Midday open thread: Optimism, tree tunnels and snorkeling

• Today’s comic by Tom Tomorrow is Farewell address: 

• How many ways can Donald Trump be a dick?

President-elect Donald Trump is breaking from 11 presidents' worth of tradition and benching Charles Brotman.

The 89-year-old Brotman -- once the voice of the Washington Senators baseball team -- has announced every inauguration parade since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1957.

"I looked at at my email, then I got the shock of my life," Brotman told CNN's Carol Costello. "I felt like Muhammad Ali had hit me in the stomach."

Brotman, who has been the announcer at presidential inauguration for sixty years, said when he read the email from the Trump transition team he thought he "was going to commit suicide."

• This may be a wee bit optimistic:

The end of the world as we know it could be near ― possibly just years from now, according to a scientist who uses historical and mathematical modeling to predict events.

Peter Turchin, a professor at the University of Connecticut’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology, warns in a Phys.Org article published this week that society could risk implosion within the decade because of increasing social unrest.

• Who was the moron who first thought carving tunnels through trees was a good idea?

One hundred and thirty-seven years ago, well before the Calaveras North Grove was purchased by the California State Park System and renamed the Calaveras Big Trees State Park, the land’s owners carved an enormous hole in the base of one of its sequoia trees. On Sunday, that tree fell.

• The story AND the picture here are great … read the whole thing, for the photographer’s take on an unbelievable day in his career, plus the bonus of an amazing picture of our president snorkeling!

• Late last summer, President Barack Obama went to Midway Atoll, halfway between California and China in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Why? Because he’d just announced the expansion of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, a marine reserve encompassing several islands off Hawaii, including Midway. He wanted to help show off the remarkable wildlife he'd just helped protect.

National Geographic photographer and explorer Brian Skerry, who has spent a career taking extraordinary pictures of the oceans, was there. So was I—but Skerry was the lucky one: He got a chance to swim with the president.