Per today’s New York Times, you can rent live potted Christmas trees in Southern California. It isn’t cheap, but it gets you a quite nice tree that does not proceed to die in your living room. And: “Families can even order the same tree year after year to see how it has grown. ”  Somehow this seems as touching as it is silly.

And so is this:  my craftsy colleague Sarah not long ago informed me that earlier this year a call went out to the knitting community for wool sweaters for lots of little penguins rescued after a bad oil spill Down Under. There was a knitting pattern online.  Knitters the world over responded with a flood of tiny sweaters.  With some of these the knitters got really creative – bright colors, colored borders, even tuxedo patterned knit jobs.   The results, as reported in Fashionista (!) online, were adorable. And it worked.  The wool sweaters kept the birds warm until their oil-soaked, cleaned-up feathers regained their natural oils, by which time the sweaters shredded off.

Speaking of adorable, one of the Circulation student assistants here at Fondren Library, unbeknownst to us,  created a YouTube video of herself and several confederates studying in the Library in Finals to a soundtrack adapted from a pop song and with full-bore choreography.  That video has been a big hit around here.

Meanwhile everything else that’s going on in the world is going on.

Penguins strike us as lovably odd species, but it’s Homo Sapiens that’s genuinely peculiar – in ways that are good and bad and indifferent and profound and never more so than at this season.