March 2010
1 post
Vote for Matt for Sexiest Vegetarian so we can go... →
Something awesome is so close we can smell it. It carries the sweet scent of victory. But it will not be easily won.
We are behind in this fight, yet there is still hope. We have not yet called upon our secret weapon: you. We have not yet unleashed your awesome fury, your emo angst, your…
January 2010
3 posts
5 tags
6 Insanely Awesome Things The 1900s Thought We'd... →
#6. The Natural World: Man Goes Nuts on Nature
What They Predicted:
People at the turn of the century fully expected that mankind would have utterly devastated the natural world by now. They envisioned an Earth with no wildlife whatsoever remaining, save for what we specifically bred and protected. And they had a word to describe this barren, lifeless wasteland:
Awesome.
Apparently the people...
December 2009
1 post
Hey ladies, a bit of advice...
hereblog:
UGGs make you look immature and self-unaware. I can’t tell you how many times I have been attracted to a woman until I noticed her UGGs. Is she a high schooler trying to look older? Is she a college-age sorority robot? Is she a post-college arrested-development wanna-be? Either way, I’m not interested, and neither are my extremely attractive, sophisticated friends.
I know the above...
June 2009
1 post
March 2009
2 posts
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The...”
– John Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey, via Daily Kos (via Balloon Juice) (via hereblog)
WatchSawes. Sawes is what bwings us togethaw today.
February 2009
3 posts
“Bob’s feeling may have something to do, in this case as in many others, with the...”
– “Living Together,” NYT
Higgins is a a 7-year-old Hamadryas baboon living with Bob and his wife in upstate New York.
Is this mutual bonding?
January 2009
1 post
Alanis went vegan? →
Alanis Morissette has lost 20 pounds through a strict vegan diet. The 34-year-old Canadian singer shed the weight over three months after making a conscious decision to drastically change her eating habits. She said: “I used to get out of bed in the morning and things were aching, and I just thought, this is what happens when you get into your 30s. “But now I jump out of bed and...
December 2008
3 posts
'Obama's "Secretary of Food"?', NYT →
What is a superorganism, anyway?
Is ant society as complex as human society? Are ants sophisticated in the ways we consider humans to be? So supposes The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies, by Bert Holldobler and E.O. Wilson, recently reviewed in Slate:
In an advanced ant city, thousands of individuals work closely together to create a functioning colony in which there is a balance of...
'As more eat meat, a bid to cut emissions,' NYT →
STERKSEL, the Netherlands — The cows and pigs dotting these flat green plains in the southern Netherlands create a bucolic landscape. But looked at through the lens of greenhouse gas accounting, they are living smokestacks, spewing methane emissions into the air.
The farm at Sterksel makes electricity for itself and for sale, and sells carbon credits.
That is why a group of...
November 2008
19 posts
Chicken manure pollutes Chesapeake Bay; Answer?... →
Just inland from the shore, the scope of the farms overwhelms the senses. The 500-foot-long chicken houses stretch from the roadways like airplane hangars.
Inside each house, 20,000 to 35,000 chickens cramp the floors farther than the eye can see. Feed and water are delivered in automated pipes that stretch the length of the houses.
Corn and soy fields separate the houses from the roads,...
““I will be continue shopping (sic—he’s French) because...”
– Jean Roukoz, average Westerner, and Steven Santiago, average American, as told to the NYT.
'Wal-Mart employee trampled to death' in Black... →
At 4:55 a.m., just five minutes before the doors were set to open, a crowd of 2,000 anxious shoppers started pushing, shoving and piling against the locked sliding glass doors of the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., Nassau County police said. The shoppers broke the doors off their hinges and surged in, toppling a 34-year-old temporary employee, Jdimypai Damour, 34, of Jamaica, Queens, who had...
Never too late to adopt a turkey. →
So when those Children International folks pester you on the street,you can say, “Sorry, I’m all out of cash. I just adopted a turkey.”
Actually, over the summer, I had one such encounter in front of my Midtown office building, and it went something like this:
Guy: Would you like to make a donation to Children International?
Me: What is my donation buying, exactly?
Guy:...
Alex still gone, still making keeper famous →
Irene M. Pepperberg, Alex the parrot’s keeper, has authored a book about her experience with the beloved bird called Alex and Me.
People would ask, “What is all the fuss about, why was Alex so special?” and I’d say, “Because a bird with a brain the size of a shelled walnut could do the kinds of things that young children do. And that changed our perception of what we...
NYC vegan Thanksgiving tips from SuperVegan →
'Vegetarian' vampires?
Am I extremely behind the times, or did no one else know that the vampires in Stephanie Meyer’s inane teen novel have been dubbed vegetarian? Explanation? They don’t drink human blood. No wonder so many people are so terribly confused about what is and what is not vegetarian. If it wasn’t bad enough that Meyer’s vampires are “ethical” because they...
Thanksliving
hereblog:
Matthew, Sam, and I traveled to Woodstock, NY, over the weekend to attend the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary’s annual ThanksLiving dinner/fundraiser. The event was sold out, and was by all accounts a great success. (Well, maybe not all accounts: my raffle ticket losing streak continues.)
A few celebrity vegans attended and spoke, but the rescued animals living at the farm were the...
To all the moms...I mean, people, who liked The...
This little Shel Silverstein poem is circulating on the vegetarian forums, and today it goes out to all those people who lovingly read Where the Sidewalk Ends to me.
Thanksgiving dinner’s sad and thankless Christmas dinner’s dark and blue When you stop and try to see it From the turkey’s point of view. Sunday dinner isn’t sunny Easter feasts are just bad luck When you...
Animal rights movement now mainstream? -- Peter... →
I think Newsweek means to refer to the animal “welfare” movement in the headline, but you can see where they’re going with this.
Consider how widely humans differ in their mental abilities. A typical adult can reason, make moral choices and do many things (like voting) that animals obviously cannot do. But not all human beings are capable of reason, not all are morally...
Term limits lawsuit: time for change, except in... →
It’s hard to get down with the formulation of the charge made by the complainants in the law suit that seeks to prevent the extension of term limits in New York, quoted in this NYT article:
Allowing a self-interested mayor and City Council to dismiss the results of two recent referenda undermines the integrity of the voting process, effectively nullifies the constitutionally protected...
Free Farm Sanctuary eBook this Friday
Download a free eBook of Gene Baur’s Farm Sanctuary on Friday, November 7 at Sony’s eBook store.
If you don’t own a Sony eBook Reader, you can read the eBook on your PC by downloading Sony’s eBook library software here.
About the book:
Leading animal rights activist Gene Baur examines the real cost of the meat on our plates—for humans and other animals alike—In this provocative and...
“That said, I’m not a vegetarian. I like a good steak now and then. Do I go out...”
– Conservationist Stuart L. Pimm, in an interview with the NYT, “Asking ‘Why do species go extinct?’”
From the last question:
Q. ARE YOU RELIGIOUS?
A. I’m a believing Christian. “God so loved the cosmos that he gave his only son.” That’s an injunction from St. John. To me,...
'Farms become wedding sites,' NYT →
Apparently it is now trendy and romantic to be wed where pigs and chickens are slaughtered. Who knew.
People: Get married at Farm Sanctuary. It’s cheap, it’s beautiful, and it’s vegan. IT’S WHAT I WOULD DO.
October 2008
27 posts
'Thoreau is rediscovered as a climatologist,' NYT →
In depression, fewer can afford leather. Joy. →
'The barnyard strategist,' NYT →
In her pleasantly (and here, appropriately) anecdotal style, Maggie Jones presents a mostly agreeable roundup of animal rights themes and issues surrounding California’s Proposition 2. I kind of have to pick on this one odd excerpt, a quote from Humane Society President Wayne Pacelle.
Pacelle … now prefers the term “animal protection” to “animal rights,” which he says is laden with...
OK, so maybe you CAN stop the reading list.
But when the reading list stops, the thesis gets moving, so you understand.
Anyway, CATCH-UP TIME. Where was I? Ah, yes.
16. William Golding, The Inheritors This product description is from one of the book’s many print runs, I’d guess. Book descriptions tend to come out at night, so this one was the most suitable I could find at this hour (from Amazon).
Eight Neanderthals...
Catalogue takes a break, dig?
I’m going away for the weekend to an undisclosed location. Actually, I know exactly where I’m going, and I’ve probably told 100 percent of the people who read this blog in various generalities where that is. That means no new book suggestions till Tuesday. I know—I’m disappointed, too. While I’m gone I’ll be reading last spring’s issue of TDR. ...
Can't stop the reading list, 15.
15. Anna Sewell, Black Beauty
The complex and contradictory relationship between humans and nonhuman animals in the Victorian era is not terribly different from the present one. It might rightly be said that evolutionary biology of that period did more to shape and problematize contemporary thinking about those relationships than did any other scientific pronouncement. At least it brought with...
Can't stop the reading list, 14.
14. David Bevan, ed., Literary Gastronomy
My interest regarding this book is twofold: First, and most obviously, it’s edited by a guy named David Bevan. Second, and way more relevant to this list, to literature, and to the world, is that I think (and, to be honest, I haven’t read every word of every essay in the collection) it entirely omits any discussion of the damaging effects of...
Can't stop the reading list, 13.
Today I present you with a list of titles on human-nonhuman animal relations in various literary periods.
13. Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay, eds., Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture
Frank Palmeri, Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, Hybrity, Ethics
Erica Fudge, ed., Perceiving...
Can't stop the reading list, 12.
12. Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal
From the first chapter:
The Postmodern Animal’s hypothesis is that there was no modern animal, no ‘modernist’ animal. Between nineteenth-century animal symbolism, with its reasonably secure hold on meaning, and the postmodern animal images whose ambiguity or irony or sheer brute presence serves to resist or to displace fixed meanings,...
“When we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing...”
– “An Open Letter to the Next Farmer-In-Chief,” Michael Pollan. From this week’s NYT Magazine, the food issue.
But then, he says this:
Commodity farmers should instead be encouraged to grow as many different crops — including animals — as possible. Why? Because the greater the...
Can't stop the reading list, 11.
11. Sue Coe, Pit’s Letter
I stumbled on this picture book—based on Sue Coe’s 1999 installment The Pit: The Tragical Tale of the Rise and Fall of a Vivisector—while researching William Hogarth’s 1751 engravings, The Four Stages of Cruelty. Pit’s Letter is a pastiche of Hogarth’s work, which dramatically illustrates how cruelty toward other animals swiftly and insidiously transforms into...
Can't stop the reading list, 10.
10. Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World
The thing that gets me about this book is not simply its fantastic cupcakes, but its style. Isa and Terry’s cookbook is packed with punchy recipes that’ll get you giggling and drooling and screaming until you don’t know what’s coming out of your mouth. Add to that the snazzy cupcake photography, and you have the...
One in Four Mammals Threatened with Extinction →
(photo via NYT via Getty Images)
Oh, don’t worry. You’re probably safe. In fact, humans are almost certainly the least likely mammal to face extinction, though perhaps we’re the most deserving.