Congratulations, you've made it through the week!

  Have a Happy Thought: Bumble bees are some of the happiest creatures out there. They’re just buzzing around, playing games , and finding pollen to get all over their round fuzzy bodies, right? Unrelated, but I love it, the genus name is Bombus. Image:  A black and white fuzzy bumble bee on a purple flower : https://www.flickr.com/photos/hillsboroparksrec/50037359926 ( CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 ) And Wikipedia has some great descriptions: Bumblebees vary in appearance, but are generally plump and densely furry. The largest bumblebee species in the world is B. dahlbomii of Chile, up to about 40 mm (1.6 in) long, and described as "flying mice" and "a monstrous fluffy ginger beast" Image:  A very large ginger furry bumble bee on a green leaf : https://www.flickr.com/photos/20ojos/5503786213 ( CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 ) Turns out, these flying beach balls (not just the huge ginger ones) are also really smart, when it comes to… gardening? L...

Have a Happy Thought:   Animal names are fun, even if they don’t even always make sense in English. Like butterflies fly, but they’re not made of butter. Or starfish. Not fish. They are vaguely star-shaped, though. Here’s a bearcat. Not a bear. Not a cat. Picture of a Binturong in a tree. Black vaguely-cat-shaped creature.  Image from https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-most-misleading-animal-names-ever.html   King Cobra – not actually a cobra. Also, there is no evidence they follow any sort of monarchy. So you see the problem we have in English. German, meanwhile… well, Germans made it simpler. There’s a flow chart. You’re welcome. A flowchart explaining German names for all of the following: pig, guinea pig, porcupine, capybara, raccoon, dugong, porpoise, turkey, tortoise, slug, armadillo, skunk, sloth, squid, bat, and platypus.   If this link still works, this is where I found this wonderful flow chart! https://twitter.com/TeaDriv...

Have a Happy Thought:     One of the very first Happy Thought emails I ever sent gave us all a different perspective on the warning lights in our cars .   And when you think about it, warning lights and all sorts of other symbols are really just like emojis – it’s all about packaging a lot of information into a little symbol, right? Side note – the word emoji comes to English from Japanese: and literally means picture-character or picture-letter : (picture, 絵 , pronounced eh)+(letter/character, 文字 , mōji).   Well, how many times have you hunted through the entire emoji list, trying to find the one that matched the exact thing you were trying to convey? (If you’re like me, about twice, and even then you probably gave up partway through – there are so. many. emojis!)   Others have felt this pain, and have proposed other emojis. Since not every emoji can (or should!) exist… there is a graveyard of emojis that.. just haven’t made the cut. (yet? S...

Have a happy thought:   Your car is trying to talk to you. Ok, it’s not your car, it’s the engineers and designers that created the car. And not so much “talk to you” as “make sure you know important things about your car”.   I’m talking about all those symbols that come up on your dashboard. If you’ve been driving for more than a couple of years you probably know most of these. That’s why I especially love this website , that explains all of the symbols but then describes them the way you probably first saw them. Hope these make you chuckle (and you might learn something, too!)   I’ve included a few of my faves; but hit up the links at the bottom of the email for more funny, and then actual, explanations of your dashboard lights. This concludes your public service announcement in advance of a long weekend during which you’re probably going to go for a long drive and you should really pay attention to your car’s warning lights!   A pirate ship with it...