As the old saying goes, build a better dragon and the world will beat a path to your door.
Or maybe just France will beat the path. As it did for Johnny Arnett, the zoo's Komodo dragon keeper. He's fresh back from Thoiry, France, where he was one of the leaders of an international Komodo conference at Parc Zoologique de Thoiry.
This was the first such conference for 120 keepers who work with Komodos in 12 countries. Arnett was invited because of his breeding success: 32 hatchings from Nago (male) and Sobat.
His topic was International Developments in Management of Komodos: He told people what to do to keep them happy, breeding and not eating each other (40 percent of a Komodo diet is each other). Meanwhile, a documentary on Arnett's 1997 trip to Komodo, Indonesia, is in the final stages.
That was the medical research trip where Arnett held the dragons down (6-10 feet long, 200-300 pounds) while Dr. Terry Fredeking, of the Texas-based Antibody Systems, collected dragon saliva for antibody research.
Their adventures - dragons charging, people dashing behind trees to get out of the way, wrestling them to the ground - were filmed by Dean Love of Spear International and will probably air on PBS or the Discovery Channel.
GOODIE BASKET:
Hmmm. Seems a little piece of Cincinnati is headed to Hollywood. Specifically, that would be stuff sent by Christi Amann-Phelps,owner of In Baskets, to Sharon Stone, Nick Nolte and Jeff Bridges. The three were in Lexington recently working on a horse racing film called Simpatico.
Seems Amann-Phelps got a call from a client of her other business (Amenities; it supplies amenity packs for hotels), saying she needed customized baskets for the three, and was having fits finding the right stuff. Could she help?
She could. She fixed up health nut Stone with organic stuff: bath gels, lotions, herbal teas, honey straws, tea biscuits, orange and ginger marmalade, all in a hatbox.
Nolte, a hard-core snacker, got bunches of munchies: mixed nuts, trail mix, candies, a UK baseball cap, sports memorabilia. Bridges, who enjoys a belt of booze, got Maker's Mark stuff: shot glasses, bourbon balls, bourbon chocolates, mint julep glasses, julep mix and of key chains.
In return, Amann-Phelps got an autographed copy of the script.
TV REPORT:
Hanging with the artsy crowd this week, we heard about Cincinnati's chamber music group eighth blackbird popping up on CBS Sunday Morning Sunday.
Right, says blackbird cellist Nick Photinos.
Locals know blackbird through concerts at CCM, where they're in the Artist Diploma in Chamber Music program. More recently, it knows the group from CCM's production of Angels in America; blackbird was the group making music on the catwalk.
Blackbird - flute, clarinet, violin, cello, percussion and piano - makes chamber music with a contemporary, almost new-age edge.
So how'd Sunday Morning host Charles Osgood find them?
They met Estelle Potkin, one of the show's producers at a conference in April. Impressed by their youth - 23-27 years old - and their cutting edge sound, she invited them to do the show.
They did Sunday: Talked with correspondent Eugenia Zukerman about music, then made some.
Oh yeah, what's with the lower case name? Seems it's taken from the Wallace Stevens poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Stevens used caps in the title but not the body of the poem, so they don't either.
Psst! appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Have an item to report? Call Jim Knippenberg at 768-8513; fax: 768-8330.
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