You just can’t drown your sorrows in champagne, and that’s bad news for makers of sparkling wine.

I’ve previously written briefly about Googie design, the space-age futuristic look from the middle of last century. Though its extremely car-centric, I still find the futurist style appealing. Googie is interesting, and it’s different, and it’s often fun. The frequent use of neon doesn’t hurt, either. Plus, it’s nice when a restaurant or gas station looks like something.

The New York Times recently wrote about the fight to save Googie, and the article includes some excellent pictures.

In recent decades, the size of cars in America has ballooned. These oversized cars increase risks for everyone else on the road, a negative externality similar to secondhand smoke. At Vox, David Zipper suggests that the anti-tobacco playbook could be used to push back against car bloat.

Much like secondhand smoke, driving a gigantic vehicle endangers those who never consented to the danger they face walking, biking, or sitting inside smaller cars. Although not widely known, car bloat’s harms are well-documented. Heavier vehicles can pulverize modest-sized ones, and tall front ends obscure a driver’s vision, putting pedestrians and cyclists at particular risk. Deaths among both groups recently hit 40-year highs in the US.

It’s hard to imagine clearing our roads of these oversized vehicles. But not that long ago, it was impossible to believe the tide could turn on smoking in public places.

Two days ago, I read an article about scammy text messages that request you reply to them. The very next day, I received the following:

Can you guess why this text wants me to reply “Y”? It’s because the “Filter Unknown Senders” option in Apple’s Messages app disables links by default. As a result, the link seen in the screenshot above is not tappable, and that makes it a lot less likely to be opened. But were I to reply, Messages would assume I had some trust in the sender, and make the link tappable.

For the past week, I’ve had a 20-year-old Bad Religion song running through my head, for reasons which are probably obvious:

When the hills of Los Angeles are burnin’
Palm trees are candles in the murder wind
So many lives are on the breeze
Even the stars are ill at ease
And Los Angeles is burnin’

Though that song’s burning is metaphorical, right now, the fires in Los Angeles are horribly literal. The Guardian has a collection of devastating images that really show the enormity of the loss.

Residents have had to flee these fires, at times with a great deal of urgency. At one point, gridlock on Sunset Boulevard led to folks abandoning their cars on the roadway. As a result, the fire department eventually had to bulldoze vehicles out of the way.

A KTLA reporter spoke with a resident, who said:

“If you leave your car on Palisades Drive, leave the key in there so a guy like me can move your cars…so that these fire trucks can get up there.”

The reporter then asked for the man’s name, and he replied “My name is Steve Guttenberg”. He may have been working at the direction of the Stonecutters.¹

Footnotes:

1. The relevant video is archived here. ↩︎

Estonian scientists recently published research on making robots more agile, by giving attaching moose-like hooves to their feet. The moose shoes could make robots more capable, by enabling them to:

navigate in complex natural terrains to conduct sensitive environmental monitoring, aid in agriculture and participate in disaster response.

Or attack enemies in war. Probably mostly that.

Last fall, the National Zoo in DC welcomed two new pandas, Bao Li and Qing Bao. They’re not receiving visitors just yet, but yesterday, they got to play in their first American snow. The video is a delight.¹

I hope you can take a moment to appreciate this panda making a snow angel.

Footnotes:

1. X Formerly Twitter can’t be trusted at all, so the video is archived here. ↩︎