A former professor on the radio

Steve Prince, who was a really tough film teacher I had at Virginia Tech, was featured on this week’s On The Media, talking about how 9/11 has been handled in movies.

Then he gave host Bob Garfield a C+.

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I have an IMDb page

So, it turns out that two of my friends from high school are writers for one of my favorite shows, completely unknown to me. (This is completely awesome, don’t get me wrong.) I participated in theater in middle school and high school, but no longer do creative work. With two other exceptions (both of whom work for non-profit groups trying to influence policy, interestingly), everyone else seems to have kept their hand in creatively, working as photographers, working in theater professionally or doing community theater. Or, you know, actually writing for a successful dramedy. The closest I get to that is listening to Martini Shot on my iPhone.

But there is good news! While it’s not as extensive as Jessica’s or Amy’s, I do have a page at IMDb. The bad news is that it’s for a misspelled version of my name, based on the completely unexpected thank-you credit I got for the original version of World of Warcraft after I left Blizzard. My correctly spelled credits for Warcraft III and Diablo II: Lord of Destruction aren’t in the system.

But just like with discovering that I had a Moby Games profile, I suppose that beggars can’t be choosers.

Now if I could just get a page on Wikipedia …

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The return of That Sound

Although it’s occurring under bad circumstances, the best new music (or alternative/modern rock, whatever you want to call it) podcast is back. Dave Cusick’s That Sound Radio podcast is now in catch-up mode, after six months “off” while he worked as a disc jockey.

That means there’s three hours of the best music released over the past six months and change, all ready for the listening:

* Catching Up with That Sound, hour 1
* Catching Up with That Sound, hour 2
* Catching Up with That Sound, hour 3

For those of you — and you know who you are — who haven’t listened to a new artist (or, worse yet, a new song or album) since you graduated college, listen to these three hours of music and be dazzled by how much awesome new stuff has come out in 2009 alone. Some of the songs are even free MP3s at the links above.

Great stuff. Cusick’s too good at what he does to not be snatched back up by the radio industry again soon, so enjoy it while it lasts.

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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.
(more…)

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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.