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| Written by Cary and Bob |
The Official Results of Our Holiday Madness Photo Contest brought in a few pictures that were well up the Madness Scale.  Deirdre McKeown’s photo of the annual Dolphin Dip held on New Year's Day gives us the chills but didn't quite make it into the finals—perhaps because the view is too distant. It might work better with a tighter crop. Dierdre writes, "The annual Dolphin Dip was held on New Year's Day near the pier in Surf City, NC. Hundreds of revelers showed up to race into the ocean for charity. The water temperature that day was in the 40's."  Laura Kraft shows a very odd take on togetherness in "A Family Christmas." Laura's photo is a wonderful document of Christmas in the United States in the early 21st century. She writes, " I receieved a text message after finishing my last final from my sister Kelly who had just come home from college. She wrote, ‘I just made the playroom a Winter Wonderland! Hurry up and get home, so we can have family time!’ This was our family time. I found it too amusing that when we finally all got together, we were each enjoying our separate forms of technology. This was our Christmas."
 Jennifer Pinkus gives us another view of "good life" in the Colorado mountain resort of Vail with the image she calls "Frosty Bottles." ( 4d3053278fa8a-047 Thirsty.jpg) This has a nice "sense of sense." You can virtually feel the cold bottle and smell the stale alcohol.
 Johnbasco Mariajoseph jolted us out of our state of frosty Madness by flying us to a street festvial in Tamilnadu, India. This photograph, called Gypsy family, is wonderfully frenetic. There is a nice visual rhythm in the stream of hands—starting with the hand on the drum on the right, the cocked hands on the two dancers, and the hand coming in from the left. The face of the dancer in the middle is the center of interest but some of the folks in the background steal a bit of energy from the photograph. Johnbasco writes, "I went to Mailam early in the morning to do some candid photography during the Panguniuthiram festival. I don't carry a tripod because it will hinder my shooting because there will be a huge pushing crowd around me at all times. Then I chanced upon this gypsy family-Called 'Kuravas'- in Tamil language."
"Retired sailor"
There were some glorious displays of Madness  Althea Pomerleau shows us a new view of Seattle.
   And the WINNER is: This picture made by Susan Poirier. On the Madness scale, it’s pretty high up there, ‘cause you gotta be mad to lie in the snow wearing nothing more than a bathing suit. Susan wrote that, “Sitting in a hot tub, they dared one another to get into the snow to make snow angels.” We would have stayed in the hot tub. It was made in a place called Eden, Utah. Guess everyone has their own idea of Eden.  Congratulations to Susan, winner of Our Holiday Madness Photo Contest!!!
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John Ellingwood’s sister shows great (and leaping) exhilaration in a New Hampshire snow storm. Nice execution – and backlight.
