Here are some cool quotes by famous vegetarians,

I did it for political, moral reasons, thinking that I was making this great sacrifice, but it was absolutely necessary; I was not going to contribute to the violence in the world anymore. -Alicia Silverstone

I’ve been vegan for about 10 and a half years. It’s been all good. I’m obviously much healthier -Woody Harrelson

There are viable (and usually better) alternatives to the use of animals for food, sport, clothing, & experimentation. I beg you to discontinue any actions that might cause or condone animal torture, abuse, or destruction. -Moby

To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body. -Mohandas Gandhi

Animals are my friends-and I don’t eat my friends. -George Bernard Shaw

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian. We feel better about ourselves and better about the animals, knowing we’re not contributing to their pain. -Paul and Linda McCartney

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet. -Albert Einstein

Since visiting the abatoirs of S. France I have stopped eating meat. -Vincent Van Gogh

May all that have life be delivered from suffering. -Buddha

This excerpt from A Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Sagan’s suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

– Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

I was looking through some old papers including the ones I recently wrote in my English class. My final project was to write an analytical paper about director Werner Herzog and his purpose in making films. Realistically I was only able to watch Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams, and Grizzly Man. The paper itself is rather long, but I would like to post some of my favorite parts of the paper. In the following paragraphs I will write about Grizzly Man, and why Herzog chose to document Timothy Treadwell.
Paragraph 1:
“Herzog and Treadwell use the power of film editing to manipulate the film they have into what they feel is their reality. Herzog wants to illustrate the struggle of Timothy Treadwell, and does so in his compelling documentary Grizzly Man. This is a true story of Timothy Treadwell, a wildlife preservationist, living amongst the grizzlies in Alaska. In his thirteenth summer he travels with his girlfriend Amie Huguenard. They camp near a Grizzly maze, and Treadwell and Amie encounter a bear that is not indigenous to the area. The bear attacks and kills both Treadwell and Amie. Even though the story is gruesome, Herzog isn’t attracted to the case because of this reason. Herzog looks under the surface of Treadwell’s film and discovers Treadwell’s reality through his film. Treadwell leaves evidence behind in the form of his personal camera, his instrument that opens his innermost secrets. Herzog analyses Treadwell and claims, “[he] saw himself as the guardian of this land and stylized himself as Prince Valiant”. It is not obvious whether Timothy believes the grizzlies need a true protector, and his actions give the impression that he is simply playing a game with himself”.
Paragraph 2:
“Treadwell used his imagination to portray someone he was not. It is evident in the film Grizzly Man, as Herzog chooses interviews with Treadwell’s friends who claim they knew much of his personality was an act. Herzog edits the film in a way that shows the extremes of Treadwell’s personality. We see the passionate side of Treadwell when he exclaims, “I will die for these bears”. At other times we see Timothy racing up and down hills pretending to be an adventurer, and sometimes his adventures turn sour in scenes where he is fighting his own demons. Herzog uncovers the truth about Timothy Treadwell exposing a remarkable observation, “Beyond his posing the camera was his only present companion. It was his instrument to explore the wilderness around him. But interestingly it becomes something more. He started to scrutinize his innermost being his demons, his exhilarations. Facing the lens of a camera took on the quality of a confessional.” A compelling moment that Herzog includes in his edit is “the tent scene”, in which Treadwell is cursing the gods during a drought in Alaska in an attempt to bring rain for the “starving” bears. Yet Herzog almost instantly follows this with a follow-up scene from what seems like hours later, where the rain starts to fall and Treadwell suddenly becomes glorified. He praises the gods for this miracle. We see here how Treadwell chose to confide in his camera, while Herzog edits it to his taste to reveal Treadwell’s true nature”.
Alas Paragraph 3:
“Herzog leaves his viewers with a compelling insight, which for me is a tribute to Timothy’s life. At the end of Treadwell’s video recording Herzog says, “What remains is his footage. And while we watch the animals in their joys of being, in their grace and ferociousness, a thought becomes more and more clear. That it is not so much a look at wild nature as it is an insight into our selves, our nature”.

After I was done with this project, I felt very relieved to turn it in. I did a lot of research for the paper, I hope it payed off well, in some sort of way.

Just a Small taste of my Interest

I was raised in a home where music was somehow appreciated in some form. My father had collections of old records such as the Magic Flute, and Mendelssohn. My interest in classical music has flourished all due respect to my bringing up. Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of film compositions. Which leads me to believe that musical scores can be a little underestimated. Some artists such as Philip Glass deserve a respectable praise and award of appreciation. It seems to me that the only real types of composition (since the turn of the 20th century) come from artists that create music for film. If this interests you, click on the links below.

Glass Works:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imbwn6iVryQ

Just for fun:
John Carpenter’s collection of Film music is really fun to listen to.