Monkeysphere

This article is a bit bit on the long side, but I thought the concept was interesting enough to share the first bit of it. It's worth following the link just to look at the monkey pictures!

Why You Don't Care About 99% of Humanity

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"One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic."
-Sportacus

What do monkeys have to do with war, oppression, crime, racism and even e-mail spam? You'll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go Inside the Monkeysphere.

"What the Hell is the Monkeysphere?"

First, picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if that helps you. We'll call him Slappy.



Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime. Think how sad you'd be if Slappy died.

Now, imagine you get four more monkeys. We'll call them Tito, Bubbles, Marcel and ShitTosser. Imagine personalities for each of them now. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is quiet, the other just throws shit all the time. But they're all your personal monkey friends.

Now imagine a hundred monkeys.

Not so easy now, is it? So how many monkeys would you have to own before you couldn't remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? Even though each one is every bit the monkey Slappy was, there's a certain point where you will no longer really care if one of them dies.

So how many monkeys would it take before you stopped caring?

That's not a rhetorical question. We actually know the number.

"So this whole thing is your crusade against monkey overpopulation? I'll have my monkey castrated this very day!"
Uh, no. It'll become clear in a moment.

You see, monkey experts performed a monkey study a while back, and discovered that the size of the monkey's monkey brain determined the size of the monkey groups the monkeys formed. The bigger the brain, the bigger the little societies they built.

They cut up so many monkey brains, in fact, that they found they could actually take a brain they had never seen before and from it they could accurately predict what size tribes that species of creature formed.

Most monkeys operate in troupes of 50 or so. But somebody slipped them a slightly larger brain and they estimated the ideal group or society for this particular animal was about 150.

That brain, of course, was human. Probably from a homeless man they snatched off the streets.


"So that's the big news? That humans are God's big-budget sequel to the monkey? Who didn't know that?"
It goes much, much deeper than that. Let's try an example.

Famous news talking guy Tim Russert tells a charming story about his father, in his book Big Russ and Me (the title referring to his on-and-off romance with actor Russell Crowe). Russert's dad used to take half an hour to carefully box up any broken glass before taking it to the trash. Why? Because "The trash guy might cut his hands."

That this was such an unusual thing to do illustrates my monkey point. None of us spend much time worrying about the garbage man's welfare even though he performs a crucial role in not forcing us to live in a cave carved from a mountain of our own filth. We don't usually consider his safety or comfort at all and if we do, it's not in the same way we would worry over our best friend or wife or girlfriend or even our dog.

People toss half-full bottles of drain cleaner right into the barrel, without a second thought of what would happen if the trash man got it splattered into his eyes. Why? Because the trash guy exists outside the Monkeysphere.


"There's that word again..."
The Monkeysphere is the group of people who each of us, using our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people. If the monkey scientists are monkey right, it's physically impossible for this to be a number much larger than 150.

Most of us do not have room in our Monkeysphere for our friendly neighborhood sanitation worker. So, we don't think of him as a person. We think of him as The Thing That Makes The Trash Go Away.

And even if you happen to know and like your particular garbage man, at one point or another we all have limits to our sphere of monkey concern. It's the way our brains are built. We each have a certain circle of people who we think of as people, usually our own friends and family and neighbors, and then maybe some classmates or coworkers or church or suicide cult.

Those who exist outside that core group of a few dozen people are not people to us. They're sort of one-dimensional bit characters.

Remember the first time, as a kid, you met one of your school teachers outside the classroom? Maybe you saw old Miss Puckerson at Taco Bell eating refried beans through a straw, or saw your principal walking out of a dildo shop. Do you remember that surreal feeling you had when you saw these people actually had lives outside the classroom?

I mean, they're not people. They're teachers.

"So? What difference does all this make?"
Oh, not much. It's just the one single reason society doesn't work.

It's like this: which would upset you more, your best friend dying, or a dozen kids across town getting killed because their bus collided with a truck hauling killer bees? Which would hit you harder, your Mom dying, or seeing on the news that 15,000 people died in an earthquake in Iran?

They're all humans and they are all equally dead. But the closer to our Monkeysphere they are, the more it means to us. Just as your death won't mean anything to the Chinese or, for that matter, hardly anyone else more than 100 feet or so from where you're sitting right now.


"Why should I feel bad for them? I don't even know those people!"

Exactly. This is so ingrained that to even suggest you should feel their deaths as deeply as that of your best friend sounds a little ridiculous. We are hard-wired to have a drastic double standard for the people inside our Monkeysphere versus the 99.999% of the world's population who are on the outside.

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My Clown Shoes Rant

What is it with clown shoes?

My work shoes have finally kicked the bucket - they're falling apart insiode and so reluctantly, I had to go shoe shopping this evening after work.

It seems that the shoe shop moguls have conspired to require me to purchase enormously long pointy shoes. Every shoe shop I went into had these... clown shoes. That's the only way I can describe them. Long pointy shoes. So long in fact that the size nine shoe pictured on the left is an inch and a half longer than my own size eleven shoe on the right.

I mean, how do you walk up stairs with these things? Your toes will never get close enough to the step to afford you any purchase. I'd be forever tripping over them (more so than I do anyway, I mean)! It's madness, I tell you.

I had to search high and low for ages before I found any sensible ones.

Are long pointy shoes okay? Or are they just silly? And why are there so many of them?

Julie, The Dinner Lady

We have a dinner lady in our canteen named Julie. She's rubbish. She's also a very friendly lady who tries to be very helpful, but that doesn't change the fact that she's rubbish at being a dinner lady.

By way of an example... I encountered her 3 times yesterday - once to buy my morning cuppa, once for my lunch and once for an afternoon cuppa.

She got the morning cuppa right.

Lunch was interesting... during her efforts to locate the mislaid leek and stilton sauce for my turkey escalope, mash and vegetables (it wasn't as nice as it sounds - it's a staff canteen, remember), she entirely forgot to give me the vegetables. So when I got my dinner downstairs and opened the styrofoam carton, I found turkey, mash and sauce, but no vegetables.

Then came the ultimate travesty. I popped up to the canteen just before it closed for my customary afternoon cuppa and, rather then ordinary tea, she gave me Earl Grey. I don't mind Earl Grey too much as long as it has no milk in it, but when you're expecting ordinary PG tips with a splash of milk, an Earl Grey with a splash of milk is a pretty horrible surprise.

She was mortified when I mentioned the Earl Grey incident to her. I briefly considered mentioning my lack of veggies to her, but decided that her heart probably couldn't take it!

On the other hand, she does give me larger portions than anyone else and always saves me an apple!

My Bloody Phone!

I have decided that my mobile phone (that's cellphone to you colonials) is rubbish!It's supposed to be well cool. It's a Sony Ericsson P990. I used to have the P800 and then upgraded to the P900 - both excellent phones, despite the number of times I dropped 'em, sat on 'em and generally abused 'em. I only upgraded to the P990 cos I'd managed to horribly scratch the touchscreen and cracked the casing on my P900 quite badly!

I love the touchscreen which recognises my handwriting (Apple's iPhone ain't nuffink revolutionary!), I love that they stuck a full querty keyboard on it just in case I get bored with the handwriting recognition. I love the fact that I can browse the net and post on the bored board or facebook or check my e-mails. I love the little bit of software on it that lets me quickly check the cctv cameras on the motorway before I go home in the evening to ensure that there's no delays. I love the 2.3 megapixel camera on it and the huge storage capacity.

But...

Not only does the clock on it lose about 10 minutes a week, it arbitrarily decides to disable the alarm clock function, randomly answers itself with no external intervention, frequently drops calls half way through - not that it makes much difference cos the sound quality on is rubbish anyway, switches on it's bluetooth function all by itself and connects itself to the handsfree earpiece I keep in the car - unless I'm actually in the car, in which case it refuses to connect to it at all; and takes about 3 weeks to do anything I ask it to. Just opening a text message to read is painful. The so-called 3G internet connection is slower than dialup on a bad day!

So basically, I'm fed up with it. It appears to be made of pants. Not fine Egyptian cotton pants, but nasty polyester pants from Primark. Problem is, I'm only about 6 months into an 18 month contract (when did they start doing that, anyway - it always used to be 12 months... grr) so I have no free/subsidised upgrade options.

What do I do. Should I grit my teeth and put up with the phone's rubbishness? Should I bite the bullet and fork out for a new one? Or should I just stop complaining?

Grim

Oh dear god.
The following story is anecdotal. It allegedly happened to someone on the third floor, who told a friend of one of my colleagues. If it's true, most of the other grimness that you've read about is positively tame by comparison.
I suggest that if you are eating, or intending to eat any time soon, or you are simply of a delicate disposition, then you read no further.
This friend of a friend of a colleague was walking to the bus stop about 20 yards from the main entrance to our building. This stretch of pavement is quite public and is well trodden.
Waiting at the bus stop was a woman accompanied by around six children... one of which was taking a dump on the pavement!
To make matters worse than they already were (and you have to admit, it was already pretty bad) the mother, rather than scolding the child or at the very least, taking the child into the bushes to do it's dirty business, was chivvying the child along saying 'Haven't you finished yet? The bus will be here in a minute'.
Needless to say, the friend of a friend of a colleague took the wise decision not to wait for the bus at that stop, or, indeed to catch the same bus as this family from hell.
Now, it all sounds just a little far fetched, but on my way into the office this morning I pass that bus stop and I do recall having to side step what I thought was a dog turd...
What the hell is wrong with people? I mean, there's a public loo a few hundred yards down the street - was that too far to go? I'm sorry Stead. Your crossbow just won't do this time. We need to nuke Bedminster. Right now (actually, give me about 10 minutes to get out of the target zone)!

The Jammie Dodger Bored Board Ain't on top no more! Oh noes....

Uh oh. The Jammie Dodger Bored Board (the message board that I run for bored people - think of it as a support group) has dropped from it's prime spot at the top of a google search for 'JDBB' to half way down the third page! Argh! Whatever will I do? Well, according to a couple of web pages I found on the subject one of the best ways to keep a web page well represented on Google is to link to it and mention it by name on a few blogs.

I have a blog. This is it. And this is me mentioning the Jammie Dodger Bored Board (aka the JDBB by name. And here's a link. And another one just to be thorough.

You may now go about your normal business!

Bristol Balloon Fiesta

The weekend just gone played host to the Bristol Balloon Fiesta, which I attended for the first time. And I used my new video camera to record the proceeding. And here, courtesy of youtube is the finished product (in 2 parts!).

This footage is mainly of the evening mass liftoff which took place at Ashton Court at around 7pm; however the shots over Clifton Suspension Bridge and any really long shots you see were taken of the morning liftoff at about 7am on the same day from the area around Clifton Observatory and Clifton Village.



And this is the night glow!

Beware the Killer Badgers

British blamed for Basra badgers

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British forces have denied rumours that they released a plague of ferocious badgers into the Iraqi city of Basra.
Word spread among the populace that UK troops had introduced strange man-eating, bear-like beasts into the area to sow panic
But several of the creatures, caught and killed by local farmers, have been identified by experts as honey badgers.

The rumours spread because the animals had appeared near the British base at Basra airport.

UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: "We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.

"We have been told these are indigenous nocturnal carnivores that don't attack humans unless cornered."

The director of Basra's veterinary hospital, Mushtaq Abdul-Mahdi, has inspected several of the animals' corpses.

He told the AFP news agency: "These appeared before the fall of the regime in 1986. They are known locally as Al-Girta.

"Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific."

Dr Ghazi Yaqub Azzam, deputy dean of Basra's veterinary college, speculated that the badgers were being driven towards the city because of flooding in marshland north of Basra.

But the assurances did little to convince some members of the public.

One housewife, Suad Hassan, 30, claimed she had been attacked by one of the badgers as she slept.

"My husband hurried to shoot it but it was as swift as a deer," she said. "It is the size of a dog but his head is like a monkey," she told AFP.

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Heh heh heh... "We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area."

Actually, I much prefer the calm measued reporting of the incident from the Australian Daily telegraph:

Giant badgers terrorise Iraqi port city

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THE Iraqi port city of Basra, already prey to a nasty turf war between rival militia factions, has now been gripped by a scary rumour giant badgers are stalking the streets by night, eating humans.

The animals were allegedly released into the area by British forces.

Local farmers have caught and killed several of the beasts, but this has done nothing to dispel the rumour.

Iraqi scientists have attempted to calm things down. However, the story has spread like wildfire in the streets of the city and the villages round about.

Mushtaq Abdul-Mahdi, director of Basra's veterinary hospital, has inspected the corpses of several badgers and tries to reassure Iraqis that the animals are not a new post-war arrival in the region.

These animals appeared before the fall of the regime in 1986. They are known as Al-Ghirayri and locally as Al-Girta, he told AFP. Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific.

Not everybody is convinced.

I believe this animal appeared following a raid to the region by the British forces, said Ali Mohsen, a farmer in his 40s from Karmat Ali, near the air base used by the multinational force.

As we are close to the airport, they probably released this animal into the area.

[...]

British army spokesman Major David Gell said the animals were thought to be a kind of honey badger melivora capensis which can be fierce but are not usually dangerous to humans unless provoked.

They are native to the region but rare in Iraq. They're nocturnal carnivores with a fearsome reputation, but they don't stalk humans and carry them back to their lair, he said.

Both the scientists and the soldiers agree that the badger ought not to be a danger to humans, but so far they have failed to reassure the populace.

[...]

Sattar Jabbar, a 50-year-old local farmer from Abu Sakhar north of Basra, believes the badger can tackle even large prey.

I saw it three days ago at night attacking animals. It even ate a cow. It tore the cow up piece by piece. I tried to shoot it with my gun but it ran away into the orchards. I missed it, he said.

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All together now... badger badger badger...

Inane Babble

Just to make up for the general quietness on here recently, here is some of my trademarked inane babble for you to enjoy:

[babble]

There's a new girl in my office. She's quite petite and a redhead. Not bad looking. Today, however she's wearing a jumper that makes her look like a bumble bee. And she has a habit of showing bum cleavage which, contrary to expactations, isn't very nice. So there's a whole bumblebee bum cleavage thing going on there. I wonder what she'll dress as tomorrow.

I'm also enjoying the view outside my window at the moment. It's been a pretty deary miserable day and has been raining on and off, and it's amusing me to watch the poor, poor smokers who now have to huddle under the one tree in the car park while they smoe their fags. They all look really miserable.

Also, my right hand has been twitching all day. My little finger and my thumb keep going in unison and I don't know why. Also my index finger keeps going off and I find myself accidentally clicking stuff with the mouse. It's quite comical. And I have a tiny bit of pins and needles in the fingers of both hands. Am I going to die?

[/babble]

18th Century France smells really bad!

Last night, Dr Karen and I watched Perfume: the story of a murderer on DVD.

It's a pretty odd movie about a guy who has a super duper sense of smell - kinda like a super power. It's set in 18th century france, which smelled really bad, so he hasn't got a lot going for him! Anyway, he decides to become a perfumier and then decides that he has to make the perfect scent, which he can only go by...er... distilling the scent of various hot french chicks. By killing them, obviously.

They guy playing the lead, Ben Whishaw, who I've never heard of, was very good in his part - not very eloquent, but sniffs really well and has some pretty good body language going on.

Dustin Hoffman plays a professional italian perfumier who hires Sniffer Boy, but since the rest of the cast is English, puts on a decidedly ropey english accent. It doesn't detract from the movie though - he just comes off as a bit odd, which is perfectly in keeping with pretty much everything else in the film.

Alan Rickman turns up half way through the film and lends his...er... Alan Rickmanness to the proceedings. He's always cool. Oh and John Hurt adds his dulcet tones to the mix as a narrator.

It's not actually a gory film, although the first few minutes have some yucky close ups of some rather unpleasant bits and pieces, depicting the nasty grimness of the slums in which the main character is born. After that, it's not so bad. There are several boobies in it and the end is totally unexpected and rather naked. More naked than you could possibly imagine!

I really enjoyed it and I think Dr K did too. Another great movie that ignores Hollywood conventions and goes off and does it's own thing! Watch it if you get a chance.