Hello again

I haven't been writing much lately, since all I've been doing is going back and forth between Boston and Albany basically every week. It's left me fairly tired. But anyway...

Peter Benchley's died. Most people know him as the author of Jaws, but he did an awful lot of conservation work as well, and his basic message for a long time has been that sharks deserve our interest and respect, not our fear. To that end, he was at the aquarium fairly often. I never met him, but I did walk past him without realizing one day. He narrated one video (called "Surviving Sharks") that we sometimes show overnight groups -- oddly counterpointed by the copy of Jaws (the book) used in our Sharks class to demonstrate the difference between the popular view of sharks as psycho killers and the more accurate view of them as efficient predators. It's interesting that one man can leave two legacies that are so diametrically opposed.