PUPPYPALOOZA!!!

Last weekend I went to Charlotte to visit my wonderful sister and brother-in-law.

Oh yeah, and they just happened to have a brand new puppy there too.

World, meet the cutest puppy ever, my niece-dog, Hope.

Hope wasn't sure about the stairs.

And the crowd goes, "AWWWWWWWW"

Fifty Shades of Oh PUHLEASE

Men. You're being hypocritical.

Now I haven't read the 50 Shades of Grey trilogy so I don't have much of an opinion on the phenomenon. But then I read this article.

Essentially, men are feeling that they can't live up to Christian Grey's sexual... acts? deviance? wonder? ...whatever it is that he does. And it makes them feel bad.

Also, that daughters are getting ahold of the books and that is just not right.

Let me remind you that men, women and children have access to a fun little tool called the Internet. Boys and girls much younger than the mentioned 18-year-old have seen way more provocative things, IN VIDEO, on the Internet. So let's just be glad that kids these days know what books are.

And men are the main audience for these videos. Even married ones. So is it really worse for women to read a book about sex, than it is for men to watch videos of the actual act - where they can see the actors..."act?" For years women have said that they feel they can't live up to the women in these videos, and now men are getting a little tastey taste of what that's like.

Can't say I feel bad for you, guys. You're gonna have to buck up. I bet Christian Grey would.

Put Simply.

In honor of Dan Cathy's... let's say "strong"...statements, this is what I have to say to people against gay marriage:

Bloggers Deserve to Die

So here's one of a series of ads run by the Lung Cancer Alliance. If you can't read the copy, it says:

IF THEY HAVE LUNG CANCER. Many people believe that if you have lung cancer you did something to deserve it. It sounds absurd, but it's true. Lung cancer doesn't discriminate and neither should you. Help put an end to the stigma and the disease at NoOneDeservesToDie.org.

Naturally, I have something to say about this.

Perhaps the ad is referring to the non-smokers of the world that have died of lung cancer, approximately 15% of all fatal cases. But I don't think so. I think the ad is aimed at debunking the thought that if you smoke you deserve to die.

I'm not wishing any general population dead. And I'm not making the statement that all smokers deserve to die. But if you make really stupid decisions with your health your whole life, and then want me to be sympathetic when you get sick, the answer is no.

If I sleep with a loaded pistol under my pillow every night, and one night I shoot myself in my sleep, will you feel bad for me? Probs not. You'll think, "Well, maybe you shouldn't have slept with a loaded pistol under your head... and then that loaded pistol wouldn't have gone off and shot you in the head."

DUH.

And it's not that the actual moment of death is any less impactful, it's more so that everyone that hears of said death will say, "Yeah... saw that comin."

Mayyybeee we should all start taking some responsibility for what we do to our own bodies. So we can avoid the blame game when we finally face consequences to the decisions we've made.

Smoking your whole life is a prolonged game of Russian Roulette. So don't be surprised when you reap what you've sown. And please don't ask me to pay for your healthcare.

Not even the chocolate kind

This summer I'm interning for the Corporate Communications team at Turner Broadcasting. It's very neat. I get to work in the CNN Center and do the behind-the-scenes work for the internal and external Turner websites.

So I'm learning a ton of new things. Mostly how to master all things Adobe (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator), but also some life lessons.

As a precursor, I really like this internship. Mostly because they let me learn whatever I want in my free time and they encourage me to seek out anything I'm interested in. But in an effort to translate the general experience of this internship, I offer you this metaphor that I have come to quote painfully often:

There was a guy who wanted to be a master chef. So he went to apprentice in some great kitchen where he could practice his wonderful chef skills. The head chef told him that he had to thinly slice hundreds of potatoes into very skinny wafers. The man spent days and days slicing the potatoes just so, and when the head chef saw that he had finished, he threw all the potato slices in the trash.

The apprentice asked why he would do that when he had spent days slicing them perfectly. And the head chef said, "Because you'll actually be slicing these," presenting him with truffles (you know, the really expensive ones that pigs dig up).

And so, if you're catching my drift, I've been slicing potatoes. But hey, I'm learning how to slice correctly, and I intend to be the best slicer ever by the time I'm handed truffles.