Birds of Florida

In the Sarasota area

Some backstory: My boyfriend Tom and I are in Florida for most of January. We rented a house and drove down early last week.

Links:

• I can’t get enough Seek by iNaturalist nature-identification app! (And regular iNaturalist.) I know I’ve mentioned these apps a couple times before (Evening Primrose, Great Mullein) — and I want to thank the people who pointed them out to me in the first place (Brittany, Leanna, Tracy, Amelia, Benjamin, Ariel, Simone, Taylor!). You can enter pictures of plants, animals, and fungi, and if the app doesn’t automatically identify the specimen for you, it will guess the family that it comes from, or you can post your photo to iNaturalist and wait for an actual naturalist to confirm. It is amazing.

• I made another comic during the drive down from NYC to Florida. I wasn’t sure about sending it, but I published it directly to the site if anyone is curious. It’s about a skin-care infomercial.

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Elsewhere:

• “In my late teens ... I came across an ad that really struck me.” I enjoyed the latest installment of Sara Campbell’s newsletter Tiny Revolutions, about making peace with how things are. (“Who knows, maybe that ad was what launched me on the path to studying Zen…”)

• “In Roman culture, parricide was a crime that provoked a unique horror; there was nothing worse than murdering a parent. The typical punishment was a bizarre form of the death penalty, which involved the perpetrator being sewn into a sack with a monkey, a snake, a dog and a chicken and then thrown into the Tiber to drown.” [History Today, via The Browser]

• “I came down the final stretch to finish lap 45, and felt as close to euphoria as I’ll probably ever get.” Starting a New Year with a 24-Hour Race. Seems like a good idea. [NYT]