Across Difficult Country

Greenland is slowly running out of ice , yet my freezer, like the freezer of most Americans, is practically overflowing with the stuff. We take our great abundance for granted. I’m doing my part by using one less cube per highball, which works out to 7 or 8, possibly 12 cubes conserved per day. Meanwhile closer to home, our old friend Dr. Sue Savage Rumbagh is in the news again. As you may remember, she’s the scientist who provided a group of apes with a large (13,000-square-foot) and luxurious (indoor waterfall, gourmet kitchen) home in the hopes the beasts would learn language, music and art. 1 That hasn’t happened 2 , but one of the apes, Panbanisha, has learned how to pull the fire alarm . Some are describing this as a breakthrough (“Brian O'Keefe said Monday it was the first known case of an animal setting off a fire alarm in Des Moines”), but given this projects grandiose aims (music?) and expense (the home by itself cost $10 million), even if the monkey’s 3 were to progre...

Scientists have discovered a monkey's voice is as good as a human's for newborn babies : Straight out of the womb, infants may be just as aroused by a rhesus monkey call as by human speech. Infants are acute listeners. Previous studies have found newborns perk up more to folk music than white noise. And four-month-olds like listening to people talk more than they like white noise. But when it comes to sounds made by all things biological, newborn babies might not discriminate. The preliminary finding was presented here Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science by Athena Vouloumanos, a psychologist at McGill University. Think what this breakthrough means: no more expensive nannies or daycare, just drop the tots off at the local zoo’s monkey house 1 and let our simian cousins do the rest. Monkey babysitters 2 will change the lives of busy moms everywhere. Or so one might think. Unfortunately Dr. Athena Vouloumanos 3 and her accompl...

Keith Chen, a Yale economist, has taught capuchin monkeys how to spend money. But can he teach the monkeys to save adequately for retirement? I doubt it. Chen describes working with the monkeys: "You can feed them marshmallows all day, they'll throw up and then come back for more." Chen fails to give the reason why he is feeding the funny little monkeys marshmallows all day until they become sick, I suspect it’s because he can (‘scientists’ tormenting animals for no good reason has sadly become all too common ). Meanwhile in the UK: A mysterious creature described as a cross between a kangaroo, a leopard, a monkey and a cat is stalking Salisbury. In a state of nature you would never find that range of creatures mating to produce an offspring. The only logical explanation is that disgusting inter-species orgies are taking place in British zoos. Someone should pay a capuchin monkey to go ‘under cover’ and investigate.

A Tide 1 correspondent visits a monkey a preserve , and discovers monkeys are a lot like people: “To a first time visitor, one of the noticeable traits of these animals is that they are truly African species, highly social and live in groups of 15-30, much like the typical African extended family life system, each animal of the same family look out for others.” Even better than people, in some ways: “A female monkey takes her sexual reproductive health and rights very seriously. Sexual reproductive health and rights is one of the actions that Africans must seek to fulfil to achieve the target of the Millennium Development Goals, 2015. There is also no question of perverse sexuality or violent sex.” The Tide correspondent also notices: “Interestingly, every animal in the group does the bidding of the dominant male.” That is interesting... Also from The Tide: Small Talks’ articles , all in one place. 1 Motto: “A commitment to truth”.

I haven’t been able to meet Faure Gnassingbe yet, as the President’s palace is (sensibly) surrounded by armed guards to prevent ‘protestors’ from causing trouble. Some are complaining that Faure taking over is ‘dynastic’. When did ‘dynastic’ become a slur? Besides being the son of a president (the most popular president in Togo's history), Faure has an MBA from George Washington University. These parallels with America's leader have inspired me to start calling him The Black Bush. Those complaining include Kofi Annan , probably only because he's still angry about the time Gassy mailed him a hunchback’s hump as a practical joke. But it’s a touching story really - out of all of Gassy’s enormous number of children, Faure The Black Bush is the only one to follow him into politics. Those trying to stand in the way of this dream should be ashamed of themselves. Meanwhile I’ve been entertaining myself with the local sights. There’s marvelous shopping here in Lome, as long as ...

We have entered a new era of insecurity. I’m referring, of course, to the menace posed by brick throwing monkeys: “ New Delhi, October 8 A 30-year-old woman who had come to AIIMS to see her nephew a dengue patient in the hospital, died after a monkey threw a brick at her inside the hospital complex ” The North Korean nuclear test is unsettling as well, but imagine a future (or don’t imagine, if you’re the nervous type) where brick throwing monkeys have managed to spread out from India to infest hospital complexes throughout the globe. Not all today’s news is bad, as there have been no new reports of the Sandsend blob bothering people.