(no subject)
Jun. 13th, 2013 09:52 amWent to see the double feature at the New England Aquarium's IMAX theater last night. One movie about great white sharks, one about king penguins on South Georgia Island. The penguin one was written and narrated by Sir David Attenborough. Who, as usual, was awesome, but... I dunno, there was something about the style of the writing that felt just a bit manipulative. Probably because the shark movie was just a documentary but the penguin one tried to have a narrative of two penguins finding each other as mates and raising a chick to adulthood, and human narrative structures and the happenings of nature don't always work together as well as the humans would like.
On the other hand the scenes of bird-on-bird predation or attempted predation took on something of a new feel once I got my first glimpse of an incoming skua or giant petrel and told myself I was watching dinosaur-on-dinosaur predation. Because seriously, you get to respect predatory seabirds a lot more if you start picturing the thing in their ancestry that looked like Allosaurus and mapping out the transitional skeletons along the way from the Mesozoic until now, and then look at their beaks and heads.
On the other hand the scenes of bird-on-bird predation or attempted predation took on something of a new feel once I got my first glimpse of an incoming skua or giant petrel and told myself I was watching dinosaur-on-dinosaur predation. Because seriously, you get to respect predatory seabirds a lot more if you start picturing the thing in their ancestry that looked like Allosaurus and mapping out the transitional skeletons along the way from the Mesozoic until now, and then look at their beaks and heads.