Dolphins, it would seem, have their own brand of fish capitalism (I know, I know, they're mammals, but, still...). The Guardian has the scoop (via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution):
Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.
Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.
The moral of the story? Douglas Adams was probably right about dolphins. Intrigued? Go, read.
Side note: I considered putting [sic] after all those funny British-English spellings. I did that once in a philosophy paper with Englishman and philosophy professor Martin Thompson-Jones. He didn't find it as funny as I did...
And now for some good news, Bubblegum Aesthetics is back with a vengeance. (Or is that Live Free and Bubblegum Aesthetics. Ha!)
From the new tome-like post, "Melancholy Bliss":
But here's the thing about songs: as Stephen Sondheim once said in an interview, you can be as lyrically clever as you want, but you always have to remember that someone has to sing the damn thing. And while Lennon's lyric is a brilliant study of loss and bitterness, its real "meaning" lies less in the words than in how they're sung. Or more precisely, how they're played, in all senses of the word. Lennon opens with an intentionally draggy timbre, like a man who's just woken up to find his lover packing her things-- words feel slurred, pulled upon, as if Lennon is using them for the first time. One could easily imagine the kind of quiet, rueful vocal we got in "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away," except the band-- now fully electric once more-- won't let him fall into that kind of solipsism.
Intruged? Go, read.
I'll let Josh at The Comics Curmudgeon take this one:
I’m not sure what’s more unsettling: that Jeffy can’t determine the relative ages of the people he sees on the TV, or that he can’t differentiate between displays of maternal and romantic affection. For his sake, I’m hoping that his horrified parents will realize what he’s watching and ratchet the V-chip protection levels on this TV set up so high that the only thing it will get is the Weather Channel.
And here's my design (not done yet) for the class of 2014 tee-shirt:
Yeah, there's no way I'm winning this one...
Lastly, Communications Department! Where's the link to the Wilder Voice website? Are you not linking to it because it doesn't work with Internet Explorer? Fuck that. IE is stupid. Just make everyone use Firefox (or Opera or Safari or Chrome or any browser that doesn't suck). In other news, ResEd! Where's an office for Wilder Voice? There's a room for hand-drying clothes in Burton Basement. We'll take that, because, seriously, this is college, and who the hell is putting their clothes on clothes-hangers.
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