For this, Ro got a cool bib:

Also check out this pic:

http://picasaweb.google.com/dpapas665/AuroraPics#5318053662191355410

“Still Bill”

I am embarrassed to say that I would not have recognized Bill Withers by name before I saw this doc. I certainly recognized his songs though, and even more embarrassingly, subsequently realized I always thought of him as having been a commercial flash in the pan and not much more.  Like any good musician doc, you get to know the person a bit better.  In this case, we find out that, though he is a very musical person, his relationship with fame is bitter and complex.  His interviews are filled with philosophical, oblique answers to personal questions, so we aren’t allowed to know what event/s led him to largely drop out of the music biz, but we do get a sense that he is probably better off for it.  This is a pretty interesting point, in that the public’s response to a celebrity that shuns fame is usually selfish, perhaps even near

cannibalistic, and we rarely get to see the issue from the other point of view.  So, he’s a sensitive man, and though his anecdotes are often vague, I think we still develop a sense of respect for his introversion and his choices. Interesting guy really, I’m glad I got to know a bit more, even if the biographical details were a bit light.

“Blood Trail”

I admit I came to this one with a bit of expectation for the sensational.  It’s about war photographer Robert King and the course of his career, from his start in 1991 Sarajevo to Chechnya, Moscow, and eventually OIF.  This film in fact starts out with some sensational material, but I ultimately had some trouble with this one, and I’ve been worried that it’s simply that I don’t much identify with or like the subject.  I hate to criticize a doc for such a trivial reason, but on the other hand, surely part of a competent documentarian’s job is to draw his or her audience in, hook them and get them interested in their subject despite their personality (see: “Winnebago Man”).  On some reflection I think that, I think it’s less a case of my inability to appreciate a somewhat unlikeable character as a subject and more, despite something like 15 years of on and off filming, the director failing to really capture the development of the subject over time.

This film starts out showing King, a poor, callow, young, but hungry photographer showing up in Bosnia to learn the trade, sure of his destiny of being put on earth to deliver an important message.  Fair enough, but the development of the character kind of goes off the rails from there.  We learn that his background is troubled and that his career, and related self abuse through drink and womanizing, is the result.  It is even suggested that he’s out there looking for something among the many current day inter-cuts to him deer hunting with his friends and family in his native Tennessee.  Despite several tense moments with him in action, the film’s narrative drifts, and about all we learn about him is that he semi-settles down, while keeping his job, and that many of his friends report that they never thought he would still be alive.  By the end, we’ve had some pretty grisly visuals, but we still haven’t had all that much insight into either the world of Robert King or the larger world of war photography for that matter. So, I’m left to consider, were the dots the director was connecting through King’s various experiences a narrative so subtle I couldn’t detect it, or was my inability to identify with the subject keeping me from getting it, or was it just not there.  Honestly, I don’t know.  I tend to think of myself as a fairly sophisticated viewer, and am not easily led to believe that I can’t pick out a simple subtext, but I suppose I really can’t be sure unless someone else, whose opinion I respected, had also seen it and was able to challenge me on it.  Such are the evil wages of going SXSW solo.

“The Yes Men Fix the World”

Those familiar with the Yes Men won’t be disappointed by their second film adventure.  For those that aren’t, let me say that the Yes Men , often referred to as culture jammers, are involved in high-profile corporate pranking/hoaxing, something they call “identity correction”, targeting companies or organizations companies whose policies most starkly favor profit at the expense of the environment or poor.  This amounts to public shaming, usually exposing some act the company in question can’t deny, but doesn’t want the world to know about.  In the past, they’ve done the likes of the WTO & McDonald’s, this time they’re on to Dow, Exxon, Halliburton, & HUD.  I don’t want to oversell this, as your enjoyment will likely depend largely on how you feel about the current state of globalization and the rise of corporate power, but if that even remotely sounds up your alley, I suggest you check their now 2 movies out.

Thursday March 19

“Know Your Mushrooms”

The latest from Ron Mann, popular from his past SXSW entries, such as “Grass” and “Tales of the Rat Fink”, now covers, of all things, the humble mushroom.  I fully expected this to be a strictly magic mushroom related affair, but was delighted to see that it in fact focuses instead on some characters that are part of a much larger pro-fungus subculture.  As it turns out, they have a mushroom festival every summer in Telluride, populated largely by eccentric mushroom loving hippies.  We follow one in particular, Larry Evans, a professional mushroom hunting “gypsy”, who guides us through the mushroom hunts, parades, and informal chats that are part of the festival.  The film is also sprinkled with enough mushroom fun-facts that, if you haven’t learned a little bit about mushrooms, you at least come to appreciate a bit how some become so obsessed with them.  From cooking tips to outer-space conspiracies, to mushroom trip stories, this film pretty well appears to cover the mushroom culture gamut.  Like his other works, this piece keeps up a good pace, has a fun narrative, and makes you hungry for mushrooms.  Check it out.

“Soul Power”

This was a single screener at the Paramount (most movies screen 2 or 3 times during the festival) so, given the subject matter, I expected a packed house.  I was dismayed to find it was not, and it really was one of the more unique pieces I’ve caught over the years.  The director of this film was an editor for “When We Were Kings”, and made this concert film entirely from archival footage of the music festival preceeding the famous 1974 fight between Muhammad Ali & George Foreman in Zaire that was not used for “When We Were Kings”.  The film includes some inspired performances from James Brown, B.B. King, Bill Withers, Celia Cruz and Miriam Makeba, among others.  In addition to the performances themselves, a good amount of footage shot during the festival setup with some of the artists and festival producers and crew, is used to put the event in context.  The legacy of the event is debatable, but the director uses a couple of Muhammad Ali rants that in particular help to show the feelings of black empowerment that surround the place and time.  The downside: each artist only gets one song.  The director said he chose them on the basis of the contrast from the other performances, as well we their relative strengths.  A little disappointing, but the film overall holds up as a document of the event, so it’s a reasonable trade-off. There is reportedly enough footage to do a much longer movie, found as it was apparently dumped in boxes and poorly stored, but as the festival was something like 12 hours long, that would be a much larger effort. So, see it as an addendum to “When We Were Kings”, surely, but see it also for the music.

Friday March 20

“Winnebago Man”

This doc took some doing to get into.  I was shut out of it the first screening I tried to get into, and it filled the Paramount the day of its last screening, well after SXSW Music had started, a rare event indeed.  It helps that the filmmaker is local, but it turns out also to have been a pretty interesting piece as well.  “Winnebago Man” is a reference to the film’s subject, one Jack Rebney.   Outtakes from an industrial video Jack shot in 1989 for the Winnebago company have circulated almost as long, first by video tape, but most recently by YouTube.  His performance in these outtakes is legendary largely for his constant swearing and bitter demeanor, which is where another title for the legendary video comes from: “The Angriest Man in the World”.  The filmmaker goes to some trouble to point out how unintentional internet celebrity like this is problematic, citing the psychiatric problems of the “Star Wars Kid” and the hounding and death threats some other “outed” people have received.  So, in an effort to find what ever became of Jack, it is discovered that he has disappeared, only to go live as a cabin caretaker in the wilderness of northern California. From there, the filmmaker develops a strange relationship with the man, first relating to his reaction to his internet fame and then dealing with his conflicting desires to be a hermit, but also to clear his name.   As this is a doc about an eccentric misanthrope, once again we confront the entirely too likely possibility that indie cinema is once again mining for comedy gold in exploiting some poor unsuspecting subject.  I’m not sure that’s the case here though.  For one, Jack is a former CBS news man, and therefore obviously at least a little media savvy.  Also, the desires of the filmmaker to help Jack redeem himself seem genuine and able to transcend what might be produced by clever editing.  There are plenty of scenes where they butt heads in a way that it’s clear Jack can take care of himself.  Still, would Jack have been just fine if he’d been left alone?  Probably.  Although he does come to some peace with his internet fame with the filmmakers help (by getting him to guest star at a found footage screening in San Francisco), there is a lingering question of how the subject was changed through the filmmaker’s and our observation. So, overall, it’s a nice story:  young documentarian helps older hermit come to terms with the circumstances of his life.  It’s a postmodern dilemma though: how much of the benefit derived is the artifice of the work itself?

“The Dungeon Masters”

My last film of the year, I couldn’t let this one get by me.  As I mentioned last year in my writeup for “Second Skin” , I’m drawn to docs about gamers and gamer communities.  Since “Darkon” a few years back, I’ve made it my business to see how the film community treats the gamers.  Being a gamer myself of one kind or another over the past 27 years myself, it’s a subject near and dear.  Like “Second Skin”, this doc follows the extra-game lives of three subjects.  The filmmaker wasn’t available for Q&A,  but I suspect he would say his intent was to study and perhaps humanize his subjects.  Unfortunately, once again we are presented with the most sensational of possible targets, and the film winds up if anything reinforcing the uglier stereotypes about gamers.  Out of our three subjects, we have two friendly but overweight older white guys and one younger white woman who, for much of the movie, we see only dressed as a drow (evil, black-skinned elf in D&D).  One of the men is an aspiring author, otherwise barely employed, living in a dumpy apartment with his wife and young son.  The other, employed, but lives with a wife unsympathetic to his gaming habits.  We also learn that he has killed entire parties of player characters because he disagree with the morality of their choices, had walked out on a previous family and marriage, and is a nudist.  The woman seems like she largely has it together except for her obvious LARP/cosplay habit, though we learn she now lives in a trailer with her gamer boyfriend after coming from a relationship with a abusive husband and digs the drow thing in particular for their matriarchal philosophy.   Through the film, as we rotate though incidental scenes with these characters, the filmmaker effectively presents more and more incidental evidence making the case that these people are all effectively losers.  Honestly, I have known gamers like this, but I don’t believe they are the majority.  It just so happens that any time a film dork points a camera at a group of gamers, they are always going to be the thing that makes the most humorous, most spectacular splash on film.  Though the fad of the gamer doc may be on its way out, my challenge to filmmakers wishing to do this subject is this:  make an informing piece that will dispel people’s fear and disdain, and show the poor gamer geeks as the good, upstanding people they largely are.  Otherwise, leave them alone.

Saturday March 21
I took the day off to hang with friends and see a little music at the SXSW Music festival.  Looking back, I think this is the first year I got away with seeing almost all documentaries, and I enjoyed it.  Once again, I’m contemplating maybe trying out the volunteer side of things for the festival next year.  Having the new baby kind of kept me from committing this year, but maybe I’ll be a little more available next year, we shall see.  I think it would be fun after 13 years to see how thing works on the inside.

“Reel Shorts 3″

Another nice reel.  The standouts:  “Thick as Thieves”, a comedy where a mugger holds up a guy in an alley and they hit it off.  So much so that they team up, hijinks ensue.  Also, “Wing It”, where two guardian angels guarding two respective parties in a drug deal gone bad try to reason with the other’s angel, but wind up having to stand their man up to fight it out.  Sounds kind of tragic written that way, but the Angels are crude and against typical convention, and the comic timing was perfect.  Last, “A. Effect”.  This one is a bit difficult to describe, but it’s set in a community college and the main characters are a loser playwright wannabe and a human

film-encyclopedia dork.   As our playwright friend musters the courage to make a play for an apparently interested girl in their mutual acting class, things go awry.  She falls for our straight man, the unassuming film encyclopedia dork.  Very subtle tension and delicate black comedy for a short, but all effective.

“Animated Shorts”

Not sure how much I can discuss what I saw here.  Animation is obviously very largely about visual effect.  Like a good animated reel should, these spanned the spectrum from surreal and insane, to ephemeral and dreamy, to just plain funny.  The stand outs, should you be so lucky as to encounter them:  “Luca Brasi Sleeps with the Fishes”, a funny musical piece about Luca Brasi’s experience, well, sleeping with the fishes.  “Sweet Dreams”, perhaps my fav of this bunch, a stop-motion work that features our main character, a cupcake, living in a land of other sweets.  This cupcake is a dreamer though, and sets sail into the unknown in his boat of sugar cubes.  Yes, the boat leaks and our cupcake arrives in the land of veggies.  Long story short, the cupcake goes native and learns some veggie skills that later will prove to save his sweet cohorts from a flood. “‘Here’s the Stapler if You Need It”, is kind of simple, but deals with a copy store that contains a forbidden industrial sized paper cutter with some strange properties and a new clerk who tries to deal with the public getting access to it. Last, “Shaman” was the winner this year, a very dreamy piece, perhaps described best by it’s own blurb: “Waiting for the bus on a rainy day in Copenhagen, the old shaman Utaaq sees a rare bird from his past. This makes him reminisce his youth, and a beautiful tale about the forces of nature begins.”

“RiP: A Remix Manifesto”

Ah, but this one is a thinker.  On the surface, a Morgan Spurlock-esque, fast paced and entertaining political piece about the nature of copyright as it exists today in the US.  The filmmaker gets at this through the framework of the points of his manifesto ( 1. Culture always build on the past. 2. The past always tries to control the future.  3. Our future is becoming less free.  4. To build free societies you must limit control of the past) and an examination of the work of “Girl Talk”, a popular mashup artist who composes his work solely from samples.  He explores a brief history of the concept of copyright and how it has evovled over time in American law.  That is to say, how it seems to be perpetually re-extended by the government at the behest of corporate interests (primarily Disney) and the consequences of this on expression in our culture.  The premise here is that the corporate anti-piracy movement has become so shrill and out of scale (like the RIAA lawsuit campaign) that it comprises an unacceptable level of control over media and expression.  He fleshes this idea out through interviews of the likes of Lawrence Lessig, Giberto Gil, Cory Doctorow, Dan O’Neill (as well as many others) and through examining ideas like copyleft / creative commons, and the nature of our relationship to intellectual property.  The crux of the argument comes down to where the line of “fair use” of previous works lies. More importantly, at what point is crossing that line genuinely piracy if that line is, in fact, a constantly moving target controlled by the increasingly few corporations who own most media?  Is remixing then a legitimate form of expression and cultural commentary?

I could go on all day about this issue.  Fact is, this movie is not even remotely objective, and often appeals to the audience on some fairly shaky logic.  I believe a lot of these ideas are pretty radical in such a stridently Capitalist society, and will take some time to be digested to find out which are worthwhile ideas and which make less sense to adopt.  It troubles me, though, that corporations currently involved in the increase of copyright powers seek to use their influence to squelch this very conversation.  This isn’t what a free society should look like.  Last I checked, that’s called oppression.

Anyway, if you’re curious, the filmmaker has put his money where his mouth is, perhaps literally.  His film is available for both view and remix opportunities by chapter at http://www.opensourcecinema.org/book/rip-remix-manifesto .

Monday March 16

“Mine”

I honestly have no idea why I chose to see this doc.  I guess I’m kind of a sucker for “current events” pieces, even when the events aren’t so current.  This one is at heart a hurricane Katrina story, though one about the rescue of pets made homeless by the storm.  I really thought this would turn out to be an animal nut piece pitched to a fairly narrow set of potential viewers, but I confess, this story really grabbed me.  The film follows the plights of several pet owners separated from their dogs by circumstances around Katrina and the eventual reunion (or not) with them.  This narrative is nicely sprinkled with background on how the purely volunteer rescue operation took place and how the pets were then distributed to shelters all over the US to help manage the immense load of the undertaking.  This resulted in many pets being both lost to their owners but also frequently adopted by families in their new locale.   You might then imagine the built in tension of the situation when an original owner wants their dog back and the new adoptive family had grown attached and doesn’t want to relinquish them.  We are taken through the strange process, which apparently involves no small amount of luck,  of the various owners attempts at being reunited with their pets.  Every profiled case seem to resolve differently, based solely on the temperaments of those people involved.  This gives the filmmaker a chance to really do an objective job of capturing all the different sides of a surprisingly complex issue.  We get to watch as one man beats his head against the proverbial brick wall trying to track his family dog down, going so far as to hire a P.I..  We even get a chance to see one of the adoptive owners experience change of heart over the course of the film about returning their dog.   I definitely recommend this one if you can find it.

“Severe Clear”

This was the only Iraq doc I saw this year, I guess the wave of these has finally begun to subside.  This one is a diary-style piece combined from the personal footage of Marines involved in the initial assault and the effort to take and hold Baghdad.  The narrative is strong, and strange enough to hear me say it, maybe a little too strong.  It’s hard to combine what is effectively home movie footage and put a coherent structure to it with voice-overs and not make it sound a little stilted.  Some of this may be based on the fact that our main character does his own voice-overs.   Still, that’s a pretty small complaint.  The subject states that his goal is to capture a more realistic side of the war than the media can likely do, including the tedium and the terror, the personalities of his peers and impact of their experiences on their humanity.  Not a bad piece, but I can’t say I had any real epiphanies watching this one.  I might just be jaded from all the Iraq docs I’ve absorbed at SXSW over the past few years.

Tuesday March 17

“Letters to the President”

This was another vérité style doc set around President Ahmadinejad of Iran.  I hesitate to say that this doc was at all sympathetic, but I do think it was a fairly realistic view compared to the one-dimensional representation of the man in the American media.  I think we don’t get any sense of the populism he enjoys in Iran, and why.   Following him during his travels around the Iran and listening in on some of both his ardent supporters and doubters certainly provides a little more window on why is not such an apparently simple country.  The title refers to a custom that seems to have sprung up around him that he and his staff will take people’s pleas for help (usually economic) in letters and put them through the Iranian bureaucracy to try and guide relief efforts.  It’s clear that this is more propaganda tool than effective governance, but for the filmmaker, it does allow a glimpse at the concerns of the somewhat more diverse than commonly believed Iranian people.   If there was a take-away from this film, I would say that, if what the news in the U.S. tells us about Iran is the extent of our understanding, then we have a lot of work yet to do.  As they are quickly becoming a nuclear conundrum, it might be best to pay attention.

“Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo”

I hadn’t originally scheduled this, but heard good things in line, so I thought I’d check it out.  It’s a new doc from Bradley Beesley (of “Okie Noodling” fame) about the now 69 year old prison rodeo in Oklahoma (there is only one other still existing in the US  at Angola, LA) shortly after the inclusion of female prisoners.  The narrative is kind of a given: prisoners, both male and female train up for the annual rodeo while enduring personal setbacks and triumphs.  Still, the characters are intriguing; the filmmaker did manage to capture an impressive depth from these people.  They don’t seem so much “other” as we typically think of them in our everyday lives, and yet some of them are murderers.  We also get some interesting information on the state of female incarcerations in OK.  They apparently jail women at a much higher rate than the national average, mostly for drug-related crimes.  I think I recall hearing that they also have the highest rate of battery, hard to say if that’s related, but it sounds like a pretty crap time to be a woman in OK.  Nevertheless, it’s an admittedly feel-good kind of film.  We get to see how the rodeo represents redemption for some of the main characters and a taste of freedom for others.  Still, I don’t think the dismissal of this as a quasi-gladiatorial event by some of the prisoners is lost on the public audience of either this film or the rodeo itself.

Friday March 13

“Strongman”

Honestly, I’m not sure what attracted me to this one in the schedule. Perhaps the potential for it to be an entertaining freak-show doc, the kind that so often seem to show up at SXSW, drew me in. It turned out to be a quasi-cinéma vérité style documentary, just following the aging “Stanless Steel”, whose ambition is to continue to be, well, a strongman in the carnival sense, though not literally in carnivals. The

film delves deeply into his relationships with those around him, including his family, his peers, and his girlfriend. It also focuses heavily on his earnest quest for self perfection, mostly of physical strength. As we follow him through his days and his various experiences and tribulations, it’s seems like he’s a bit of a feckless, but lovable dolt. His heart in in the right place, but he is incredibly absorbed by his need to be a better, and more popular and bankable strongman entertainer. After leaving this one, it occurred to me that independent docs are often guilty of victimizing subjects/people like this, taking advantage of their naive natures to exploit them for entertaining material. This piece transcends this a bit, seeing something about his creative impulse and struggle that is identical to that which is presumably at the core of anyone involved in the creative enterprise of independent film. It’s subtle, but the subtext is definitely there. I confess, I usually prefer docs with a strong narrative current, which this one lacked, but I think the treatment of the subject was relatively fair yet unflinching, and if you were paying attention, you might learn something before it was all done.

“Monsters From the ID”

This doc suggests that the 50’s were something of a scientific golden age for America. It points out that, although the conventional understanding now is that the science fiction cinema of the era was largely about fear of Communists and the Bomb, that many of these films: (“Forbidden Planet”, “Them”, and one of my favs: “The Day The Earth Stood Still”) also lionized scientists as heroes, something not often seen since, and this had a knock on effect of inspiring people of that time to pursue science, and thus drive the county on to great scientific achievement. He also goes on to draw the conclusion, mostly though his interviewed experts, that there is something of a connection between the lack of this glorification of scientists these days and the decline of scientific education and ability in this country.

I went along with this premise, mostly out of the sense that we’ve just emerged from 8 years of a government fairly disdainful of things intellectual, and that American science could use some bolstering right about now. Still, I’m troubled by the flag-waving aspect of this. We are a wealthy and powerful nation, and as such, we surely have a responsibility to support and contribute to science. However, since the subject was limited only to a discussion of a history of America’s scientific prowess, one implication there is that science should be used to secure our own advantage in the world. The film does not overtly suggest this, but I think the inevitable conclusion from the notion that America is in danger of being left behind intellectually is that Americans should then pursue science for our own benefit. I frankly find this to be a fairly shallow point of view. Thinking about science in tems of national engagement kind of misses the point. Good science should be about the free exchange of ideas unimpeded by borders and what have you. I understand that some things will be considered to be military secrets or whatever, but what about when we’re talking about clean energy or pharmaceutical research? Surely science at it’s best must include inputs from and benefits to everyone rather than just one country or just the First World. So, I guess I came away feeling like trying to look at 50’s sci fi as being some kind of inspiration for us now to be a bit specious. I understand needing to limit a subject for purposes of discussion, but this one left me feeling like the discussion had unceremoniously been ripped out of context to a point so as to be useless. It doesn’t help that the title kind of points to the aspect of the discussion least developed by the end of the film. Seems like this film might have gotten away from it’s masters when it crawled off the slab.

“Ong Bak 2″

No need to belabor this one, it’s more Thai martial arts from Tony Jaa. If you saw the original, you’ll probably like this one. It has the same film speed-ups and florid slo-mos of the original as well, but it was pretty enjoyable overall if you’re a martial arts film fan.

Saturday March 14

“Reel Shorts 1″

My annual readers might recall that I do loves me some shorts programs. There’s something about the form that makes for a sort of “pure” cinematic experience. There is absolutely no room for dead wood in a short. Either you hit your mark or you don’t. When they do, they seem so satisfying somehow.  Fortunately, many in this reel did.  Strange as it is, if there was a theme to this reel, it would be semi-experimental black comedy. “Winter Lilacs” is about a man living with his aged mother who appears to be near catatonic with dementia.   Oddly, yes, they found a bit of humor in this.  Also true for “Countertransference”, about a milquetoast antique store worker and her relationship with her boss, but also her twisted, abusive therapist helping her with her low self esteem issues and “Cochran”, about a loser who hates his delivery job, bit whose true love of skeet shooting and hunting leads him towards a hunting accident that leaves him unable to deliver, but allowing him to work at the gun range. The stand out from the black comedy take would be “Isis avenue”, about a crime scene cleanup company emptying a house of its contents left behind by it’s dead owner.   I suppose the commonality here was that though the subject was undoubtedly morbid, the interviews with the workers were surprisingly upbeat.  Go figure.

“AMAC @ The Hideout”

This was a shorts program Jordan turned me on to populated only by works from students of the Austin School of Film.   I have to say, it was surprisingly solid.  In particular: “Remains”, a narrative about a woman who is in town to clean out the house of her recently deceased, estranged mother and her interaction with her mother’s neighbor, who had had some kind of relationship with her. It was really well acted and fairly compelling, especially for a narrative short. Also, “Blade Throwers”, a very short doc about a regional knife throwing competition. Nicely polished and put together, your typical “get to know a subculture” doc. Lastly, “Headcheese”, a somewhat longer horror piece where the young worker of a butcher shop starts to lose it and starts taking orders from a pig head, Son-of-Sam style.  Not shy with the fake blood.

“The Last Beekeeper”

Knowing a little bit about this subject, I was curious to see this filmmakers take on the state of the bee industry, if you will, in light of the recent troubles with honeybee populations in decline. This one was really well put together, had a nice little narrative to it as we follow three beekeepers on their annual trek to the almond pollenation in California, and their struggles to keep it together. As it turns out, there’s quite a bit of passion and heartbreak in the bee biz. The only thing that left me unsatisfied were the scientific underpinnings of the film. There are some interviews with apiarists trying to explain Colony Collapse Disorder, often heard about through brief mass media science-scare stories, but as there’s no explanation, no theories are really advanced. We learn that the almonds in particular are instructive as they, unlike many other crops, depend totally on bees for successful pollenation, and to accomplish this takes 75% of the US supply of beehives. There are therefore some stabs made at an explanation implicating the constant, long-distance transport of hives into monoculture areas, such as the vast almond orchards of California , are to blame, combined with the stressed of environmental pesticides and imported bee parasites.   I guess if you assume that we’re in the grips of a national bee holocaust, that beekeepers are having a rough time of it, interesting as their stories might be, isn’t excatly a surprise.

Ken’s Shed

Enjoy,

-D.

Whoa, you say, is that safe? Well, its about as safe as I can make it. The crib and the bed are strapped together with bungee cords, and there are no gaps between the mattresses. When she gets to crawl stage she will have to go through me, Dave, and across a big bed before she can fall off. Plus, I can keep a very close eye on her.

In fact, that is what I like most about the arrangement so far. In the co-sleeper, I had to look down to see Ro’s face, but this way we are on the same level and can see each other eye-to-eye. She was a bit startled the first night, but seems to be settling in ok.

-D.

I can’t help but feel they should have let the franchise rest a little longer a-la Doctor Who.  What I don’t want to see is yet another ill advised, half-baked Hollywood fishing expedition through TV shows of yore.  I couldn’t bear watching Star Trek become a parody of itself.  I guess we’ll see next Summer.

http://www.startrekmovie.com/