Those Darlins – “Wild One”

Those Darlins “Wild One” from Tugboat Productions on Vimeo.

If more country music was like this, I’d count myself a country music fan.
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Protestors target Shark Week

I guess I’m either really the target audience for Shark Week or I’m really not, based on the charges leveled at Discovery Channel’s annual week of shark programming by some “scientists, scuba divers and self-described shark lovers” bloggers:

This loose coalition argues the Discovery Channel programming sensationalizes shark attacks and embellishes the dangers sharks pose to humans. While Shark Week may provide a handsome profit to the US-based network, it has created a generation of viewers that feel “sharks need to be hunted to extinction,” the group argues. They are circulating a petition calling for the boycott of Shark Week.

I clearly have been watching different shows than they have.

Sure, the various shows — only a few new ones are added to the mix each year — make it clear that tigers are tops of the aquatic food chain (or close to it) and comparable in power (and fragility) to land animals like the great cats. But when I see video of sharks leaping out of South African waters to swallow a seal in mid-air, I don’t think “those animals need to be hunted to extinction,” I think, “that is one incredibly badass shark. Sucks to be a seal, though.”

Are there people who are getting upset watching Shark Week? And if there are, why don’t they change the channel?

According to most estimates, each year sharks attack 50 to 70 people and kill between 5 and 15. Between 20 and 100 million sharks die annually due to fishing.

A fact that’s hard to miss in the shows or in the short segments aired during commercial breaks.

People are interested in sharks for the same reason they’re interested in tigers and the like: Predators are fascinating. Most of the conservation efforts that are the best chance for tigers to survive at all are due to this sort of fascination. There’s a lag generally for most people realizing how endangered ocean populations are, but sharks aren’t exactly being singled out here: Most people scoff at the notion that tuna are in danger, for instance. (They are, though. We’ve eaten the slow-to-mature adult tuna and are busy consuming our way back through the breeding years. Once we’re done with that, kiss Charlie the Tuna good-bye.)

The bloggers are also hilariously un-self-aware:

The question-and-answer session sparked debate throughout the shark community.

If there are sharks debating things online, someone please tell me where; I’ve got to bookmark that site.

I got interested in sharks due to the Original Sin, in the mind of this community: Jaws. When I was a kid, I roamed around the Army base we lived on with my Star Wars figures carried in the belly of Jaws game shark and wanted to be an ichthyologist studying sharks when I grew up.

Maybe I had more sense as a kid than the people these bloggers are sure are getting whipped up into an anti-shark frenzy by Shark Week, but I don’t think so. I think most people who actually watch Shark Week — as opposed to merely being offended by it — see it as pro-conservation programming packaged with action movie narration.

Of course, I also used to relish shoving Luke Skywalker down into the belly of a great white, so what do I know?

Shark Week 2009 starts August 2.

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Bad Religion – “Sorrow” (acoustic)

This version is on their album “New Maps of Hell” and available (for free!) if you become a fan of iTunes on Facebook. (It’s in their Warped Tour free sampler set.)
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The Invisibles, Season One

It’s hard to overstate how good this show is (well, except for the music, which is very BBC House Band), and it should be an immediate grab for fans of Anthony Head at his very best, caper films or even stories like Lonesome Dove, focusing on aging heroes.

The basics of the show are strong on their own: Nationally famous burglars who have never been caught and who retired to Spain, return to England to be closer to family and friends in their 60s. It’s not long, however, before they’re back on the job. Like the best police shows, though, the capers are really just the backdrop for the meat of the show: The Invisibles relationships with their families. The show may feature burglars, but it’s about growing older, dealing with adult children, dealing with old loves, dealing with being the person you want your children to know their parents as, and so on.

This is really Head’s show. He may be beloved by Buffy fans, but he didn’t get to do much other than be very English, and when they tried to give him more to do, his post-high school bachelorhood was awkward and somewhat directionless. Here, though, he gets free range with a character and story made to showcase his talents.

Head’s Maurice (pronounced “Morris,” in an English attempt to baffle American audiences) was the greatest burglar in England, the smartest man in pretty much every room and a man among men. Now he’s grappling with the notion that his best days are behind him, his daughter doesn’t know who he really is (he’s lied to her for decades about what he does for a living), his beautiful wife is focused on creating a life for herself outside of the world of crime, his best friend is not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer and while he still looks (very) good for his age, getting older scares the hell out of him.

It’s baffling that this wasn’t picked up for a second season by the BBC, but by no means should that dissuade anyone from picking this up. This is easily one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, and an absolute tour de force for Anthony Head.

Endorsed without reservation for fans of caper movies or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

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Blizzard releases official Armory app for the iPhone

Blizzard Entertainment has released their second application for the iPhone and iPod Touch today: Mobile Armory.

I was one of the lucky people to download a third party Armory application for my iPhone 3G prior to Blizzard getting them all yanked down a few months ago. (As so often happens, the legal folks associated with Blizzard seem to be working on a different page than the rest of Blizzard — why an app like Characters, which pulls World of Warcraft character information to the iPhone is a problem, while countless third party Web sites that do the same are not is hard to fathom.)

Characters was a so-so application — it didn’t display even the raw numbers of achievement points, didn’t display titles, and so on — but it was free and it was there. Until it wasn’t.

This morning, Blizzard Mobile Armory, and it’s really, really nice. (And, like Characters, it’s free.)

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