Instapaper has been a life saver for me. ¹ It offers me several pleasures. I don't have to wade through horrible, garish web pages to get to words I am interested in. There is almost always something to read on my phone in the event of an emergency. It stores what I've saved and makes it easy to annotate and share.

As I say, a life saver.

These have been very trying times. When the UK voted to leave the European Union I was having a good time in two of Britain's former dominions. I was utterly shocked, surprised and depressed. I still am, in a way. I refused to discuss it with anyone over there unless they also allowed me to bring the US presidential campaign into the discussion, and mostly they saw my point.

Which was: if the Brits could vote to the leave the EU -- which all the experts, as opposed to talking heads, believe could be bad economically, culturally, everything -- it is entirely possible that come November, the Americans could vote for the presumptive Republican nominee, as he was at the time.

Only one thing was clear, although I could not articulate it: these voters and the people they followed were not simply stupid.

Down a microscope, a lichen looks like a loaf of ciabatta: it has a stiff, dense crust surrounding a spongy, loose interior.

Wonderful story of curiosity and a willingness to follow the evidence.

I have to believe that nobody at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science has actually looked at the site since 11 July. Either that, or this headline is a joke to which I am not privy.

Also interesting, the original on the BBC website, credited by the AACCS, has no such error, and is shorter.

So maybe it is a joke.

Back from almost 6 weeks away (and no inclination to write here) my first order of business was to coax my sourdough leaven back to life. In 36 hours I managed to go from the somewhat smelly jar above to the rather delicious bread below. And I wrote about it over on Fornacalia, which, like the leaven, has been a little bit neglected of late.