Rerun of the Mensa Chimps! (4-15-2008)

Don’t get me wrong, I love nature shows on television. My kids are fascinated by the stories on Discovery and National Geographic. We encourage them to learn about the creatures of this Earth and to be stewards of all creation.

But sometimes, I think the narrators are in serious need of an intervention.

We were watching a show on PBS called "Primates" as told by a British researcher and nature hottie as she traipsed through the jungle in New Guinea and later in Matagascar to document the lives of various primates. One expects the researcher to love her subject. I can’t imagine braving the sub-topical heat, countless bugs, assorted necessary vaccinations and physical deprivations required of this type of research, unless one was in love with the subject matter.

However, this babe’s breathless descriptions of the various creatures and their habits and habitat paralleled that of the type of fan that is normally issued a restraining order.

In her first segment on orangutans, she was attempting to describe how these creatures move from limb to limb on a tree without suffering injury or breaking the branches.

"Careful judgment is called for, the orangutan must determine not simply the weight of the branches, but also the amount of force to be applied while taking into consideration his own weight. These calculations would be difficult even for a human." she whispered as we viewed said calculating primate move from branch to branch with nary a slide ruler.

Who knew orangutans could rival the engineers at MIT?

Still, the critters were pretty interesting so I watched the next segment on chimpanzees. As we viewed the "thoughtful stoic faces" of a family at peace with the world, she talked of how these chimps would sit for hours contemplating the world around them and showed footage of the chimps staring out at the jungle.

“Perhaps most startling about these pensive creatures is their sense of awe at nature.” She offered as she hiked to a local waterfall. “These chimps perform this same ritual every time they come to the waterfall.” The chimp on film is jumping from one side to the other in a zig zag pattern. “They do this whether they are alone or in a pack.” The footage shows the same chimp zigzagging with others over the waterfall. “This celebration of the water could be some form of ritual, signifying the higher awareness of the chimps, their sense of beauty, of wonder at the majesty of nature.”

She paused to look at the waterfall thoughtfully and then mentally went over the edge. “It could be their expression of essentially what for us would be religion.” The image of the waterfall blurred on the camera and the scene faded to black.

Following the religious chimps, she then took us with a war party from the same colony who set out to defend their territory. "The attack is brutal, unexpected, viscous and sends a clear message. But perhaps who are we to judge?" she posits as we are left with the shocking image of four angry chimps mauling a fifth for not showing due deference to their territory. Maybe the waterfall was a form of confession.

After the monkish monkeys, the film crew took us to an Amazon Utopia, where Pygmy chimps used sex as the dominant means of controlling behavior. Women (note not females) ruled the roost and over aggressive males were pacified with "a quickie." Also unique amongst this "chimp culture" was the use of tools and the occasional decision to walk on two legs instead of hunched over on four. The use of tools and the fact that some were left handed as versus right indicated "imagination, creativity, problem solving, intelligence and a sub culture." This particular cluster of chimps had determined how to open a kind of nut rich in protein that other chimp families could not open by using stones. More advanced than others, they had formed a chimp charter Mensa organization.

Though not the first to anthropromorphise the creatures she studied, I couldn’t bring myself to not see how far she would take it.

The silver back gorillas in Rwanda were obviously the grand prize of her documentary and she had us follow her through the bush to their territory, where the whole clan was having a "siesta." Seated less than five feet from one of the gorillas, she talked about these gentle giants that are so closely related to us, showing shots of the "children playing," the adults lovingly grooming, and others enjoying a well earned rest. I had to wonder, what exactly fatigues a gorilla, I mean besides nosy documenting film crews and the ongoing feud between the sex amazon monkeys, Mensa Chimps and religious sect.

When they woke from their rest, the lead silverback "sensibly" led them away from the camera but two adolescent males stayed behind as a rear guard and to "show off for the camera." She said. One knocked over a tree and thumped his chest. The second dragged the tree over to him and then went over and lightly tapped the intruding narrator on her back with his foot. She beamed with pleasure at having been brought into the game. "I’ve just been kicked by a gorilla!" she grinned impishly at the camera as though it had caught her first kiss. The second adolescent male, not to be outdone, charged at her and knocked her over before the behind the scenes guide could chase him off. She turned to the camera, breathless and hardly missing a beat, "Who knows what he might have tried if the guide hadn’t driven him off?"

After the sex chimp colony, I was certain I didn’t want to know.

Ten Percent Mental

Experts say that a woman’s brain shrinks during pregnancy by 10%. I don’t believe it. According to science theory, matter cannot be destroyed or created, only transformed…and to my way of thinking, grey matter is no different than any other matter for that matter.

But it is a convenient excuse.

So I am torn morally and mentally…I could wave off my shirking of intellectual responsibility for my own continued education based on hormones. I could rest on my dusty laurels of academic achievement by claiming to be intellectually incapable of managing. But pregnancy eventually ends. That means I’ll have to assume responsibility at some point for my own mental faculties faultiness.

The problem is, I’m a vain little thing. I dislike thinking that there is something I "can't" understand or master. I don't even like the word "Can't" in my vocabulary. And it isn't just a case of being unwilling to acknowledge the barriers of my own brain, it's with respect to the body as well. I have kick boxed at 8 months pregnant, just to show it was possible. Don’t ask me who I was showing, we all know it was me.

It’s a very simple case of pure self delusion. I dislike limitations on my intellect, talent and physical ability and seek actively to disprove them whenever they pop up. Once, I spent three days on a super hard Sudoku just because I wasn’t going to be defeated by a mental puzzle even if I had to Xerox it three times and start over to eventually get it right. I am annoyed whenever I fail to guess who done it in a mystery novel. My brain IQ may not be Mensa worthy, but my ego says it is, and that it’s just that I don’t test well.

So I don’t want to surrender even that 10% to pregnancy, no matter the facts. I have to own my sloth and slacker ways and keep trying to prove I could have been a mental contender. For example, I keep checking out Joyce’s Ulysses from the library, and trying to read it so I can then nail the book on a wall like a stuffed boar’s head trophy with the date it was successfully endured engraved on a brass plate. I never get very far before I have to return it. If I bought the damn thing, it would eliminate my exculpatory excuse for not finishing.

Every summer, I make great plans to learn Spanish and master American history the way my husband and son can recite it with love and accuracy, and settle for memorizing the list of presidents in chronological order, watching a few PBS historical documentaries and having suffered through two or three sides of a language tape, two Spanish, one French. (It’s all I could find in our collection of cassettes). Then I sniff out loud, mollifying my wounded self that is chaffing at all the work and my unwillingness to persist at the same time, “Well, I took Latin anyway, so it’s reasonable that I don’t know French or Spanish.” As if I could actually say anything in Latin.

And I eat smart food like blueberries and pomegranates and fish when it’s fresh. I read things that bore me and listen to classical music or jazz, straining in my disingenuousness to prove somehow, I’m urbane, sophisticated and elite intellectually, and not a mere suburban house mom. I want to be the kind of person who would get the jokes in the New Yorker so well, she never bothered to read them. “Too telling.” I’d sniff.

Oh. How I’d love to be able to know enough to be a snob about something; wine, politics, literature, baseball, music, art, anything at all. Someone who gets “it,” whatever “it” is.

In the meantime, I’m just assuming, whatever it is I haven’t learned or mastered, it’s because of that missing 10%.

To find the other ten percent, click on over to http://www.humor-blogs.com if you liked this post and give me a smilie...it will molify my ego which clearly is in need of some serious praise, and if not, well, humility is good for the soul.
Humor-Blogs.com

Minding Your Own Monkey Business

Because it's tax day, here's one I wrote a while ago...happy filing and reading folks!

Don’t get me wrong, I love nature shows on television. My kids are fascinated by the stories on Discovery and National Geographic. We encourage them to learn about the creatures of this Earth and to be stewards of all creation.

But sometimes, I think the narrators are in serious need of an intervention.

We were watching a show on PBS called "Primates" as told by a British researcher and nature hottie as she traipsed through the jungle in New Guinea and later in Matagascar to document the lives of various primates. One expects the researcher to love her subject. I can’t imagine braving the sub-topical heat, countless bugs, assorted necessary vaccinations and physical deprivations required of this type of research, unless one was in love with the subject matter.

However, this babe’s breathless descriptions of the various creatures and their habits and habitat paralleled that of the type of fan that is normally issued a restraining order.

In her first segment on orangutans, she was attempting to describe how these creatures move from limb to limb on a tree without suffering injury or breaking the branches.

"Careful judgment is called for, the orangutan must determine not simply the weight of the branches, but also the amount of force to be applied while taking into consideration his own weight. These calculations would be difficult even for a human." she whispered as we viewed said calculating primate move from branch to branch with nary a slide ruler.

Who knew orangutans could rival the engineers at MIT?

Still, the critters were pretty interesting so I watched the next segment on chimpanzees. As we viewed the "thoughtful stoic faces" of a family at peace with the world, she talked of how these chimps would sit for hours contemplating the world around them and showed footage of the chimps staring out at the jungle.

“Perhaps most startling about these pensive creatures is their sense of awe at nature.” She offered as she hiked to a local waterfall. “These chimps perform this same ritual every time they come to the waterfall.” The chimp on film is jumping from one side to the other in a zig zag pattern. “They do this whether they are alone or in a pack.” The footage shows the same chimp zigzagging with others over the waterfall. “This celebration of the water could be some form of ritual, signifying the higher awareness of the chimps, their sense of beauty, of wonder at the majesty of nature.”

She paused to look at the waterfall thoughtfully and then mentally went over the edge. “It could be their expression of essentially what for us would be religion.” The image of the waterfall blurred on the camera and the scene faded to black.

Following the religious chimps, she then took us with a war party from the same colony who set out to defend their territory. "The attack is brutal, unexpected, viscous and sends a clear message. But perhaps who are we to judge?" she posits as we are left with the shocking image of four angry chimps mauling a fifth for not showing due deference to their territory. Maybe the waterfall was a form of confession.

After the monkish monkeys, the film crew took us to an Amazon Utopia, where Pygmy chimps used sex as the dominant means of controlling behavior. Women (note not females) ruled the roost and over aggressive males were pacified with "a quickie." Also unique amongst this "chimp culture" was the use of tools and the occasional decision to walk on two legs instead of hunched over on four. The use of tools and the fact that some were left handed as versus right indicated "imagination, creativity, problem solving, intelligence and a sub culture." This particular cluster of chimps had determined how to open a kind of nut rich in protein that other chimp families could not open by using stones. More advanced than others, they had formed a chimp charter Mensa organization.

Though not the first to anthropromorphise the creatures she studied, I couldn’t bring myself to not see how far she would take it.

The silver back gorillas in Rwanda were obviously the grand prize of her documentary and she had us follow her through the bush to their territory, where the whole clan was having a "siesta." Seated less than five feet from one of the gorillas, she talked about these gentle giants that are so closely related to us, showing shots of the "children playing," the adults lovingly grooming, and others enjoying a well earned rest. I had to wonder, what exactly fatigues a gorilla, I mean besides nosy documenting film crews and the ongoing feud between the sex amazon monkeys, Mensa Chimps and religious sect.

When they woke from their rest, the lead silverback "sensibly" led them away from the camera but two adolescent males stayed behind as a rear guard and to "show off for the camera." She said. One knocked over a tree and thumped his chest. The second dragged the tree over to him and then went over and lightly tapped the intruding narrator on her back with his foot. She beamed with pleasure at having been brought into the game. "I’ve just been kicked by a gorilla!" she grinned impishly at the camera as though it had caught her first kiss. The second adolescent male, not to be outdone, charged at her and knocked her over before the behind the scenes guide could chase him off. She turned to the camera, breathless and hardly missing a beat, "Who knows what he might have tried if the guide hadn’t driven him off?"

After the sex chimp colony, I was certain I didn’t want to know.

Editor's note: Wonder if I can get the mensa chimp to do my taxes next year...

Every Breakfast Tells A Story...

My favorite breakfast in the whole world is blueberry pancakes with syrup and Jasper county sausage on the side. The problem with this combo was that it used to require tremendous coordination of my parents, not to mention the postal service.

Before the internet and 24-7 mail order catalogs, maple syrup didn’t exist in the south. My grandmother from Dunkirk, New York would to ship it to us once a year for Mom’s birthday. Mom would parcel it out like a miser, for fear its golden taste was being wasted on young moppets who might have been just as happy with Mrs. Butterworth.

Dad grew up on sugar cane and caro syrup and enjoyed experimenting. He’d buy boysenberry and blueberry and blackberry flavors. We liked the colors but not the taste. We knew what the Good Stuff was.

Then one day, Dad was cleaning out the cupboards of extra stuff. He was consolidating the peppers into one space, doing inventory for a grocery shop. When he found three different types of mustard, he began interrogating no one in particular, asking “Why do we have three jars of pepperocini? Did you know we have four different kinds of olives in this pantry and over fifteen separate types of jam in the second fridge alone?”

Mom could have said many things at this moment, but she wisely responded, "That’s why you are clearing out the stuff dear." And left the room.

Dad got efficient and ruthless in his cleaning frenzy, to the point of being reckless. He consolidated the syrups, all of them: the boysenberry, strawberry, the cheap log cabin and the sugarless into the biggest tin of all, the Pure Grade A Dark Amber Maple.

My childhood was a fairly happy one, but I remember, this was a grave sin.

Suffice it to say, Mom got a new tin of Grade A Maple Syrup and it is now considered sacred, such that she eyes every new different bottle of syrup that darkens our door with suspicion.

Now getting the Jasper County sausage was a separate issue all together, shrouded in secrecy.

My dad gives his clients, his friends and his family and those who know about it, two wonderful gifts at Christmas time; a five pound bag of rice from the Beaumont Rice Mill (our ancestors started and some of our family still own it), and a five pound slab of spicy pork sausage known only as Jasper County sausage. Dad hunts ducks in LaBelle and thus has contacts with all sorts of people from the South East Texas area, including apparently this mysterious sausage man.

Once a year he clears out the Suburban and drives to Jasper County, (we don’t know where) and comes back with his truck filled to the gills with fresh processed meat which we then dutifully wrap in butcher block and red cellophane and tie with green ribbon. Then the freezer is stuffed and we begin the sausage runs around town, delivering spice, rice and good cheer as we go.

The only thing I think I know about the Jasper County Sausage man is that one year he got a new helper. That year the links were shall we say, extra spicy. Almost inedible by some standards, but I found if you drenched them in maple syrup, all that was left was the pleasant after burn of eating something hotter than usual for breakfast and feeling you had conquered any chance of being labeled a wuss, (and all before noon).

Now we have tried over the years to learn the name and address of this man. Somehow, Dad always manages to duck us, I think it tickles him that we have to take it on faith that this sausage will reappear each year. Once, my younger brother even tried to tail him to Jasper but Dad lost him on the back roads. In recent years, however, he has taken Mom. I suspect he has sworn her to secrecy.

Still, while maple syrup and jasper sausage are filling enough on their own to supply all the calories necessary for running a few marathons, they need the plain comfort of fresh pancakes. Pancakes are the Larry to Curley and Moe in breakfast.

For years, my parents had used the very sensible (you are too short, you are too young) rationale to keep me from the griddle. However, when my mom went into the hospital two months early with my sister,I thought it had become necessary for me to master making breakfast for my brothers and myself.

Could I have made cereal? Yes but that’s too easy. Could I have made scrabbled eggs? Yes, but I had been making those for years and those were boring. Could I have made oatmeal or grits? Yes again, but I didn’t think of those because, well, I wanted pancakes.

Now most pancakes are fool proof but then most of my functional cooking life, I have personified fool. A Mensa member I am not. After I wrecked the kitchen, my Aunt stepped in to do clean up and save my bacon, or at least, my pancakes.

Still, after years of practice, I can now flip them with a practiced ease and make my own favorite breakfast thank you very much, I just have to get Dad to cough up the info on the sausage man.

Maybe I can bribe Mom with some Maple Syrup.

Waiting for Mensa to Call...

This year I got a page a day calendar, and it’s put out by Mensa. Imagine the joy of getting up each day to a pop quiz. What fun.

Whee.

The first three days however, I gave it a shot and you know what? I did it.
What a rush.

The first day I solved the problem, I felt like “Hello, I’m Super Mom and me and my magnificent brain thingy are going to solve all your problems. Ask me how to go from COAST to SLIDE in seven steps, changing only one letter each time and each time making a word. Go on…Ask!”

No one asked.

The second day, I solved the math pattern problem and got the answer right but the method wrong. Close enough I thought. I GOT THE RIGHT ANSWER. Sherry G. Antonetti…supra genius. I like the way that rolls out….Sherry G. Antonetti….supra genius.

Reality hit back hard when the toddlers found the left over Christmas wrapping paper and unrolled it to get the cardboard tubes. Hey Genius the mess seemed to mock, how to you clean this up?

On the third day, it was a Tom Swifty and though I unscrambled all the words correctly, when it came to phrasing, I got it wrong. Being a Supra Genius, I said, “Who cares?” And then to prove the point, I wondered, “Why do Tom Swifties exist at all?”

The next two days were the weekend and I didn’t get to the calendar. Come Monday, it was a word problem. I hate word problems. I got it wrong. I tried to justify my answer. It was still wrong. Still, my record was 3-1-1 so I was shaken but not out of the genius running.

Yesterday. A pattern question. I spent all day puzzling over this one. All stinking day. When I finally checked my answer and got it wrong, I declared it a cheat test of my intelligence if they don’t give all the rules. When my husband looked at the puzzle and remarked “That’s tough.” I casually let slip, “Oh, it’s every letter that is made of only straight lines.” I had my reputation to maintain.

It has become an epic battle just to know what day of the week it is. I dread being given yet another chance to prove my ignorance on a daily basis, but I go back to it, just as surely as I do the super hard Sudoku. Today's puzzle, a letter problem.

"Place the same three-letter word in each blank below to make three different words."

_ _ _ ANT
_ _ _ DON
_ _ _ URE

Maybe there's a B-Team for Mensa.

By the way, the answer, (I looked on the back), is TEN --Get it, today's the tenth. The Supra Geniuses of the world are sniggering at my piddly intellect.