Oh look, it's Dietrich

I caught a little bit of Fresh Air yesterday, just the last ten minutes of an interview with the filmmakers responsible for the new documentary The Cove.

It's a movie about a little village in Japan called Taiji, where fishermen round up thousands of dolphins into a cove each year, sell the finest specimens to the highest bidders, and slaughter the rest.

I had no idea this was going on. Most of the Japanese have no idea this is going on.

But it is going on. And I think that per a discussion I was having recently about activism, I have found the thing that I cannot let go. I have to do something about this.

Ric O'Barry, who trained the dolphins who played the original Flipper and thus touched off a multi-million-dollar industry, went through a transformation when one of those dolphins committed suicide and died in his arms. Dolphins, you see, aren't automatic breathers like humans; every breath they take is a conscious act. When they're stranded, when they're under stress, and sometimes, when they are in captivity, they will simply choose not to breathe.

I am more than ever convinced that these creatures should not be kept in captivity at all, and they certainly shouldn't be killed for meat - meat that contains many times the legal level of mercury, and that is being fed to schoolchildren.

The other reason they're being killed? These fishermen consider them "pests" - competitors for fish.

Please, help stop this. This film might finally bring this to an end. But help is still needed.

Start here.

rednikki: do you know anything about this? Any way you can find out what relationship Monterey Bay Aquarium has with other organizations that keep captive dolphins?

The muting, crushing snow that fell so insistently yesterday upset me somewhat; I am ready for spring to be here, and the warm day before the storm tricked me into longing.

But beneath the blizzard I could feel its tenuousness; it was still too warm for this, it would melt, and this would be the last of it.

I went out with my love last night to the scene of the crime to celebrate a year together. Seeing him sit across from me at that restaurant brought back everything I fell in love with him for. I stared into his eyes and vistas opened before me.

This morning I awoke refreshed despite the wine and the later evenings activities. Sun was streaming in, and I made the 8:10 bus for once. At Kendall, I waited 15 minutes for the bus that I ordinarily miss. But the waiting was sweet: the sun positively beamed, not just with light, but heat; the snow piled atop the greenhouse-style glass enclosure at the station slowly slid down and plopped, bit by bit, onto the brick below. A cute boy at the stop and I watched it, curiously, and each other, surreptitiously.

Springishness does strange things. I asked someone if she was waiting for the CT2, and rather than the curt grunts of January I received an affirmative, a wry smile, and a brief conversation. I stood again and watched the shadows the snow on the glass made on the walls and floor beneath, and suggested we place bets on which clump would fall next. Behind the clock tower in the square, white smoke arose and plumed in all directions, dancing apart in the sky, impossible just-washed blue.

And I thought of my novel, the one I haven't worked on since '99, the one I promised I'd write but had abandoned for a new, memoirish project, which is getting nowhere.

I got to work and opened the novel on my desktop. I read a chapter: it's good. It's quite good. A few missteps in language, some overly literary self-indulgence, but it's intriguing, linguistically rhythmic, haunting, strange.

And I think I'm ready to work on it again.