Thursday, March 31, 2011

Things like this make my life

I might be mildly obsessed with cats...

So when I see things like this, it makes me happy:



And when finding something like that in turn causes me to find something similar, but still amazing, like this:



It makes me even more happy.






The end.

You are NOT the "female Indiana Jones"

My friend suggested that I try to start blogging. Just post a bunch of the random stuff that I send out over email every day... well here goes nothing:

I'm going to start with a mild, and completely ridiculous rant :). I'm acknowledging the fact that this is ridiculous in advance because my obsession with Indiana Jones might be clouding my judgement slightly. As I was steadily getting more and more offended by the following article, I could feel the level of my self-proclaimed nerdiness rising to a level that has only been reached about two, okay maybe three, other times in my life.

I was clicking through links on CNN earlier today, and noticed one titled Meet the 'female Indiana Jones'. So I'm thinking, sweet! This girls gotta be a bad ass, which she is -- She travels the world, discovers new animals, runs with giraffes, swims with "unusually aggressive" sharks, has tried cow blood, and eats a plethora of strange things at each stop she makes on her journeys. All of that makes her completely awesome in my book, and mildly jealous (minus the cow blood) that I don't have the time or energy to live a life full of animals and traveling.

While all of this is great and she really is some kind of super human, she is NOT the female version of Indiana Jones, nor is she the "real life Lara Croft"... I understand these are not nicknames that she has given herself, so I should not be bitter towards her, but for some reason I am. Her other nickname, the female Steve Irwin, I feel is COMPLETELY appropriate and I have no qualms with it. I actually suggested it (to myself as I was stewing about the original nickname) before I had reached that section of the article.

NOW, continuing my rant about Indiana Jones.....
THIS is Indiana Jones, as I'm sure most of you know. He's a archeology teacher/OSS Operative/Adventurer. He carries a whip, wears a fedora and a leather jacket. He outruns boulders, hates snakes and generally saves the world every chance he gets:

He discovered the Ark of the Covenant, and saved it from the Nazi's... sort of. He saved a bunch of enslaved children from a bloodthirsty cult. He found the location of the Holy Grail. He even comes back later in his life and saves a Crystal Skull from the misuse of the Soviet!

So as we can see, there's a lot more to Indiana Jones than going around the world and discovering new species of animals. IN FACT, most of his experiences with animals weren't exactly pleasant... So I don't quite understand how people can claim that his female counterpart is a woman who admits that the draw for her to visit dangerous, exotic places around the world is nothing more than the animals. NOT the adventure, NOT the adrenaline associated with danger, NOT the prospect of discovering centuries old pieces of archeology!

Dear Media-type people,

Next time you try to find a "label" for a person that is making a name for themselves by doing GREAT things. Find something more appropriate so that you don't ruin it for the rest of us.

Thanks in advance,

Ashley

Now...
let me take a moment to mourn the fact that Indiana Jones is, in fact, fictional.
Sad.