A Distraction

I am sitting here watching the news, unable to turn away from coverage of the atrocity in Arizona. I am going to hold my tongue for now. At the moment, I am too angry, frustrated, and sad to put together a thoughtful summary of my reaction and what I think it says about our culture.

The cable news channels have gone back to taking commercial breaks, and they are providing a welcome distraction from the news itself. Particularly enjoyable was an ad by the World Wildlife Federation. Over breathtaking footage of beautiful wild tigers stalking through the jungle, a concerned voice enumerates the many threats to the giant cats. The speaker goes on to explain that for as little as $25, anyone can "symbolically adopt a tiger."

Don't get too excited, it says symbolically. I would love to know what happened to prompt the WWF to add the symbolically disclaimer to their literature. I'm picturing an outraged donor calling to demand a refund when he realized that no one was going to deliver an orphaned tiger cub to his door. "Oh. It's not a literal adoption? You should say that!"

I realize that this seems random, but try to follow my train of thought...

Here is a picture that I came across and saved two months ago. I am jealous of this girl. She's wearing a wedding dress, she probably gets tons of free clothes from J. Crew, and a baby leopard is whispering in her ear. Bitch.

A Preview

I have tons of pictures of Florida fun to go through, but I couldn't wait to post these. On New Year's Eve, Tom, his parents, and I headed to Lido Beach for sunset cocktails. It was the first warm day of our trip, so we were all excited to be outside. The sunset was gorgeous, and a couple of dolphins showed up to complete the quintessential evening beach scene. I didn't have much hope of capturing anything, but I set my cocktail aside to try out my fancy new telephoto lens.

The dolphins seemed to enjoy the audience of twenty or so people who stopped to watch them, and they hung out, breaching and frolicking for at least fifteen minutes. By the time they disappeared, I knew that I had gotten at least a few shots of fins, but it was hard to tell much from my camera's LCD screen. It wasn't until I transferred the pictures to my computer that I could see just how lucky I got. The pictures are pretty grainy, but my heart started pounding when I saw them because I was so excited that I had managed to capture on film what I couldn't even see when I was standing on the beach - dolphin dinner hour.