I am back down in Los Angeles for the three-day weekend. I was reminded on the way here that the last time I went through Oakland airport it was just a day or two after the "miracle on the Hudson," which, as you already know unless you've been living under a rock with your iPod turned up to 11 with the Ride of the Valkyries on repeat and a silky sleep mask over your eyes, involved a plane that crash landed in a river on account of birds being sucked into its engines. There is a piece of artwork at the Oakland airport called "Auspicious Cranes," and it struck me last time that this piece of art was maybe no longer so appropriate lining a corridor people walk through as they are about to board planes at an airport that sits on the shore of a major bay, seeing as it basically depicts a bunch of large water birds whose heads appear to be bloodied:
But maybe that's just me.
As many of you know, almost nothing pleases me more than getting a chance to deploy the "inappropriate animals" tag on this blog, and today I have occasion to do so yet again, not only on account of the mangled cranes but also because we were walking at the L.A. Arboretum this morning and encountered an extra-large grade A coyote sauntering across the path ahead of us. As we got closer, he stopped and turned around with his big ol' coyote head poking up over the side of an embankment and I swear to god all he needed was a jaunty bandana around his neck and he'd have been ready to act as mascot for a cheesy Southwest souvenir shop.
"It's a good thing there aren't any roadrunners around here," James opined. "Yeah," I said, "That would be nothing but chaos."
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