Dave and the Whales

My friend Dave is once again sailing with the Greenpeace ship Esperanza, shadowing the Japanese whaling fleet on their annual whale hunt. Here's his latest dispatch:

The Esperanza is currently heading south, and the weather is getting warmer. On Sunday morning, the Japanese whaling fleet left its home port of Shimonoseki, and did the 10 hours transit out to the open sea, south of Japan. As they slipped out through rather hectic shipping lanes, they switched off their Automated Identification Systems (AIS) and went into cover - we see this as being proof that they think they can't be too upfront about what they their dodgy whaling business. They used naval vessels as decoys - not sure how the taxpayers feel about that.

Right now, we're getting shadowed by a coastguard vessel (we can't see it) and we're looking for the fleet.

• Here's the lowdown on what happened on Sunday
• I was on RTE's Morning Ireland on Monday
• Me in the Guardian: Japan urged to recall whaling fleet
• The Great Whale Trail at the Greenpeace website.

If you want to follow the story, the Greenpeace site will have frequent updates. Last year's voyage also yielded some great photographs of the sea life of the antarctic.

Other articles on the subject:

• The Daily Telegraph online: Japan's whaling fleet delays Antarctic depature
• Gallup/Nippon poll: attitudes to whaling in Japan
• From Youtube: Whale Love Wagon and Koji Yamamura's award-winning short film

Dialing for Whales: You can encourage other world leaders to get on Japan's case about this.

Good luck, Dave! (And the rest of you can send him fan-mail if you like.)

Support the writers!

Home shopping, religious nuts, yapping pundits, infomercials, old-style reality shows, new-style reality shows — face it, these days, about 4/5 of all television just completely sucks. The stuff on teevee that doesn't suck? It was written by actual professional writers.

"Writer" means someone who actually thinks about what's going to happen on the show, and what the actors should say, and how to make your experience entertaining or even, sometimes, intelligent. The alternative is to just point cameras at people and stuff and hope that something interesting happens — where "something interesting" is usually a drunk shirtless guy getting arrested, or a houseful of drugged-up snotty egomaniacs gossiping about each other.

"Professional" means (or is supposed to mean) that these "writers" get paid for it. With, y'know, money, so they can pay bills, feed their kids, cover the rent; all that boring stuff that enables them to continue being writers, instead of just giving up and selling paint and wallpaper for their brother-in-law.

If you like to watch teevee occasionally, and you appreciate the parts of it that don't suck, then you should care if the writers get paid. Right now, the corporate bosses that run the conglomerates that own the studios that employ the writers don't want to pay them for their work when it's distributed over the internet. So the writers have gone on strike.

You can support the strike by the Writers Guild. Find out more at United Hollywood.