Right Whale Dies Off St. Augustine
On Dec. 30, 2010, a team of federal and state biologists rescued a severely entangled North Atlantic right whale off the coast of Daytona, Florida. The whale, born during the 2008-09 calving season, was one of 300-400 left in existence from a population that once numbered in the tens of thousands. (Click the picture to see a high-resolution JPEG photo.)
The female whale had become caught in more than 150 feet of fishing rope and wire mesh, some stuck in its mouth. This was causing it feeding difficulties that left the creature undersized.
On Jan. 15, 2011, the team sedated the same whale, slowing it down enough to remove 50 more feet of rope.
Sadly, the whale died this week and its body was towed to shore on Butler Beach south of St. Augustine late Wednesday night. I drove out yesterday to see the whale and witnessed a team of around 20 people conducting an autopsy and dispensing of the whale's remains.
I've shared the photos I took on Flickr. They're not for the squeamish. The whale was so big they had to use a backhoe to pull it apart. One guy stood atop it with a machete and others climbed inside the animal, a gory process that was surprisingly bloodless. By the time I stopped by a few hours later with my son Max, almost all that was left was a 20-foot long truckbed filled with whale bones. It looked like the remnants of a giant rib dinner. The smell downwind of it was horrible.
I've been following the news of this whale for weeks, so it was depressing to learn that it didn't make it. I'm currently looking for opportunities to help the whales, who come south every winter from December to March to give birth to calves. The blog North Atlantic Right Whale Watch has more pictures and information on how to volunteer as a whale-spotter here in North Florida.
Direct Quote
"Around 12 years ago I photographed the opening of a salon at Bergdorf Goodman. Molly Ringwald was there & I asked to her to pose. She said yes & we walked over to a private area to do the shoot. Before I started to click I told her that Sixteen Candles was my all time favorite movie. She gave me a NASTY look & stormed away. A minute or so later the event organizer came over to me with 2 security guards & told me that I offended Ms. Ringwald & she wanted me thrown out. I explained what I said & was told it didn't matter, she wanted me out & I had to go. I said fine, I'll leave on my own & he said that Ms. Ringwald insisted she be able to watch me be escorted out with the security guards. It was humiliating, to say the least. I still remember the nasty/gloating smile on her face as I walked past her, with a security guard on either side of me. That is probably my most memorable (not in a good way) celebrity experience as a photographer." -- Steven Bergman
'Place to Be' by Hiromi Uehara
Heard this song for the first time tonight on the Concord Records site and couldn't believe how great it was.Buying Our First iMac for Video Editing
My son Max has volunteered to help athletes at his high school edit video of their game highlights to send to colleges. The athletic department devotes an Apple iMac to this purpose and also has some Windows 7 laptops.
Since my sons all have an interest in filmmaking, thanks to YouTube, we're going to buy an iMac that will be devoted to editing video and find classes to help them nurture their inner Akira Kurosawa. As a Windows and Linux guy, I'm not sure what we need to purchase. I have a few questions for Mac gurus reading this post:
- How much iMac do we need to edit video, in terms of hardware, memory and disk space?
- Is Apple iMovie sufficient, or should be we looking at Final Cut Pro?
- What other software should we get?
- How upgradeable are iMacs?
We'd be buying the Mac from an Apple Store, so if there are service or training plans to get (or avoid), that advice would be helpful too.
The high school produces video in several formats. Some are VOB, BUP and IFO files, which I think are the standard DVD format. The others are in either Quicktime or AVI.
I don't think the school has Final Cut Pro, so my son will be using iMovie on the Mac and Windows Movie Maker on the PCs at school.
I tried unsuccessfully to pull VOB files into iMovie. A Google search led me to advice that Toast Titanium can convert that format to one iMovie likes, but when I tried to do that with Titanium 6, a dialog informed me that I needed "Toast with Jam."
Please help me become an Apple snob. I don't want to have to ask a Genius.
Direct Quote
"Thought experiment for conservatives: You have a terrorist, really bad guy, plenty of blood on his hands. He's in your basement. There's a bomb set to go off in 24 hrs that will wipe out an American city, killing millions. Only he knows where the bomb is, and how to defuse it. The only way to get the information out of him is to get his wife heart surgery, his mom into a good retirement home, set up a college trust fund for his son and bake him delicious homemade sugar cookies. Do you do it?" -- Quinn Norton
Direct Quote
"As female journalists working in this region we constantly find ourselves putting clothes on to please Hamas and taking them off to please the Israelis." -- Sherine Tadros
The Best Way to Deal with Rev. Fred Phelps
During sports broadcasts in the U.S., there are moments where the cameras abruptly stop showing the game, turning instead to show the crowd or the announcing booth. A telltale roar reveals the reason: an idiot has run onto the field and interrupted play.The drama of a field crasher would make excellent television. Most of the time, it's just a drunk, an attention-seeker or a drunken attention seeker, but sometimes things take a more newsworthy turn. A teen was tasered by cops at a Philadelphia Phillies game last year and a father and son assaulted an umpire in 2003 at a Chicago White Sox game.
Live broadcasters don't show these crashers because they know that the TV time would encourage more people to do it. The industry-wide self-censorship helps discourage idiocy.
It's time the media took the same approach with Rev. Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas.
Phelps is getting widespread media coverage by threatening to picket the funerals of the Tucson shooting victims. It's the same game he's been playing since 1991. Find a funeral of a soldier, public figure or someone else whose death is getting major media coverage. Fax blast a press release celebrating their demise, grab the "God Hates" signs, gather up the kids and grandkids and hop in the Ford Econoline.
Because of the enormous amount of attention his deeply offensive protests receive, you might get the impression that Phelps is a significant religious leader in this country.
He's not. Westboro Baptist Church had only 71 members as of 2007, according to a BBC report, and they're members of his extended family. He has 13 children, many of whom have stuck around and brought their own kids into the loathsome family business.
Nate Phelps, an estranged son of Rev. Phelps, says the only point of the protests is to get attention. Phelps doesn't care if he attracts a single follower to his religious views:
My father equipped his church with a bank of fax machines, and daily sent faxes to hundreds of machines across the city and state, filled with invective and diatribes against anyone who had offended him. To demonstrate the effectiveness of his methods, this tiny church of 60 people, led by my father, is today known not just throughout the United States, but across the world. ...
My father has simply refined Calvin's doctrine to the point where the vast majority of us are going to hell. And he and his followers are among the privileged few chosen by God.
This doctrine is very important to understanding the Westboro Baptist Church. My father, and those who follow him, are not preaching to try to convince people of their truth. Unlike street evangelists, who are trying to convert people, my father has no intention of converting anyone, since conversion is impossible. You're either chosen, or you're not.
The best way to deal with Phelps isn't to organize counter-protests or to form a human wall of "angels" to block people from seeing the Phelps family picketing a funeral.
Instead, it's to convince the national media to stop covering the publicity stunts of a no-name preacher with no following and no influence.
Update: "Topeka's Westboro Baptist Church won't picket the funeral of a 9-year-old girl killed in Saturday's shooting rampage in Tucson, Ariz., in exchange for getting airtime on two radio stations, a church spokesman said." -- Topeka Capital-Journal
Social Media
Subscriptions
Blogroll
Projects
RSS Advisory Board
How to Read an RSS Feed with Java Using XOM
The RSS Advisory Board Just Turned 20
Downloading 50,000 Podcast Feeds to Analyze Their RSS
Tara Calishain Explains: What is RSS?
Be Unique And Use RSS Guid Like Everybody Else
Statistics
This blog has been published since Nov. 7, 1999 (a span of 9,372 days).
Thank you for visiting Workbench.
