Item #1: Image
Hood Canal, labeled “Bloom” in the image, is 125 miles west and a little north of us. From a NASA satellite (MODIS) the image shows Puget Sound and the lakes near Seattle as blue/black, indicating clear water.
A phytoplankton bloom stretching across Hood Canal, a narrow inlet in the Puget Sound in Washington, causes the Aqua color, as the millions of tiny shells reflect that wavelength of the Sun. There is a bit of explanation here: Coccolithophores
Item #2: Pancho Villa 
Shown is a wind instrument from Argentina called an Erke. A good image of the horns that I wanted is hard to fit on the page, so click below.
Pancho Villa and other things with horns
Our Naneum Fan has a Longhorn Cattle Company, just 4 miles south of us. Could an instrument be made from one of Pancho’s horns? What about some of the other horns shown in that link?
Item #3: improper tire inflation 
The photo is of part of a tire stuffed with bags of drugs. The idea was to ship them to “dealers” in Canada. There was a problem:
Ford Fusion sedans were involved. Do you have one?
Item #4: Do you remember these? 
Maybe you are too young.
There were rows of wooden cabinets in libraries holding drawers such as these filled with paper cards [search: dewey decimal system card_files ] using Images and/or regular Wed search.
When elders needed to find information, you could go to a library and “look it up.” Time moves on and things change.
In an article titled “Search me by Helen Rumbelow of The Times of London we learn that “look it up” is so last century. From her article:
If you are researching something on the internet, and you are over 21, I bet you “look it up”. If you are under 21, you don’t. You say “I’ll search it up.” My children say “let’s search it up on Google”, which to me sounds like a non-native English mistake.
It’s not. It’s British young people doing their young thing, and changing stuff in a way that irritates their elders. They are all at it, searching it up all over the country. YouTube is full of videos of kids “searching up”.
I’ve read blogs from teachers, doing worried analyses of the phrase on Google trends, hoping it is dying out (quite the reverse). They have changed it for a reason. The old “look up” things, as if the computer is a dusty reference library, while the young more actively “search it up”: we merely observe the internet, they dig in.
What do you say you do?
Item #5: Animals and I-90
Elk are said to dislike going under highways. Thus, I was surprised to see these photos. Many are taken where recent construction spanned a wide swath (275 yards) where Gold Creek enters Keechelus Lake, just this side of Snoqualmie Pass. WTA just did 3 days of trail work about 3 miles north of the lake. I have seen geese under the highway, but nothing these trips. It only takes multiple seconds of driving time to pass this, on the north side.
safe passage
Location in Google Earth for most of these photos:
47.390947, -121.383106
I haven’t found a good source of photos for the overpass that was built. I may have to ask the biology folks.
And that, for this week, is the not so nasty news.
John