Green porno

Speaking of lower organs, I just learned that Isabella Rosselini has a series of shorts for the Sundance Channel called Green Porno. The promo for season 3 features fried calamari (Sorry, you'll have to click through -- there doesn't seem to be a way to embed the video here).

Gonzo Scientist has more about the project at www.sciencemag.org, but here's a little background:

"Green Porno began as an experiment," says Rossellini. Fellow film icon Robert Redford challenged her to create a series of online shorts for the Sundance Channel. The constraints: "It had to work on a small screen, it had to be brief, and it had to be cheap," she says, because she was given a tiny budget. "It also had to be about the natural environment in some way." Her solution: Green Porno, a series of cartoonlike vignettes about the sex life of animals. "I want to give people a sense of wonder about the natural world," she says, "to make them fall in love with it and want to protect it." The first season's episodes were all about backyard invertebrates. For the second season, she teamed up with conservation biologist Claudio Campagna and focused on marine creatures.

"I want to give people a sense of wonder about the natural world, to make them fall in love with it and want to protect it."

I'm too much of a nerd to know how to create that sense of wonder, whether about the natural world or about science, but I'm delighted that there are people who can.