January 2010

  • Save Turtle Habitat!

    By sarajean on 1/30/10 9:53am
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    The other day, I was rummaging in my daughter’s toy chest and found her turtle puppet. “Look,” I told her, “Your turtle puppet!”

    She wrinkled her nose, slapped a hand on her four-year-old hip, and informed me, “It’s not a turtle, Mommy, it’s a leatherback sea turtle.”

    Well then! At least they had someone sticking up for them, eh?

    It turns out that we, too, can stick up for the leatherback sea turtle today—albeit in a slightly less bossy manner.

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  • Pacific Garbage Patch on The Colbert Report

    By erika on 1/15/10 11:41am
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    I'm catching up on my Hulu queue this week, after a big lag over the holidays, so it wasn't until this morning that I saw Charles Moore as Stephen Colbert's interview guest.  Captain Moore is the one who first discovered and identified the Pacific Garbage Patch in the North Pacific Gyre while sailing back to Los Angeles from Hawaii.


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  • Jellyfish Doom!

    By erika on 1/14/10 2:55pm
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    I enjoy watching MonsterQuest, but it tends to irritate me.  My feelings towards the show were handily summed up by a quote from the latest episode I watched.  "If ____ happens, the results would be frightening."  Well, sure!  And if crocodiles learned to drive cars, the results would be frightening, too.  What's your point?

    The point of their episode "Killer Jellyfish" is that if jellyfish take over the ocean, the results would be frightening.  (Except for some of the clips from night diving in Australia, the point of which was "if these sharks were hungrier, the results would be frightening."  I mean honestly, sharks have it hard enough without the narrator throwing around terms like "feeding frenzy" to describe sharks swimming around peacefully, over a suite of horror movie music, don't you think?)


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