That title made me think of that awesome Rod Stewart song (remember when he did great songs? before the disco and standards he sold-out to make)...Every Picture Tells a Story. What a great album that is.

But I wanted to mention two news stories that had interesting pictures that accompanied them.

The first is of Alex Wells, the 8th grader who won the spelling bee in March, and yesterday advanced to the semifinals of the National Spelling Bee in D.C.

(on a side note: rent the documentary Spellbound, one of the best documentaries ever).

I believe Alex is down to 41, and he started out facing off against almost 300 kids. And, have you seen the words these kids spell? It's funny, because I'm a great Scrabble player, but a lot of that is memorizing two-letter words that can benefit you (like "xi" which is a letter in the Greek alphabet that's acceptable in Scrabble play).

Alex is a student of Standley Middle School in University City and he won the San Diego contest with the word "nominative", which seems easy enough. I'm guessing he got a lot of words that were freaky, and a lot harder to sound-out.

Things got tougher yesterday, when he had words like "amadelphous."

Rock me, Amadelphous!

But what I love about this kid isn't just his spelling prowess, and the fact that he's local. He's a tall dude, with these long blonde locks. He looks like the keyboardist of the band Yes. Such an awesome look for someone you might think of as having thick glasses and a pocket protector.

The other photo I saw a few days ago. It had a Chinese man saluting. I wondered if it was a Memorial Day thing, as I glanced to the photo right before it, which showed him shaking hands with a man.

But I read the story and was astounded.

Apparently, one guy was on this bridge and wanted to kill himself. He had gotten heavily in debt. And this older guy asked police if he could talk the man down. They said no. So, he snuck by them and got up there. He shook the mans hand.

And then he did what any of us would love to do. He pushed the guy.

Now, what makes him a bit pyscho is...he saluted the dude as he was falling. That to me, is pushing it to far (pun intended).

The guy said he pushed him because people always threaten to kill themselves and they just do it for attention. Traffic had already been held up for hours.

I had a fantasy football draft I missed, when I was trying to leave Coronado a few years ago and someone on the bridge was threatening to jump (thank god for cell phones, I was still able to make my draft picks).

Anyway...the photo of the guy in the Union-Tribune over the weekend was great. And, although I'd never push somebody off a bridge, you got to at least understand that on some level.

I just wonder if he said to the guy "See ya next fall," or something clever like that. Or did he say, "Hey, your shoe's untied," and when the guy looked down, he shoved him.

The police say they won't charge the guy, since the other person wanted to kill himself, they don't feel he did anything wrong (huh? isn't this some kind of obstruction of a police scene?)

It all ended on a positive note. The guy lived, as he landed on some inflatable thing that the police were in the process of blowing up.