"Unlike the original Vine, which required users to film their own six-second clips, Musk’s reimagined version will harness AI to generate videos..."

"... based on simple text descriptions. Users could potentially type phrases like 'a cat breakdancing in Times Square' or 'Shakespearean drama in a McDonald’s' and watch as the system instantly creates corresponding video content complete with sound."

From "Elon Musk says X will bring back Vine — with an AI twist — to rival TikTok, Reels" (NY Post).

Vine was bought by Twitter which then closed it down — all in the years before Elon Musk took over. Now, Musk is saying the old Vine video archive has been located. I like the idea of bringing Vine back, but if it's loaded with AI videos, I hate it already. 

Maybe you've seen the AI video with bunnies bouncing on a trampoline. It's got over 230 million views:

"A zoo in Denmark is asking the public for donations of unwanted small pets or horses to feed its captive predators."

CBS News reports

The zoo in northern Denmark said that chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs were an important part of the diet of its predators, which need "whole prey," reminiscent of what they would hunt in the wild.

"If you have a healthy animal that has to leave here for various reasons, feel free to donate it to us. The animals are gently euthanized by trained staff and are afterwards used as fodder. That way, nothing goes to waste — and we ensure natural behavior, nutrition and well-being for our predators," Aalborg Zoo said. 

The zoo said it accepts donated rabbits, guinea pigs and chickens on weekdays between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., but no more than four at a time.

They're eating the dogs! They're eating the cats! No, they are not. It doesn't say dogs and cats. It says "chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs." 

Here's the notice. Is that the zoo's predator or somebody's unwanted cat?

 

That's easy to translate and to see that's a lynx: "Chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs form an important part of the diet of our predators – especially the European lynx, which needs whole prey that resembles what it would naturally hunt in the wild." 

"Some people seem so obsessed with the morning/Get up early just to watch the sun rise...."

So begins the song Spotify chooses for me after it comes to the end of the album I'd chosen and as I am emerging from the overgrown forest path and looking back to see the sun has finally emerged above the smoke on the lake. 

That's a little too on the nose, Spotify. If you're really following me that doggedly you ought to act more nonchalant.

The album that was my choice — the soundtrack for my sunrise walk/run — was "New Morning." I'd picked it because as I drove up there was a "rabbit runnin’ down across the road" — as Bob sings in the title song. Yes, Bob, like Chuck Schumer, drops his G's.

I got back home and assembled my coffee-and-peanut-butter breakfast and then got a late start blogging because I became quite involved testing whether Grok would replicate my hypothesis about the progression of songs on the "New Morning" album. Seriously, I'm not going to bother you, the blog reader, with the details of my hypothesis about the alternating 5 themes. I'll just say I was surprised that Grok found "One More Weekend" to be "possibly... sinister." Oh, really?! We — Grok and I — got fixated on the first line "Slippin' and slidin' like a weasel on the run." Grok:

There's no better interior decoration than Amy Sedaris interior decoration.

"It’ll seem like it’s all systems go, let’s keep going, let’s cut the red tape, et cetera. Let’s basically effectively put the A.I.s in charge..."

"... of more and more things. But really what’s happening is that the A.I.s are just biding their time and waiting until they have enough hard power that they don’t have to pretend anymore."/"And when they don’t have to pretend, their actual goal is revealed as something like expansion of research development and construction from earth into space and beyond. At a certain point, that means that human beings are superfluous to their intentions. And what happens?"/"And then they kill all the people, all the humans."/"The way you would exterminate a colony of bunnies that was making it a little harder than necessary to grow carrots in your backyard...."

It's Daniel Kokotajlo talking to Ross Douthat, in "The Forecast for 2027? Total A.I. Domination" (NYT).

AND: I thought May 13th was Bad Analogy Day.

"That branch in the water looks like some creature rising from the lake and reaching for the shore...."

Said Rusty in the comments to last night's café. He was looking at the sunrise photo I'd taken that morning.

And Meade had made a similar comment about the previous morning's sunrise photo. He commented pictorially, by text, picking out the detail...

... with the caption "The Easter Bunny."

It made me wonder — what are the horror stories involving rabbits?

Reading the rabbit's mind.

I'm reading "We take our dogs everywhere. Maybe we shouldn’t," by the Portland, Oregon writer Tove Danovich:

After pausing to take a photo of a flower along the trail, I looked up to see a doe standing directly in the path in front of me.... Later on, while sitting to take in a quiet moment, I watched as a rabbit popped out of the bush onto the trail, ears twitching. The two of us stayed there together for a minute, maybe two. Then she ran off a second before I heard the dog coming toward us. It wasn’t safe for a rabbit with a potential predator close by....

I see rabbits all the time, in our yard and along the nearby woodland trails, and the rabbits are always the same. They freeze at first, and then they suddenly bolt. It doesn't take a dog to trigger the shift from frozen to hopping the hell out of there. The rabbit has 2 modes. The column writer interprets it her way, flattering herself by imagining the rabbit is communing with her, followed by fear of the dog. But I think I've seen far more rabbits than the author. That doesn't make my reading of the rabbit's mind perfect. But I'm thinking that the rabbit isn't thinking anything at all, but is programmed by evolution to alternate between 2 strategies: 1. Look invisible, 2. Become invisible. That is: 1. Freeze, 2. Run. The rabbit does the same thing every time.

And, by the way, no matter how gently you may move through the woods and how fondly you may regard bunnies, when you, the human being, are around, for the rabbit, there is "a potential predator close by."

"Cats and dogs have an outsize carbon footprint, mostly because of their carnivorous diet."

"If the pet food industry, which mainly feeds dogs and cats, were a country, it would rank as the 60th-highest greenhouse gas emitter, equivalent to the Philippines. Rabbits, by contrast, leave a minimal pawprint. They eat small amounts of hay and otherwise discarded vegetables. Their waste can be used as fertilizer in gardens...."

From "Why you should consider bunnies as your next pet/'It’s like having a vegan cat'" (WaPo).

From the comments, from someone who said she had a rabbit as a pet:

"Make Love Great Again."

Photographed yesterday in the East Village.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

I was looking through my old photos from August 2007, and I ran across this...

 ... which I just want to show you because it made me laugh:

The reason I was poking around in that section of the 19 thousand photos I've uploaded to Flickr is that I happened upon the new NYT article "Can a Neighborhood Be Instagrammed to Death? The return of tourism to New York has brought crowds back to one of the most popular selfie spots on earth. People who live there aren’t feeling #grateful." 

That's about a vantage point I remember photographing when I sojourned in Brooklyn 15 years ago. Yes, here's my photo:

That was taken before there even was an Instagram — Instagram began in 2010 — and there was no concept of Instagrammable. Only bloggable. 

Blogged here, where somebody said he thought he recognized the shot from "Once Upon a Time in America."

Beasts of Wisconsin.

1. There are 24,000 bears in Wisconsin: "The DNR said in 1989 there were only about 9,000 black bears in the state. Now the population is up to 24,000. 'Our bear population has been steadily increasing and expanding southward'...."

2. They found an alligator in Long Lake in Fond du Lac County. 

3. We spotted 6 foxes romping together in our neighbor's lawn just before sunrise the other day. They were very active, even trying to run up a tree. The next day, same time and place, I saw them again. At what point do you say, now, there are too many foxes?

4. Seen today in great numbers: very tiny toads/frogs (about a half inch long), extremely nervous chipmunks, rabbits (doing their best to look like rocks), turkeys.

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can write about whatever you like.

It was an awfully dull sunrise today, so let me give you this photo of the rabbit in the rye — not ryegrass, rye, the grain —  that we planted in our front yard:

Foolosophy.

It's the word of the day at the OED, and it means what you think — foolish philosophy. 

It's an old funny word, traced all the way back to 1592:

1592 ‘C. Cony-Catcher’ Def. Conny-catching To Rdr. sig. A3 That quaint and mysticall forme of Foolosophie.

I had to look up "Cony-Catcher"/"Conny-catching" too, and I imagined, wrongly, that it was a reference to female genitalia. But, no, "coney" is the skin of a rabbit. And to "coney-catch" is to swindle. 

From 1907:

1907 Putnam's Monthly May 188/1 ‘Man is truly handicapped by reason.’ Doubtless, when it comes to this kind of ‘Foolosophy’. 

But what kind of philosophy was it? Here's the whole essay from Putnam's: "Quack Journalism."

"There was an attempt..."

"The Bidens are GIGANTIC. I had no idea."

The Bidens are GIGANTIC. I had no idea. pic.twitter.com/8JQrzLogP0

— Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) May 4, 2021

ADDED: That picture is mindbending. Fortunately, The Guardian investigated: "Why do the Carters look so tiny alongside Joe Biden and his wife Jill in this picture?/You don’t need special gear to create this optical trickery. If you have an iPhone 11 or 12 you too can loom large over a former US president." 

What amazes me is that the picture was chosen for sharing. It looks like it was the Carter Center that tweeted it. I think that showed poor judgment, but maybe they knew it was hilarious and wanted to amuse us.

PLUS:

There. I fixed it. pic.twitter.com/dmjLiX3oXk

— 🌊 Deonardo La Vinci 🌊 (@DeonardoLeVinci) May 4, 2021

FROM THE EMAIL: Nancy links to this famous Diane Arbus photograph and says: 

This was the first image that came to mind when I saw the Tiny Carter’s. (Finally, a name for my new band.) 

Perhaps The Carter Center has a good, slightly twisted sense of humor as this also reminded me of the story of Jimmy battling the giant rabbit.

I see "Jimmy Carter Rabbit Incident" has its own Wikipedia page.

"The thread began with a tweet that simply read 'Drunk' and began ending with one that read, 'I am goi f to sleep. My husband has asked me five hundred rimes@if I am alright.'"

"'That means it’s go to sleep o’clock.' At some point in the middle, she tweeted: 'Ok a newborn colt rocks it totally and he thought my hand was his mom. It was not. He has tasted life’s infinite tragedy. As I mentioned Earlier I am inebriated.'"

From "Susan Orlean explains her drunken viral Twitter thread, candy-coated fennel seeds and the comfort of cats" (WaPo). Susan Orlean is a much-praised New Yorker writer, best known for "The Orchid Thief."

There's an interview with Orlean — after she recovered from her drunkenness and learned how popular her drunken ravings had become. Excerpt from the interview:

At some point, my husband came in and said he had gotten a few texts from friends saying they thought that my Twitter account had been hacked. And I said, “It hasn’t been hacked!” I was incensed at the thought that someone thought it was hacked. Then he said, “Are you sure you want to be tweeting in your condition?” I said, “Yes, yes, it’s fine. Everything’s fine.” But I was just sort of tweeting, and I wasn’t looking to see if anyone was responding. I was just typing, stream-of-consciousness, without giving a great deal of thought to if anyone was reading it. To me, it was late at night, even though it wasn’t late. I had gone to bed at 8:30, because I was hammered.

I noticed the tweets at the time, and it revived my interest in Susan Orlean. So whatever that crazy stuff was it was effective in boosting her visibility and maybe even her reputation. It caused me to go read the article of hers in a recent New Yorker, which I'd noticed but skipped with a vague plan to get back to it later. The article is about rabbits: "The Rabbit Outbreak/A highly contagious, often lethal animal virus arrives in the United States." Sample paragraph:

"Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are on lockdown at their $14 million Canadian bolthole after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau closed the country’s border amid the coronavirus pandemic."

In case you were wondering how Harry and Meghan are doing after running off to Canada into supposedly burgeoning new opportunities, Page Six has the answer.

I had to look up "bolthole." It's "a hole by which to bolt or escape; figurative a means of escape" (OED).

1877 E. Peacock Gloss. Words Manley & Corringham, Lincs. Bolt-hole, (1) the hole by which a rabbit makes its escape when the ferret pursues it. (2) Any unknown hole by which a person makes his way into or out of a house....
1924 E. Marsh tr. La Fontaine Fables 71 [The hare] heard a rustle, And took the hint to bustle Off to his bolt-hole.
1932 H. Simpson Boomerang xii. 306 A girl who had been jilted might choose any bolt-hole to hide her shame....

A very rabbit-y concept.

And while I'm here in the OED, let me look up "lockdown" (a word that we're seeing a lot this week and that I suspect will not go away for a long time). The oldest meaning is "a piece of wood used in the construction of rafts when transporting timber downriver." That goes back to the 19th century.  The next oldest meaning of "lockdown," dating only to the 1970s, is the prison meaning — keeping prisoners in their cells for a long time (notably after an outbreak of violence). Most recently, going back to 1984, the word came into use to refer to "A state of isolation, containment, or restricted access, usually instituted as a security measure; the imposition of this state." Examples:

1999 Computerworld 11 Oct. 8/1 (heading) Many users plan Y2K lockdowns.
2002 Quill (Nexis) 1 May 34 We heard the city was on lockdown and that it wasn't possible to get in.
2005 Courier-Mail (Brisbane) 3 May 3/5 Contestants go into lockdown tomorrow isolated from the outside world as they prepare to enter the Big Brother house on Sunday.

I heard NY Governor Andrew Cuomo struggling with the word on this morning's "The Daily" podcast. He said it was a scary word, and he didn't want to use it. It would mean that people are required to stay inside their own homes, and he wanted to assure New Yorkers that he would not do that, yet it was obvious that he was going to say that whether it was true or not, as he openly talked about the problem of causing a destructive stampede to the stores.

Today, the heart of Facebook is blackish-purple.

Compare "Facebook has a heart... a blackish-green, mystifyingly obscure heart," where I encountered a large looming male with a parrot and a cockatoo and a squat crow-headed woman feeding a goose while a long-hair child turned away and had nothing to do.

Today's Facebook image has only female humans — one old and one young. The old one — Facebook must have chosen this specifically for me — is knowable as old because her hair is white and she's wearing glasses and white anklets and she has cats — one to pet and one perched on her back. Maybe her back aches — her non-cat-petting hand is in the oh-my-aching-back position. How long has she been bent over in the go-ahead-and-sit-on-my-back position? This woman Facebook thinks is me has a head so empty that the shape of the cat shows through it. Why can't I stand up and heave this beast off my back? How long have I been petting the standing cat? Perhaps for all eternity in this blackish-purple limbo.

The woman who Facebook has determined does not represent me is squatting grasping a rabbit and attempting to interest it in a carrot. Unlike normal cartoon rabbits, this rabbit is blasé about a carrot. Unlike normal cartoon humans, this woman has 5 fingers, and it looks like too many fingers, thus explaining, at long last, why normal cartoon character hands have 4 fingers.

The cat in the foreground contemplates a ball of yarn. Like the rabbit with the carrot, the cat does not react to the yarn like a normal cartoon cat. This thing that should be so exciting — yarn! to a cat — is lackluster, something to be gazed at with ennui, like the tiny world itself. The world of Facebook, where groups are at the heart, and the group their sophisticated algorithms have offered to me is, apparently, cats. Or rabbits. Or aching backs. Or anklets (yes, the "I Wear Anklets" group! I must join!). Or see-through bulbous hairdos. Or Forcing Carrots on Rabbits. Or Gazing Ennui-Filled at a Symbol of the World.

"A market where extremely rich people pay too much for mediocre art and shut out the not-quite-as rich may not be the biggest issue in a wildly polarized economy."

"But art is the record of culture we leave for future generations, and it too is being warped by our unequal economy," writes economist Allison Schrager in "Even the Rich Aren’t Rich Enough for Jeff Koons/As billionaires compete for art in an overheated market, the merely affluent are giving up" (NYT).

I really don't know why I'm supposed to be bothered that Steve Mnuchin's dad paid $91 million for a shiny metal rabbit.

Schrager invites us to care about the psychology of art collectors who might see that an artwork sells for tens of millions and "assume the $50,000 work they can afford is not worth buying, especially if they can’t flip it for a quick profit at auction." You need people of "middle tier" wealth to buy product in the middle-tier market to keep the art market doing what it's supposed to do to cause art to come into being and leave a record that we existed.

I don't know. You've got that rabbit. That's the record. Future generations will look back on us and think we were that rabbit.

A big fox in our yard this morning.

He's walking on the path Meade created for people to walk and mountain bike. I was just calling it "The Bunny Trail" — the place referenced in the old song "Here Comes Peter Cottontail" — because I saw a big rabbit using it. And — as if on cue, to top my joke — a big fox takes the same route. I had a dramatic reaction, but no camera at hand. Five minutes later, the fox was back, and he stopped right in the middle of the yard, as if he knew I'd wanted to get a shot of him. Actually, he seemed a little slow and confused, and we worried that he was sick. Then he ducked down the alleyway between the two garages.