Orangutans are smarter than me

I hate to admit it but I have no idea how to short out hot wires. If you stuck me in a cage with an electrified boundary, I'd probably figure out how to get out eventually. But we're talking really fucking eventually here. For me the most remarkable part of that article is the last sentence. "She has shorted hot wires before, but just to get food." And then she used that food-getting skill to short them during some sort of emotional crisis that drove her out of her enclosure, and then she immediately had a crisis of confidence, and wanted to go back in. Holy shit. Resourceful and neurotic. How eerily human.

Not the first orangutan experimental electrician when it comes to that:


I hope they're enjoying themselves. It's awful to look at great apes in zoos because we're a great ape. Eww. Orangutans are in big trouble in the wild, though. Two culprits: forest clearing in southeast Asia for 1) palm tree cultivation and 2) pulp and paper industry. What to do as a private citizen? Be aware that any time you eat something with 'vegetable oil' on the ingredient list, it's almost definitely palm oil, and the palm oil industry is a merrily deforesting one. Go for olive oil. It'll force you to cook more for yourself, and that's better for your health. And the parts of Europe where they grow olives are already so environmentally degraded it won't make a damn bit of difference. As far as the pulp and paper industry goes, the WWF has a Paper Toolbox they're working on, to help with buying choices; it's more geared to corporate buyers but it's something.

I suspect it's also important to monetize or commoditize (or whatever the appropriate ugly word is) conservation efforts. I think most sensible people would like to find a way to ensure that people living in environmentally sensitive areas don't go the European route and absolutely ruin local biodiversity by hacking every last fucking tree down except for estates where the royal fucking inbred incestuous families can play caveman and chase foxes like fucking five-year-old morons. But then not that many people actually spring for the sort of holiday that gets money in local people's pockets for showing off the nature. Well, why would they. I'd rather watch David Attenborough, myself. Fewer mosquitoes. And generally people like a bit of luxury on their holidays. What a fucking world it is, anyways.

Speaking of the Attenborough, he's come out more than once explaining human overpopulation is the main driver of long term environmental degradation - that we're just too much of a burden on the planet. And I don't think he's wrong. What annoys me sometimes, though, is a sort of general unconsciousness of the fact that the people having tonnes of children in the developing world have a good reason for having tonnes of children: infant mortality rates are so high, or have recently been so high, that (in the words of E.P. Thompson, whose Making of the English Working Class I'm really enjoying) they 'made a mockery of family planning.' You can't ask a woman to only have one or two children if there's a healthy chance the children won't survive for a couple of years. You can't just educate people about how not to have children when the general health conditions and social security structures are so visibly bad they've got a real understanding of the fact they stand a good chance of growing old alone and unsupported if they limit their families. It's inhuman, and what's more, it's impractical. So damn sticky. There needs to be an improvement of six or seven things at once to do anything about overpopulation.

Highkus

Clash of the Titans
The first half was so silly-
God, I miss reefer

Pornography stream
Loaded on my sweetheart's Mac-
I will watch it straight

David Attenborough
gurning at a stinkflower
means less to me now

Hyperventilate
twirl until I fall over
and hope I feel high

Is it just me or did you do something new with your slime trail today?

Finished watching Life in the Undergrowth last night. I wouldn't say I have a thing about insects but I did spend a lot of the series feeling like there were bugs crawling around under my skin. Nonetheless it was very lovely in a Microcosmos kind of way, but more like a Microcosmos for grownups, I'd say. The slugs fucking in the first episode was to the snail porn in Microcosmos as Curvy Girls XXX is to a Miley Cyrus video, for example. I don't know if I've ever seen anything quite as pornographic as those slugs fucking. Youtube has it:



It was also an awful lot more violent than Microcosmos. The only sort of scary bit in Microcosmos, as I remember, was that bird appearing and eating all the scurrying things, but Life in the Undergrowth had a lot more gore and social upheaval. Whole little Late Roman Empires quaking around under our feet at any given moment. There are a lot of things I love about David Attenborough, but one of them is the way he makes me see nature as a massive collection of cocks and fannies and hungers waiting for an opportunity. It gives order and sense to a seemingly chaotic world. No wonder the Christians hate him.

Speaking of, another thing I love about David Attenborough is the way he drives the question of creationism vs. evolution to its natural conclusion with his it's-not-all-hummingbirds-and-orchids-what-about-blinding-parasitic-worms-in-children's-eyeballs line - that you can believe in creationism if you want, but then you have to believe God is an asshole. Which when you think about it, isn't an argument against creationism, but a psychological clarion call.

Because let's face it: most very vocal Christians do see God as an asshole. An asshole who'll destroy us all and winnow the chaff from the wheat and the wheat has to kiss his ass eternally to be allowed to not burn in hell. An asshole whose hand is in every stinking human event and who can be appealed to in every stinking human eventuality; whose overwhelming, assoholic omnipotence can relieve us of responsibility for every phenomenon which goes outside of the bounds of personal, immediate morality. An asshole, apparently, who only hits us because he loves us, baby. It's alright that the planet is heating up: God is an asshole. It's alright that Africa is dying of AIDS: God is an asshole. And I love him.

Frankly, I find that sort of vocal Christian attitude to God shocking, insulting, insupportable. I don't think God is an asshole. But then I don't have a Stockholm syndrome complex with nowhere to go that I'm trying to foist off on all my fellow 'victims'. God is what He is and we are what we are and we must all simply do the best we can.

Dreams of sheds and projectors

Home again today. My lungs are just too disgusting. The F-word says I smoked too many joints this weekend; I say I'm a victim of society; the reality is that my co-workers look queasy when I come close to coughing up my lungs. Fair enough.

Reading Samuel Pepys's diaries, from the final couple of years. What a slut that man was. But then, what a slutty time he lived in. It's small wonder melancholia used to be known as the English Disease considering the centuries they spent wildly complicating their lives by trying to bang everything, and small wonder that finally the Victorians had to be, well, Victorian. Sheer exhaustion, I guess, but now they seem all rested up. I love the way the Brits of my acquaintance rail against their reputation as loose, and then take my breath away by marathon scores anywhere from business functions to subway rides. Their cultural legacy, I suppose - hangover guilt not letting them just own how awesome it is that they have so much sex with so many people. I think it's awesome, anyways. I can't do it myself because I don't like most men and because I don't understand how to work other people's vulvas, but I'm glad some people do. Reminds you people are people so why should it be, that you and I et cetera.

My boss lent me Planet Earth, too. David Attenborough narrated but did not write it. Still, I expect his voice will soothe me sufficiently and it looks awfully beautiful. His documentaries always make me wish I had a projector. Oh well. Someday. Perhaps when we live somewhere less narrow. Our Art Deco flat is big, but it's one of the ones en enfilade - three rooms in a row, with the kitchen off to one side - so it's long but skinny. Is it over-domesticated of me to want a real house? I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want - I want a back yard with a shed in it. Fuck a house. If I could have a flat like this, and then a nice yard where I could grow things with a nice shed where I could make things, I'd be happy as a freshly jigggajiggaed Spice Girl.

The private life of plague carriers

I don't think there's a limit to the number of sickdays you can take in Belgium; at our office there certainly isn't. Just as well because in this city everybody is a little sick all the time. Today I actually feel quite good, mood-wise and everything, but I'm hacking like an autistic Englishman, those clever influenza germs agitating my respiratory system in a quest to become airborne as I cough all over potential new colonies, ergo est my colleagues. Well, fuck you, germs. I went to work yesterday and you had your chance.

Besides being a plague carrier I have too much to do today - bully the banks, write to young family members about the Netherland's land reclamation strategies, sew some diapers for the legions of friends who've started breeding, and basically be better at keeping in touch. I don't understand how I can love my friends and family so much and be so crap about keeping in touch.

Wanted to point out something though: David Attenborough's Private Life of Plants might be one of the most exquisite things I've ever seen. Even more exquisite than the Life of Birds. And better suited to drrrrrurrgs. There aren't many people who I don't know personally that I love, but I reckon I love David Attenborough. Imagine if he was your uncle or something, and read to you. Wow. That would be the best uncle ever. Even now I like to watch his documentaries last thing before bed - brush and floss before they start and go to sleep with his enthusiast-calm voice still in my ears. Watched P2 of the Private Life of Plants last night and what he said about the conifers, carbon dioxide and light gave me the same soothed, sleepy feeling as The Paper Bag Princess did when I was little.

Eat your big fat fucking heart out, Michael Moore

Rather hurried this morning, so a quick list of Things That Should Be Seen:

1 and 2. Adam Curtis documentaries The Living Dead (3 episodes) and Pandora's Box (6 episodes). I fucking love Adam Curtis - I meant to point out how much I loved him months and months ago, but I got sidetracked. His documentaries make just about everybody else's except David Attenborough's look like shit. They're observational - they don't stretch points, they don't stretch the truth, they have talking heads observing from every perspective of the subjects they treat - but absolutely devastating in their exposure of how societies are manipulated in the pursuit of elite agendas, from the general (global neoconservatism) to the specific (post-independence dam project in Ghana). And they're jolly fun to look at too. You've never seen such excellent use of stock footage.

The upshot is I've never been able to choose a favourite from among his documentaries - they should all be watched - the ones that came out this decade are rather more topical, but they're all pretty topical. The Living Dead is my least favourite - too general, I'd heard it all before - and it was still excellent. You know, now I'm just gushing, so I'll shut up. Suffice it to say that his documentaries are a multi-part advertisement for why public television should operate more or less like the BBC.

3. Cane Toads: An Unnatural History. Absolutely adorable and beautifully organized as a film - hilarious on top of educational on top of unsettling. It runs the gamut of making you want to run over as many cane toads as you can to making you want to tickle their tummies, while succeeding in reminding you our scientific classes can be blithering, dangerous idiots when they get involved with agriculture and industry.

As animals, the cane toads are very cute, but then I have a thing for frogs and toads. Their legs remind me of mine. I know some people, indeed one of my favourite people, find the subgroup petrifying, and I've always been fascinated with that phobia. What's to fear? Is it like our snake phobia - do some of us have a deep, unquenchable disgust for the animals built into us instinctively because some of them are highly poisonous? And if so, how did the French shake it off enough as a nationality to eat the poor little fuckers?

Novella crimes

Sean Penn looks like a penis. I know an awful lot of people like him, so I guess some directors are better at exploiting that than others, but one director who did a really crap job exploiting that was Philip Haas, he of the vastly superior but still not that great Angels and Insects. And one movie that was an honest to goodness sack of crap was Up at the Villa.  

Angels and Insects was, as I've gone on about before, the film version of A. S. Byatt's Morpho Eugenia, and much worse was it too. That's only to be expected because Morpho Eugenia was a very beautiful and complex novella. Not in the story - that's quite a direct stream of events and emotions that got transcribed accurately to the screen. Rather in the construction, with Byatt putting in layers of scientific and philosophical-scientific musings through epistolary devices, etc. It's a smashing novella, one of the best, and it would have been impossible to translate its smashingness to the screen, not without taking hours and millions of dollars, not without getting David Attenborough in to narrate. Angels and Insects was a good effort. 

But. Philip Haas utterly buggering Up at the Villa is beyond explanation or excuse. I liked the novella well enough, though relative to other Somerset Maugham books like The Moon and Sixpence and Of Human Bondage it's very fluffy. It's also very simple, in the sense of being a rather good yarn where people talk about all the emotions that they actually have, and translating it to film should have been a walk in the park. The casting was also really promising - Kristin Scott Thomas was perfect for that gold-skinned lead, and Sean Penn - okay, I don't get it, but I saw flashes of how with a decent script and a heavier-handed director, he could have been good as the male lead. 

But the scripting process buggered the whole thing up. It over-complicated, artificially extended and stretched a plot that was already a perfect, self-contained unit. It bizarrely airlifted Derek Jacobi in to play a disreputable queen without allowing him to be comic relief or in any way relevant to the events portrayed. It gave Anne Bancroft way too much time and too little to do with it. In short, it over-complicated a simple novella - a much greater sin than over-simplifying a complex novella, like Morpho Eugenia. And it didn't deal with the crisis/opportunity of Sean Penn looking like a penis. 

Anyways. What that peice of shit did do is remind me that I have the complete works of Somerset Maugham sitting around waiting to be read, so after my mum left I started dipping into Cosmopolitans, a bunch of short sketches he wrote for a magazine that would fit on to one or two pages. Hit and miss but much more hit, in that nice terse language that makes Ernest Hemingway seem like a gushing auntie. He's not fashionable anymore, I guess, but I'm getting quite fond of Somerset Maugham.  

The Red Dragon enjoys pizza

Hey, guess what? No Locrians today either.

Here's a story though. Last night, we were relegated to the futon so Mum could have the cat-free bedroom. I always sleep well on the futon and last night had one of the most compelling dreams of my life. I knew it was a dream, which was sort of neat, and the dream was that I was flying, gently spinning and turning in an utter black void. It was great. And then I realized it wasn't a void, and that the blackness heaving below me was actually every man who had ever existed, in reality and imagination, and that I could now proceed to have an erotic dream about any of them.

My mind boggled, as it would, and I couldn't choose right away, until I realized that I could just have one after another, really, since I was dreaming and they were all obviously already somewhere in my subconscious, stowed away for later. Finally I chose the name of someone who I'd enjoyed several times in the past in the flesh, with the theory that I could see how the dream ---- compared to the real ----, to gauge exactly how realistic and top-notch this awesome situation was going to get.

He materialized himself out of the heaving black sea of men, smiling invitingly, and I realized as I floated through the ether that I wasn't that interested - been there, done him, and probably going for it was going to mean thrashing around in my sleep, and perhaps me screaming his name, waking up the F-word in a way that perhaps might make him sad. So I decided instead to peacably float in the fake black void, having a think about who exactly I'd do, perhaps while I was on a business trip. Ghengis Khan. The Neanderthal who invented cunnilingus. Simon Bolivar. Beau fuckin' Duke. Thomas More. Javier Bardem. The Marx brothers. David Attenborough. And then I woke up.

And then at lunchtime we went to my favourite pizza place, and for just a moment, I hated myself for not choosing the chef. Fuck, he's hot.

Mmmmmmmm bacon redux

Oliver Twist is even better than television. I wonder, as I wondered with North and South, what it would have been like to read it as a serial. It really does move me to tears . . . Feeling rather melancholy at the moment generally and not sure why. All is fine, good even, and somehow seeing Rodelinda gave me some perspective on where my life is going - those sorts of long, catch-up afternoons can do naught else. And while I'm going through a frowny period at work, I'm expecting that frown to be turned upside down when the budget is worked out for next year - by hook, by crook, or by bluster. Any which way, that's fine. So I'm fine. Beyond the garden level dissatisfaction with my industry that should be there, driving me a bit.

Could be because I'm on the rag. Not on the Red Dragon, though. It's been a painless process this month too, which makes me think. We're not really vegetarians - we eat fish and cheese like nobody's business. Otherwise, however, we don't eat meat, for most of the normal reasons (concerned about resource overconsumption, we're too cheap, it makes us fat, watched too many David Attenborough documentaries resulting in a resolution to avoid eating anything who's mother loved it, etc.).

But ending up at a lousy conference in London where the only recognizable foodstuff on offer was chunks of cow marinated in something, and then ending up in a hotel in London, where they were serving a full breakfast buffet with wonderful, wonderful bacon, good lord, how I love bacon, that salty ambrosia, I ended up eating lots of meat two days in a row at an apparently critical juncture, and then not suffering the crippling pain that's become par for the course over the last couple of months. Maybe I'm just wildly casting around for an excuse to eat more bacon but I think I shall set aside a couple of days every 28 to get really bloodthirsty. Wasn't there a Danny Boyle movie about that?

Monday morning slap-a-wake

Nice weekend, though rather lazy as I recovered (mostly there, certainly there enough to show up at work today, which I'm a touch sad about). My last with the F-word for a few weeks as he won't be joining me in Canada-land. Looking forward to Canada like crazy but really at the moment sad about how he won't be there. That's the thing about the F-word. I don't just miss him when he's not there, I get homesick for him. But still very much looking forward to Canada.

Watched There Will Be Blood. Pretty damn good. Very actor-y; I bet they all got a nice kick out of that, particularly the Day-Lewis. 'I drink your milkshake' indeed. And great soundtrack. Still, not much more to say about that, it was just fine but, well, it wasn't Best in Show, which by the way we also watched, during a couple of hours of amused abstraction. What else? An episode of The Life of Birds. The whole first season of Monkeydust. I love it, though it does sometimes make me want to vomit. There's something so merciless about it, but so funny. Usually very focused on the misery of the UK but a running feature focused on the idiocy of American big budget cinema, of which the following is an example:



What else? After finishing Chain of Command (very nice), read a couple of excerpts from the John Pilger edition Tell Me No Lies to carry on in the investigative journalism stream. One from the pinko Mitford sister, Jessica - 'The American Way of Death'. How absolutely revolting and not much changed, I don't think. When my Grandpa died in England, his going-away rites were the right sort of thing, I think - no fucking makeup; viewing just by the family, and a nice speech from a preacher he'd liked. But then that was C of E, which hardly counts as a religion in comparative terms - I think Catholicism has a lot to do with Egyptian-style funerary ridiculousness. Anyhoo. It was all very revealing and gross, but it provided an opportunity to discuss our preferred way to have our bodies disposed of, which is an important talk for couples to have.