Particle board, particle board
Looks just like a regular board
What is it made of? Nobody knows.
Particle board.
Is it compressed
Or is it a mess
Could it be totally worthless?
Who came up with particle board?
Degraded board, particle board.

I can’t recall the last time a news story gave me as much joy as I felt reading about the long-tailed macaques at an Indonesian temple who steal items from tourists to trade for food. That they have figured out how much various items (from sunglasses to phones) are worth to people and demand appropriate payment is especially wonderful.

It does strike me that for all the jokes about criminal enterprise and academic pondering about Macaca economicus there is a potential religious explanation for what’s going on. Consider:

1. “The Balinese Hindu site dates back to at least the 11th century and the roughly 600 monkeys that inhabit it are considered by locals to be sacred guardians of the temple.”
2. “Kadek Ari Astawa, who coordinates the monkey handlers, said he heard that when the site first opened to tourism, visitors sometimes fed the monkeys. When temple management started feeding them a regular diet and forbade tourists from giving them food, the monkeys began to steal visitors’ belongings.”
   
   

If you quit bringing gifts for the sacred guardians of the temple, what can you expect?

Cradle-to-grave pollinator gardening. This spring I planted a bed of parsley, partly for myself but mostly for these little guys: black swallowtail butterfly caterpillars. There are at least ten of them out there now, bulking up.

I don’t expect my (human) neighbors enjoy the partridge peas as much as they do the cosmos and the coneflowers, but I like them and the bees like them, and I’ve been glad to see so many of them blooming this summer.

If American Catholics dressed up like birds, I’d be a heck of a lot more likely to convert. I’m not saying I’d do it, but I’d have to seriously consider it.

If your employer is so odious that you feel compelled to publicly insult it or create an app to undermine its work, is it maybe, just possibly, time to quit your job?

Rose pink.

Saw the neighborhood green heron again this week. A great blue heron was stalking something only a few yards away, but separated by brush, and I don’t know if they were even aware of each other. The difference in scale was fascinating.

Facebook Marketplace just sent me an email suggesting I might want to buy a 1963 Chevy Impala. Should I be insulted?

Think of craft as a pearl, which begins with a novel irritant but is built by patient accrual into something rare and beautiful.