Amber Sparks » animals

This makes me want to stab Borders management in the eye.

Amber Sparks — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:30:42 +0000

I mean, WTF, Borders? No, really. WTF? I understand your stores are failing and you are losing money and people are buying ebooks. But hello, just quietly fold up and go away rather than selling your soul like this.

I used to like you, Borders. Better than Barnes & Noble, even, and I worked at Barnes & Noble once upon a time. But this is just too much. What’s next? A Dippin’ Dots counter in the store? A ball crawl for the kiddies?

Stab, stab, stab.

My Favorite Kind of History: The Dusty, Forgotten Kind

Amber Sparks — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:11:26 +0000

SEED Mag has a really neat slideshow up of artist Justine Cooper’s large-format photographs of the scientific collections at the American Museum of Natural History. Lots of old specimens in dusty back rooms, never-unwrapped fossils from a hundred years ago, even a closet full of old leopard skins.

All of this is especially cool since I’m in the middle of reading Melissa Milgrom’s Still Life, a totally creepy and fascinating book about taxidermy, much of it at the AMNH. Highly recommended.

Really. Really? REALLY??!!??

Amber Sparks — Fri, 14 May 2010 19:51:34 +0000

Oh, world. Sometimes you make me sad.

(via the Millions, which I don’t want to link to, because I hate when my blog shows up in their comments. I know, I know. Don’t care.)

These are not your childhood dinosaurs, my friends.

Amber Sparks — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:47:00 +0000

As a kid, I went through a brief period of being way into dinosaurs. I mean, what kid didn’t go through that period, right? My personal favorite dinosaur was the Ichthyosaurus, though I suspect not so much for its aquatic habitat as for the fact that I could pronounce the name and was hugely proud of that fact. (I had no particular genius as a child except that I spoke very clearly and could pronounce the words that nobody else could. I kicked ass at reading aloud. I was even cast in a play solely for my ability to pronounce the word “streptococcus.” (It was a play about teeth.) I was lucky, incidentally, that life is not really a Greek tragedy or my immense hubris about my ability to say things correctly surely would have rendered me mute or something by now.)

Anyhoo. Dinosaurs. You’ve no doubt heard that they had feathers, and were warm-blooded, and all this stuff–and I mean, holy crap they’re not your grandpa’s dinosaurs now, kids. Check out this article and see for yourself, or totally ignore this entire post if you find it ranting and self-interested. Which is obviously is.

PANK Reviews Wolf Parts (Which is Awesome)

Amber Sparks — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:16:03 +0000

I read Wolf Parts last night and was surprised, pleased, then very pleased, then riveted, then had to delay dinner to finish it. It was quite a departure for Matt Bell, but his exploration of the Little Red Riding Hood story was a journey through gender roles, fairy tales, love, cruelty, sex, family, expectations–and a damn good read, too, with Matt’s wonderful, innovative use of language and darkly drawn pictures fully on display.

But don’t just listen to me. Roxane Gay at PANK has a much better review. Read it now and weep if you can’t get your hands on a copy of this fantastic little book by Matt Bell.

Some Wild Ideas for Your Fiction

Amber Sparks — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:10:00 +0000

Photo: National Library of Medicine

If this bit of awesomeness from the New York Times doesn’t get your creative juices flowing, nothing will.

Life Under the Ice

Amber Sparks — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:05:46 +0000

Whoa.

Six hundred feet below the ice where no light shines, scientists had figured nothing much more than a few microbes could exist.

That’s why a NASA team was surprised when they lowered a video camera to get the first long look at the underbelly of an ice sheet in Antarctica. A curious shrimp-like creature came swimming by and then parked itself on the camera’s cable. Scientists also pulled up a tentacle they believe came from a foot-long jellyfish.

(h/t Andrew Sullivan.)

Jonathan Safran Foer wants you to eat dogs. Or does he?

Amber Sparks — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:45:40 +0000

Jonathan Safran Foer has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today that is so amazingly clever I can hardly stand it. Oh my god, seriously, you guys. Check this out.

He goes on, for like forty-seven paragraphs, about why humans should eat dogs. And you’re thinking, Wait, what, JSF? What are you saying about man’s best friend? How dare you! I would never eat Fido!

But then–in the last couple of paragraphs–he hits you upside the head in a way that will awe and inspire you with its sleight of handedness:

There is an overabundance of rational reasons to say no to factory-farmed meat: It is the No. 1 cause of global warming, it systematically forces tens of billions of animals to suffer in ways that would be illegal if they were dogs, it is a decisive factor in the development of swine and avian flus, and so on. And yet even most people who know these things still aren’t inspired to order something else on the menu. Why?

Oh, slam! Why indeed? Do you see what he did there? Factory farming! It’s totally satire, guys–just like that dude that made the proposal about eating Irish babies or something.

In case you can’t tell, I am unimpressed. Food and farming issues are important to discuss, but complex and difficult, and raise more questions than a glib op-ed with a twist ending can provide. For example: if we all stop eating meat, what happens to all those millions of jobs that the various supporting industries provide? How does that not plunge us into economic chaos? How will non-award-winning-wealthy-authors (who live in other parts of the country and work two jobs to get by) afford and find access to all the healthy foods they will need, and the time to cook them?

Perhaps the answers will appear in Foer’s new book on vegetarianism. (Aha! Now we understand.) I like Jessa over at Bookslut’s take:

now he’s indulging in my least favorite form of nonfiction: the “I have never thought about this thing before until now, and despite the fact that other people have thought about this for years and wrestle daily with the implications, I think my brand new thoughts should be shared with the world.”