I am a corporate media consumer. I confess. I watched the two hour Future is Wild Animal Planet special, plus the latest Hollywood-Speilberg-DiCaprio vehicle, Catch Me If You Can, and enjoyed both of them immensely.

2 minutes into Catch Me I was glad to be there, I didn’t care if the movie sucked, the openning credits were worth the price of admission. Like the dumb show of Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre, or like one of Shakespeare’s prologues (Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona…) the entire story plays out in stylized silohuette. The movie did not however suck. It was well acted, engaging, amusing, and even occsaionally insightful.

Future is Wild is something you could have predicted would show in our house. It was a 2 hour mock nature documentary about the animals which evolve over the next 200 million years. This sort of speculative biology is Aidan’s cup of tea, and he wrote a good response to the show. He fails however to mention my favorite, which are the silver spiders. Clever, communal spiders build giant webs to harvest grass seeds. Even as we were watching Aidan was muttering “vegetarian spiders? creative”. But they aren’t vegetarians. They pile the grass seeds in caves where the last mammals on earth, mouse like “poggles” live. The spiders are farming poggles. (I confess I like the idea of animals that farm, if you let me get away with it, I’ll explain to you how otters farm kelp forests)