Last week I got a nice email from a group of graduate students in marine ecology at Northeastern University who apparently are losing their minds as badly as I did in the early 90s. They sent me links to these two videos which they said were inspired by my early Prairie Starfish videos (particularly Barnacles Tell No Lies I’m guessing). But these folks have taken it to “a ho nuva leva.” They’ve figured out ways to rap about everything from trochophores to veligers, tell slug haters to be quiet, and extoll the virtues of forming a brown body when times are rough (if you’re a bryozoan). And they also explain how to Drop your Box on the Rocks.

I give their work an “FA” (Frickin’ Awesome).

Clearly the time is coming for an Invertebrate Film Festival, with a special prize for Best Tardigrade Short.

We sang about it six years ago. In 2002 we made a Flash video in which we said, “A new term for the new millennium:  Jellyfish blooms.” And now our dire predictions appear to be coming true, around the world.

They’ll sting your knees, and cause disease.

In all the thousands of hours I’ve logged diving on Caribbean coral reefs I’ve never once seen a dead or dying eel. It’s a rather disturbing mystery for now.

Did we do something to the moray eels of Bonaire?

Also, I just spent the weekend at Penn State where we had a “Sizzle” screening on Friday night that produced another great panel discussion which included Michael Mann, co-founder of realclimate.org. Whether you love the film (Variety) or hate it (Nature), you can’t deny it’s a catalyst for productive discussions like this panel from Woods Hole.

From left: Andy Revkin (NY Times), Scott Doney (WHOI chemist), Naomi Oreskes (UCSD historian of science), Randy Olson (filmmaker)

Back in the first week of June the Junk Raft expedition faced some very dark days. When they were first towed out to the Channel Islands one of the pontoons broke apart, forcing them to stop and gather the plastic bottles that came loose. Then, a day later they discovered the lids of almost 1000 of the bottles were working themselves off, filling the bottles with water, causing the raft to slowly sink. When Anna Cummins took a repair crew out to San Nicholas Island she told me the raft was basically sinking and would have been done in a day or so.  How ominous of a start is that for a 2000 mile open ocean journey?

Yet they went to work, fixed all the leaky plastic bottles, re-rigged the sails and the two eco-mariners, Dr. Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal, bravely headed off. Personally, I was offering up my suggestions for them to consider curtailing the trip and simply never go offshore–instead just hug the coast down to Cabo. Which is why I sit here on my couch while those guys are true environmental heros fully deserving of all the admiration they are about to receive.

It’s almost three months later and they basically kicked ass. Once they caught the westward currents halfway down Baja it was literally smooth sailing. Not a single harrowing day. No close calls. Just sailing on the trade winds until last week when they had a wonderful meeting and dinner on the high seas with British row boater Roz Savage.

They’re now set to arrive in Honolulu next Wednesday. Truly amazing. They will have a joint press conference the next week (early September) with Roz in which they will achieve their real goal which is to bring large scale attention to the work of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation addressing the shocking level of plastic trash clogging the oceans these days. And it is shocking if you look at some of the short videos the guys have posted on their Junk Raft blog–they’ve conducted plankton tows, 1000 miles from land, and found them to be full of bits of plastic, and caught fish with guts full of plastic. This is not the ocean of our grandparents.

Would you want to spend 3 months at sea on a floating pile of junk like this? Look at the brown lounge chair on the right side–bloody luxury!

Nature vs. Variety: disappointment vs. applause

So in honor of their friendliness, we had to bring out own special guest to the Pool Party yesterday. Can you spot him in the photo?

OUTFEST POOL PARTY: Can you spot the “Sizzle” cast member?

For over twenty years I have felt what this article has to say. Since way back in the eighties when Beavis and Butthead introduced a new way of maintaining constant, shallow laughter that never has any depth to it. Since average citizens began learning how to speak directly and calmly to the television cameras on the same day that their loved one was murdered (you see it every day here in L.A., its incredible how composed people are these days speaking to cameras), since surfers learned how to have one of their own drown and instead of going home in shock and grief, they end up just keeping on surfing, saying amongst themselves, “he would have wanted us to do this” (as happened in January of this year).

Technology has changed us. The article talks about this. About how the advent of books and printing changed storytelling and even the depth of emotion. It’s not clear if this is a good or bad thing. For all the bad ways that books changed society there are as many or more great ways they improved society. The same may be true of the current shallowing.

Today people talk about some novelist being a “classic storyteller,” but that’s a joke. Classic storytelling doesn’t work in today’s shortened attention span society. As the article says, we are “pancaking” – developing wider, shallower interests. And this is the focus of the very profound Flash piece called EPIC 2014 from a few years ago. And it is the message of what I still think is the greatest movie civilization has ever produced…Idiocracy.

Who you callin’ stoopid.

The title sort of says it all. One blog that posted it registered over 100,000 views in the first few days, and all of the filmmaking blogs were on fire with discussion of his speech. Basically lots of independent film companies have shut their doors, and several of the studios have resorbed their independent branches. It’s a grim time. I can see the difference in activity just in the two years since we went to Tribeca with “Flock of Dodos” and negotiated with all the distributors.

There are many shocking stories of films under-performing. One of the most stunning was the recent documentary about steroids, “Bigger, Stronger, Faster.” Julie Janata, who was an executive producer of our “Flock of Dodos,” was an editor on the film. She raved to me about it repeatedly over the past year, and her raves proved to be justified as it received sterling reviews–it currently has an incredible 54 positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and only ONE negative review.

And yet…they opened it at 26 theaters, it has made only $246,000. I saw ads for it on television. Those ads cost a lot. They probably spent well over a million in prints and ads. Somebody lost a lot of money on a movie with near perfect reviews. It makes me think of people who submit NSF grants, receive all Excellents for their scores, and find out they get nothing because the budget for their program is too small. “Congratulations, you win nothing!”

So everyone is panicked, no one knows how to market small films, and the number of movies being produced continues to skyrocket–Sundance had over 5000 submissions this year. How do you call attention to a small film in such a chaotic situation?

Unifying 50 bloggers to post their reviews all on the same day is our idea. We’ll see how it works. Tune in next Tuesday, July 15, as Science Blogs helps to sponsor SIZZLE TUESDAY. The range of reviews is going to be interesting. I already took one solid beating for the movie back in January when I played it for a group of senior scientists at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual meeting. They hate, hate, hated it. Lots of reasons why. Some we addressed in the subsequent months of editing, some we didn’t (hey, they’re old folks, they’re not going to get everything). And at the same time, last week we got accepted to the Chicago Reeling Gay and Lesbian Film Festival! Who knew I was a gay filmmaker (don’t answer that). So we’re doing fine reaching the gay audience. The question is what the science crowd will have to say. Yeeks.

SOMETHING NEW: 50 blog reviews, 35 from ScienceBloggers