One of my current toilet readings is Henry Gleitman's introductory psychology reader. Admittedly, it is a steep challenge for a toilet reading, but it features various chapters with more and less interesting well-organised short sections and - there are various amusing and educational images and graphs on every page.
Today I read about peculiar courtship rituals in the animal kingdom and since it is spring I would like to share some of them with you. Maybe we can all learn something from it, refine our human interaction, arrange unions, liberate from hormonal controls and physiological cycles and enjoy the splendors of polygyny, polyandry and monogamy!
First of all, the bower bird, living in Australia and New Guinea. The male bower bird tries to entice the female into a straw hut decorated with all sorts of items, preferrably matching the blue of his feathering.
Appart from traditional decoratory items, such as shells or berries, the modern bower bird likes clothespins, plastic caps and all sorts of strips and shreds of consumer culture. If an object is moved while Mr Bird is out at a collector's fair, he puts it back in its place. Miss Bower walks around, carefully assessing each bower, considering everything from the color coordination to the rarity of the items, including the overall artistic significance and what that might say about Bob Bower. Finally, many females mate with the same male, leaving everybody else in artistic squalor and tornment.
Secondly, the grebe. The average grebe surely knows how to make the good times roll. These water animals engage in a complex water ballet during courtship, stylishly dancing with hydrofoil feet accross the water while exchanging gifts of seaweed. How utterly beautiful, nice and sexy! I think I wanna be a grebe for a sunny springtime afternoon!
Much unlike the dancing fly. During mating time, the male dancing fly secretes a little ball of silk which he gives to the female while he copulates ("Dear, I think the ceeling needs painting"). It may sound nice to bring a gift to a date, but why exactly does he do that? Apparently, in other related species occupied with less precopulatory fuss, the female may decide to eat the male, rather than making precious love. Some male flies have therefore cunningly taken up bringing a small prey animal to their date, to have something up their sleeve if Ms Fly is looking for a fry. She eats, he copulates, everybody wins.
Now that isn't the summit of fly cunning: Other guys decided to wrap the prey in a little bit of silk, in order to make sure Lady McFly is occupied with unwrapping and eating, while he's got a little more time to copulate.
The dancing fly, in turn, is the abomination of that idea - he simply sticks to the wrapping and when poor Florina Flyson is finished unwrapping the ever smaller present ("What could it be?! A grub? A fly? A small fly? A tiny fly? A very, very tiny diamond? Nothing?!!! What the ---") - he is already gone, bragging about his conquest with the other guys at the liquor store. I surely do not want to be a lady dancing fly, not even on a sunny springtime afternoon on Broadway.
Now, not all guys are like that. For that matter, let's turn to one of my favorite animals - the sea horse. When Seamour Stallion and Melanie Mare discover their mutual interest, they court for several days, disregarding any interference of others. They change color (do they blush?) and swim side by side, gently holding tails or gripping the same strand of sea grass. Before dawn they wheel around dancing. Their final courtship dance lasts about eight hours whereas Seamor pumps water through his egg pouch, which opens up to display its emptiness. Then both he and Melanie let go of any anchors and drift snout-to-snout in spirals upwards out of the seagras.
Melanie deposits her eggs in Seamour's pouch, together with a handmade wooly hat and other practical items one needs for a long journey. He then sighs, assures her that everything will be fine, fertilizes the eggs and carries them with him until birth - a pregnant father, as well as a beautiful and indubitably humorous animal: They can look with each eye at different locations at the same time. I wonder if they use that skill during courtship.
Gut, ok. Ihr seid keine Massenkonsumenten, sondern besondere Menschen. Ja, und genau darum geht's hier. Denn nun gibt's eine tolle Gelegenheit für Online-Einkäufer nebenbei Gutes zu tun. Und ganz nebenbei auch noch unsere unterfinanzierte aber total wichtige, tolle, gute, sinnvolle Arbeit in einem innovativen gemeinnützigen Verein zu unterstützen. Indem Ihr Euch nämlich ganz einfach den tollen auf's philippinenbüro zugeschnittenen Toolbar von clicks4charity.de runterladet:
Yul is a modification of the old nordic word „Yula“, meaning „wheel“ and referring to the ever constant cycle of the seasons. „Yul“ is a pagan celebration of winter solstice. Solstitium in turn is Latin, meaning „resting of the sun“. During Yul, the longest night of the year, the promise of rebirth and the return of the light are celebrated and realised and many candles are lit. While it originally refers to the night of the 21st December, it has been postponed this year by two weeks, for purely personal reasons.
Here is a balad that was recently played to us by a good friend in a session with other good friends. Each of us brought a few songs that meant something to us. My friend brought "Samson" by Regina Spektor and think it is really special. It basically tells the biblical story of Samson and Delila from Delila's perspective - Samson wasn't tricked into cutting his hair, but chose so himself, out of love. I think her story is so credible and such a good alternative to the biblical story - after all Samson's uncontrolled anger was also the source of his invincibility, but how could he truely love with an anger like that? So she cut his hair out of love and she did rightly so. Yet their ensuing true love was only meant for a night: After all Samson, as a major political leader, could not afford to be in love, with enemies waiting for him to pounce upon the sign of weakness - and then they wrote history, blaming it all on Delila.
This is my friend Autumn. He really likes leaves, but thinks that green is boring. That’s why he changes their colours into various shades of yellow, red and brown. I often challenge him to do blue or pink, but that’s just a no-no: He usually says he’s an artist and that there are certain colours that just don’t go down well with his general appearance, political mission and interior personal landscape. It’s a long standing discussion between us…
This one he really liked – the technique is apparently called juxtaposition: “Wait until I bring in the wind and all the leaves mix --- everyone’s equal in a leaf-pile…”, he nods significantly while I quietly mumble a ‘smartass’ in his general direction, wishing that I could do something like that...
This guy lives in the park and just overheard my friend’s artistic comment. He said he had thought about this and other fundamental questions of life and death for a long time now and has eventually come to think that if Autumn really thinks so, he must really and actually exist; probably as an entirely separate substance from any body and therefore wholly distinct from the nature of anything physical, i.e. as an incorporeal, indivisible, non-spatial, unextended thing, which is entirely distinct from any object and would therefore not fail to be what it is even if every object in the world would cease to exist… 
This is Schneeeule (pronounced "Shnoile") and she knows Autumn for quite some time now. She thinks he is generally ok, but she actually prefers the real thing --- Winter. “Not good,” I thought, because for sure this Winter is now out to kill my good friend sooner or later... 
“I never really wanted to be a migratory bird. I just didn’t read the small print when I applied for a job as an entertainer in Europe and even though I don’t even care about Autumn or any of that seasonal nonsense, I could imitate it if you gave me a 10er. I’m saving up and working 24/7, hoping to someday wriggle out of my contract in order to fly back to my tropical home...” Those are the working conditions for professionally trained parrots inside our local city park. Truly shocking, but Autumn couldn’t have cared less…
This is me in front of the arboretum. Autumn just made some bad and politically incorrect joke about all those trees waiting to get their leaves stripped - just to take a stupid picture of me…
But usually he is good to be around with, especially now, while he’s still joyful and full of colours…
This is officially subjectively the first day of autumn at my place, and I decided today that autumn will be my friend. I shall play with it, make fun of it, fool around with it and remember it dearly once it's dead and gone.
Yesterday it rained like I'd never seen before. A thick curtain of wet strings fell from the sky and within minutes drains turned into creeks and streets into rivers. The two seconds it took me to jump out of the taxi under the porch were enough to make me wet. Just how much water can fit into a cloud, I was wondering, and this one might have just been overambitious and was now coming down with a crash. I cannot imagine what Manila itself might have looked like - or the slums alongside the river Pasig.
For us up in Quezon City, however, it was mostly fun - the kids in the neighbourhood used the opportunity to swim on the street and I became a laughing stock when I tried to cross the street with my flip-flops on and they got carried away, me hurriedly hobbling after them. Also, I was happy that somebody had warned me to watch out for open manholes: Apparently they are one of the great dangers during rains like that.
There was always something I loved about America by Simon and Garfunkel. The music is gorgeous and the lyrics really get to me. It is basically about a bus journey through America with Paul’s former girlfriend Kathy. It’s so full of friendship, love, longing and the search for some place where all these were actually possible, where one could truly be at home. It is about personal language between lovers and friends as well as unbridgeable distance – the sweet pain of being in love and alone, because there are places within ourselves which remain inaccessible however much we share.
First of all, the bower bird, living in Australia and New Guinea. The male bower bird tries to entice the female into a straw hut decorated with all sorts of items, preferrably matching the blue of his feathering.
Secondly, the grebe. The average grebe surely knows how to make the good times roll. These water animals engage in a complex water ballet during courtship, stylishly dancing with hydrofoil feet accross the water while exchanging gifts of seaweed. How utterly beautiful, nice and sexy! I think I wanna be a grebe for a sunny springtime afternoon!
Now, not all guys are like that. For that matter, let's turn to one of my favorite animals - the sea horse. When Seamour Stallion and Melanie Mare discover their mutual interest, they court for several days, disregarding any interference of others. They change color (do they blush?) and swim side by side, gently holding tails or gripping the same strand of sea grass. Before dawn they wheel around dancing. Their final courtship dance lasts about eight hours whereas Seamor pumps water through his egg pouch, which opens up to display its emptiness. Then both he and Melanie let go of any anchors and drift snout-to-snout in spirals upwards out of the seagras.
Is human personality more like an onion or more like a fruit, say, a mango? Are we made up of spicy layers that can be stripped away until all eternity or do we hold protected a seed with all our basic makeup right in the middle of us? I'd like to think I am a fruit bearing a seed, doing all the stuff fruits do, with a core protected by juicy flesh. Who wants to be an onion? But did you know there are egyptian walking onions? Possibly you even know one personally? And what does it mean that the mango seed gets harder, the riper the fruit?
