Distract yourself from the impending snowstorm by watching this baby elephant frolic in the sand. Jealous much?

Kids at the Jirasartwitthaya elementary school in Ayutthaya, Thailand, are paid a visit by an elephant dressed as Santa Claus earlier today. [Image via AP]

In your incredibly close call of the day, some extremely lucky (or unlucky) people in a minivan narrowly miss being tusked and trampled by an elephant.

A rare white elephant was captured in the jungles of Myanmar and has been transported to the capital, where the 38-year-old animal will live out its days caged in front of a temple. The country's military leadership named her Bhaddavati.

This video generates more questions than it answers: what is "Elephant Toothpaste?" Do elephants even need toothpaste? Oh, nevermind- the colors are bright and the music is jaunty, and that's all a video really needs.

This elephant youngster accidentally falls into a watering hole that's a little too deep. Luckily, a group of moms spring to the rescue.

When someone from YouTube showed me this yesterday, I swore it was a fake, or at least the elephant is just repeating a pattern learned by rote, because no way can that animal represent itself so abstractly. But apparently it was on 60 Minutes? But if it's real, why do they zoom in when it's painting so it looks like they could have used a fake trunk? What are we supposed to do when the elephants throw off the shackles of the humans? Like half the Internet is debating this right now, so I thought you ought to know.

In the wee hours of this morning, Barnum & Bailey's Circus paraded their elephants into Manhattan, in what has become an annual tradition and spectacle. PETA is not too happy about this sort of thing. Is the circus really bad? On one hand, they're cruelly exploiting majestic mammals for the pitiful bemusement of humanity. On the other hand: elephants! Below, a clip of last year's NYC elephant march. Is there an easy answer to this one?

As regular readers/depressives have no doubt surmised, most every weekend around here is about reading the New York Times — that is, ogling the pictures and sniffing the newsprint — and convincing ourselves that, just like Harry Hurt, we could do interesting things if we wanted to, that we aren't just inputs to an industrial contraption presently on a 48-hour cigarette break. The glossy girth of the Sunday Times serves such purposes quite well (so stay in your lane, weekday colleagues); the flimsy flaccidity of Saturday, not so much. Take today's Arts section, which contains reviews of four television programs premiering this weekend. Three of them — 75 percent! — are shows about animals.

Writing in the Pursuits section of the Wall Street Journal's weekend edition today, film critic Joe Morgenstern takes approximately 70 square inches to explain why the "gory, stupid" action movie 300 is a symptom of the empty bigness that Americans now demand from their entertainment. (We'd link to it, but according to the "Notice to Readers" that pops up when you visit WSJ.com, the Journal's entire website is completely down.) 300 is "blood-soaked and utterly bloodless," Morgenstern writes, and its popularity is an indication of our preference for fast and loud hugeness over slow and moving smallness.