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Video Subscribe to Video Blog  Note: This is a separate subscription from that of our standard web log and podcast. This subscription will automatically download videos in the same way podcasts are downloaded. As these are in Windows Media files they may not play on all devices.  Thursday, March 02, 2006
Souvenirs: when you travel, you both take them and leave them. I think about this as I sit on my deck at home scraping Costa Rican mud off of my boots. Who knows what is in this stuff: maybe anteater scat, or some seeds dropped from the bill of a three-wattled bellbird that will plant themselves in my garden, thrive and perhaps (oh dear) eat my cat. I
took a hike through Costa Rica's Monteverde Cloud forest with Danilo
Wallace, a park ranger born and raised in what is now one of the
world's foremost rainforest preserves. He said that when he was a child
he shot Toucans with a slingshot, cut off their bills and made
necklaces. For his parents, the forest was a servant, from which they
extracted building materials and food. That has changed. (MORE) 2:31:57 PM 
 Thursday, February 09, 2006 I am lucky enough to occasionally work on a project that is both interesting and makes me feel good. Last summer I was one of the consultants who helped create and communicate a strategy for developing sustainable tourism in the Mekong region of Southeast Asia. I first became involved with the Mekong in 1996 when I traveled to Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar (or Burma), Thailand, Vietnam and Yunnan Province, China to develop media for videos, books, websites and the like. The latest project, with the sponsorship of the Asian Development Bank, outlines a strategy that aims to reduce poverty by targeting economically-depressed areas, managing the adverse social impacts that tourism can have, particularly the exploitation of women and children and protecting and promoting both the natural and cultural heritages of the region. The ADB says that the strategy could help raise more than a million people out of extreme poverty by 2015. It is an ambitious plan that, happy to say, was approved by all six governments. Here is a short documentary I made on The Mekong Tourism Strategy. It is not a travelogue but demonstrates how travel and tourism has as much potential to improve nature and humankind as it does to destroy it and that there a lot of people around the world trying to make it happen.
7:21:05 PM
Thursday, December 08, 2005
”Watch out where the huskies go, and don’t you eat that yellow snow” Frank Zappa God tipped over the snowglobe and fresh flakes fall, frosting the castle and the Canadian Rockies. On the banks of the Bow we sit, sprinkled with new snow, un-sullied by foot and tire prints, un-yellowed by cats and dogs. It is the first snow of the season. Holiday decorations go up, fireplaces blaze with bonhomie, while politicians in Ottawa punch each other out over a kickback scandal. Did you hear about it in the US, eh? The government of our neighbor to the north brought down and the US media ignored it. It is a myth, by the way, that Eskimos have 200 words for snow. MORE 2:50:23 PM
Friday, November 25, 2005
The French are getting fat, so say reports, consuming and consumed by le fast food. You wouldn't know it by looking at their scrawny turkeys. Dindon rings with onomonopoea. This time last year my wife and eschewed dindon and enjoyed a Thanksgiving rack of lamb with expat friends before roaming about the City of Lights. The audio story is from last year but we just got around to editing a minute of video from our nighttime stroll. The podcast version is in standard Windows Media video but, if you have the bandwidth, there is a downloadable HDTV verson. READ MORE 11:40:15 AM
Friday, November 04, 2005
"So long and thanks for all the fish As organisms, we humans are pretty stupid, easily outclassed by bumblebees (bombus terrestris), which rarely sting and would never think of bombing Iraq. Their life purpose is to bumble about pollinating and and helping to create life. Mice are also extremely gifted, according to the late Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, as are dolphins, which escaped an earth about to be destroyed singing "So long and thanks for all the fish." My dad said that fish was brain food, which scientists have proven to be true. And while we can't, like Dolphins, joyfully snort krill, we can avail ourselves of the convenience of a supermarket fish counter or a restaurant.
4:15:33 PM
Friday, October 07, 2005
AUDIO:
MP3 The 2nd DARPA Grand Challenge takes place this weekend. It is a virtual Star Wars junkyard of unpeopled robots rolling across the desert in pursuit of a 2 million dollar hare. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known for developing The Internet and training dolphins to carry bombs, sponsors the event. But no spook stuff here, the public is welcome, IF you want to get yourself to Primm, Nevada (a nowhere with no there there) real real early Saturday morning (Oct 8). We were at the Grand Challenge last year, in another godforsaken spot near Barstow, California, cheering on a doomed dunebuggy that bit the sand in the trials. This time twenty contestants will try to complete s 175 mile course to win $2-million bucks, double last years prize. Take a look at the video we shot last year, which included one of this year's finalists: the mighty TerraMax, a 37,000 pound six wheeled vector of shock and awe that won't stop for anything. Read about last year. Also, happy 90th birthday to Les Paul, with a new CD and still strummng strong at the Iridium in New York City every Monday evening. He invented the multi-track tape recorder, an instrument Orson Welles called "The Octopus." The 15th annual Ignoble Prizes have been handed out, honoring scientific genius that, in the words of its founder "cannot and should not be reproduced." Their web page is just as cheezy as the winners, among them: Neuticles, artificial replacement testicles for dogs (DARPA would probably mine them with plastics explosives) and a carpet-covered alarm clock that runs away and hides before it can be switched off. I love word books. I wish Bill Bryson would abandon his grumpy, partially-manufactured travel stories and get back to writing the word books he gained his first fame from. There is a new one by the UK's Adam Jacot de Boinod that I can't wait to get my hands on. It is called The Meaning of Tingo, one of those collections of bon and not-so-bon mots that is guaranteed to make you the life of the party. Tingo is a word in Pascuense, the language of Easter Island, that means borrowing objects from a friend's house, one by one, until there is nothing left. The author's background is as a researcher for a BBC radio quiz. Figures. Areodjarekput an Inuit word, stands for the practice of exchanging wives for a few days to help pass the time in the long winter nights. In Russian, koshatnik is a dealer of stolen cats and to a Japanese man bakku-shan is a woman who looks attractive from the rear but not from the front.1:33:22 PM
Friday, September 23, 2005 Oktoberfest starts in September, lasweekend in fact. I went to Oktoberfest a couple of years ago and did not have a beer. Nope, not one biermadchen's tear of frothy brew, a sacrilege for which I will surely rot in some Faustian teetotler's hell. But I did witness something that I had read about but never believed I would see.  Video-WMVThe Story with Audio 3:35:34 PM
I am a river rat. Not a rafter, but a lollygaging Huck Finn kinda swamp rodent who likes to flow with the current and poke around the slough. Lord Buddha describes The Dharma as a raft that floats one to Nirvana. A few days on a river and I find myself paddling pretty close to a perfect state of bliss. I love jungle rivers, draped with serpentine vines (not to mention envined serpents) where steam rises in the morning, macaques squawk and shake their hairy little fists, insects whine like powertools and plumy birds, aloft and aloof, snub me as a lower form of life while I stare at them in admiration. Thailand's Kwae Noi, better known as the River Kwai, is such a river...MORE 3:26:58 PM
Sonoma County,
California contains a wide range of microenvironments, which translate
to prime cropland for many wine varietals, ewok-habitat redwood
forests and as rugged a coastline as you'll find anywhere. I flew
over Sonoma County with pilot and photographer Robert Campbell a couple of autumns ago:
2:44:39 PM
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