A plan by Ripley’s Believe It or Not to dig up a 13-metre sperm whale’s remains on the North Shore of P.E.I. has hit a few more snags.
Environmental rules require the company to put in place measures to prevent erosion before it starts digging, because the site is close to the shore.
“We now have a soil erosion problem that we weren’t prepared for. We are going to have to build some sort of retainment wall before we can dig,” said Edward Meyer, vice-president of exhibits and archives at Ripley Entertainment.
“We’ve had the government inspection. We know what we’re supposed to do. We’re waiting for some signatures and some rubber stamps and until that happens we can’t put a shovel in the ground.”
The delay means the dig might not happen this year.
The company buried the whale 21 years ago with plans to eventually recover it and display it. It’s buried on a property in the Darnley area, north of Summerside.
Ripley’s officials were on the Island last month to get things underway. There was some difficulty in locating the burial site, and concerns from the landowner to deal with.
Meyer said the landowner wants the digging done before the end of September, so unless the federal permit comes through in the next few weeks the dig will have to wait until next summer.
The whale skeleton will likely be housed in the Ripley’s Museum in Niagara Falls, Ont., said Meyer.
Via: cbc.ca
Definitions of family, love and friendship all get put to the test with wit and warmth in “The Kids Are All Right,” one of the year’s most honest and endearing films.
Blessed with a supremely talented and natural cast, director Lisa Cholodenko (“High Art”), writing along with Stuart Blumberg (“The Girl Next Door”), has fashioned a portrait of the modern family that manages to touch many buttons without hammering too hard on any one. You get a sense of the breadth of these people.
First there are the moms — longtime lesbian partners Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore). Nic is the responsible one, a physician who can turn to a few extra glasses of wine for strength. Jules is a dreamer, just now starting her latest career as a landscape designer. It helps the camera mightily that both women are beautiful.
And then there are their kids, the products of artificial insemination, both from the same anonymous donor.
Joni (Mia Wasikowska, far more impressive here than as Alice in “Alice in Wonderland”) has just graduated from high school and leaves for college at the summer’s end. Brooding jock Laser (Josh Hutcherson) seems a bit lost as the only male in the family, and he seems to want something more.
That something more, it turns out, is a father. Now that Joni’s 18, she can legally try to contact the sperm donor who contributed half their genetic makeup.
Prodded by Laser, she does just that, and the kids eventually meet up with Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a freewheeling, motorcycle-riding, organic health food restaurant-owning guy who had no idea somebody actually used his essential juices for procreation.
Then comes the inevitably awkward lunch where the kids bring their newly discovered dad home to meet the moms. Nic’s feathers are ruffled and she’s wary of this sudden interloper, while Jules seems more open to extending the family. When Paul hires Jules to landscape his backyard, you know complications are looming.
While the moms’ lesbian relationship isn’t pushed full forward — this is a family, first and foremost — it is used to wonderfully funny and humanizing effect. Not even the moms can explain their love of hardcore gay male porn, and they do have a certain cluelessness when it comes to dealing with Laser, which they at least sense.
Cholodenko combines the many modern elements in play here — the sexuality; the breezy California life style; Paul’s organic holiness and Peter Pan tendencies — with a deft mix of insight and cheekiness. And yet when it comes to dramatic moments — when the fragile family extension falters — “Kids” is as taut, touching and real as you could want.
It helps that Bening and Moore work so easily off one another — they are your basic long-loving, long-bickering married couple, each balancing the other. Moore, in particular, lets loose in this role, throwing body and soul into a character who’s both lost and found.
It’s probably a bit early to muse on Oscar nominations, but “The Kids Are All Right” is certainly a worthy contender, especially in the Best Actress race. The film slips a bit toward the end — of course, so do its characters — but its faith in the power of family and love endures. In the truest sense, this is the best family film of the year.
‘The Kids Are Alright’ stars Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as a married lesbian couple raising two teenagers. Their identity as a family unit is challenged when the kids contact and befriend their sperm donor (Mark Ruffalo), and then further challenged when Moore’s character starts humping him. This film has taken some criticism from both sides of the spectrum, with some charging that it is not a positive portrayal of lesbians, and others asserting that it glorifies the lifestyle. Both sides are wrong.
What makes this film good is that it provides the audience with a funny and sometimes moving portrait of what I think most people might consider an alternative lifestyle without pushing an agenda. It’s sad that many moviegoers want to simply have their own belief systems affirmed, rather than be presented with a complex portrayal that may challenge some of their beliefs and perhaps affirm others. Any movie that provides insight into how others live without forcing an agenda is worth seeing, so I recommend this film which is now playing at E Street Cinema.
One bit of insight I gleaned from this movie is the pressure on same-sex couples who are raising children. When a heterosexual couple raises a kid who turns out to be a complete mess, some blame the parents and some don’t. But if a same-sex couple has a kid who becomes a delinquent, it is an indictment on an entire lifestyle, and that’s not really fair. This movie demonstrates how both moms, Bening in particular, tend to overcompensate and smother, but essentially they are just both being motherly.
The film also bravely addresses the role of the sperm donor and takes on two important social issues. While a sperm donor can hardly be considered a parent, blood is blood, and kids are going to be curious about their blood ties and should be allowed to explore them. The second is what role a male should fill in this type of relationship. Moore’s affair with the sperm donor serves as a metaphor for the need of some kind of male presence within this family unit.
The issue of a male presence in the lives of children is hardly unique to lesbian couples, and there are plenty of examples where it does not seem to have much of an impact on a child. But there are some examples to the contrary, the best are from the world of sports. We see these incredibly strong, dynamic men like Terrell Owens and LeBron James, who on the surface epitomize classic manliness. Yet, their behavior, their need to be the center of attention and the belief that they can do no wrong, makes these men seem oddly effeminate. It’s not a pejorative, moms traditionally affirm how special and unique their child is. Dad is there to put a foot in your ass when you fail to meet an obligation, and these men never had that.
Overall, good movie and it does address these issues and others very well, and I think affirms the authenticity and legitimacy of a family with two moms.
The age old male view that women are too picky has been taken to a whole new level after research found the female reproductive system may be rejecting sperm it doesn’t find good enough to create a pregnancy.
University of Adelaide Professor Sarah Robertson, who is leading the research, says tests discovered that females have an in-built quality control system, that assesses if the male partner is quality enough to invest her reproductive energy in.
“Part of this whole process is it’s a way of the female body evaluating whether the time is right and whether this particular partner is the right one to conceive a pregnancy with.
“Some women have higher thresholds to responding to this signalling pathway. It might be that with one partner they’re having more trouble than they might with another partner.
“What we understand is that there is a partner-specific component to this. Some combinations of men and women might not be compatible and it’s possible that the immune systems of some women aren’t responding correctly to their partner’s triggering molecules.
In the past, blame has generally been put with the woman if a couple is struggling to conceive and the man has healthy sperm.
But Professor Robertson says her findings show there may be another element to it and with further research there may be tests and treatments later down the track.
The research has primarily been on mice and pigs, but Professor Robertson says there is some indication that it will have the same or similar effect on human females.
“We’ve discovered that there are signalling molecules in the seminal fluid, so that after coitus when that fluid travels from the male to the female reproductive tissues it activates gene expression changes and also changes in the female immune system that increase the likelihood of a pregnancy occurring,” she said.
“At the moment we’ve done lots of work on mice and pigs and we’ve done a little bit of work with human cells and we’ve found if we put seminal fluid on cells in vitro that we get the same kind of changes in human cells.
Professor Robertson says this discovery could be extremely important from an evolutionary perspective, because it means the female body has the ability to decide when the time is right to fall pregnant.
The University of Adelaide research team is looking for female volunteers from 18-40 who have had a tubal ligation, but are in a stable, sexually active relationship.
A woman’s body may be unconsciously selective about sperm, allowing some men’s to progress to pregnancy but killing off the chances of less suitable matches, an Australian researcher said Wednesday.
University of Adelaide professor Sarah Robertson said her research suggested that sperm contains “signalling molecules” that activate immunity changes in a woman so her body accepts it.
But some apparently healthy sperm failed to activate these changes, leading to the suggestion that the female system can be “choosy” about its biological mate, she said.
“It’s rather like a two-way dance,” Robertson said.
“The male provides information that increases the chances of conception and progression to pregnancy, but the female body has a quality control system which needs convincing that his sperm is compatible.
“That’s where the dance can go wrong with some couples – if the male signals are not strong enough, or if the female system is too ‘choosy’.”
Robertson said sperm was more likely to fail if the woman had not previously been exposed to that man’s semen for at least three months.
“We used to think that if a couple couldn’t get pregnant, and the man’s semen test was normal, the problem lay with the woman. But it appears this is not always the case,” Robertson said.
The researchers plan to continue their work, which they hope will lead to improved treatments for infertility and miscarriages. – AFP