We're Not Alone

If anyone missed the NYTs Mag's "Animal Self" piece, you just have to check it out. Light-hearted prose combined with rigorous, empirical evidence makes Charles Siebert's work the best I've read this year. Here's just a smidge off the tip of the spoon:

A big-city aquarium after closing hours is an eerie, spectral place. With the lights turned down in the empty viewing galleries, the luminous dioramas of the different fish fairly swell against your senses, rendering you the viewed and startled captive, adrift in your own natural medium, in a literal suspension of disbelief. "Help yourself," Sal Munoz, a night-shift biologist at the Seattle Aquarium, told me one night this past fall, pointing to the huge 12-foot-high glass tank in which the subject of my specially arranged private encounter that evening resided: a 70-pound giant Pacific octopus named Achilles.

If you like that, it just gets better and better. Let's just say descriptions of innate, separate and distinguishable personality types across the broad swath of the animal kingdom makes me feel incredibly guilty for going carnivore again. But then again, Vincent Vega said it best, "Bacon tastes gooood. Pork chops taste gooood."

Arnold from Green Acres beware, however charming you maybe, you look good on my barby.