did in Top Gun: Maverick:

Here’s Barney’s Top Gun worthy bat move in all its slow motion glory:

No doubt in my mind that Barney does it better. Wouldn’t you agree? And wouldn’t you consider subscribing to this Letter (and Not a Note), if you’re not already? Whether free or paid, it’s what Batman would surely do. It’s the magic key that unlocks the rest of this Letter. And all the future ones!

NICKYITIS

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