Saturday I had fun at a wedding. You know the tradition where you ding the glasses with your fork to make the bride and groom kiss? I love that. Ding Ding Ding Ding! Kiss! Applause! Awww. Eat some more. Ding Ding Ding Ding! Kiss! Applause! Awww. Eat some more. And again! But when there are little kids at the wedding, they sometimes keep dinging the glass. All they know is that all of a sudden it's okay--even the adults are doing it!---to bang on your glass with your silverware, and when you do it, people applaud, so it's really great. They don't even know to look at the bride and groom to see if they're kissing. They're just happy making noise! I suppose it wouldn't be as special for the adults if there were lots of other occasions in life when people in suits and fancy dress could bang on crystal goblets with spoons and forks, but I can't help but wish it wasn't only at weddings.
On Sunday I had fun at the zoo. I tagged along with some computational biologists in search of zoological insight. Perhaps they found some--I found cute animals, cute kids, kettle corn, and tree-filtered November sunlight. The really little kids could be amazed by just about anything that happened. ("Mom! Look! MOM! He's EATING! The Gorilla is EATING!") Most of them were less than six, running about underfoot. The few school age children I noticed must have been true critter connosieurs. As I regarded the blue-faced mandrill's thickly muscled limbs and seemingly hostile gaze, I speculated that the fence must be electrified, since its mere structure hardly seemed enough to enclose such a strong beast--the primate seemed so close. My friend Lior, who's pretty tall, teased me that he could lift me up over the fence and drop me in and then the mandrill would be quite close. "Oh no!" I said, "well, at least he wouldn't eat me." A boy, perhaps 10-years-old, turned to me with a very somber face. "Yes. Yes he would." Then he went back to carefully watching the mandrill. Luckily, I think he was wrong, but it certainly put the fear of baboon into me.
Nick has posted a shot of two grizzly bears we saw--one was biting the other on the head. Well, more like the bridge of the nose. Were they fighting, grooming, or necking? I have no idea. Perhaps all three at the same time. Pretty magnificent beasts, regardless.
Yesterday was not so exciting, but I have collected some fun links. From TK: Star Wars Transformers! TK also sent me this BBC article about surveillance cameras in Britain tracking the license plates of getaway cars. From Snarkmarket--facsimiles of three original illustrated Strand Sherlock Holmes stories! (These are the Sherlock Holmes I grew up reading, as I have most of them collected in a single volume.) From Manish@SepiaMutiny: Colored Bubbles that don't stain--Zubbles! Whee! From Reneebop--a chart of GWB's Gallup approval ratings--in decline. From Matt Yglesias, an LA Times article about smuggled seahorses thriving at SEA Lab. What a wacky world we live in.
