Tooth and Claw

Well, one of the last shows last night was about animal's teeth, and a miserable bit on animal wines in Vietnam....this is where animals are pickled in rice wine, mostly snakes, but larger things all the way up to what looked like a baby sun bear, and valued for what I dont know....I suspect it's just the exoticness...Old China is kinda notorious for these things...like foot binding. And the animal teeth documentary brings a despair...I dont know if Nature can have a dark side, like Darth Vader!...but clips of a long haired hyena wantonly killing baby seal after seal was depressing. I dont know if a whole animal species can be criminal, in whatever way animals could be, but the habits of Hyenas may put them in that class.

And tonight, it's the Swamp Lions. Now, having done my own little clips, I have a new interest in how these nature photogs put clips together. The soundtrack and narration is awful as usual. And the clips, especially of other animals, like birds, are so short as to be meaningless..."titanic forces of Nature when winner takes all"...geeeaahhh...most of the time these animals are lounging about, sleeping, browsing, just living...but that's too boring for TV.

And the news from Pakistan is depressing, as was the story of Thailand. One by one dictatorships are supplanting democracy...another recent one Venezuela. It's the same pre WW2 pattern...back then there were just a few Democracies left.

Rice wine pickled cobra in bottle pic, snagged from ebay. That's just creepy.

Now, Naked Science has a bit on the interior of the Earth...it would take 32 hours falling to reach the center of the earth....??...now, is that with air resistance?...I imagine so...and I've tried to imagine this my ownself, and wondered if once at the center the fall would be arrested, insomuch as one is surrounded by equal mass pulling in all directions!! This to say I think at the center one would be weightless...but the crushing pressures...the narrator tells...someday I'll meet someone I can ask about this!!

DavidDavid

Tree in the Door

Nov. 4, 2007