23 Tevet/9 January, 2010
Jan. 9th, 2010 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bearshortyI’m feeling so geeky for remembering that it is Snape’s birthday. I need to remind myself that he is a fictional character, even if he is my favorite fictional character. It does feel weird that he was 31 in Book One.
I watched Planet Earth’s “Fresh Water” episode today. Fun thing I learned: fresh water is only 3% of all water. The episode follows rivers from their mountain birth to either lake or sea and along the way we get to see Angel Falls (since I’ve seen “Up” recently this was doubly cool, “Up” used these for inspiration), stream creatures close up in all their weirdness, giant salamanders, grizzly bears fishing for salmon and looking pretty adorable after diving in the water a bit, all wet and disheveled (I have a bear bias), Grand Canyon, fish-otter-crocodile hunts where little otters gang up on the crocodile so that he won’t eat them, wilderbeasts vs crocodiles – crocodiles grab a leg and don’t let go and drown their pray, really big tropical lakes in Africa with lots of colorful fish, lake flies that are hatched on the bottom of the lake in the abyss and then come up on top to transform into flies to mate before they die – that is kind of awesome: from sea creatures to flying ones, Baikal and its ice sheet, Amazon river, monkeys in a delta. The diaries show how they filmed piranhas feeding in the wild including some piranha soup the cameramen ate in Brazil. That is kind of a cool job, being a cameraman in exotic locations.
I’ve been spoiled by technology that many shots look computer generated at first, but it is actually real rivers, just some cool images. I like the music in each episode – they try to match the native music of each land they visit – for Japanese salamanders there is Japanese music and Amazon dolphins get South American rhythms.
This show reminds me of Tomek books. They were a polish series translated into Russian about a boy and his family traveling all over the world getting animals for zoos, set in 1900s. There were seven books, which I read in fourth grade (the seventh book ended on a cliffhanger and it is frustrating knowing that there is an eight book in Polish to finish the story which I can’t read). The stories take place in Australia, Africa, North America, India, Siberia, New Guinea and South America. The prose is a bit stiff now – too many geography and explorer fact and expositions but I loved them.
Went to Brooklyn in the morning to visit grandmother in the nursing home where she is undergoing rehabilitation from surgery for a few weeks. My Uncle (my father’s brother) was visiting too and it was nice to see him. Papa and Uncle are on good terms and everything and they occasionally talk by phone but they are not too close, probably because of an age difference, Papa is seven years older. So I haven’t seen him for a long while. When we all lived in Brooklyn our families saw each other much more but now we all live far enough apart not to interact that much. I wanted to visit Yeva too, as she just got back from vacation, but she was out shopping and it was too cold to wait. Next week, perhaps.
I watched Planet Earth’s “Fresh Water” episode today. Fun thing I learned: fresh water is only 3% of all water. The episode follows rivers from their mountain birth to either lake or sea and along the way we get to see Angel Falls (since I’ve seen “Up” recently this was doubly cool, “Up” used these for inspiration), stream creatures close up in all their weirdness, giant salamanders, grizzly bears fishing for salmon and looking pretty adorable after diving in the water a bit, all wet and disheveled (I have a bear bias), Grand Canyon, fish-otter-crocodile hunts where little otters gang up on the crocodile so that he won’t eat them, wilderbeasts vs crocodiles – crocodiles grab a leg and don’t let go and drown their pray, really big tropical lakes in Africa with lots of colorful fish, lake flies that are hatched on the bottom of the lake in the abyss and then come up on top to transform into flies to mate before they die – that is kind of awesome: from sea creatures to flying ones, Baikal and its ice sheet, Amazon river, monkeys in a delta. The diaries show how they filmed piranhas feeding in the wild including some piranha soup the cameramen ate in Brazil. That is kind of a cool job, being a cameraman in exotic locations.
I’ve been spoiled by technology that many shots look computer generated at first, but it is actually real rivers, just some cool images. I like the music in each episode – they try to match the native music of each land they visit – for Japanese salamanders there is Japanese music and Amazon dolphins get South American rhythms.
This show reminds me of Tomek books. They were a polish series translated into Russian about a boy and his family traveling all over the world getting animals for zoos, set in 1900s. There were seven books, which I read in fourth grade (the seventh book ended on a cliffhanger and it is frustrating knowing that there is an eight book in Polish to finish the story which I can’t read). The stories take place in Australia, Africa, North America, India, Siberia, New Guinea and South America. The prose is a bit stiff now – too many geography and explorer fact and expositions but I loved them.
Went to Brooklyn in the morning to visit grandmother in the nursing home where she is undergoing rehabilitation from surgery for a few weeks. My Uncle (my father’s brother) was visiting too and it was nice to see him. Papa and Uncle are on good terms and everything and they occasionally talk by phone but they are not too close, probably because of an age difference, Papa is seven years older. So I haven’t seen him for a long while. When we all lived in Brooklyn our families saw each other much more but now we all live far enough apart not to interact that much. I wanted to visit Yeva too, as she just got back from vacation, but she was out shopping and it was too cold to wait. Next week, perhaps.
