Netflix seems to believe I'll be interested in the "Offbeat, Cerebral" type of movie, and it is correct.

I watched this 17-minute David Lynch movie last night.

I made that screen capture just as the monkey is saying "Who's going to believe an orangutan?" The monkey, Jack, is being interrogated for whatever it is the title "What Did Jack Do?" refers to. The interrogator is played by David Lynch, and the taunt "Who's going to believe an orangutan?" is aimed at the Lynch character. 

The movie came out in November 2017, so I don't know if the orangutan accusation has anything to do with Trump — who was famously taunted about looking like an orangutan— but maybe some resonance was intended. Lynch has something of a resemblance to Trump....

That ran in the NY Post. Lynch was clarifying his earlier remark, "Trump could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history." Oh! It's sad that Lynch should have had to clarify anything. Clarification isn't his lane. Let's get back to interrogating Jack the monkey. 

I'm going to need to rewatch "What Did Jack Do?," and I'm going to do it more offbeatly, more cerebrally. My hypothesis is that the interrogator (Lynch) is Trump, and We the People are the monkey. What did we do?

"Now a team of scientists in New York say they have pinpointed the genetic mutation that may have erased our tails."

"When the scientists made this genetic tweak in mice, the animals didn’t grow tails, according to a new study that was posted online last week... Darwin shocked his Victorian audiences by claiming that we descended from primates with tails..... 'This question — where’s my tail? — has been in my head since I was a kid,' said Bo Xia, a graduate student in stem cell biology at N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine. A bad Uber ride in 2019, in which Mr. Xia injured his coccyx, brought it back to his mind with fresh urgency. 'It took me a year to recover, and that really stimulated me to think about the tailbone,' he said.... [H]e compared the DNA of six species of tail-less apes to nine species of tailed monkeys. Eventually, he discovered a mutation shared by apes and humans — but missing in monkeys — in a gene called TBXT.... The mutation that Mr. Xia discovered had not been observed before. It consisted of 300 genetic letters in the middle of the TBXT gene.... Even if geneticists are beginning to explain how our tail disappeared, the question of why still baffles scientists. The first apes were bigger than monkeys, and their increased size would have made it easier for them to fall off branches... It’s hard to explain why apes without tails to help them balance wouldn’t have suffered a significant evolutionary disadvantage.... 'That’s the next outstanding question: What on earth would the advantage be?'"

From "How Humans Lost Their Tails/A new study suggests that a single genetic mutation helps explain why monkeys have tails, while apes and people do not" (NYT).

ADDED: I continued reading the article blogged in the previous post and I ran into this, which I want to put here:

I thought, early on, I would’ve loved to have been a singer. But I realized that, at a certain point, the audience makes a pact. I remember this guy, his name was George Kirby, I saw him on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” He did the greatest impersonations of everybody. And one week, on “Ed Sullivan,” he just was going legit. He was just going to sincerely sing. And I’m going, “Is there a sandbag that drops on him at one point? You’re breaking your contract with us.” Lorne Michaels has this thing where he says, “You go to the zoo and you see the monkeys and they have a right to be reflective, but if they’re not swinging by their tails and jumping around, we go, ‘I’ll come back later.’ Marty, you’re one of the monkeys.”

"Facebook users who recently watched a video from a British tabloid featuring Black men saw an automated prompt from the social network that asked if they would like to 'keep seeing videos about Primates'..."

"... causing the company to investigate and disable the artificial intelligence-powered feature that pushed the message.... The video... featured clips of Black men in altercations with white civilians and police officers. It had no connection to monkeys or primates."

The NYT reports. 

News flash: Human beings are primates. Black, white, whatever — we're primates. Notice how the love of science drops out of the picture altogether when there's an accusation of racism to be made. 

Of course, it's wretched of the AI to refer to black people as "primates" when that's not the standard way to refer to all human beings. It's touchy creating AI that can make embarrassing mistakes, and I think the companies have long been on notice that AI does a worse job at facial recognition when the subject is a black person.

"Macaques at Japan reserve get first alpha female in 70-year history."

 The Guardian reports: 

Yakei’s path to the top began in April when she beat up her own mother to become the alpha female of the troop at the Takasakiyama natural zoological garden in Oita city. While that would have been the pinnacle for most female monkeys, Yakei decided to throw her 10kg weight around among the males. In late June, she challenged and roughed up Sanchu, the 31-year-old alpha male who had been leader of “troop B” at the reserve for five years....

For the Annals of Lateral Thinking: Ohio makes vaccinating into a million-dollar lottery.

Governor Mike DeWine announces on Twitter: 

Two weeks from tonight on May 26th, we will announce a winner of a separate drawing for adults who have received at least their first dose of the vaccine. This announcement will occur each Wednesday for five weeks, and the winner each Wednesday will receive one million dollars.

The pool of names for the drawing will be derived from the Ohio Secretary of State’s publicly available voter registration database. Further, we will make available a webpage for people to sign up for the drawings if they are not in a database we are using. The Ohio Department of Health will be the sponsoring agency for the drawings, and the Ohio Lottery will conduct them. The money will come from existing federal Coronavirus Relief Funds.

To be eligible to win, you must be at least 18 years of age or older on the day of the drawing. You must be an Ohio resident. And, you must be vaccinated before the drawing. We will have further, specific details tomorrow and in the days ahead.

I know that some may say, “DeWine, you’re crazy! This million-dollar drawing idea of yours is a waste of money.” But truly, the real waste at this point in the pandemic -- when the vaccine is readily available to anyone who wants it -- is a life lost to COVID-19.

You could spend $5 million on ads cajoling people — or shaming them — into getting vaccinated. One way or another, it costs money to complete the vaccination project. The great thing about the lottery idea is that it's an effort to reach minds that are not primarily oriented to science — people who are emotional and transrational.

Am I making up the word "transrational"? I had to look it up. I can't credit myself with coinage. There's a whole Wikipedia article, but let's see if it means what I — in my thwarted word-coining effort — had in mind:

"If you’re going to work from home indefinitely, why not make a new home in an exotic place?..."

"It turns out there are drawbacks the trend stories and Instagram posts didn’t share. Tax things. Red-tape things. Wi-Fi rage things. Closed border things. The kinds of things one might gloss over when making an emotional, quarantine-addled decision to pack up an apartment and book a one-way ticket to Panama or Montreal or Kathmandu.... The anxious self-optimization pingpongs between 'Why aren’t I living my best life?' and 'Why aren’t I killing it at work?'... Ms. Smith-Adair’s office became a folding chair on the sidewalk outside whatever McDonald’s or Starbucks was nearby. It wasn’t exactly a peaceful commune with the redwoods. During one curbside conference call in Eugene, Ore., a nearby man with a weed whacker began roaring his motor. Ms. Adair-Smith told him that she was trying to salvage her career. He didn’t care." 

 From "The Digital Nomads Did Not Prepare for This They moved to exotic locales to work through the pandemic in style. But now tax trouble, breakups and Covid guilt are setting in" (NYT). 

This is a very amusingly written article by Erin Griffin. 

There's a photo with the wonderful caption: "After six months in Costa Rica, Austin Mao returned to the United States, where he has fewer opportunities to chop open coconuts knocked out of trees by monkeys." That's like the first line of a novel! I love the main character's name!

  

There's also the story of a guy stranded in Portugal with his visa expired who attempts to apply for asylum there: "I said, ‘Trump’s a dictator, my city is burning, and people are dying.'... They made a joke that I was the first person since the Vietnam War from America to ask for that." The Portuguese officials were nice anyway. They laughed at him, but extended his visa.

Strangely, in the comments over there, people are bitching about it. Why did the NYT even publish it? They regret reading. Oh! I see what's going on: "Are we supposed to feel sorry for these people who made selfish, ill advised decisions?" Unlike the Portuguese officials, they don't know how to laugh. 

Joe talks about monkeys stealing coronavirus vials and other monkey-related topics.

"They believe that monkeys and some chimps are in the Stone Age now...."

"Shh! You'll wake up the monkey" — We now know Trump's favorite movie.

There was a time when this business had the eyes of the whole wide world. But that wasn't good enough. Oh, no! They wanted the ears of the world, too. So they opened their big mouths, and out came talk, talk, talk... And who have they got now? Some nobodies — a lot of pale little frogs croaking pish-posh.... Words! Words! You've made a rope of words and strangled this business! But there is a microphone right there to catch the last gurgles, and Technicolor to photograph the orange, swollen tongue!

Yes, Trump was raving last night. In Colorado Springs. One of his many topics was the fact that a South Korean film had won the Best Picture Oscar:

"How bad were the Academy Awards this year? Did you see? And the winner is: a movie from South Korea. What the hell was that all about? We've got enough problems with South Korea, with trade. On top of it, they give them the best movie of the year? Was it good? I don't know? I'm looking for — where? — can we get 'Gone with the Wind' back please? 'Sunset Boulevard.' So many great movies. The winner is: from South Korea. I thought it was Best Foreign Film. Best Foreign Movie. No. Has this ever happened before? And then you have Brad Pitt. I was never a big fan of his. He got up, said little wise guy statement.* Little wise guy. He's a little wise guy."

Now, the most interesting part of all that was saying "Sunset Boulevard."

Some people might say, no, the important thing was disrespecting South Korea or disrespecting films that are not American. But that's just his usual America-first rhetoric. We should be the best. Other countries may compete, and good for them, but we should play to win. Certainly, the film industry is a place where America has traditionally won big. So we should win every year.

Some people might say that the important thing was that when he needed to think of examples of American greatness in film, the first thing he thought of was "Gone with the Wind" — a movie that takes the Southern side in the Civil War and presents slavery in a positive light. How out of touch can you get? Or was he dog-whistling to present-day racists? Ah, "Gone with the Wind," those were the days! Is he nostalgic for old movies or for the Old South? Or is he just trying to sidetrack his critics into making weak accusations against him?

But I say the most interesting partis that after he cited "Gone with the Wind" — the most conspicuous Old Hollywood movie — he paused and said "Sunset Boulevard." Now, "Sunset Boulevard" is a great old movie. It's one of the few movies that has its own tag on this blog, one of my all-time favorites. But it is a smaller, more artsy, more film buff choice. It must be a movie he actually cares about. Does he identify with the main character, Norma Desmond? She's an aging actress, who has become sidelined, but she dreams of becoming big again, and it's all quite delusional. Think about what it means for Trump to identify with that... and then to find himself on the presidential stage.


________________

* Pitt's "little wise guy statement" — accepting the Best Supporting Actor Oscar — was: "They told me you only have 45 seconds up here, which is 45 seconds more than the Senate gave John Bolton this week. I'm thinking maybe Quentin does a movie about it. In the end, the adults do the right thing."

IN THE COMMENTS: Temujin says something that completely resonates with me:

The NYT's Charles M. Blow thinks it's "a mistake to believe that Trump’s supporters don’t see his lying or corruption. They do. But, to them, it is all part of the show and the lore."

Blow writes:

[W]hen you survey the constellation of folk heroes, you see that many have been criminals. Bonnie and Clyde. John Dillinger. The Sundance Kid....

Perhaps one of the most popular folk heroes in the world is mythological: Chinese folklore’s Monkey King.

Please note that Blow is black and Trump is white. If the races were reversed, Blow's career would be over. Ask Roseanne Barr.

The British Council wrote of [the Monkey King] legend: “Despite his superpowers, at the heart of the Monkey King’s appeal is his human fallibility — he is greedy, selfish, and prone to sudden changes of mood and outbursts of exceptional violence. He defies divine authority, laughs at attempts to be controlled, and leaves chaos in his wake. But we know that there is fundamental good within him. He is the misbehaving child who only needs a firm hand and a sense of purpose to come good.”

This is an insight that's been easily available to Trump haters since at least 2015.* But I guess it feels like a revelation to those who refuse to look at Trump from any angle that could be at all flattering.

And Blow's column ends with no solution for Trump antagonists (and of course there's no reconsideration of whether Trump is the enemy):

Anti-Trump forces must stop operating as if they are doing battle with a liar; they are doing battle with what his supporters have fashioned into a legend. How does one fight a fiction, a fantasy? That’s the question. Its answer is the path to America’s salvation.

_______________________

* To try to find early instances of the recognition that the Trump story is a hero narrative, I did a search of my blog archive for "Trump" and "hero." One thing that came up, from last October, was this fascinating rant from Kanye West:

"You know, they tried to scare me to not wear this hat—my own friends. But it’s hot! It gives me, it gives me power in a way. You know, my dad and my mom separated, so I didn’t have a lot of male energy in my home. And also, I’m married to a family that, you know, not a lot of male energy going on. It’s beautiful though! But there’s times where, you know, it’s something about—I love Hillary. I love everyone, right? But the campaign, 'I’m With Her,' just didn’t make me feel, as a guy that didn’t get to see my dad all the time, like a guy that could play catch with his son. There was something about, when I put this hat on, it made me feel like Superman. You made a Superman—that’s my favorite super hero. You made a Superman cape for me, also, as a guy who looks up to you … looks up to American industry guys, nonpolitical, no bullshit.…"

Maybe Blow could analyze that. By the way, Blow's column begins with a discussion of his mother (who, he says, was "austere" and full of "moral rectitude" but nevertheless loved the Democratic Party scoundrel Edwin Edwards), but he says nothing about a father.  Blow did write a column about that Kanye incident at the time, but he dismissed Kanye as a "troubled... rambling, incoherent" and concluded:

The spectacle wasn’t really Kanye. The spectacle was watching Trump pretend to care about remedying a problem that he is consciously continuing to not only cheer but worsen. Kanye was just being used.

I'd like to see Blow extend his folk-hero analysis of Trump to Kanye's rant about making him feel like a super-hero. Blow wrote about how women might embrace a rogue, but what about how a man might see himself in the hero?

"'We Negroes' robocall is an attempt to 'weaponize race' in Florida campaign, Gillum warns."

WaPo reports:

"Well hello there,” the call begins as the sounds of drums and monkeys can be heard in the background, according to the New York Times. “I is Andrew Gillum."

"We Negroes . . . done made mud huts while white folk waste a bunch of time making their home out of wood an stone."

The speaker goes on to say he'll pass a law letting African Americans evade arrest “if the Negro know fo' sho he didn't do nothin'."

It is unclear how many people heard the call.

WaPo is amplifying the call, and it seems likely that everyone who might vote in Florida will at least read the text of the call. I've long been skeptical of exaggerated racist incidents — like the recent case of the man that urinated on a little girl and called her the N-word. I didn't blog that when it came out, because I didn't want to amplify a lie, which is what it turned out to be.

A spokesman for the GOP candidate for governor (Ron DeSantis) said:  "This is absolutely appalling and disgusting — and hopefully whoever is behind this has to answer for this despicable action. Our campaign has and will continue to focus solely on the issues that Floridians care about and uniting our state as we continue to build on our success."

The robocall seems designed to keep alive the accusation that DeSantis displayed racism when he said "The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state. That is not going to work. That’s not going to be good for Florida."

The word "monkey" — even used as a verb — was portrayed as intentionally stimulating racial feelings against the black candidate Gillum. The new robo call "begins as the sounds of... monkeys can be heard in the background."

It was Gillum supporters who made the "monkey this up" quote go viral, so I assume they think that accusations that the other candidate is racist helps Gillum's cause, and the new robocall leans in the same direction. But maybe you think DeSantis has more to gain from that robocall, because people really are racist and will be moved to vote against Gillum. I think it's more likely that the racist interpretation of "monkey up" and the follow-on robocall will edge people toward showing that they are not racist, which they can do by voting for Gillum. I don't have a way to know the mind of the Florida voter, but I suspect that the words after "monkey this up" — "by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state"—  are what have the most power to move the voters, and the racism charges are a wonderful distraction.

So who made the robocall?

A disclaimer at the end of the robo-call says it was produced by the Road to Power, a white supremacist and anti-Semitic group based in Idaho. The Southern Poverty Law Center has noted a recent rise in robo-calls across the country, describing them as a “new, high-tech, computer-delivered brand of hate,” according to the Times.

The Road to Power is also the group behind the most unsubtle attempt to turn the killing of Mollie Tibbetts in Iowa into anti-immigration policy and a 2018 campaign talking point....

According to the Des Moines Register, the man producing the robo-calls is named Scott Rhodes, of Sandpoint, Idaho. He has been linked to similar campaigns in California, Alexandria, Va., and Charlottesville. Rhodes could not immediately be reached for comment.

If you were making a false-flag robocall, it would be clever to end it with the assertion that it was produced by the Road to Power. I don't know why the Washington Post calls that a "disclaimer." It's a claimer, not a disclaimer, but I don't know if it's true. At least WaPo tried to reach Rhodes, but if you asked him if he made these robocalls, what would he say, and how would you know if he was lying?

You know, there's a lot of fakery out there, a lot of chaos-making and trollery. We need to handle it well, and yet what's happening — instead of us all learning good skepticism — is seizing upon whatever pops out and leveraging it for your own political cause. That is, roiling emotion and adding to the confusion.

Quite the line-up of faces on Drudge right now.

We talked about the Pope's horrible scandal yesterday, so I'm not restarting that.

I refuse to talk about the latest murderer (on the right)... other than to just say he looks mentally ill.

The story about Glenn Greenwald is something I was already in the middle of reading. It's in The New Yorker: "Glenn Greenwald, the Bane of Their Resistance/A leftist journalist’s bruising crusade against establishment Democrats—and their Russia obsession." Excerpt:

Greenwald...has lived largely in Rio for thirteen years. For most of that time, he and Miranda, a city-council member, rented a home on a hillside above the city, surrounded by forest and monkeys. Last year, they moved to a... house... in a baronial-modernist style, and built around a forty-foot-tall boulder that feels like the work of a sculptor tackling Freudian themes: it exists partly indoors and partly out....

He seemed happy. He was wearing shorts and flip-flops; he has a soft handshake and an easy, teasing manner that he knows will likely confound people who expect the sustained contentiousness that he employs online and on TV....  Greenwald, though untroubled about being thought relentless, told me that he was “actually trying to become less acerbic, less gratuitously combative” in public debates. He recently became attached to the idea of mindfulness, and he keeps a Buddha and a metal infinity loop on a shelf behind the sofa; a room upstairs is used only for meditation. He has turned to religious and mystical reading, and has reflected that, in middle age, one’s mood “is more about integrating with the world.”

That all strikes me as hilarious, so I give it to you now, but there's much more to the article, which I haven't read yet, because I was reading it while waiting to have blood drawn and the buzzer went off calling me into the lab. It was just a routine test, but I had to fast for 12 hours, including no coffee, so that threw off my morning routine. If you want to know the difference between Morning Coffee Althouse and No-Coffee Althouse, read this post and then all the posts that preceded it this morning. Anyway, I will finish the Greenwald thing, and I'll have more to say about it. I love when left-wing people go after left-wing people. It's just boring when right-wing people go after left-wing people and left-wing people really do need to be gone after.

If you scroll up at Drudge, you'll see...



... link goes to CNBC: "Dow jumps more than 250 points, Nasdaq hits 8,000 as US and Mexico strike trade deal."

ADDED: Maybe, like me, you wondered, what's an infinity loop. Here:

I have been challenged in my use of "akimbo" in "posing on the chair arm with an arm akimbo."

I knew that was a risky phrase, because the cliché is "arms akimbo," but does that mean "akimbo" relates only to the 2-armed gesture? In the comments to the post, ballyfager said "How do you make that 'arm akimbo'? My understanding is that arms akimbo (as it is usually expressed) is hands on hips." Well, the answer to how is just that you're doing it only on one side, but the issue is whether "akimbo" is restricted to 2 sides. Another question is whether "akimbo" is only about the hands-on-hips pose (which seems to be the only way people use it)? Here I am, trying to use it just slightly more broadly, to cover the unilateral and not bilateral arm position, but why isn't it a much more useful word?

Now, let me pause a moment, to talk about Kevin B. Williamson, who's so much in the news this week. He mostly got in trouble (and fired from The Atlantic) for opining that women deserve hanging if they got an abortion, but he was also criticized for writing, back in 2014:

"Hey, hey craaaaaacka! Cracka! White devil! F*** you, white devil!" The guy looks remarkably like Snoop Dogg: skinny enough for a Vogue advertisement, lean-faced with a wry expression, long braids. He glances slyly from side to side, making sure his audience is taking all this in, before raising his palms to his clavicles, elbows akimbo, in the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge.

The word that got him in trouble was "primate," but notice "akimbo." Do monkeys and apes — like their fellow primates, us humans — display territoriality with arms akimbo? They have such long arms compared to ours. It's a weird picture, in my head.

Oh, but I guess Williamson didn't mean "With hands on hips and elbows turned outwards" (the OED's first definition of "akimbo," and the one I, reading Williamson, assumed). I couldn't find an image of an ape or monkey standing like that, but then I reread Williamson's turgid prose and noticed the hands are on the chest, not the hips, and I can easily picture a gorilla doing that.

Anyway, back to the OED. The oldest examples have the arms or hands "in kenebowe" or "on kenbow." It becomes "akimbo" in the 1700s. What's a "kenbow"*?!

The word, which seems so restrictive to us today, did get wider meaning in the 1800s. It could refer to legs and meant "spread or flung out widely or haphazardly." (Did both legs have to be doing that, or could one leg be akimbo?) And it became "More generally: askew, awry; in disorder":

c1796 C. Dibdin in Songster's Compan. (ed. 9) 203 In life's voyage, should you trust a false friend with the helm, The top lifts of his heart all akimbo, A tempest of treachery your bark will o'erwhem.
1880 T. W. Reid Politicians of To-day II. 253 They do not wear their hats akimbo.

Ah! There's only one head for the hat and the hat can be "akimbo." And what of the heart? Only one of those.**

And in the 20th century, "akimbo" became also "Crooked, bent, or askew; that is in disorder, awry."

1959 New Yorker 5 Dec. 146 He tended to match all of Coleman's near-atonal plunges with akimbo melodic lines of his own.
2002 Esquire Sept. 80/1 He is still blue, with mitteny hands and startled, akimbo eyebrows.

Yes, but can one eyebrow be akimbo while the other maintains its orderly position?... Hmm???!

That picture is from "A DEFINITIVE RANKING OF WHITE MALE COMEDIANS RAISING ONE EYEBROW IN A PUBLICITY SHOT" at Thermocow. And speaking of cows, I could not find a photo of a monkey or ape getting its eyebrow (if any) into a position like that.

By the way, I never cared whether I was technically right or wrong in the proper use of "akimbo." I think if you know the standard meaning, with its bilateralism, you immediate get the unilateral concept, and it may be even better, because it's jocose.

Protests trashing stores in South Africa after H&M uses black child to model a shirt inscribed "Coolest Monkey in the Jungle."

Look at the lawlessness!!! This is at H&M pic.twitter.com/UvpHEYS9dQ

— Yusuf Abramjee (@Abramjee) January 13, 2018

[IMPORTANT NOTICE]: All the stores of that racist retailer @hmsouthafrica are CLOSED. Racism must fall and we will never tip toe around racists. pic.twitter.com/eqmw885k6X

— Floyd Shivambu (@FloydShivambu) January 13, 2018

Via "H&M Closes Stores in South Africa Amid Protests Over ‘Monkey’ Shirt" (NYT), which quotes Julius Malema, leader of South Africa’s second-largest opposition party, Economic Freedom Fighters: “We make no apology about what the fighters did today against that store called H&M... Every shop that undermines black people must be attended to. It must be shut down. It must be closed... We cannot allow the humiliation of black people to continue... No one should make jokes about the dignity of black people."

Can PETA sue on behalf of that monkey that took a selfie and might therefore own the copyright to the photograph that came from the camera David Slater set up?

You may be familiar with the monkey selfie copyright story. It's been around for years. But it's in the news today because the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral argument in a case that the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals brought against Slater on behalf of the monkey. PETA claims to know the particular monkey, Naruto, and to be in a position to represent him. The judges noticed that the text of the copyright statute doesn't square up with the idea that a monkey could own a copyright:

“There is no way to acquire or hold money. There is no loss as to reputation. There is not even any allegation that the copyright could have somehow benefited Naruto,” said Judge N Randy Smith. “What financial benefits apply to him? There’s nothing.”

At one point, Judge Carlos Bea considered the question of how copyright passes to an author’s heirs. “In the world of Naruto, is there legitimacy and illegitimacy?” Bea asked. “Are Naruto’s offspring ‘children’, as defined by the statute?”

Meanwhile, Slater is said to be too poor to attend the hearing or to pay his lawyer or to afford the camera equipment he needs to carry on as a photographer. But Slater’s publisher has a lawyer. One of his arguments is that Naruto is the wrong monkey:

“I know for a fact that [the monkey in the photograph] is a female and it’s the wrong age,” he said. “I’m bewildered at the American court system. Surely it matters that the right monkey is suing me.”

It's sad if the loss of control of this popular photograph has derailed Slater's career. I understand feeling aggrieved, but he could have let it go and tried to leverage a career on all free publicity and interest in his work. But perhaps he couldn't. Without the copyright, what's the point in setting up more animal selfies, and what are the chances he'll get another miracle smile from an animal?

"They use their weapons against us, so people are using what they have" — excrement.

"They have gas; we have excrement," say the ads for the "Shit March."

Protesters in Venezuela — where inflation is "in the high triple-digits" and people are starving — are collecting feces, from animals and from human beings, to throw at the police.

"The kids go out with just stones. That's their weapon. Now they have another weapon: excrement," said a 51-year-old dentist preparing containers of feces in her home for protesters to launch at authorities.

This isn't funny, but terribly sad. People are desperate and not thinking straight.

It seems that people, in their misery, are sinking to the level of monkeys and apes, who are often observed in zoos throwing feces. And yet here I see that "Researches find poop-throwing by chimps is a sign of intelligence." But if you read that closely, you'll see that the study is about the ability to throw, not the choice of projectile:

In this study, we examined whether differences in the ratio of white (WM) to grey matter (GM) were evident in the homologue to Broca's area as well as the motor-hand area of the precentral gyrus (termed the KNOB) in chimpanzees that reliably throw compared with those that do not....

Perhaps you — the human being or the ape — throw what is available. "People are using what they have," said the man quoted in the post title, and apes in zoos are using what they have.

When have human beings used shit as a weapon? Here's a Vice article on the subject. The ancient Scythians dipped their arrows in "a mixture of viper venom, viper corpses, human blood, and shit." In the Middle Ages, "the feces of bubonic plague victims was flung over castle walls with catapults in an effort to infect those inside." There was an "excrement trebuchet bomb" in 12th century China —  "gunpowder, human shit, and poison... lit with a hot poker" and launched. And prisoners in America these days throw shit mixed in milk cartons with fruit jelly (for stickiness) and hot sauce (for a burning sensation).

There is also a fascinating case described at that link of an Inuit elder who resisted Canada's forced removal of the Inuit to the high Arctic. With no tools and only 2 dogs, he molded his excrement into a knife shape, which froze into a workable knife — "the shit knife." But he didn't stab anyone with the knife. He butchered a dog, and he used the meat to feed himself and the other dog. And he cut the pelt to make a coat and the guts to make reins for a sled fashioned out of the dog's ribcage, and he escaped.

"When police approached her, the monkeys surrounded the girl, protecting her as one of their own, and attacking an officer as the girl screeched at him...."

"After rescuing the girl, the officer sped away in his patrol car, the monkeys chasing him...."

Based on her behavior, it appears [the girl who appears to be 11 or 12] could have lived among the primates since she was an infant.... When the girl arrived at the hospital, she had wounds all over her body. “Her nails and hair were unkempt like monkeys,” [Bahraich police officer Dinesh] Tripathi said....

“The way she moved, even her eating habits were like that of an animal,” D.K. Singh, chief medical superintendent at Bahraich District Hospital, told the Associated Press in an interview recorded on video. “She would throw food on the ground and eat it directly with her mouth, without lifting it with her hands. She used to move around using only her elbows and her knees.... She behaves like an ape and screams loudly if doctors try to reach out to her,” Singh told the New Indian Express. Another doctor treating her said the girl struggles to understand anything, and makes apelike noises and facial expressions.

But monkeys don't walk on their knees and elbows, and they eat with their hands!



I'm skeptical.

"Incredibly, he was able to instead survive by following a group of monkeys, who dropped him fruit and lead him to shelter and water every day."

"Maykool had been found in very weak condition; nine days in the rainforest had left him dehydrated, his skin ravaged by bites, botflies, and spines, his feet and ankles painfully swollen."

"Contemplating marriage, I gave Carrie a sapphire ring and subsequently in the romance she gave me a Donald Roller Wilson oil painting of a monkey in a blue dress next to a tiny floating pencil..."

"... which I kept for years until it began to frighten my children. One of the most brilliant and hilarious minds of our eon, Carrie would say things like: 'I love tiny babies. When they cry they turn red and look like screaming tomatoes.' OR 'This romance is finished the second you let out even a threep. I’ll be sick for a year.' AND 'You have a jawline, hold your chin up otherwise you look like a tuna.' From then on I would identify myself on the phone as Tuna Neck."

Dan Aykroyd writes about the time he and Carrie Fisher were a pair.

I'm fascinated by the idea of a couple where the man would give the woman a sapphire ring and the woman would give the man a painting of a monkey in a blue dress next to a tiny floating pencil — and it's not the kind of situation where she's not a painter of paintings of things like monkeys in dresses near gravity-defying writing implements but she actually went out and located an artist who did and bought the thing for the man who might have imagined himself a bit individualistic for going with sapphire instead of the diamonds those ordinary men get for their ladies.

I do like the meeting of the minds in blueness — sapphire and monkey dress. 

Here's a Pinterest page of paintings by Donald Roller Wilson. They are quite fabulous. An example:



I can't imagine getting one of these — especially when it was a gift selected by someone you loved — and then getting rid of it because it scared your children. Put it in a room where the children don't go or hang a drapery in front of it to be pulled back when the children are in bed. Wait for the children to grow up. Daughters rescued from nightmares of dubious monkeys.

I'll bet they'd like that painting now.

The news from 57 years ago today: Why was this on page 66?!

Click to enlarge.

It's so far back that you don't even have to ask what else was happening that was so important. It was page 66. Anything else was more important. There was this on page 3:



The front few pages are loaded with stories relating to the Soviet Union. The biggest front page story is about an airplane crash, not a small plane with popular singers, but an American Airlines plane that crashed in New York City, into the East River, with some survivors swimming for their lives in the "icy," fast-moving water. "Cries pierced the fog...."

Also worthy of the front page, news of hearings on housing discrimination:



That's Jackie Robinson on the left.

The selfie monkey cannot own the copyright to the photo he took.

The Copyright Act doesn't extend its protection to nonhuman animals, says U.S. District Judge William Orrick. 

Of course, a monkey wouldn't know he had legal rights even if he did. Some human beings would need to purport to represent the monkey, and that's what was going on here. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sought to capture the income stream from Naruto the monkey's beloved photography and offered to spend the money for the benefit of him and the various other crested macaques on the island of Sulawesi.

Here's the beloved and apparently uncopyrightable monkey selfie:



Naruto is delighted with the public domain.

ADDED: Here's an earlier post about why the copyright isn't seen as belonging to the man who set up the camera, setting up the conditions and predicting the last step, a monkey's pushing the button.