The Essential Dinosaur Pack Disc 2: DVD Review

This disc, although it has a copyright date of 2008, is a collection of TV programs originally aired between 2003 and 2008. Thus none are really up to date.

“The Mystery Dinosaur,” from 2006, deals with the discovery of  “Jane.” This fossil has been variously identified as a Nanotyrannus and a juvenile Tyrannosaurus Rex. The program is primarily about the argument, which could date it, but as far as I can tell, the argument has never been resolved. Thus the program is still fairly current, though it is more science than entertainment.

“Dinosaurs: Return to Life” deals with the observations that the differences between dinosaurs and birds appear to be due to a relatively small number of mutations. Could birds be “reverse bioengineered” to produce something like dinosaurs? Would we really want to?

The four-program series “Dinosaur Planet” first aired in 2003, and unlike the rest of the programs in this set, it is definitely intended to be entertainment. Each of the four episodes focuses on one or two individual dinosaurs and follows them through a period of their lives. Each episode also covers something that is important or intriguing in the fossil record, and links back to that record. Thus “White Tip’s Journey,” featuring a Velociraptor,  suggests one explanation for the famed (real) fossil of a Velociraptor locked in a death struggle with a Protoceratops.

“Alpha’s Egg,” featuring the large sauropod Saltasaurus and the medium-sized predator Aucasaurus,  is based on the discovery of  a Saltasaurus nesting ground,  fossilized in Patagonia.

Pod of “Pod’s Travels” is based on a Pyroraptor,  a European raptor genus. The episode includes the natural hazards (earthquake, tsunami) that made occasional travel between the islands that made up Europe 80 million years ago possible. The focus of the program is on the dwarfing effect that islands tend to have on species. Pod is a Gulliver among Lilliputians when a tidal wave sweeps him to a much smaller island.

“Little Das’ Hunt” follows a juvenile Daspletosaurus  (an earlier close relative of Tyrannosaurus Rex) learning to hunt, and a herd of Maiasaura. The episode is based on a group of Daspletosaurus and Maiasaura found fossilized together in Montana, but the evidence for the kind of pack behavior shown in the episode is scanty and controversial.

Obviously there is a good deal of imagination going into the behavior, color, feathers or lack of them, musculature and behavior of all of these dinosaurs. Here I want to mention three, because they struck me so strongly.

The first is the underline of the creatures portrayed.  Theropod dinosaurs did indeed have a bone jutting back from the pelvis. However, the velociraptors are shown as having this bone stick out of the body, covered by a narrow wedge of tissue. It seems to me that this arrangement would be very susceptible to breakage, and that evolution would have reduced the length of the bone fairly fast. It makes much more sense that the tail and the posterior part of the belly were much deeper, with the projection buried in muscle. In fact a mummified hadrosaur had exactly this conformation, with a tail much deeper than anyone expected. Why not Velociraptor?

Second is the behavior of prey dinosaurs. Granted they didn’t have much brain, but instinct is also guided by evolution. Threatening a predator with teeth adapted to munching relatively soft leaves, and exposing the vulnerable neck in the process, does not make sense. Kicking (recent work has shown sauropods had vicious kicks) or tail swipes are far more reasonable for the big plant-eaters. This bothered me as far back as the Disney dinosaurs in Fantasia, when the stegosaurus turns to try to threaten T. Rex with its tiny mouth, instead of lashing out with its spiked tail. Now Disney may be forgiven – after all, Fantasia came out in 1940. Between making his dinosaurs animatable by artists drawing each cel by hand and the paleontological knowledge of the day, he did a respectable job even if his sauropods did have necks like snakes and his characters never actually lived at the same time. But that stegosaurus is pure theater, and Discovery Channel should have known better.

The third is grass. There is now some controversy over whether dinosaurs and grass coexisted, but the amount of grass shown is almost certainly incorrect.

Overall evaluation? Watch, but don’t believe everything you see. This DVD has a lot of creative interpretation, some of it almost certainly wrong.

The Essential Dinosaur Pack Disc 1 (DVD Review)

This set of two DVDs, although the cover has a date of 2008, in fact combines episodes originally aired on the Discovery Channel from 2001 to 2008. The first disc contains four episodes:  Valley of the T. Rex (2001), T-Rex: New Science, New Beast (2006), When Dinosaurs Roamed America (2001) and Utah’s Dino Graveyard (2005). Keep the true dates straight, because our interpretation of dinosaurs is changing rapidly, and the episodes at times seem to contradict each other. None of the interpretations are truly currant, or represent today’s ongoing controversies.

This DVD focuses on the processes of finding, unearthing and interpreting fossils, with only minor clips of computer generation of the living animals. It will be of more interest to budding paleontologists than to those looking for entertainment.

Valley of the T-Rex looks at the idea put forward by Jack Horner that T-Rex was primarily a scavenger, not a predator. The idea is hardly new, and is far earlier than the discovery of T-Rex’s tiny arms – Wiley Ley proposed it as a science article in the April 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. I really doubt that there is any such thing as a pure predator or a pure scavenger. Any predator will scavenge a fresh kill, and any scavenger will kill an animal down and helpless, if only by eating it. Like the short-faced bear, T-Rex may have used its impressive size to intimidate other predators off their kills, but that doesn’t mean it never killed.

T-Rex: New Science, New Beast is more balanced, mentioning that how T-Rex fed is controversial but not getting into the controversy. Rather, it summarized new (as of 2006) methods of investigating dinosaur fossils. This included learning how to tell how old fossil dinosaurs were at death (which led to the discovery of the fantastic teenaged growth spurt of T-Rex and the relatively young age (29) of Sue, the largest T-Rex found.) At least one dinosaur was sexed, though the technique only works with pregnant (with eggs) females. Study of locomotion in modern animals has been applied to dinosaur skeletons, suggesting a lower top speed for full-grown T-Rex than was previously estimated. The episode also mentioned the discovery that some fossil bone had collagen, study of T-Rex bite strength, and the discovery of feathered theropods, leading to the possibility that T-Rex juveniles, at least, had downy feathers.

When Dinosaurs Roamed America goes through the history of dinosaurs, using an American location to spotlight each time period. Remember this segment, and the computer animated clips included, is eleven years old in 2012.

The video starts with New York (Permian-Jurassic, first dinosaurs, early opening of the Atlantic.) It then moves on to Exeter Township, PA (Triassic-Jurassic boundary, theropod-sauropod split.) Utah was a savannah 150 million years ago, wandered over by giant sauropods, their predators, and the smaller herbivorous dinosaurs that survived at their side. New Mexico 90 million years ago was a tropical swamp, with an explosion of flowering plants and broadleafed trees. The notorious K-T (Cretaceous-Triassic) boundary and the final extinction of the dinosaurs is investigated in South Dakota. The video is not bad, but dated.

The final program, Utah’s Dino Graveyard, covers a single location with a huge number of dinosaur fossils of a single species. Falcarius Utahensis was a strange beast even by dinosaur standards, as are most of its Therizinosaurian relatives. It is one of the earliest of a group that evolved from raptor-like carnivores to big-bellied but still relatively upright herbivores. This does happen – all dinosaurs, even the huge sauropods such as Apatosaurus evolved from early ancestors that ran on two legs and preyed on insects. More recently, the giant panda seems to be a bear that has embraced a diet of bamboo.

The real question is, what killed large numbers of the same species? Their preservation seems to be due to the fact that they all died near ancient springs, with rock from the spring deposits forming a cap that preserved their bones, but could the spring also have played a role in their deaths?

In general the computer graphics are adequate but not inspired, and at times show behavior I have doubts about — but I’ll save that critique for the second disc.

Dinosaurs Inside and Out: DVD Review

This is actually a reissue of programs aired on the Discovery Channel in 1997, though the DVD has a 2009 date. The package date is very misleading, as both the facts given and the computer animation are 15 years old – before the first airing of Walking With Dinosaurs. The computer animation, in particular, is very poor, and I would certainly not buy this DVD to watch the dinosaurs!

The DVD includes four 1-hour programs: Renaissance of the Dinosaurs, Land of the Giants, The Killer Elite, and And Then There Were None. In order, they deal with the public fascination with dinosaurs, the large herbivores, the two-legged killers such as T-Rex and raptors, and the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Luckily, the program concentrates not on the videos, but on the science of paleontology. Even that is a bit dated in describing what is known about dinosaurs, though the finding, excavating, packing and cleaning of specimens is worth watching for budding paleontologists. So is the history of our fascination with dinosaurs, including more than the usual information about how our views about dinosaurs have changed since the Crystal Palace reconstruction and the dinosaur wars between Cope and Marsh.

If you are looking for a video to entertain children, this is not it. On the other hand, the DVD does have a number of airings of scientific controversies and field operations.

One point I would disagree with. The question of whether dinosaurs resembled birds or reptiles in care of young is addressed by using fossil bone cross sections to determine whether newly hatched dinosaurs had strong enough legs to stand. I strongly suspect that some dinosaurs could stand and some couldn’t, and the same is true of modern birds. Certainly chicks and ducklings are on their legs and finding their own food almost at once, and I suspect at least some dinosaurs may have been the same. I have seen arguments in later DVDs that some pterosaurs (which admittedly are not dinosaurs) were able to fly shortly after hatching.

All in all, this is not a DVD I would consider entertainment, but it could be of interest to a budding paleontologist.

Kids and Cannons: Fairbanks Synphony Concert

A friend of mine claims that Fairbanks has more arts events for its size than any other city. I’m not going to take a stand one way or another, if only because the metric is so poorly defined, but it certainly has more going on than my inability to drive at night (and the lack of alternative transportation) will let me attend! This time of year, however, the evenings are light enough I can go places, and the Fairbanks Symphony’s Concerto Competition concert April 29 was certainly worth attending.

The Concerto Competition is held each year to find the best young local musicians in four categories: 11 years and under, 12-15, 16-18 and University of Alaska Fairbanks students. Winners play with the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra at one of their concerts – this year, the last concert of the season, Sunday evening. They were superb. Every one received a standing ovation, and in my opinion, well deserved. Granted, the tenor is a graduate student and an understudy for the role of Rudolpho in the Opera Fairbanks production of La Bohéme this summer, but these kids are talented and the concerto portion of the concert alone was worth attending.

And that wasn’t all.

The second half of the concert had two “patriotic” pieces that were both inspiring and somewhat overwhelming. The first was Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait. You know the one – bits about Lincoln, interspersed with his own words, read to a background which (and I caught this primarily because of the pre-concert lecture) quoted several times from Camptown Races. It took a few bars for the orchestra to find the right balance between their own volume and that of the reader, but once the balance was found it was an excellent performance. Then came Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

Maestro Zilberkant always gives an introductory lecture before the concert, and when I can attend the concert, I generally manage to arrive early for the lecture. This time he let us in on some interesting bits about the cannon fire and church bells which are orchestrated parts of this piece — often with real cannons, which are not all that easy to time properly, and which (for obvious reasons) are not used indoors. Timing? Imagine a gunner lighting a fuse to fire a cannon which has to go off at exactly the right time. How long must the fuse be? Exactly when must it be lit? And since cannons have to have a cool-down period between firings, it takes no less that 18 cannons!

It is possible to fire the cannons outdoors and have the sound piped indoors, and to Maestro Zilberkant’s credit, he checked with our local Army base, Fort Wainwright, about the possibility. A century ago, it might have worked. Today it would require closing all roads in the vicinity of the university and closing the airspace over the university (which would mean closing down the Fairbanks airport.) It wasn’t practical. A recording of cannon fire was used, and played through – well, I don’t think they were your usual everyday speakers. Maestro Zilberkant warned those sitting near the speakers to move before the final piece was played. The building shook – literally. I don’t think anyone’s hearing was actually damaged, but then I was at the very back of the theater, and the loudspeakers were at the front.

I hope I can figure out a way to get to more concerts next winter.

IMAX T-Rex: DVD Review

Back when IMAX theaters were rare and found mostly in museums I went to a 3-D IMAX show – T-Rex – at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Even then I found it a peculiar amalgam of three-dimensional animation, paleontology, and not-very-good science fiction. (OK, it’s pretending to be science fiction, but it’s closer to bad fantasy.)

I got the DVD a while back, when I was getting most of the dinosaur videos available.

It’s a 1998 movie, and of course a lot has been learned about T-Rex in the intervening 14 years. Not enough, however, to make me feel like trying to pet one, or think it was capable of gratitude to another species!

Both the animation and the sequences of paleontologists in the field are fascinating, and so is the information about museum displays and Charles Knight. If the producers had stuck to the informational part, and perhaps used the idea of T-Rex as a nurturing mother in a more reasonable way, this could have been an excellent film, though a short one (44 minutes.) However, they insisted on adding a plot which involved something that left the audience guessing whether dreams, hallucinations, or time travel was involved. The supposed resolution, with a paleontologist finding a 20^th century watch, was totally ridiculous. Complex metal objects like watches simply do not fossilize.

Further, neither the big-screen of IMAX nor the 3-D were available in the DVD I have. This was a movie which depended on these effects.

Interestingly, there is considerable current research on the extent to which tyrannosaurs might have lived and hunted in family groups, and it is generally recognized today that birds are fundamentally modern dinosaurs, descended from the same bipedal group to which T-Rex belonged. The DVD, watched with the production date in mind, does give some interesting information on the history of how we think about dinosaurs. Just forget the plot!

p.s: As an update on last week’s post about ice jam floods, there is still a flood warning out for the Salcha River area, and the ice went out at Nenana at 7:39 yesterday evening. This can happen from April 20 to May 20, so breakup this year was early.

Pride and Prejudice: Different Points of View

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

So begins one of the most enduring and enjoyable of English novels.  Over two centuries have passed since it was first written, and very little less since it was published.  It is a comedy of manners, and those manners are very far from today’s – but the human interactions and perplexities remain as strong as ever.  Derivatives have been rewritten on everything from murder mysteries to zombies to time travel. There are of course different editions of the original work or commentaries on it, but there are also sequels, plays, videos, retellings and even a paper doll.

I have recently been indulging in the original novel and two of the derivative works: the DVD of the BBC dramatization and a trilogy by Pamela Aidan of a retelling of the story from Darcy’s point of view.  The three versions give an interesting demonstration of the importance of point of view.

The original book is primarily focused on Elizabeth’s point of view.  It is not a tight point of view; Mr. Collins sneaks out to court Charlotte, Bingley’s sisters talk about Elizabeth behind her back, and even Darcy’s emotions are made clear to the reader long before Elizabeth has any hint that he considers her anything but a nuisance.  But in general the reader is not told much that Elizabeth does not know, and there is no scene without a woman present.

The dramatization follows the book quite closely, even to most of the dialogue being taken word for word from the book. Some changes, such as Darcy’s swim (Jane Austin certainly never thought of his meeting Elizabeth at Pemberley dripping wet) are minor, but the scenes immediately following discovery of Lydia’s elopement produce a definite shift toward a more distant and omniscient point of view.  In the book, the reader is encouraged to think, with Elizabeth, that Darcy wants nothing more to do with the family.  In the dramatization, the viewer follows Darcy to London and knows long before Lydia lets it slip that Darcy, far from withdrawing himself from the contamination of Elizabeth’s family, has humbled himself to bribe the man he hates most to marry Lydia.  The effect is a switch to a more omniscient point of view.

The Aidan trilogy, Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman, is written using a tighter limited omniscient point of view than the original novel, but this time the character followed is Darcy.  The first book, An Assembly Such as This, follows most of Volume I of Pride and Prejudice.  As far as the scenes in which Darcy and Elizabeth both appear, there is little difference in what happens, though of course the interpretations are quite different.  Three new characters are introduced early, but only one, Darcy’s valet Fletcher, is human.  (The other two are Darcy’s horse and the young hound he is training.)  The last two chapters of the first Aidan book are concerned with Darcy’s attempts to distract Bingley from Jane in London.  Here Fletcher comes into his own in a sartorial rivalry–quite unanticipated on Darcy’s part–with Beau Brummel.  I suspect the major purpose of the author is to depict the shallowness and degeneracy of the group that would be considered Darcy’s social equals, and to point out that Darcy is aware of and disgusted by their behavior.  Other new characters introduced in this book are of minor importance, though some become critical later and at least one, Lord Dyfed Brougham, turns out to be an important character in Darcy’s recognition of his own selfishness.

The second Aidan book, Duty and Desire, covers the period between Darcy’s separation of Bingley from Jane and his visit to Rosings.  Elizabeth appears only through Darcy’s infatuation–which he is trying his best to overcome.  He must have an heir, and Pemberley must have a mistress.  He actively seeks a wife, hoping to put Elizabeth out of his head.  Darcy’s interaction with his sister in the first third of the book, together with the later house party, make his eventual proposal to Elizabeth at Rosings more believable, though it is not until the third book that he finally acts on his infatuation.    (I cannot help but wonder if Ms. Aidan saw the PBS special, Regency House Party, as that certainly ties into the last two-thirds of the second book.)  But the Aidan book is otherwise quite unconnected to the Austen original.

The third book, These Three Remain, covers the second half of Pride and Prejudice, from the arrival at Rosings of Darcy and his cousin, the proposal, and most important, and totally left out of the Austen original, Darcy’s struggle with himself which leads him “to see himself as others see him”. By the time he meets Elizabeth again, at Pemberley, his change is convincing enough that we can follow him to London and his bribery of Wickham to marry Lydia with some degree of belief. After this, the trilogy gradually returns to the original novel, though I greatly enjoyed the scene where Lady Catherine confronts Darcy at his town house.

By itself, the trilogy would not compete with Jane Austen’s novel.  It does, however, complement it, as does the dramatization.

All in all, the novel and the two derivative works form an interesting demonstration of how different points of view can make different stories of the same events.

Allosaurus: DVD Review

This is a Walking With Dinosaurs program, and like most of that group the animation is excellent, even though the narration tends to present guesswork as fact. Case in point: the red color above the eyes, mentioned as a sign of sexual maturity. To the best of my knowledge (and it was certainly true in 2000, the copyright date) both color and possible significance are pure speculation.

The story follows the life of an Allosaurus, “Big Al,” as reconstructed by forensic analysis of the bones of one of the most complete Allosaurus fossil skeletons ever discovered. I found the second half of the video, which deals with the actual forensic analysis, even more interesting than the fictionalized video of Al himself.

Al was certainly a “live fast and die young” dinosaur. His bones are remarkable not only for being found relatively complete, but for the number of healed injuries they show. How did he get those injuries? The main program gives possible reasons, though of course things may not have happened exactly as shown. But we know he survived broken bones that had time to heal completely and a toe infection that must have lasted for months before his death.

I would like to make two points about dinosaur DVDs in general. First, our knowledge of dinosaurs is changing so fast that is essential to know the dates at which the videos were made! Dates on the cover of DVDs made up from programs originally broadcast on television can vary widely from dates of the original broadcasts. This one’s from 2000; I’ll go back as I find the actual copyright dates on the individual programs and add them to earlier reviews.

Second, for some reason animators feel compelled to have their dinosaurs roaring (or making other sounds) at every opportunity. Now animals do make sounds, and we certainly expect dinosaurs did. But predators, in particular, make sounds at particular times for particular reasons. They may communicate with sounds. They may warn off rivals, or try to intimidate them. They may call to attract mates. They may make sounds to deliberately panic prey. They try very hard not to make a sound when they are trying to stalk prey! Certainly they do not hiss, growl, or roar while setting up an ambush!

All in all, this DVD is worth watching if you want to watch dinosaurs in action, or see what the state of dinosaur science was in the 20^th century. Just keep in mind when it was made.

The Four-Winged Dinosaur: DVD Review

This is a 2008 Nova (PBS) program on a dinosaur (Microraptor) that is still the subject of breaking news, so in some ways it is pretty dated. But it also gives a good view of how scientific controversies are resolved (or not) and some of the tools of paleontology.

Most people, thinking of dinosaurs, think big. Tyrannosaurus. Stegosaurus. Triceratops. Even the raptors of Jurassic Park were large, though not overwhelmingly so.

But how much of that is due to a combination of publicity (the biggest of anything is news) and preservation bias? How many of today’s birds ever fossilize?

Luckily there are formations in which fossils are preserved with extraordinary fidelity. One such formation, in China, has yielded numerous specimens which retain vestiges of fur or feathers, leading to the recognition that feathers were widespread on dinosaurs. Most of the feathers seem to have been more for warmth or display than for flying, as they lack the aerodynamic asymmetry seen in the flight feathers of today’s birds.

This is not the case for Microraptor, which had asymmetric flight feathers on all four limbs.

But how were those limbs used in flight? Could the animal actually have spread its rear limbs horizontally, as first suggested by Xu Xing when he initially described it?

The controversies explored in this DVD are twofold: how did Microraptor use its extraordinary feathered hind limbs, and are birds in fact dinosaurs?

Birds have all of the skeletal features used to state that a fossil is a dinosaur. Given the evidence of many other feathered dinosaurs from the same Chinese formation, I have problems seeing birds as anything other than flying dinosaurs. The origin of flight — from gliding out of trees or scrambling up from the ground — is a completely separate question, and should have been separated in this way by the scientists involved.

One argument repeatedly made by one of the scientists strikes me as as based on a rather poor assumption. This is that “dinosaurs didn’t climb trees, so flight could not have originated by dinosaurs gliding down from trees.” Who says dinosaurs couldn’t have climbed trees? Certainly the big ones couldn’t have, but there is increasing evidence that some dinosaurs were considerably smaller than a turkey, and turkeys (the original wild ones, not their domesticated descendants) certainly roost in trees. Lack of evidence the dinosaurs climbed trees is not the same as evidence that they did not climb trees.

Leaving that aside, the bulk of the DVD follows experimental work trying to reconstruct the 3-dimensional skeleton of Microraptor from the fossils (often flattened in the fossilization process) followed by wind tunnel work to asses the probable way in which it used its limbs to fly or glide.

The DVD is worth watching for this experimental work, though none of the work shown should be considered conclusive. It is worth pointing out the actual fossils are still giving up more information, the latest being evidence that this animal probably had iridescent blue-black feathers. Neither this DVD nor the microraptors shown in Prehistoric Park show this color.

Tourist Trap: Best Fiction Book Award.

Three years ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

There is nothing like cancer to make you realize that your time on Earth is limited, especially if you’re in your late 60’s to start with. If I wanted anyone to read the five novels I’d written, I had to do something. I went to a round table discussion on publishing shortly after I finished radiation therapy, and for the first time heard of assisted self-publishing. This sounded do-able, and I wrote down two names: Lulu and iUniverse.

I checked their web sites and decided to try the first book with iUniverse, which offered an editorial evaluation as part of the package. I had it edited by Carla Helfferich, who’d edited much of my popular science, and sent it off. The result, with Editor’s Choice right from the start, was my first published book, Homecoming. I submitted it to several contests, of which only Reader Views offered an online book review as the first step in judging. The review was published, and the book won 2^nd place in science fiction. Further, it was evident from the review that the reviewer had really read and fully evaluated the book.

Tourist Trap, which Carla thought was the better book of the two, did not fare as well with the editorial review at iUniverse. I think the problem was that I did not use a standard science fiction plot arc. My protagonist leaned a few things about himself, rather than getting himself out of an impossible situation without help. The iUniverse editor wanted me to drop the last two chapters and have the protagonist get himself out of trouble, which would have completely ruined what I saw as the main point of the book.

With Carla’s backing, I went ahead without Editor’s Choice. This has meant among other things that bookstores did not get discounts or returnability, which has certainly hurt sales. (I think that, at least, has been fixed.) Partly because of this I entered Tourist Trap in only one contest, Reader Views, as that way I would at least get another unbiased review.

I hoped to get another placing in science fiction.

I know I had that March 1, when they announced the finalists.

On March 7 the winners were announced, and I was pleased to find Tourist Trap took 1^st place in science fiction. Then I found a later e-mail, and discovered that Tourist Trap had won the Garcia Award for the Best Fiction Book of the Year. What? Science fiction books don’t do that! But when I checked the winners list again, there at the end of the post were the special awards, and Tourist Trap had won a $1000 value publicity package from Maryglenn McCombs Book Publicity.

Tourist Trap is a book about a young man’s coming of age as well as a science fiction adventure, and that young man already knows he will face an awesome responsibility as an adult. He must learn the difference between justice and revenge, and recognize that he himself may be destroyed by his own choices. But it’s also a book about a group of teenagers traveling through a world populated by the animals we lost at the end of the ice age—mammoths and sabertooth cats, to name a couple. The travelers don’t even realize—until it’s almost too late—that they are the intended victims of a murder plot. To quote from the review: “Tourist Trap” is a great read for anyone that wants motivation and feeling to accompany the action in their sci-fi adventure. Alien beings and super powers are an integral part of Roi’s story but what makes this novel really shine is the heart. Nobody is good or evil just because that’s their assigned role. Just like in real life, everyone has their own motivations and desires, and Bowling does a great job of letting the reader see what it would be like to walk in the shoes of Roi, Xazhar, and even madman Zhaim.

Sometimes it pays to stay with your own feeling about what’s right with a book.

Conferences, Places and Events

These posts are based on places, conferences and events.

Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival
General Description 7/18/10
Summer Festival 1 7/20/10
Summer Festival 2 7/21/10
Summer Festival 3 7/22/10
Summer Festival 4 7/23/10
Summer Festival 5 7/24/10
Summer Festival 2^nd Week 7/25/10
Summer Festival 7/26 7/27 10
Summer Festival 7/27 7/28/10
Summer Festival 7/28 7/29/10
Summer Festival 7/29 7/30/10
Summer Festival 7/30 7/31/10
Summer Arts Festival 7/12/11
Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival Day 1 7/18/11
Summer Arts Festival Day 2 7/19/11
POCHOIR 7/19/11
Summer Arts Festival Day 3 7/20/11
Summer Arts Festival Day 4 7/21/11
Summer Arts Festival Day 5 7/22/11
Summer Arts Festival Day 6 7/25/11
Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival Day 7 7/26/11
Summer Arts Festival Day 8 7/27/11
Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival Day 9 7/28/11
Summer Arts Festival Day 10 7/29/11
Writing Craft and Practice: Some Suggested Books 7/30/11
Summer Arts Festival: Three Concerts in One Day 8/2/11
Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival Reprise 8/30/11

OLLI Classes
The Cambrian Explosion 4/22/11
How did We Learn to Walk? 4/29/11
Back to the Water 5/6/11
Where did the First Plants Come From? 5/13/11
It’s Class Time—Even for Adults 3/9/11
The Alaskan Mesozoic 11/1/11
Mesozoic Alaska, Part 2 11/8/11
Alaskan Mesozoic 3 11/15/11

Other Events
First Book Signing 11/21/10
Reading in the Dark 2/20/11
Homecoming Award 3/1/11
Ice Sculpture: Ice and Sun 3/26/11
More on Ice Melting 3/27/11
Musk Ox Art 9/6/11
A Concert for New York, as Seen in Alaska 9/13/11
Fairbanks Chamber Orchestra Concert 10/3/11
Ice Art 1 3/6/12
Ice Again: Single Block by daylight 1 3/8/12
Ice Sculpture: Single Block by Daylight 2 3/10/12
More Ice Sculpture: Multi-Block in Progress 3/13/12
Multi-Block winners 1 3/15/12
World Ice Art Championships Multi-Block 2 3/17/12
The Fairbanks Ice Park for Children 3/20/12
Kids and Cannons 5/1/12
Tanana Valley Farmers’ Market Opening 5/17/12

Places
The Alaska Salmon Bake 5/17/11
Trying to Sell Books (Farmers’ Market) 6/23/11
Tanana Valley State Fair 8/9/11
Tanana Valley State Fair Again 8/11 11
The Johnson Art Museum 10/18/11
Tombstone and Bisbee, Arizona 10/25/11
North Pole Christmas Eve 12/24/11