"Beaver Cloud"

Recent panel appearing in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.
Believe it or not, sometimes it's a quiet victory to get a "look" just right: the expression on a character is so crucial that the slightest shift will affect everything. Unless, of course, nobody gets the dam joke anyways. Case in point being the statistical fact that probably a sizable number of newspaper readers might not know just exactly what a word cloud is. I've been using one here on the blog for a couple months now over on the sidebar for the list of Topics, and have to come to like the visual representation of ranking post subject matter in such a way.

The topic of trees has been chewing away at my attention as of late since there is a comparatively wider range of species in this neck of the woods. One challenge has been trying to tell apart some of the more common coniferous trees: instead of dealing with the ubiquitous black spruce of Interior Alaska, many of my walks about Maine will now also come across red and white spruce, red, pitch, jack and white pines, hemlock, cedar and fir. Talk about needles in a haystack, this place definitely earns the tag "The Pine Tree State."

"And those beavers have been busy, chomping and gnawing their way through pristine forests." 

Meanwhile, NPR for some reason doesn't really "Consider All Things" when choosing to focus on how beavers are supposedly decimating Argentina, all the while conveniently ignoring large-scale deforestation (70% of native forests) caused by corporate logging and industrial farming interests. Pick on somebody your own size!