The Real Estate Page, And A Little Apple, Too -- Nothing About The Bakken -- May 4, 2020

I really don't care about the seller or the circumstances all that much, but it's interesting to see the houses, some of the back stories, and their locations.

A huge "thanks" to ZeroHedge for posting.

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The Apple Page

Treasury yields jump as Apple Inc jumps in.

Link here.

Apple's offering includes 3Y, 5Y, 10Y and 30Y tranches, and will be used to fund the company's newly announced $50 billion stock buyback expansion; additionally, continuing the record flood of bond issuance, Amgen and Starbucks also have slated issuance for Monday, with IG issuers are expected to raise $70b this week.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site.  Do not make any investment, financial, career, travel, job, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here.

Updates and specifics here.

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North American Bird Migration In Full Swing

From Cornell.

Since I have nothing better to do, and I'm enjoying a second cup of coffee on the patio, while watching the cardinals and robins, I might as well pull out The Wall Of Birds: An Artistic Journey, Jane Kim, c. 2018, The Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

The "wall of birds" is a mural painted by Jane Kim on a 2,500-square foot "spandrel" separating the auditorium from the rest of the visitor center. This is really an education book for artists. Jane Kim describes the challenges in painting the various birds and how she faced those challenges.

Some data points from the book:

• the mural depicted 243 modern families of living birds,five modern families that had gone extinct by human hand with the last thirty thousand years, twenty-one prehistoric ancestors, and a ten-foot caiman to remind people of the ind-bending reality that the crocodile family is more closely related to birds than it is to other reptiles;
• all told, 270 life-size animals, from the 30-foot-long Yutprannus to the tiny Marvelous Spatuletail hummingbird which weighs about as much as a penny
• first bird painted: New Zealand's North Island Saddleback; a passerine; a member of an order of perching birds that comprises more than half of all avian species;
• from a visual perspective, there's no other bird on the wall like the Great Spotted Kiwi;
• the "kiwi": a national "demonym" -- a word that I placed on Arianna's vocabulary list some time ago; New Zealanders refer to themselves as "Kiwis";
• the Southern Cassowary: a modern-day velociraptor;
• when one looks at Jane Kim's painting of the Scretarybird, it really does remind one of T. rex;
• the Peregrine Falcon is famous for hitting two hundred miles an hour in a stoop;
• Jane Kim feels the Great Hornbill is unrivaled on the Wall of Birds;
  
  
  
• a nice piece on evolution, pages 131 - 157;
• the Wood Duck is one of the most visually complex birds in the world; its head is covered in a sheen of iridescence and its body is a quilt work of stripes, solids, polka dots, and vermiculations; an ordinary bird of this size would have taken Jane Kim a day to paint; the Wood Duck took three days to paint;
• mentioned in passing: Jane Kim was a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, p. 201; 
• Jane Kim: I always find painting with primary colors -- red and yellow especially -- a tricky endeavor; highlights and shadows, crucial for creating depth and volume, pose a risk of stripping the vibrancy from these hypersaturated colors; to address this issue, I used subtle hints of lavender and orange to add dimension to the 'I'iwi's plumage, a fiery red-orange like the lava that formed its home island; 
• the 'I'iwi is a Hawaii honeycreeper;
• perhaps the two most famous names in ornithology of yore: Audubon and Gould;
• as an intern, Jane Kim was given a corner desk in the Lab's large, beautifully lit second-floor staff lounge, a huge "gift"; overlooking the Sapsucker Woods Pond; she was an intern for five months, 2010;
• she returned to the Lab in 2014 to start the mural;