• Have a young one or someone who gets overwhelmed by the language in standard Wikipedia articles?  Try Simple Wikipedia, which only uses simple English words and grammar.
• Jim Hair posted a Youtube video of photographs from his trip to the Inauguration.  He’s got DVDs available too.
• Literal Music Videos – what your favorite artists were really trying to say
• A few new (at least to me) local blogs to check out: Michele is rennovating a cool house here in Richmond, Adrienne is blogging about books and various other things, Cassie is blogging about life at IU East and in Richmond and also has a pet sitting service blog, Nate is looking at technology as a means to community empowerment and engagement, and Jay is writing about outdoor experiential education.  Keep it up, folks!
  
• 25 people to blame for the financial crisis (according to TIME magazine).  Be careful, you might be one of them.

With the photo here, I don’t even know what the hell is going on. It’s like the creepy older guy is trying to arm wrestle with the maniacally screaming younger dude over who gets to use the laptop, while the two women totally ignore them and instead grin broadly at the hamster dancing on their screen. But I’m like “creepy older dude, BACK OFF!” Why does he need to lunge into younger dude’s space like that, using his fingertips as a push-off to further invade? And why won’t either of the women help younger dude? This is some messed up stock photography. What was the photographer yelling at them? “Pretend you went to the office holiday party and took Ecstasy!”

I won’t say I’ve never had a hand in building such a website, but with apologies to stock photo models everywhere, I thoroughly discourage this practice. If you really want to put a human face on your website, then put your face on it (or that of your staff, customers, partners, family, etc.) When you use a stock photo of an ethnically balanced group of people to show how diverse and contemporary you are, you look stupid. When you use a stock photo of a bunch of high-powered blinking servers stacked up in a huge data center to show that you know something about technology, you look stupid. When you use real pictures of real people related to you or your organization, then you look authentic. If you can’t do that, then consider doing without the photos altogether.

• Schmap Nashville Travel Guide: a couple of photos I took at the Tennessee State Museuem are apparently now a part of the fourth edition of this online tourist guide. There may be a print version too, but I’m not sure where to find it.
• All Around Ohio for November 11: a photo I took of Antioch Hall at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio was featured in an article about the college staying open.

I’ve had plenty of conversations about why most zoos maybe aren’t such a good thing, about what they symbolize, what they mean about who we are as a people and a culture. But until I read Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos by Derrick Jensen and with photography by Karen Tweedy-Holmes, I hadn’t really explored that symbolism and sense of concern in any depth. And to that end, the book is a thought-provoking and eye-opening treatment of the subject.

Derrick Jensen, if you haven’t already read his other work, writes and talks extensively on the destructive nature of modern culture. His works like A Language Older than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame Volume 1 and Volume 2) are epic investigations into the many ways in which Jensen sees humans chipping away at the very foundations of life on Earth. Of primary concern to Jensen (from personal, ecological, moral perspectives alike) is the need to live in a world where non-human creatures are not sacrificed or imprisoned for the benefit of human creatures. It’s no surprise, then, that he sees the institution of zoos and zoo-keeping as one of the most clearly harmful results of the human tendency to subjugate other life-forms for our own purposes, or out of a sense of god-like dominion and responsibility:

When we see it is not true that zoos rescue animals, that animals are better off in zoos than in the wild, than in their own homes; when we realize that zoos do not teach us about wild animals but that instead they teach us to misperceive animals entirely, that they reinforce the flattering and absurd (as well as lonely) perception that humans are separate from and superior to all other animals; when we know that zoos are prisons; when we see that zoos are big business amusement parks attempting to pass as anything but what they are; when we say out loud that by subduing, capturing, and imprisoning those who are wild (then saying it is for their and our benefit) zoos are tangible manifestations of the mindset and processes that are killing the planet…zookeepers and their supporters fall back one more time, to their final argument: through captive breeding programs, zoos are vital to the recovery of endangered species. –p.129-130

As with his other books, Jensen seems to write out of a place of extreme anger and disgust, of urgency and necessity, and of hope for the future. His narrative is often quite personal, including stories of his direct experiences with zoos and animal captivity, and interspersing bits of insight about the spaces and times from which he is writing in with the essay itself. But he does not rest on intuitive conclusions, citing an extensive bibliography with almost as many endnotes as there are pages.

He makes comparisons of zoos to pornography (“wanting to see animals when you want to see them, without being willing to work for their habitat and not get upset when they ‘poop all over the place’ is like wanting to have sex with someone without being willing to do what is necessary for the other person to want to spend that sort of time with you”), talks about the rationalizations that zoos are making use of funds that would not otherwise be available for wildlife conservation (quoting Mike Seidman, saying “Such is the depth of our love of nature — that we will gladly donate vast sums to keep animals in elaborate cages but not to let them live wild.”), and tries in earnest to answer the question of how we can let our children encounter wild animals without zoos. All of this creates a text that is at once emotionally engaging and academically broad.

And then there are the photos. Karen Tweedy-Holmes visited zoos around the country and captured not just the shots you might expect – an animal behind bars looking out at the “free” world – although there are plenty of those. She also shows plenty of animals without any visible sign of imprisonment around them, but who are clearly broken, with a demeanor that looks unnatural, eerie, out of place. She shows us animals on display for happy, pointing humans, surrounded by the “nightmares of concrete and steel, iron and glass, moats and electrified fences” that Jensen holds up over and over as an abomination.

I’m wondering if Thought to Exist in the Wild might be somewhat jarring for someone who hasn’t read Jensen before. A lot of his lines of thought are based on premises explored in his other books, and while you don’t necessarily need to know what they are or even agree with them to find meaning in this book, I think he assumes that you do have that context and his writing style reflects it.

I’m not writing this review of Jensen’s book because it put me on a crusade to abolish animal captivity – at least for me, it often only crystallized or clarified thoughts and feelings I already had about the phenomenon of zoos. But it did that well, and I do think it is an interesting exploration of the subject — certainly worthy of your time if you care to think about the relationships that humans have to other forms of life, and what zoos represent in those relationships.