Saying thanks

Here is a site where you can send a free postcard to say thank you to someone serving in Iraq. You cannot choose to whom the card will be sent, but it will be sent to a member of the armed services. The site is sponsored by Xerox and is for real. It allows you to choose a postcard design and offers some ready-made messages, but it will also allow you to write your own if you choose. It takes only a minute and might add some encouragement to the day of somebody who needs it. Send the link to your friends!

Lions and zebras and giraffes, oh my!

Caleb found this link, not me, but he is too busy being a studious vet student to post it, so I will. It's a live webcam pointed at a watering hole somewhere in Africa. It has night vision, so you can see whatever might visit the watering hole 24 hours a day. (If it's in spooky-looking black and white when you visit, that's why.) A person operates the camera, so if there's something particularly interesting, you might get a closeup - see above.

So far I have seen an elephant, giraffes, antelopes, wildebeests, hornbills, a hyena or jackal that entered the frame and left too quickly to be sure what it was, and I have lost count of what else. The sounds are beautiful and hypnotizing. And once I just watched the sun come quietly up in Africa, slowly turning the frame from black and white into full color, while it was dark and cold outside here. It is mesmerizing. Thank you, Caleb!

White Christmas

Remember this?

Yum!

The best part of this picture is not the cat in the dog's mouth, but the kitten sitting next to them. He is so funny.

I can't take credit for this, I got it from Anna.

Look for the Northern Lights tonight.

If you are outside tonight around midnight or thereafter, especially if you can get away from lights, you may well see the Northern Lights. There's a solar storm underway. See a more detailed explanation here.

By the way, all of a sudden it seems to be possible to copy and paste images into Blogger posts. Now THAT'S an easy way to do it!

A Poem from Grandpa Frey

Carnation milk is the best in the land.
Here I sit with a can in my hand-
No tits to pull; no hay to pitch.
You just punch a hole in the son of a bitch.

Anon.

Helaine meets Obama!

The last time my Lexis friend Helaine made the blog, it was because she had her picture taken with Johnny Damon. This time, it's another brush with fame. Helaine lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where presidential candidates show up early and often to court the voters. Yesterday, Barack Obama hit the state, and she had tickets to his book signing. And today, she's in the New York Times. This video (click on the video link in the right-hand column) requires a little bit of patience because, first, you have to sit through a brief commercial (for a movie about Idi Amin?? I guess I haven't been paying attention), and then the Obama story itself is several minutes long. But at the very end . . . the woman in green who wants to wait and see is Helaine.

Of course, we all know what happened to Johnny Damon after she met HIM, so this may not augur well for Obama. But I guess, as Helaine says, we'll just have to watch and see.

Crime among snowmen

You will eat what we tell you to eat

I'm not sure what motivates people like this, but I think that it really makes them angry that people are getting more pleasure from eating donuts than they are from eating celery. Click here.

It's a...

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