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Natalie Portman on Target

In talking about her new vegan shoe line, Natalie Portman reveals she often shops at Target to find vegan shoes: "Basically, I [launched the line] out of a lack of […]

Gray wolves in northern Rockies lose endangered-species protections, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: He’s Back Hero or Zero? Across the Gray Divide Canada, a Tax! A Batt Out of Hell Coil in Fear […]

Deep thought of the day

When tallying up the costs and benefits of climate change (and mitigating climate change), economists generally use GDP figures. If the entire continent of Africa was wiped out, that would […]

Brazil seizes huge load of illegal Amazon timber after riots

Brazilian troops and police seized about 500 truckloads of illegal hardwood timber from the Amazon rainforest over the weekend, following riots and protests by sawmill workers and others that had […]

Science says we are turning the West into a desert

A major new study in Science by a dozen water experts, concluded humans are the primary cause of changes in Western river flow, winter air temperature and snow pack in the past 50 years -- and things will only get worse if we don't act soon. The abstract of the study, "Human-Induced Changes in the Hydrology of the Western United States" (subs. req'd), led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, states:

A metaphor for climate change and modern politics, in film form

That would be the title of An Inconvenient Truth, if it had been produced by the Coen brothers -- since young men (and women) are poised to suffer through the worst consequences of our immoral short-sightedness. (This is not such an odd pairing of movies, considering that No Country star Tommy Lee Jones was the Harvard roommate of Al Gore).

I do think No Country for Old Men deserves the Oscar for best movie of the year because it is brilliantly constructed and acted -- and delivers a powerful, coherent message to all of us from the Coen brothers and Cormac McCarthy.

Yet this is easily one of the most depressing and nihilistic major movies ever made. On the nihilistic/life-affirming story scale, where Hamlet is a 1 and It's a Wonderful Life is a 10, No Country is easily a zero and perhaps deserves negative numbers.

Normally I do not like movies with an unhappy ending, and this movie arguably has about the unhappiest ending a movie of its kind could possibly have -- but the movie did seem to me a perfect metaphor for modern American politics and global warming.

[You can read the basic plotline here. Since Wikipedia is untroubled by spoilers, with nary a warning, why should I be? Note to people who haven't seen the movie: (1) I'm assuming you have figured out that when a film is titled No Country for Old Men, you can be sure it does not end well, and (2) this post will not make much sense to you.]

Water wars!

The Georgia legislature, perhaps driven slightly around the bend by the drought battering its state, is attempting to claim part of the Tennessee River, which it claims is rightly Georgia’s […]

Shark superhighways and radioactive fish bones

Scientists studying the sea floor near Antarctica discovered new species of fish, plankton and jellyfish. "We had some of the world's experts on Antarctic fish and they were completely, completely flabbergasted," said the leader of the expedition ...

... a researcher studying a dead zone off the northwest coast of the U.S. saw nothing on the ocean floor. "It appeared that everything that couldn't swim or scuttle away had died," she said. The dead zone is thought to be a result of climate change ...

... the government of Taiwan allocated $1 million in Taiwanese new dollars to clear the shore of dead fish, both wild and farmed, that had died during a recent cold snap ...

Friday music blogging: She & Him

I have an enormous and longstanding celebrity crush on actress Zooey Deschanel. I was a Deschanelophile way back when I saw her in Mumford, and then Almost Famous sealed the […]

California sewage makes for femme fish, says study

Chemicals in southern California wastewater are sneaking past sewage-treatment plants and into the ocean, where they can seriously wack out fishy hormone levels, according to preliminary research. Flame retardants, PCBs, […]