television
laelaps | September 7, 2008I loved all the Gary Owens & Eric Boardman dinosaur documentaries (see here, here, and here) when I was a kid, but I think my most favorite was their special on prehistoric mammals. Called "Prehistoric World," the show took a look at the Page Museum in LA and even featured a bit on Dougal Dixon's After Man creatures (including everyone's favorite, the Nightstalker).
The stop-motion mammals seen at the beginning of the show brought back fond memories, as well. They were part of another documentary I saw as a child, although I can no longer remember what it was called. What I do remember,…
laelaps | September 6, 2008When we last left Gary Owens he had been turned into a mustachioed dinosaur. The good news is that he apparently found a cure and again teamed up with Eric Boardman for another dinosaur documentary. (It's not like being eaten by a dinosaur stopped them before or anything.) It's called "Son of Dinosaurs," and this time the duo get caught up with some Russians with a viable dinosaur embryo. I think they jumped the Tenontosaurus with this one, but it's still fun;
laelaps | September 4, 2008
The John West mascot really gets into his work (featuring a guest appearance from one of the shark puppets from Deep Blue Sea).
laelaps | September 3, 2008
Fun with stock footage and a blue screen, from Shark Attack 3.
After watching the first episode of Jurassic Fight Club I felt that the show deserved some amount of praise, but I was utterly flabbergasted by the latest episode ("Deep Sea Killers"). (You can see the full episodes yourself, for a limited time, here.)
The new episode featured the famous "mega-tooth" shark, Carcharocles megalodon, popularly called "Megalodon." During the entirety of the episode I don't think the genus name of the shark is ever mentioned; it is always referred to as "Megalodon" (and once as "Meg"). As was…
laelaps | August 29, 2008Just in case you haven't had enough of the "classic" (vintage?) Eric Boardman & Gary Owens dinosaur documentaries, here's the sequel to "More Dinosaurs" called "Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs."
laelaps | August 26, 2008When I was growing up, dinosaurs were almost always on television for one reason or another. From movies to commercials, from cartoons to documentaries, there was always some ancient creature on the screen. Among the panoply of prehistoric programming the documentaries featuring Eric Boardman and Gary Owens were among the ones I remember most fondly, and I just happened to stumble across a few of the old shows on YouTube. Here's one from a series the two hosted, "More Dinosaurs," that was one of my favorites (although the ending gave me nightmares);
Suzanne Somers versus Christina Applegate in a bilateral prophylactic mastectomy fantasy cage match!
oracknows | August 25, 2008Earlier today, I did a rather extensive post about a particularly ghoulish attempt to exploit the story of a woman with cancer, in this case Christina Applegate. It turns out that Mike Adams isn't the only woo-meister looking to capitalize on Ms. Applegate's misfortune, You just knew it had to happen, but Thighmaster, Bioidentical Stem Cell Huckster Suzanne Somers has gotten in on the act. Apparently she's penned an open letter to Applegate that was published in People:
Dear Christina,
Cancer is scary, and lonely. You can't ask anyone to make decisions for you because it's just too heavy.…
laelaps | August 23, 2008I normally don't care when I miss television documentaries, but I'm going to have to find some way to see this when it airs in three weeks;
So... freakin'... cool... And remember some of those exclusive clips (which are not associated with the Discovery Channel program) that I told you about a while ago? The Houston Museum of Natural Science has been kind enough to upload some of them to the web. Here's Bob Bakker on "duckbills";
laelaps | August 21, 2008Here it is, at long last, my take on the first part of The Genius of Charles Darwin. I've included each of the parts available on YouTube and recorded the running time to which each of my comments applies. This may require some scrolling if you're playing the home game. Now that I think of it, it would have been fun to do a Rifftrax-style commentary on each episode, but I don't have the means or know-how to pull that off. I'll also cover parts 2 & 3 in the days to come, but (as I've heard) the very beginning is a very good place to start.
False facts are highly injurious to the progress…
laelaps | August 21, 2008I know I have been promising it for a while, but tonight I will finally be getting around to liveblogging my reactions to the recently-aired series The Genius of Charles Darwin, hosted by Richard Dawkins. The title of this post should already give you an impression of what I thought of the series, although I was tempted to come up with some sort of title involving "Richard Dawkins and Friends" given the presence of his adaptationist compadres Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett.
If you haven't seen the documentary already, most (if not all) of it is freely available on YouTube, and if you have…
oracknows | August 17, 2008After seeing some Doctor Who silliness yesterday, I also came across this great tribute to 45 years of Doctor Who. Since it's a beautiful Sunday afternoon, and I'm again too lazy to post anything substantive until Monday, here we go again. It's every Who story compressed into less than 8 minutes. Truly, a tour de force for surveying the evolution of the show.
laelaps | August 16, 2008I'm hard at work on my book today (I intend to finish the chapter on whales by the end of the weekend) but I won't leave you hanging. Here's a Charlie Rose episode from 1994 featuring both Stephen Jay Gould (starting at the 29:10 mark) and Donald Johanson (starting at 45:25, with a rather unfortunate introductory blurb);
oracknows | August 16, 2008Why? Because I love Doctor Who and Benny Hill (although I was never much of an Eminem fan) and because it's funny, that's why. Besides, it's a beautiful Saturday, and I'm feeling too lazy to post anything substantive this morning. That's all the reason I need.
oracknows | August 15, 2008I was called upon once before, and now I'm called upon again. Jenny McCarthy needs me:
From: "Jenny McCarthy" volunteer@generationrescue.org
Reply-to: volunteer@generationrescue.org
To: orac@scienceblogs.com
Date: Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 11:26 AM
Subject: News From Jenny McCarthy
Become a Rescue Angel Today!
Dear Orac,
It's Jenny!
Please join my team and help other families!
I'm about to go on tour to promote my new book, Mother Warriors, which hits the bookstores everywhere, September 23rd (38 days from now!). I will also be on all the major talk shows showing the world that autism is…
laelaps | August 14, 2008Now this is pretty damn cool. Peter McGrath of the Beagle Project Blog liveblogged the airing of the 2nd episode of Richard Dawkins' The Genius of Charles Darwin (I posted a few thoughts last week here). Michael Barton and Richard Carter show up, too, and it's definitely some interesting commentary on the documentary.
I still have to liveblog my 2nd viewing of the first episode (and I hope to do the same for the other two parts), but after watching the first half of the 2nd episode last night I have to say that I'm not very impressed by this series. I can see now why many critics of Dawkins…
laelaps | August 8, 2008Was Charles Darwin a genius? He certainly was extremely bright, but if we are to call him a genius on the basis of coming up with the theory of evolution by natural selection then we must recognize the genius of A.R. Wallace (and perhaps William Wells, Patrick Matthew, and Edward Blyth), as well. Although the idea of natural selection has developed independently several times in the past it was Darwin and Wallace who grasped the power of the theory as a driver for evolution, but even then it is Darwin who is the focal point of so many discussions about "transmutation." While there are…
laelaps | August 6, 2008I didn't get a chance to see last night's Jurassic Fight Club (you can see my thoughts on the first episode here) but someone has put the "main event" up on the web. I don't know whether to laugh or cry;
I know I promised to try to be more even-handed in reviewing science media but there are some real howlers in that clip. First is that it has yet to be conclusively established that Nanotyrannus was an actual distinct genus of tyrannosaurid; the fossils attributed to the "pygmy tyrant" may just be young Tyrannosaurus. The debate is ongoing, and I hope that this point was made in the show.…
oracknows | August 1, 2008Remember how on Monday I posted a dissection of some truly execrable reporting on vaccines and potential conflicts of interest (COIs) by Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News that aired one week ago today? As you may recall, my main point was that Attkisson's reporting was lazy, describing nothing that couldn't be found from public sources, and biased in that it intentionally used inflammatory language in order to bias the reader/audience against Dr. Paul Offit and the American Academy of Pediatrics right off the bat before even describing the supposed COI. I further made the point that it's rather…
laelaps | July 29, 2008Tonight the first episode of the History channel program Jurassic Fight Club will air (I reviewed it here) and I definitely want to know what you think about it. Have at it in the comments.
oracknows | July 28, 2008You know, I think I've found a bride for Steve Wilson.
You remember Steve Wilson, don't you? He's the local "investigative reporter" in my hometown who recently did a truly awful "report" (it actually makes me cringe to call it a "report," but I couldn't think of anything else to call it) a couple of weeks ago, in which he regurgitated just about every anti-vaccine talking point about mercury and thimerosal there is out there. I hadn't seen anything like it, ever (at least not that I can recall). So bad was it that I feared the hyperconcentrated stupid might lower my blog bud PalMD's IQ by a…