I finally got my in-person baby panda fix today. Dianne took me to the zoo.
If you hadn't noticed...baby pandas are cute. Not just cute. CUTE. Big pandas are cute too, perhaps the two are connected? D'ya think? The cute sperm donor babydaddy panda sat and ate his bamboo, unnoticed by all but a few people who glanced up as they left the exhibit. The cute mother panda ate her bamboo, but also stopped to periodically wrestle with the CUTE baby panda. This increased the cuteness quotient exponentially, reducing everyone in the exhibit to making excessively mushy sounds like humans do when they see something cute.
But most of the time the big star was Mei Lan. She did what normal little pandas do, climb, roll over, waddle around, chew on bamboo, or stare off into space. People like me will pay the zoo membership fee of $59 to watch all this for an hour and a half until being thrown out for the next group of panda junkies.
I think the Chinese lied. "Mei Lan" in Mandarin doesn't mean "Atlanta Beauty". It really translates into "The Baby Panda Who Is Worth About A Billion Dollars To The Atlanta Zoo. "
