Sorry for the belatedness.  The internet was down on the whole island for most of the last 24 hours.

Perhaps a baby deer like this one chewed through a cable.

Geez.  That’s almost too cute for me to take.

For those who don’t understand cricket: the goal of the game is to hit your wicketkeeper in the nuts with the ball.

Here, Adam Gilchrist takes one for queen and country, while teammate Matty Hayden celebrates the nuttage from first slip.

Tough gig, wicketkeeping.

For those who don’t understand cricket: the goal of the game is to hit your wicketkeeper in the nuts with the ball.

Here, Adam Gilchrist takes one for queen and country, while teammate Matty Hayden celebrates the nuttage from first slip.

Tough gig, wicketkeeping.

Mmm…

It’s a stew, if you’re curious.

This teenager was walking and giggling with a girlfriend when saw me taking snapshots outside the cricket ground in St. Vincent. Just goofing around, she playfully called out for me to take her picture, posing as a joke for a few seconds while I made her friend laugh again by calling her bluff.

Could this young girl possibly be lovelier? I cannot imagine how.

The model in the window display is not Jessica Simpson, even though it looks almost exactly like Jessica Simpson. No, it’s Hilary Swank, an actress with two Oscars, and who is absolutely gorgeous in her own right, without trying to look like someone else. But for the cosmetics ad, she’s made to look remarkably like Jessica Simpson, who didn’t know that Chicken of the Sea isn’t chicken.

So the ideal of beauty here isn’t the model herself, but someone else entirely — someone with incomparably less to offer, and whose face isn’t even real in the first place.  (Jessica Simpson’s eyes, lips, and nose have all reportedly been surgically altered.)  And then somehow an airbrushed photo of all that — literally, a fake of a fake of a fake — is supposed to be reason to believe that some fragrant goo in a jar will suddenly transform you in some beneficial way.  Which of course, it can’t.  So that’s fake, too.

That’s weird enough as it is.

Then put all that in a store window here in Basseterre, the capital of a country which is maybe one percent northern European.

That’s not beautiful. It’s just…bizarre.