spacefem

Welcome to the savage and surprising world of Zoo Story , an unprecedented account of the secret life of a zoo and its inhabitants. Based on six years of research, the book follows a handful of unforgettable characters at Tampa's Lowry Park an alpha chimp with a weakness for blondes, a ferocious tiger who revels in Obsession perfume, and a brilliant but tyrannical CEO known as El Diablo Blanco.

The sweeping narrative takes the reader from the African savannah to the forests of Panama and deep into the inner workings of a place some describe as a sanctuary and others condemn as a prison. Zoo Story shows us how these remarkable individuals live, how some die, and what their experiences reveal about the human desire to both exalt and control nature.

Do you like zoos? Or do you loathe them? While this book gives the reader a lot to think about, it’s still left up to the reader as to where they stand. Because the title tells you exactly what a zoo is; while the animals may be safer than in the wild, their lives are boxed in by cages. They may be large and well kept cages, but they are cages nevertheless.

Especially tragic are the lives of Herman the chimpanzee, and Enshalla, the Sumatran tiger. Forced into safe but unnatural lives, they would pay the ultimate price for it. Would they have lived shorter lives in the wild? Perhaps, but I think they would have been more rewarding.

Maybe zoos will go the way of circuses and water parks, who have had to discontinue many of their animal acts. We are the ones who have caused the extinction of so many species; perhaps it would be better if we didn’t have zoos to act as balm for our guilt.

But however you think of them, this book is a must read.

( Mount TBR 2025 Book Links 1-55 )

56. Quick Fixes: Tales of Repairman Jack by F. Paul Wilson
57. Followed Home (Exalls Attacks, Book 1) by Andre Gonzalez
58. The Recipe Box by Viola Shipman
59. One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky
60. Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives by Thomas French

greghousesgf

This is what sucks about being alone all the time. I am running low on or out of several things, including cold and flu meds and I feel too sick to go out and mess around with a lot of stupid buses to go to the stores.

Current Music: the Beatles

susandennis

Several months ago, I decided to have Christian (the designer) help me figure out my closet. I could call the closet designer people but Christian can do that, too, and give them better guidance or not call them and do something else. He said he'd be glad to and I told him then that I was in no hurry. Then I heard nothing.

Then I studied the space and what I want to accomplish and figured out a scheme involving the storage area and my brother and some shelves that I bought from Amazon. To be completed in January when said brother comes to visit.

Then, Christian called last night. We had a good laugh about his guilt at waiting so long and that the only reason he got around to it now is that he has a new Timber Ridge client. So he's going to meet with them on January 2 and then swing by here for lunch and a closet consult.

I didn't mention that I had a plan cause I figure this is the perfect way to vet my ideas and if they suck, then we can talk Plan B. Plus lunch with Christian is always a hoot. So no harm and maybe extra good.

susandennis

Probably the big news today will be clean linens on the bed. So quiet day. We have a new puzzle going in the elbow so there may be some of that.

Biggie is still under watch. He's still peeing a little and often and he's still NOT happy with the new food. He is, however, happy with the treat switch. There are two kinds of treats available for his prescription diet. One is NOT Biggie approved but the other is fine. He seems a bit more needy than usual - needing attention from me - but also more playful with Julio than usual. So, we wait and watch. And hope that if he takes a turn it's before Friday or after Sunday.

Shetland has been a British TV series (taken from Anne Cleeves books) that's been on for a fairly long while. I tried to watch it many times but could never latch on. There's at time and place and I finally found it. I'm now enjoying the heck out of the backlog of episodes. Way more good watching for me than the endless lonely hearts Christmas movies.

Ooops Eastside Emergency and Rescue just came up the drive - lights and sirens. Some Timberidge-ion is not having a wonderful morning.

Biggie keeps hopping up on the counter to check and see if there has been any improvement in the food situation. He takes a few bites and then leaves. And then, apparently, forgets and 15 mins later, repeats. It's pretty funny to watch. At least he still has an appetite!

Guess I'll go get the bed project started and... get dressed.

maju

The temperature has risen quite a bit today (it's well above freezing), and I finally managed to go out for a good brisk walk this morning, covering just over 6 km/4 miles. There was a small amount of ice here and there in shady patches on the roads but nothing I couldn't avoid. The forecast for tomorrow is rain, which is annoying. I guess I'll be climbing the stairs again for exercise.

zenigotchas posting in

addme

( Read more... )

Current Mood: friendly

tweek_uk

After going offline yesterday I read a bit more of Martian Time Slip. I then watched Pointless Celebrities on BBC1 followed by two more episodes of For Better or Worse on the All Four. I then watched an episode of Game of Thrones on DVD and finished reading my book.

This morning I made my moves in the Kingdom of Loathing and watched two more episodes of Game of Thrones on DVD. I then made a start to another jigsaw; this one should be complete as I've dome it before.

This afternoon I made my moves in RavenBlack's Vampire Game.

Current Mood: okay

maju

15. What job would you never do no matter how much it paid? Stripper, and many others.

16. What is the number one solution to healing the world? Impossible to say.

17. What could society do without? We could easily do without the current US president.

18. What stresses you out? Change, especially when it's forced on me. Moving house.

maju

I kept thinking yesterday was Thursday and now I'm convinced that today is Friday.

The girls' concert last night was fun in spite of the rather unskilled playing of some of the participants. There was a strings group, a brass band group, and the fifth grade chorus, and the absolute star of the show was a 3rd grader who had obviously been playing for several years, who played a violin solo. He almost received a standing ovation. The school band is restricted to 4th and 5th graders, except that 3rd graders who can already play an instrument are allowed to join.

I did get to go (obviously), because Aria spent the evening with a friend who lives four or five houses away. Aria was rather predictably still awake when we went to pick her up around 8:30 pm, and the other two went out for icecream with another family after the concert and they didn't get home until after 9, so it was a late night for everybody.

We (the adults in this household) were expecting the girls to be very grumpy and uncooperative this morning, but things went surprisingly smoothly. However, my daughter predicts that it won't be so pleasant after school; she thinks this will be a good night to have a movie night followed by an early bedtime for all.

elainegrey

If i miss writing in time, i hope everyone is able have the observations that make passing through this solstice period a joy or at least the darkness eased. I am enjoying my LED lit branch (up all year) and tree during the long dark morning, and found that BritBox has streaming holiday light shows to run in the background of doing other things.

Some quick notes

no car news, but we don't really need two vehicles, so we are OK. What we have is a good reliable car (that is now dmaged) and a vehicle for taking things to the dump. Christine managed to find a really nice take things to the dump vehicle some years back, so we'll drive it about more and live with the lousy gas mileage.
Bruno and Marlowe have had a step of improvement in how they get along and how Bruno believes he can access the rest of the house. He doesn't need coaxing to leave his safe room, Marlowe is not nearly as vigilant. It's odd to see how things seem to have little jumps and not gradual change. We went from much coaxing to get him to leave his room on his own to him dashing out in the morning.
Christine is having a more serious flare (infection) of the issue that sent her to the emergency room in June. Less than a month to the surgery that should resolve things.
I am fighting my own self denigration around gift giving and not really winning but avoiding. I hope i can take some time off today to label and wrap and pack and ship. I had so much joy making and thinking about giving -- years of it imagining when i could gift things from the orchard -- and ... anyhow, i will focus on that and try to take the insecure part of me and tell her ... that people already know i am a flake so it's ok? No, wait, that's not the message. We'll work on that.
i've gotten in my (pathetically low count of) steps the past two days. I think i feel better for it. I am worried about how fatigue hit me out of the blue a few weeks ago, but i have no evidence that the fatigue is caused by doing things, i just NOTICE when i am doing things. Acting like i am fatigued all the time is not the solution.

dandylover1

Hello, Dear Readers. I hope that Dreamwidth will let me post this, considering how long it is. Reddit won't, even when divided into separate translations.

This is a fascinating interview with some anecdotes about Francesco Tamagno. Please note that I had Perplexity first transcribe the Italian, and then translate that into English, keeping it as close to the original as possible. I have included both texts. Below, however, is the original link to check for accuracy. I loved the story of how he met Verdi and convinced him to let him take the role of Otello by making the notes higher! The joke at the end also made me laugh aloud. So he did sing Nesun Dorma after all! Just not for us on the living side! (For those new to opera, it was written after his death, and the title refers to no one sleeping.)

Il tenore F. Tamagno raccontato da Mario Ruberi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hGP9UXbSJM
( Italian )

( English )

dustbunny105

There's a bit of fuss in the Skybound Transformers fandom regarding the new run by Robert Kirkman, on account of he's brought back a bunch of characters who had seemingly been killed off.

Now, I'm not especially interested in all that. I dropped the book for other reasons and so Idk how well or how poorly this was done. But it's raised some interesting questions regarding how death works for Cybertronians. Which, y'know, is something that's always been sort of tenuous. Like, obviously the Sunbow cartoon let the characters take all kinds of abuse without dying, until the movie came along and they decided to clear the shelves. And then over in Marvel, they could be pretty doggone dead by our standards without really dying. Every continuity has its inconsistencies.

But I'm thinking about it now specifically in terms of Skybound.The thing about the Skybound comics is that a lot of people have been dying. And the thing about that is that only a handful of those people have been Cybertronians. Humans in this book have been getting massacred left and right ever since the Autobot-Decepticon war woke up on Earth. And I think that carries some truly incredible potential.

Those aforementioned massacres have given humanity plenty of reason to resent the transformers, even the Autobots, for bringing their business to an uninvolved world. That was a given already. But now. Now. Imagine being one of those humans. Cities destroyed, thousands killed. And it's all got nothing to do with you-- not you personally, your family, not your country, your continent or even your planet. This conflict just appeared one day, literally from space. And then once the dust is cleared, some of these alien robots who were meant to be dead... aren't. They were shot, blown up, rent apart. But they're not dead. It's not that easy to kill a Cybertronian, even for another Cybertronian. You, though. You and your family and friends and your countrymen-- your people. It is so, so easy for these beings who brought their war to your planet to kill you. They hardly have to try. They don't even have to care.

Can you imagine?

legalmoose

My coworkers seem to be settling back into the fully remote routine. I think it helps that it's so close to the year-end holidays, so much of the normal business of the agency is quieter than usual. Not to say that we're not working, but the normal urgency isn't quite as bad as the norm.

Comics, dinner, and a Target run. I was surprised at how quickly we were able to get out of Target. The husband's sister had ordered something for her husband that she had us pick up, and then we went ahead and got the candy for stockings while we were there. I also picked up a Roku stick for the monitor in my office, as I slowly turn my office into a pseudo-man-cave. Hoping that the better seating and some TV will be conducive to more knitting and cross stitching. In unrelated news I finally finished the first section of dark grey yarn for the latest scarf so now I have to refresh my memory of how to switch colors. I know it's not hard, I just haven't done it in a while. I did some knitting on it while we were in Ocean City, and managed to finish the section today while waiting to pick up the husband from the Metro.

fauxklore

I didn’t get around to writing yesterday because I was too exhausted when I got home from going out to dinner with people from Flyertalk. We went to Bluejacket, which is in the Navy Yard area. There were 8 of us and we were at a high top table, with wooden stools. Unfortunately, the lack of padding on the seats and the absence of chair backs got to me after a couple of hours. On the plus side, the food was better than I expected. I had fish and chips. There was tartar sauce for the fish, and ketchup and another unidentified condiment for the fries, which may have been their idea of barbecue sauce, but wasn’t really to my taste. Most people got beer, but I opted for a delicious cocktail called strawberry gingin, which had gin, lime, ginger beer, and fresh strawberry and ginger syrup.

More importantly, the conversation was lively and, of course, focused on travel. I had met everyone who was there before, but knew some better than others. The organizer was someone who I hadn’t seen in over ten years, as she recently retired and moved back to the D.C. area after several State Department overseas assignments. (The actual instigator was one of the out-of-towners, however.)

By the way, there was a large group there in one of the private areas. We learned later on that they were from a Brown University alumni group. I’m sure it was hard for them to be celebrating given that this was just a few days after the shootings there.

susandennis

I swim to music. I had a player once that actually allowed me to download from Spotify. But, it was way too fiddly. Now I just use music from my own collection of MP3's. I've bought many of these and ripped the rest off of CD's over the years. Lots of years, as it turns out - some are from 2009. 5954 mp3's to be exact. Not bad for a non-music person, I think.

They were in folders in folders in folders in two massive folders on my Google Drive. Most were there twice some 3 and 4 times. They were organized by ... well, actually, they were not organized at all. It was an unholy mess. Some have the song titles as the file names, some don't. When I say mess, I mean it.

When AI first came to my web page, the first thing I ever asked it to do was organize my mp3 files. No Can Do, says AI. I asked again and again every few months and got the same answer. Then, about a year ago, the answer came back, no, but... AI pointed me to some Windows programs and Mac apps that would do the work for me. Thanks, but...

I persisted and today I was rewarded handsomely. Today I asked Gemini again, how the fuck can I get order out of this chaos and BTW the only operating systems at my disposal are android and ChromeOS. Well... this time, the first answer was a recommendation to look at a web tool called FileRev. It rapidly scans whatever drive you tell it to and reports duplicates, empty files, empty folders and all kinds of cool shit.

The free version lets you see how it works and does some stuff but I quickly bought a month of the top tier version and whoa mama! I deleted a million and a half duplicate files. I deleted 256 empty folders - how the hell did I get so many empty folders???

But then I drilled down on the mp3's. They were so nested into many layers of folders. With jpgs and pdfs of album covers and other junk. I got everything cleaned out and the extra files and empty folders gone but still then had 4,500 + mp3 files that needed to be collected out of their folders and into one big folder. I'm about 75% done.

Then I will copy them all onto an external drive just for safety. I keep about a couple dozen on my player and swap them out for different ones when the player comes in for recharging. Now I have a way bigger, easier to access, pile to pick from. Woot!!

somedayseattle

Me, August 2025-"Won't it be quaint....living across from one of Raleigh's oldest fire stations?

Me, December 2025-"JFC! Cant we go one #$%& night without a #$%& siren?! Aaaaaagh!!"

bill_schubert

They had to chop off a bunch of his hair so it didn't come out really good. But once it's grown out his next grooming he will look just as cute as he can be. But he's a really sweet dog and looks and feels, I'm sure, a lot better.

greghousesgf

I can't believe I caught another cold, I just had one last month. I probably caught it at the Dickens Fair. It was super crowded, much more than usual.

Current Music: George Harrison

summersgate

Looking at the Entity Outside My Window. It's sunny today!

I've been busy all morning doing things like helping Dave cut the bottom off Candy's xmas tree and setting it up. Then I went with her to do meals on wheels and finally did some shopping at G E. They have the best mini oranges right now. I could live on them.

I called the vet and neither doctor was in but the vet we saw yesterday left notes to say that he wants to consult with the other vet before he talks to me. The notes mention possibly doing an xray. My most fearful imagined scenario says that she has cancer in her liver. I hate the idea of having to put another animal to sleep.

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Reading

Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives by Thomas French

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Just when I think...

Thursday

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Henlo again! In a mood to be friendly.

Another grey day

365 Questions 2025

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(morning writing)

Interesting Links for 18-12-2025

Tamagno Anecdotes

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Settling in

DC Flyertalk Dinner

Clean up on Aisle MP3

lumberjack & jill

And after

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wednesday

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May 2025