Every time Oscar tried to dance, he landed on his head. Two legs always went up. Two legs always went down. Two right legs always went left, and two left legs always went right. Oscar would land on the dance floor with his eight legs in knots. The Sea Salt Sensation, the largest dance of the year, is tonight, but there is no way Oscar can go. He wishes he could dance the Crunchy Crab Crawl, the Jumpy Jellyfish Jitter, and the Sea Serpent Slide, but he just can't. Oscar heads off for a swim when he accidentally enters the Eerie Eel Expressway where the electric eels live and a place a lonely octopus shouldn't be. Oscar runs into Ernie, the meanest, longest, scariest eel Oscar has ever seen. What will Ernie do to Oscar? Will Oscar decide to go to the Sea Salt Sensation?
An octopus follows Charlie home from the aquarium. And that's where everything goes wrong. When Charlie fails to convince his parents that a mischievous octopus is the culprit of the chaos, he takes matters into his own hands, devising a plan to get rid of the octopus once and for all. Addresses the following social and emotional learning skills: Thinks things through before taking action Helps with less desirable tasks and activities when asked Helps others with prompting and support Independently recognizes when others need help
Enter a galaxy full of snarky one-liners, inappropriate use of tentacles, and video game style battles.A life of captivity is finally getting to Kirian, Destroyer of Planets. She has never actually destroyed any planets, but getting to choose your own title is one of the few perks you get when working against your will for an evil Neon Octopus Overlord. In an attempt to gain her freedom back, Kirian defies the the Overlord and secretly saves the being she is supposed to kill, making life more complicated and dangerous for both of them. Then again, nobody ever accused Kirian of making good decisions.
Finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction * New York Times Bestseller * A Huffington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of the Year * One of the Best Books of the Month on Goodreads * Library Journal Best Sci-Tech Book of the Year * An American Library Association Notable Book of the Year “Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus does for the creature what Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk did for raptors.” —New Statesman, UK “One of the best science books of the year.” —Science Friday, NPR Another New York Times bestseller from the author of The Good Good Pig, this “fascinating…touching…informative…entertaining” (The Daily Beast) book explores the emotional and physical world of the octopus—a surprisingly complex, intelligent, and spirited creature—and the remarkable connections it makes with humans. In pursuit of the wild, solitary, predatory octopus, popular naturalist Sy Montgomery has practiced true immersion journalism. From New England aquarium tanks to the reefs of French Polynesia and the Gulf of Mexico, she has befriended octopuses with strikingly different personalities—gentle Athena, assertive Octavia, curious Kali, and joyful Karma. Each creature shows her cleverness in myriad ways: escaping enclosures like an orangutan; jetting water to bounce balls; and endlessly tricking companions with multiple “sleights of hand” to get food. Scientists have only recently accepted the intelligence of dogs, birds, and chimpanzees but now are watching octopuses solve problems and are trying to decipher the meaning of the animal’s color-changing techniques. With her “joyful passion for these intelligent and fascinating creatures” (Library Journal Editors’ Spring Pick), Montgomery chronicles the growing appreciation of this mollusk as she tells a unique love story. By turns funny, entertaining, touching, and profound, The Soul of an Octopus reveals what octopuses can teach us about the meeting of two very different minds.
Based on an actual bloody dispute in 1880 between wheat farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad, this tale of greed, betrayal, and a lust for power is played out during the waning days of the western frontier.
BBC R4 Book of the Week ‘Brilliant’ Guardian ‘Fascinating and often delightful’ The Times What if intelligent life on Earth evolved not once, but twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?
Now that she has control over her transformations, Takako is happy to be known as the Octopus Girl. Octopus Girl and Sakae (a wicked girl with the body of a moray eel) face satanic cults, pregnancy, death-trap elevators, violent family strife and their own backbiting rivalry.
Andrew Zimmern, the host of The Travel Channel’s hit series Bizarre Foods, has an extraordinarily well-earned reputation for traveling far and wide to seek out and sample anything and everything that’s consumed as food globally, from cow vein stew in Bolivia and giant flying ants in Uganda to raw camel kidneys in Ethiopia, putrefied shark in blood pudding in Iceland and Wolfgang Puck's Hunan style rooster balls in Los Angeles. For Zimmern, local cuisine—bizarre, gross or downright stomach turning as it may be to us—is not simply what’s served at mealtime. It is a primary avenue to discovering what is most authentic—the bizarre truth—about cultures everywhere. Having eaten his way around the world over the course of four seasons of Bizarre Foods, Zimmern has now launched Bizarre Worlds, a new series on the Travel Channel, and this, his first book, a chronicle of his journeys as he not only tastes the “taboo treats” of the world, but delves deep into the cultures and lifestyles of far-flung locales and seeks the most prized of the modern traveler’s goals: The Authentic Experience. Written in the smart, often hilarious voice he uses to narrate his TV shows, Zimmern uses his adventures in “culinary anthropology” to illustrate such themes as: why visiting local markets can reveal more about destinations than museums; the importance of going to “the last stop on the subway”—the most remote area of a place where its essence is most often revealed; the need to seek out and catalog “the last bottle of coca-cola in the desert,” i.e. disappearing foods and cultures; the profound differences between dining and eating; and the pleasures of snout to tail, local, fresh and organic food. Zimmern takes readers into the back of a souk in Morocco where locals are eating a whole roasted lamb; along with a conch fisherman in Tobago, who may be the last of his kind; to Mississippi, where he dines on raccoon and possum. There, he writes, "People said, 'That's roadkill!' ‘No it's not,’ I said. ‘It's a cultural story.’” Whether it’s a session with an Incan witch doctor in Ecuador who blows fire on him, spits on him, thrashes him with poisonous branches and beats him with a live guinea pig or drinking blood in Uganda and cow urine tonic in India or eating roasted bats on an uninhabited island in Samoa, Zimmern cheerfully celebrates the undiscovered destinations and weird wonders still remaining in our increasingly globalized world.
Classical music is everywhere in video games. Works by composers like Bach and Mozart fill the soundtracks of games ranging from arcade classics, to indie titles, to major franchises like BioShock, Civilization, and Fallout. Children can learn about classical works and their histories from interactive iPad games. World-renowned classical orchestras frequently perform concerts of game music to sold-out audiences. But what do such combinations of art and entertainment reveal about the cultural value we place on these media? Can classical music ever be video game music, and can game music ever be classical? Delving into the shifting and often contradictory cultural definitions that emerge when classical music meets video games, Unlimited Replays offers a new perspective on the possibilities and challenges of trying to distinguish between art and pop culture in contemporary society.
Readers learn about the unique life cycle of the octopus, including facts such as a mother octopus doesn’t eat while taking care of her eggs and neither male nor female octopuses live very long after becoming parents. Colorful photographs and engaging graphic organizers enhance age-appropriate language and science content. Bizarre fact boxes draw in readers with even more octopus oddities.
