Friday, Apr. 23, 2010

Trunk puppies for sale! Would you prefer smiling or serious? (Pet market in downtown Amman, Jordan.)

Or a very small grandmother: If you're very quiet at the Landesgartenschau (garden show) in Bad Essen, Germany, you might spot a woodland elf.

Them Ohio Amish must be ... different. This ain't good for the tourist trade, you know! An Amish girl wears a proud and vain Winnie the Pooh backpack in Middlefield, Ohio.

After one mile, total exhaustion: Steve Henson gets some rest under the shade of a tree in the One Mile Recreation Area in Chico, Calif.

No, don't do it ... not your bathwater! Ewwww. (Nehru Zoological Park in Hyderabad, India.)

Hosing around: Firefighter recruits practice putting out a liquid-propane gas blaze at the Louis Jones Training Facility in Roswell, N.M.

No, Luke, THIS WAY! Luke the dog takes Lara Thomsen the 2-year-old for a walk at Lagoon Valley Regional Park in Vacaville.

Two heads are not necessarily better than one: A double-headed bobtail lizard born in Perth, Australia, has problems crawling because its hindlegs get conflicting signals from each brain. Also the bigger head keeps trying to eat the smaller one.

Stay, Bo: So the Obamas' dog is kept on a leash inside the White House? And tied to the upholstered gilded beech chairs from the Monroe administration (or worse, to the flag)? Apparently Bo has a behavior problem. Do we need to call Victoria Stilwell?

Salad for lunch: Switzerland's Basel Zoo has enough lettuce to cover its outstanding bills.

Pink tootsies: The grimy streets of Los Angeles shall not soil the royal paws of Princess the poodle.

And speaking of dirty feet ... Thick, wet volcanic ash coats stairs and paws on the Onundarhorn dairy farm, south of the Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull glacier near Hvolsvollur.

The sun sets on the Great Pyramids of Giza, outside Cairo.

Star baby maker: A Hubble telescope composite image shows a star birth pillar, three light-years high, depicting how scorching radiation and fast particle winds from super-hot newborn stars in the Carina Nebula are shaping and compressing the column, causing new stars to form within it. This pinnacle lies within the Carina constellation, 7,500 light-years away from Earth.