postapocalyptic wolves
Jan. 22nd, 2012 09:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanateI have finished knitting the giant gray sweater that I started last year, thanks largely to last weekend spent driving out to Ohio & sitting around talking with the in-laws. It is large, and gray, and fuzzy, and very warm, and also the largest knitting project I've ever completed.
Grauwulf's aunt, of whom he is not particularly fond, turned up on Sunday (because for some reason she will actually come visit her parents if we're there) and made some comment about how she wasn't patient enough to knit things. I didn't think of it at the time, but the appropriate counter to this is that I'm not patient enough to watch TV shows (they were discussing cable bills at the time.) If I have something to do with my hands to hold me down, then I may sit still long enough to get engaged with the plot, but for the most part, I compulsively wander off sometime in the first five minutes or so. However, thanks to a heads-up from the aquarium's marine animal rescue people, I went seeking out a PBS program on a whale necropsy and discovered that while we can't get any of the local on-air channels, the PBS website is a fascinating place.
While waiting for the sperm whale innards to release (after the air time) I discovered Radioactive Wolves, about wildlife in the Chernobyl "dead" zone. I hadn't really known much about the what-happened-after of Chernobyl, besides that awful footage of the immediate clean-up, with the film sparkling with radiation the workers couldn't see, but apparently they've fenced off a huge area where people had fought the river for farmland, and police it fairly strictly to keep people out. Now the buildings are falling apart and the wildlife is booming, complete with reintroduced large herbivores, and beavers reclaiming the rivers. It's an absolutely amazing post-apocalyptic landscape: human ruins everywhere, but no humans, and teeming with life, which makes a nice alternative to the usual barren wasteland.
It has a bunch of the things that annoy me about this genre of film as well: ridiculous use of the present tense, for instance, and a lack of speaking to the apparent inconsistencies of their assumptions ("it is only safe for people to be here X # of hours"... and by the way they've introduced extinct-in-the-wild endangered horses?) But for the visuals alone I quite recommend the hour spent watching. Nature, large predators, ruined cities...
And I find that I'm a little comforted by the idea of a world that people have mucked up beyond their tolerances, but where the wolves still thrive.
Xposty from dreamwidth.
Grauwulf's aunt, of whom he is not particularly fond, turned up on Sunday (because for some reason she will actually come visit her parents if we're there) and made some comment about how she wasn't patient enough to knit things. I didn't think of it at the time, but the appropriate counter to this is that I'm not patient enough to watch TV shows (they were discussing cable bills at the time.) If I have something to do with my hands to hold me down, then I may sit still long enough to get engaged with the plot, but for the most part, I compulsively wander off sometime in the first five minutes or so. However, thanks to a heads-up from the aquarium's marine animal rescue people, I went seeking out a PBS program on a whale necropsy and discovered that while we can't get any of the local on-air channels, the PBS website is a fascinating place.
While waiting for the sperm whale innards to release (after the air time) I discovered Radioactive Wolves, about wildlife in the Chernobyl "dead" zone. I hadn't really known much about the what-happened-after of Chernobyl, besides that awful footage of the immediate clean-up, with the film sparkling with radiation the workers couldn't see, but apparently they've fenced off a huge area where people had fought the river for farmland, and police it fairly strictly to keep people out. Now the buildings are falling apart and the wildlife is booming, complete with reintroduced large herbivores, and beavers reclaiming the rivers. It's an absolutely amazing post-apocalyptic landscape: human ruins everywhere, but no humans, and teeming with life, which makes a nice alternative to the usual barren wasteland.
It has a bunch of the things that annoy me about this genre of film as well: ridiculous use of the present tense, for instance, and a lack of speaking to the apparent inconsistencies of their assumptions ("it is only safe for people to be here X # of hours"... and by the way they've introduced extinct-in-the-wild endangered horses?) But for the visuals alone I quite recommend the hour spent watching. Nature, large predators, ruined cities...
And I find that I'm a little comforted by the idea of a world that people have mucked up beyond their tolerances, but where the wolves still thrive.
Xposty from dreamwidth.