Now, they are burning up our state:

Vicious squirrels set fires in their ongoing war against humans. (I may possibly be editing the considerably calmer headline written by NBC, but mine's more accurate.)

In related news, we had a slight tinge of wildfire smoke in the air last night, which seems fortunately gone now. Hoping -- really hoping -- for rain tonight and then this weekend when a frontal boundary comes through. Not just to bring my roses back into shambling zombie life.

Blueberries, bonsai, and other things beginning with B

Years back, one of my grandmothers lived next to two women who kept, among other things, bonsai. And rocks (lots of rocks) and sea shells. I loved the rocks, but the bonsai fascinated me: trees turned into fairy gardens. I want one, I thought.

Years later, I (somewhat reluctantly) shelled out the money for a little one, and promptly killed it.

"Did you keep it inside?" asked a bonsai expert later.

I'd bought it from inside. "Er, yes."

"Well, that did it."

Which was a friendly if probably inaccurate way of deflecting blame.

Anyway, this weekend my brother and I briefly popped into the Winter Garden Rose and Bloom Festival, which had a lot of roses, kettle corn, clowns, little trains, jewelry, pumpkin bread, and yes, other plants. He wanted another paw-paw plant and some other Florida native plants.

Me...

Well, see, some of the booths had bonsai.

I was only planning to get one.

We ended up with two -- a little pine tree one (my choice) and a little ficus tree one (his choice.) They aren't dead yet. Unfortunately, although the ficus doesn't know this yet, it is eventually going to be put into a pot that I am theoretically making in my ceramics class. I say theoretically because as it turns out I am very very bad at ceramics, partly because the class is really exhausting, and after an hour I'm kinda incapable of doing anything in it, partly because I keep forgetting various Important Steps, and mostly because I have no visual imagination. This is what usually happens:

Instructor: What is the clay saying to you?

Me, sadly: Give me to someone that can understand me!

Instructor: No, no. I mean -- look at the shape. What shape does it suggest to you?

Me, looking: Clay.

Or this:

Instructor: Now, if you want, you can add a little bird to this.

Me, excited: Bird? (Several happy minutes with clay, turning to several unhappy minutes when my clay fails to do what the instructor's clay just did.)

Instructor, later: Ah, what a nice abstract look! Well done! Gives a sense of a fish.

Me: Zzzzzz.

The instructor's encouraging hope that even I could use the easy to use bonsai molds turned out to be slightly overoptimistic. I suspect we shall actually be investing in a bonsai pot.

But I digress. Along with the bonsai my brother also picked up some paw-paw plants, I think because he likes to say the word "paw-paw," and a large blueberry bush that already had ripening blueberries on it.

Thus this post, since today I was able to head out and pick an entire pint of blueberries from the backyard. This may never happen again, since chances are good that we will a) kill the bush or b) only manage to get one of the two bushes to flower, thus not allowing whichever one that flowers to pollinate and get little berries, but I thought it should be recorded.

And then I stopped to look at the little bonsai. The one I picked -- the one that's a little pine tree, bent over, a little tiny bit of beauty, holding magic in every leaf.

Hopefully I won't kill it. I have left it outside.

Why we hate the media, part infinity

So I was indulging in my guilty pleasure of Revenge tonight (I admit; I have a severe crush on Nolan. And a minor crush on the actress playing "Amanda.") and unusually enough didn't turn off the TV before the local news came on.

It reminded me just why I need to turn of the TV before the local news comes on.

It's not that I don't want to be informed. But.

On Sunday, some bicyclists found two burning bodies on the side of a bike trail. That is awful enough. Today, they were identified as two teenagers from a local high school, which is even worse. Just a horrible, horrible story, and not surprisingly, the lead story on the news.

Now, I have to say that I can't immediately think of a good way to handle this, other than perhaps retelling the bit about the bicyclists and the identification of the teenagers, especially since the cops are apparently not releasing any other information except the identities of the victims, so the media doesn't have much to go on here. Even with that, though, they failed.

Because instead of quoting the cops, or friends of the victims (who understandably aren't talking) or parents of the victims (ditto) or even the typical concerned neighbor of "It's really scary -- it makes you feel unsafe, you know?" or even bicyclists, they went to the high school and interviewed some students, and added that in an exclusive, they had learned that "one of the victims called a friend, apparently by accident."

The MORE THAN SLIGHT PROBLEM WITH THIS?

That report was based on interviews with the students, who were repeating what they had heard in school. In other words, mere rumors.

I don't blame the students. They said, and I am quoting, "I heard that there were sounds of running...." [on a phone call that one of the victims VERY allegedly made to an unnamed friend. They admitted that they had not heard the phone call in question and that they were only repeating what they'd heard in school.

I think we all know how quickly incredibly false information can spread in school.

ABC assured us that they had learned that the call in question really happened -- while ALSO telling us (and showing us) that the alleged receiver of that call had refused to talk to them on camera. They told us what his friends had said about the call.

And that was the SOURCED part of the story. ABC also told us that the murder happened because of a $500 drug deal gone bad, with no accompanying police statement.

Look. I know the media is desperate to tell the story; I assume the community wants to know what the hell happened -- I mean, I want to know what happened. But is it really too much to ask the media to wait for a statement from an actual witness or the cops, instead of reporting what a bunch of high schoolers happen to be saying?