Save The Elephants

Yesterday: helping the Amazon Conservation Team save millions of acres of rain forest, not least by hooking shamans up with Google Earth and GPS.

Today: curtailing the slaughter of elephants and rhinos with drones flown by the Air Shepherd Inititaive.  Such a cool idea:  the drones fly silently at night, spotting elephants — and poachers — via infra-red.  Where the latter are spotted in the vicinity of the former, rangers are dispatched to intervene.  With super-computers predicing poachers’ most likely patterns.  It’s fascinating . . . citizen-supported . . . and, according to their website, working! How cool is that?

Tomorrow: go see It Shoulda Been You, about a Jewish wedding (more or less) written by my friend Brian Hargrove and directed by his husband David Hyde Pierce (four Emmy’s for Dr. Niles Crane on “Frasier,” and much else).

Well really — after all that forest saving and slaughter curtailing, don’t you deserve a good time?

The show was great fun the first time I saw it . . . and then I read the New York Times review.  Apparently, if the audience had any brains we’d not have enjoyed it, as it was inspired by “a sappy little [1920s] comedy called “Abie’s Irish Rose” [that] became a runaway hit over the strenuous objections of the New York critics.”  Ah, the New York critics.

So I saw it again, hoping to be more sophisticated and disdainful — but fell for it again, along with the rest of the audience . . . perhaps more in tune with USA Today (“The freshest, funniest musical of the season”) and the Hollywood Reporter (“100 minutes of comic gold”).

You might like it, too.