Charles Blow enjoys his fair share of making up fake, misleading, and otherwise nonexistent “trends” to fill up space around the advertisements and obituaries in the NYT. (In a past weird column, he asserted that hooking up is an entirely new phenomena only done by people under age 30.) One such trend that doesn’t exist in the natural world is the current media meme in which President Obama is quickly losing steam amongst American Jews.

Aside from the general weirdness of specifically singling out Jews, this isn’t really happening at all:

From January to July 2010, Jews gave Obama a 61 percent approval rating, down from 66 percent from July to December 2009. Muslims gave him a 78 percent approval rating during the first half of 2010, and Mormons a 24 percent rating. The overall approval rating is 48 percent, down 15 points from the first half of 2009.

Obama received average job approval ratings from Catholics, and below-average ratings from Protestants.

Despite drops in the overall job approval rating from January 2009 to July 2010, Muslims have consistently given Obama the highest rating and Mormons the lowest. Jews’ approval ratings have remained above average.

In a video on YouTube lasting just over a minute in length with nearly 4.2 million views, a Himalayan cat named Shirobu reclines at a table. (The Japanese title translates into “Dandyism,” according to Google Translate.) His large furry body is propped up with pillows. We never actually see Shirobu partake in any of the Japanese food or drink arranged in front of him, although he appears to chew on something small at the beginning of the video. Instead he grooms himself, pausing only to look around the room blankly for a couple seconds.

A school of tadpoles chilling along the edge of the water. Judging from their abundance on land nearby, these are most likely to be future American toads.

This is from the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN on September 2nd 2008. I had gotten close to police action on the previous day and enjoyed a face-full of mace, but during this march I hung back with another journalist. I had actually lamented to myself because I wasn’t sure there would be anything good to photograph if I kept my distance from police, but the march was much less dramatic and I got some good shots.

In truth, I take tons of shitty pictures but I just show people the good ones. For every picture I post, there’s often up to 20 (or more) that didn’t make the cut. My memory card fills up quickly. It’s not easy to know which shot out of dozens of seemingly identical shots is the one you should use. While learning how to use a photo-editing program is vital, it’s not going to pull a rabbit out of a hat if you don’t know what you’re doing with your camera. You can only do so much to try to redeem a bad picture. If it sucks, then it sucks.

I leave a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor but I also save it. I planned on selling some of it as stock photography, but then I started going back to see what I may have overlooked. This picture is one of them. I have a critical eye and even now I can see all of the reasons why I didn’t include this with the initial batch of RNC08 photos: it’s hectic, the woman in pink has her feet chopped off, and it would’ve been so much better if I had been a few feet back and to the right. But I’ve decided that it doesn’t have to be perfect.