Photo of mountain goat taken a week ago on Ben Lomond Peak. The big, white-topped building above the Mountain Goat is the Harrisville Walmart.

My daughter wrote this in her journal this last spring:


Bud of wishing flower.
It has green curls on the bottom. Still curling.
Seeds with folded umbrellas. Tucked in green.
When it fully curls, umbrellas will open.
Creating a wishing flower.
I can't believe it.

© 2006 Cambridge Hinds (9 years old)

I saw this picture a number of years ago and was very moved/disturbed by it. It is circulating in email now, but with a fabricated suicide note. Here is the picture and the information on it http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/c/kevincarter.htm from truthorfiction.com.

Summary of the eRumor:
The eRumor includes a dramatic photograph of a starving child being watched by a vulture.The email says that the picture was taken in Sudan 1994 by Kevin Carter who won a Pulitzer prize for it.The eRumor says he committed suicide three months later and left a note about world hunger.

The Truth:
The picture is real as is the story of the photographer's suicide, but the alleged wording of his suicide note is fabricated.
Kevin Carter was a South African photojournalist.
The picture of the vulture stalking a starving girl is real and was taken in Sudan in 1993.
He was awarded Pulitzer prize in May of 1994 for the picture.
Two months later he connected a hose to the exhaust pipe of his pickup truck and committed suicide.
His long time friend Judith Matloff wrote in the Columbia Journalism review that Carter was the kind of person who seemed more affected by some of the violent events he photographed.
She says that he would often return from upsetting assignments with bouts crying, drinking, or using drugs.
She says that after he shot his Pulitzer prize winning picture, he "sat under a tree and cried and chain-smoked" and couldn't distance himself from the horror of what he saw.
He was criticized for not helping the girl in the picture and said he did not know what happened to her.
In his suicide note he said he was "depressed...without phone...money for tent...money for child support...money for debts...money!!!!!"
He also said he was haunted by vivid memories of killings, corpses, anger, pain, starving or wounded children, and trigger-happy madmen."

The eRumor includes a comment about world hunger that was created by someone along the way who decided to turn the picture into a lesson about not wasting food.
Such wording was not included in Carter's suicide note.

A goal is only a wish until it is written down!

From the the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

"For six days, investigators wondered exactly how someone as familiar as longtime New Orleans broadcaster Vincent Marinello could execute his estranged wife in broad daylight and get away undetected.

But he took great pains to disguise himself with a false beard and mustache, rode away from a brazen crime on a bicycle and fashioned an out-of-state alibi, police say.

They know because he wrote it all down on paper. And police found what they said is his checklist when they searched his home Wednesday night."

The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry