I truly gasped when I received this photo from my husband on Saturday night. He was upstate, and I was in the city. I completely missed the moon here in Brooklyn, but he captured this outrageous image without having to contend with any of the light pollution from the city. Also, he cheated. Turns out he took the photo through the lens of a telescope. But still!

100 Words for Snow by Phil James, for Mendosa. As seen on the ever-edifying blog at Present & Correct. Personally, I am hoping for tlalman and tlanip, so I can set up a snow pop-up shop and add to my savings. Please note, Mr. James’ list is, I believe, mostly a work of satire.

Saw this photo in the NYT this morning. Made my stomach lurch. The height of that wave is approximately 100 ft. And yes, that is a surfer, one Garrett McNamara, in the middle. The wave is off Nazaré, on the central coast of Portugal. Who knew? Photo by Tó Mané via Reuters.

If I hadn’t chosen to pursue life as a designer, I might well have been a scientific illustrator. As a student, I loved biology. I would spend hours with my pencils and paints making drawings of dissections and microbes. I was (no surprise here) consumed by chart making. I remember in high-school biology how I dove headlong into the science and visual representation of genetic traits. Gregor Mendel wasn’t exactly my hero, but I noticed early on how much I was enamored by what I imagined to be a life devoted to pea plants and bees. My friend Kay sent me a link to this site. It has a wealth of unusual and wonderful images. Thanks Kay!

Along with Muhammad Ali (“Don’t Do Drugs!”), the Keep America Beautiful campaign to stop littering (“Don’t be a litterbug!”) and President Jimmy Carter urging us to turn down the heat and put on a sweater, Smokey the Bear factored in quite prominently to my formative years. Thanks to him, to this day still I have an outsized paranoia of unwittingly setting the forest on fire. This sign is posted on the side of the firehouse in Jeffersonville, NY. The last I knew it had been removed to make way for a more contemporary mural. I was so happy to see that he’s back in place. And don’t you just totally dig his pants!