Visit the kelpforest....

Not suprising...

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You are a Waterbender!

The first waterbenders learned how to bend water by watching the moon control the tides. Waterbenders use Chi, the energy that flows through life, in combat. They redirect their opponent’s Chi rather than using direct strikes. Waterbending is stronger at night and strongest during the full moon. Waterbending is not possible during a lunar eclipse.

Which Element do you Bend?

Seriously, I am so far behind on Avatar - I love it, but I only seem to catch the reruns. I think I've seen half the second season (but sporadic episodes), none of the third, and I swear I've seen the first episode at least a dozen times. I should just break down and buy the damn series... Ah well, this way I can stretch out the limited time I have left with Uncle Iroh...

Edit: Looking up a link below, and I found this - Live Action Movie by M. Night Shamyamalan? If I went to ComicCon, I might know these things. Not sure, I've really liked some of his stuff, but he's sure had some clunkers, too.

Apparently the crab in the Honda Element commercials is out of a job...

http://www.savethecrab.com/

There is a television in the breakroom which people, usually the support staff, turn on to watch the news during lunch. Biologists seldom turn it on for some reason, but when it's on we watch like the rest of the TV addicted masses we are.

Yesterday, along with the stories of mayhem and car chases and accidents, there was a little story of how an Orange County neighborhood was getting a new playground a year after the previous equipment had been badly vandalized. The reported interviewed a few neighborhood children who were excited about their park opening up again. The first little boy's name was shown on the screen as Dean Martin R****. I didn't think much of it until the reporter announced his two little sisters' names as well.

IT and I just looked at each other in disbelief. They were Grace Kelly R****, and Sophia Loren R****.

I shit you not.

We are alternately reading Coraline by Neil Gaiman and watching the Space Shuttle launch. Gareth was trying to find Animal Planet and stopped on the NASA channel. The channel guide said "Video File" so I thought this was a tape of a previous launch...checking the NASA website - this was a real-time launch!

Aw, shucks it was just scrubbed - anvil clouds within 20 miles...maybe tomorrow...

Science Channel is rerunning Cosmos. *Sigh* I loved this series when it first aired on PBS. Ah, I had such a crush on Carl Sagan at the time. I loved his voice. I'm still a sucker for voices. I joined the Planetary Society because of him.

I have the soundtrack on LP - I can't believe this series is 25 years old! Coincidentally, I've just been rereading Contact too.

Leggman's The Tick Super Fanpage! is reporting:

I have heard from several people (thanks!) that The Tick is returning to American airwaves Monday through Sunday at 10 CST on Toon Disney as part of their Jetix set and Saturday and Sunday mornings at 10 on ABC Family starting Monday, June 13th.

I don't personally have Toon Disney, but I'm still excited about this as any Tick interest is sure to be a good thing going forward and this has to be seen as making a Tick animated series DVD more likely.

Spoon!!!!!

About damn time the collective Disney got off its fat butt and started the ball rolling about its acquired property. There's certainly been a demand.

Btw, I got runsamuck The Tick liveaction tv series DVDs last Christmas. He still has not watched them. He's got some sort of superstitious thing about them; like if he watches them they won't be as good as he remembered or something other bad thing will happen. He's done the same thing with Men at Work and The Princess Bride, so DVDs are now completely out as gifts for him. I'm only getting them for myself from now on. :p

runsamuck has been waiting for two days to see a new show on the History Channel.

Modern Marvels: The Evolution of Bricks.

TN could see that; having worked in the industry, he's also interested in construction materials. But IT agreed with me - he needs to get out more.

Remember how I said Angus was insisting octopus were arachnids last week, and wouldn't believe me when I told him they were mollusks?

We watched a program on the Science Channel last night called Origins: The Battle for the Planet, which dealt with evolution, and the fossils of the Burgess Shale. At that time, a tiny flat swimming critter named Pikia, first noted chordate and possible ancestor of all vertebrates, may have had a rough time escaping predators such as Anomalocarus, a voracious arthropod forerunner, which may have been up to six feet long, or the nautiloids, the large ammonite forerunners. There was a lot of interesting CGI animation of the creatures of what is now the Burgess Shale set of fossils, interspersed with interviews with the scientists and, during longer period of narration, footage of a hairless athlete in a Speedo stepping around and over a bunch of snails and cockroaches, symbolizing, I guess, the competition between arthropods, mollusks, and vertebrate precursors.

(I have to admit during these sections of the show I sort of lost track of the narration - he was quite interesting to look at. John said he had been the volleyball team during the Seville Olympics, and has a condition that keeps him from growing any hair anywhere on his body - not even eyelashes or eyebrows.)

The animation of living versions of the fossils was pretty interesting, as I've always wanted to see what these critters looked like when they were alive - they even showed my favorite, Hallucigenia, although only for a few seconds. When I first learned about these fossils in college from my then-boyfriend, a Geology major, it was thought that we weren't even sure what phylum these animals belonged to. The one book I read on the subject (the late Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life) seemed to confirm that. However, some comments in this show led me to find out the Gould was not the last word on the subject, and other authors feel that these critters are actually related to, or are ancestors of, animals existing today (I guess I need to do some more reading). Hallucigenia seems to be related to Peripatus, itself called a living fossil - something I at first found disappointing. Somehow it piqued my sense of the weird and non-conformist that all these animals seemed to be defying conventional classification. However, now it seems right - at least the velvet worms (ha, a common name I was unaware of) are a rather weird phylum themselves.

However, the main point of this series, that vertebrates are somehow more successful, because their internal skeletons allowed them to form larger bodies, and therefore "better" colonize the land, bugged me. Possibly because we humans are considered to be the dominant species on the planet. There are other measures of success, aren't there? Insects may not have large bodies, but they are far more diverse than vertebrates. I guess if you count how much humans are affecting the ecosystem of the entire planet for the worse, we are the "winners."

Where was I going with this? Oh yes, getting back to my original starting point - since this show placed such an emphasis on "Mega-Mollusks," Angus now buys that octopuses are related to snails, and not spiders. If it's on tv, it must be true - whereas, mom isn't always to be believed.

*Sigh*

Twas ever thus.

Someone turned on the tv in the breakroom during lunch, and following all the innawguration folderol, there was a story about several hundred Dosidicus gigas (Humboldt squid) beaching themselves in Newport Beach. This happened a few years ago in La Jolla and at Catalina Island. Seems a little early for them to be showing up here. We were given one last year in April, that one of the purse seiners caught in his net. We later found a home for it at one of the local museums, where it'll help educate school children about cephalopods.