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Line of rabbits along the ground, silhouetted against some old-looking airplanes and trees in the distance.

When wild jackrabbits roamed the fields of LAX. (Los Angeles Times)*

From time to time passengers in giant air liners are amused when giant jacks race the plane on take-off. Until now, none of the rabbits has left the ground.

I’m reminded of all the rabbits we used to see near UCI in the 90s, especially out in the housing complexes on the edge. A lot of that open space has been filled in since then. I’m told they were still all over the place as of 2010, but I can’t remember seeing any the last few times I was on campus. Though several of those were Wayzgoose, which I’m sure would have most of the rabbits hiding in their burrows, waiting for all the people to leave so they can see what food they might have dropped. Then again, I don’t remember noticing squirrels at the time either, and I’ve seen squirrels walk up to me and pose like Oliver Twist asking for more soup.

Anyway, the rabbits at LAX were eventually wiped out by foxes, who have since disappeared from the airport as well.

About Those Foxes…

But the foxes are still around! Just not on the runways. LAist ran a story about the local population of red foxes on the Palos Verdes Peninsula just last month. The LA Natural History Museum has an article on the species’ history in the area, from being imported and farmed for hunting and fur in the early 20th century, to going feral, to a population boom in the 1980s.

The red fox coexists with the native gray fox on the peninsula, but coyotes will kill them, and the current population is believed to be fairly low.

Could be worse, though. The Channel Island fox almost went extinct through a Rube Goldberg food chain of events. SFGate reported on their plight and rebound (on the same day LAist published the piece on red foxes, oddly enough!) due to the feral pigs (way more than 30-40) left over from the islands’ farming days. The pigs not only overran the islands’ vegetation — it was basically trees and grass and nothing in between for years — but they attracted predatory birds from the mainland who, once they were in the area, went after the smaller, easier prey: the foxes. By 2004, there were only a dozen on each of two islands.

The National Park Service hired an outfit to hunt down the feral pigs over the next few years. The islands’ vegetation — and the foxes –rebounded. By 2016, the island fox was removed from the endangered species list entirely.

*Photo credit: Art Rogers, originally published in the Dec. 2, 1946, edition of Life magazine and later in the Aug. 4, 2011 LA Times.

Expanded from a Mastodon post I wrote back when the LA Times highlighted the LAX rabbits in a “From the archives…” story in 2017.

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Finally getting around to sorting through photos from a walk at the pond and botanical gardens at Polliwog Park…um…two months ago.

Two ducklings with mottled brown feathers swim, following their mother, who has similar coloring. A third is off to the side, not far from where a turtle's head is poking out of the water.

The third duckling on the right was spooked by the turtle surfacing its head right next to it. Between this shot and the next, a few seconds later, it had darted away and hidden behind its mother!

The same two ducklings and their mother, only the third duckling is nowhere to be seen. For that matter, neither is the turtle.

Ducks (mostly mallards like these), coots and geese (mostly Canada Geese) make this pond one of their regular migratory spots. Seagulls, pigeons and crows stop by regularly. Smaller birds mostly stick to the other parts of the park. The turtles, like those in most of the ponds around here, are feral – released pets and their descendants.

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A while back, I mentioned one of the exhibits I remembered from a childhood visit to the Los Angeles Museum of Science and Industry (now the California Science Center) in the 1980s:

…a multi-screen cartoon about energy sources and engine types called “The Water Engine.” (Each screen has a character talking up internal combustion, flywheels, mag-lev, electric, etc. I still quote the Peter Lorre-inspired fuel-cell scientist saying “And then…we burn the hydrogen!”)

At the end, the scientist tries repeatedly to ignite the hydrogen while everyone else watches nervously, then starts hiding behind obstacles or off-screen before the inevitable explosion bursts across all the screens. Then they all climb out of their hiding spots and agree that this would be really cool once the kinks are worked out, but it’s not there yet.

Brooke brought it up on Mastodon last month and I decided to go looking for it again. In 2017 there was nothing I found to show it even existed. In 2024 the only thing she could find at first was…my blog post from 2017. Which I’d forgotten writing. 🤦‍♂️ I kept looking, and found a brief note that it was later shown at EPCOT, with a link to a long-dead page that had been archived in 2002 containing some extremely tiny screenshots!

9 tiny cartoon screens in a grid: You can just barely make out a cowboy, a child with a large tricycle-like assembly, a football coach, a miner with a hard hat, some old, yellowed parchment with a sketch on it, someone carrying an axle with wheels, a large lab flask filled with water, an old man holding up a picture of a horse, and someone in a superhero outfit standing on a row of horseshoe magnets.
Rescued from a long-dead web page via the Internet Archive.

Adding EPCOT to my search eventually turned up an extremely sparse IMDB entry and…*drumroll please* someone’s home camcorder video of the whole presentation!

It does exist! It wasn’t a shared hallucination! The fuel cell scientist (who extracts the hydrogen from water, hence the title) does sound like Peter Lorre! He does indeed say the line that my family still quotes decades later! And it does indeed explode across the whole display!

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Today I found myself thinking of Terminator 3, specifically the plotline in which all kinds of random computer crashes are spreading across the internet.

For obvious reasons.

In today’s real world incident, it’s a bug in an auto-pushed update for widely-used security software by CrowdStrike, ironically used to protect mission-critical systems. In the two-decade-old movie (pardon me while I turn to dust), it’s Skynet spreading itself across the internet.

At the time, I thought the nuclear strike would wipe out a lot of internet infrastructure, destroying major nodes and leaving pieces of Skynet disconnected from each other. A commenter remarked that he’d been doing research for a novel and experts agreed that enough of the major nodes and infrastructure would survive the attack to keep the network functioning.

The interesting thing: Neither of us had heard the story that ARPANET (the internet’s predecessor) had been designed for that scenario. These days, it’s pretty much repeated as gospel… but apparently it wasn’t a design goal, and the idea that it was can be traced back to a 1991 article in Network World magazine that conflated ARPANET with a different network design, which was never actually built. (via)

From there it took on a life of its own for the same reason many urban legends (and conspiracy theories) do: it made a better story.