I spent twenty minutes slowly getting as close as safely possible to an elk in Rocky Mountain National Park.

This is my husband fussing at me from the shelter of the car about our differing ideas of safe elk-photographing distances.

I had to crop both of the photos because my telephoto lens only goes so far, so please do not think that I really got this close to either dangerous mammal in real life.

See? Safe distance.

In this uncropped photo, you can see that I am enough feet away from the elk to be able to scream my dying words of "OH CRAP" before its pointy hooves make first contact with my face. Not that this would have happened, anyway, because
1) I am standing under a tree.
2) Elk cannot climb trees.
3) Under the right circumstances (like, for example, a several-hundred-pound piece of wildlife charging at me at speeds upwards of 45 m.p.h.), I can fly up the side of a tree like a spider monkey wearing a rocket pack. Or so I claim in my defense, and will continue to say to weakly counter everyone who has seen these pictures and shared their amateur diagnosis of criminally stupid with me.

Now this, ah. This, my friends, is the giant herd of elk that we drove by at the next bend in the road. I was able to photograph them easily from the car, thus rendering my careful stalking and subsequent spouse-scolding utterly useless.
But it makes a great story.

I'm 13,000 words into my first novel. I have to be in a certain mood to write, and this is my playlist that helps me fake the mood when I'm just not feelin' it:

Klaxons - "Golden Skans," "It's Not Over Yet"
Ting Tings - "Be the One," "Shut Up and Let Me Go"
Incubus - "Stellar"
Charlotte Sometimes - "Losing Sleep," "Waves and the Both of Us," "Sweet Valium High," "Ex-Girlfriend Syndrome," "Toy Soldier," "This Is Only for Now," "Build the Moon"
Rod Stewart - "Maggie May"
The Smiths - "This Charming Man"
Paramore - "Decode"
Jason Mraz and Colbie Caillot - "Lucky"

My precious website readers, all three of you: Please tell me you remember Farkus from A Christmas Story. He's my all-time favorite buttertoothed redhead.

"And to think... I couldn't see into this heart I knew so well, and see that it was sacrificing itself for me. No good can come to either of us without the other - I know that now."

When I was a kid, one of my favorite movies was Annie. There's this neat little scene towards the middle of the film where the fantastically wealthy Mr. Warbucks rents a Manhattan movie theater for a night and takes his charge, Annie (of "Little Orphan" fame), and his dedicated secretary, Grace Farrell (think Depression-era Pepper Potts), to a private showing of a new film. We're treated to the opening scene and then the climax of that movie-within-a-movie (for those of you keeping score, the term for this is an "embedded narrative"). In the shots that cut back to Annie's main characters, the little orphan is entranced, Grace is in tears, and Warbucks, the no-nonsense captain of industry, is flustered and embarrassed by all these shows of (*gasp*) emotion. He's particularly appalled that Grace weeps openly when the dashing movie hero's lover dies in his arms as he calls out, "Marguerite, come back! Come back!"
I just finished watching this movie, 1936's Camille, and I'm telling you what, if you don't go through at least three hankies when Robert Taylor cries over Dead Greta Garbo, you have no heart. I'm serious. Go to your doctor immediately, because there's a giant vacant place in your chest cavity. Greta Garbo is, of course, amazing; also, Robert Taylor?

Maybe I'm just old school, but I think he broods a hundred times more compellingly than Robert Pattinson does, and he's got much better hair.
Both Camille and another favorite of mine, La Traviata (the Verdi opera as filmed by Zeferelli), are based on the same source, Alexandre Dumas fils' La Dame aux Camélias . (Incidentally, Dumas fils was the illegitimate son of Alexendre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, etc.) A more recent adaptation is the visual smorgasbord that is Moulin Rouge!, the Baz Lurhmann flick with Nicole Kidman (one of her best roles, honestly) and Ewan McGregor (swoon) - and the "Come What May" scenes in Moulin Rouge! rival Camille for inducing tears in the female of the species (this one, at least).