Ever wanted to go back in time to the Hollywood golden age and attend a movie premiere with the likes of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly?  I got to do it.

Well, actually I photographed a hotel in Florida that kind of looked like that.  No glam time traveling here, unfortunately:

But this is a scary number of them:

Getting on an airplane means I am going somewhere new or interesting or at least away from where I am currently.  It also means enduring the actual flight.  Which is something that I really dislike.  Ok.  Hate.

One time I was flying from Boston to Reykjavik and the turbulence was so bad that I thought I was utterly going to jump out of my skin.  During that flight, I was white knuckling it.  I couldn’t eat anything.  I just sat there in my seat convinced that our next bump was going to be our last one.

Topping or equalling that experience was the time I flew from Philadelphia to New York in some kind of crop duster used by the Wright Brothers.  No, I’m kidding.  But it was just as awful.  We were in the air for 45 minutes of sheer and utter hell.  The plane shook side to side, up and down.  I felt like Richie Valens on that plane with the Big Bopper in the movie La Bamba.  We were going to die.

Obviously, in both cases, we reached the ground eventually.  THANK GOD.

Today I took a flight that we can add to annals of awful flights.  We were flying into some crazy weather front over the entire east coast of America.  The pilots warned us ahead of time that the flight would be bumpy but they should have said “we’re flying directly into a huge storm front.  Expect to be shaken for the entire flight, including the approach to the airport.”  I looked out the window to see the wings shaking and being pelted by an insane amount of rain.  I prayed to the only god I know — the Real Housewives of Atlanta.  As the tin can shook, I watched Phaedra try to repair her marriage to Apollo and Nene premiere her line of leggings and tops on HSN.  Anything to distract me from that insane shaking.

I’m back on solid ground.  But I still hate flying.

Alas, only through flying could I have gotten these thoroughly excellent shots.  Click to make them larger:

My Endless Summer:

A couple of years ago, there was this genius little commercial on for something called Rozerem, which is a sleeping pill.  A sleepy guy comes into the kitchen to talk to and play chess with Honest Abe and a ground hog.  In the background, there lurks a man wearing a copper diving helmet.  While Honest Abe and the ground hog talk to the sleepless guy about his problems, the copper diving helmet wearing guy says nothing, seemingly preparing a meal for three of them.

Well, the copper diving helmet wearing man just wanted to watch some New Years fireworks, I guess:

Attention lions, tigers and cougars.  Keep your hands out of the cages, don’t lean forward too much and please, please, do not feed the humans.  They are on a special diet and can’t be overfed.

I think this is how the big cats are instructed at the Big Cat Sanctuary in Tampa, Florida.  God, what an amazing place.  Seriously.  Tigers wandering around literally feet from you.  Huge lions and little lessons on how they all came to the sanctuary.  Pretty sad stuff, but these big cats are resilient.  And of course, very beautiful:

Last entry of this kind.  Yes, more up in the sky photos.  These are two I got of the island of the man hates, aka Manhattan island.  The sun shone on the isle so perfectly that I had to do was shoot it.

Sitting on pretty at its best.  Actually here it looked the beginning of some kind of apocalypse for Manhattan:

This is the continuation of the previous entry with the “above America” photos.  I took these, so of course I think they are great. It all does really interesting from up there.  I like how some roads go in complete straight lines through a town and how rivers curve to such extremes.

All in an effort to alleviate the boredom of flying!!!:

I’ve had this blog for almost eight years.  I have published a lot of entries up here.  Funny, poignant and of course full of (what I believe to be) great photos.  But today, I am making a plea to the internet gods.  December has been my best month of year and I want to set a blog record this month.  Now I realize I only have two days to accomplish this, but I would like to put this out there.  I want these images to go viral.  I want the whole world to see them. First the story then the images.  I took these today flying from Boston to Tampa, Florida.  Flying over Manhattan, I could not believe what I saw, including the one where the lines on the ground lined up to look like some sort of an animal.  Hence I want them to go viral.  All sorts of weird stuff goes viral, so why not my weird stuff? So here goes.  GO VIRAL IMAGES, GO VIRAL!!!: