Frank Frazetta (1928-2010)

MORE HERE.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

CURL
By DeVil

On The Road Again. Again.

As in lying down on the road and taking a long nap. I'm feeling a little toasty from burning the candle at both ends and am awarding myself a Mental Health Day. Back to the usual sturm und drang on Wednesday.

Image: "Cranes" (1945) by N.C. Wyeth

Philippines: Backwards Into The Future

OH GOD!
Photograph by Jess Azmar for The New York Times

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

SIGMUND FREUD
(ca. 1930)
By Imagno/Getty Images
From the Library of Congress

Science Sunday: An Ode To Bluebirds

The bluebird carries the sky on its back.

~ THOREAU

I love birds and would be hard pressed to name a favorite species, but I have a special place in my heart for bluebirds.

My fondness goes beyond the bluebird's precocity, song making and lovely markings (the male and female are stunningly different). While never faced with outright extinction, the population in rural Chester County, Pennsylvania where I lived for many years had become depleted as they lost habitat and had to compete with two introduced species -- starlings and house sparrows -- that took over many of their nesting sites, killing their young and smashing their eggs.

But bluebirds have come back strong in Chester County because of nesting box programs. Same at the mountain retreat.

The bluebird (Sialia sialis in its Eastern incarnation) is a medium-sized, mostly insectivorous or omnivorous member of the thrush family. The males typical have blue and red plumage while the females are less brightly colored. Their song is a soft warble, heard often during breeding season and they seldom sing without quivering their wings.

Bluebirds are extremely territorial and prefer open grassland with scattered trees, which is exactly the kind of habitat off the back deck of the mountain retreat. Absent nesting boxes, they nest in cavities like woodpeckers, typically producing between two and four broods during the spring and summer.

Males take the lead in the breeding ritual, identifying potential nest sites and attracting prospective mates to those sites with by singing and quivering their wings and then placing nesting material in a box or cavity. If the female accepts the male and the nesting site, she alone builds the nest and incubates the eggs.

As Paul McCartney sang to Linda:

Late at night when the wind is still, I'll come flying through your door. And you'll know what love is for, I'm a bluebird.

IMAGES: John James Audubon paintings of bluebirds

Just Sharing

An earworm, for those of you who may not know, is a snippet of song lyric that gets stuck in your head.

Even though I listen to lots of music daily I suffer only intermittently and certainly not compulsively from earworms, but this snippet from Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London" has been banging around in my noggin for a couple of days now:

He's the hairy-handed gent who ran amuck in Kent
Lately he's been overheard in Mayfair

I think it must be the delicious rhyming and world play, eh?

Cartoon du Jour

Glenn McCoy/Universal Press Syndicate

Spilled Oil & Skewed Priorities

Well, I'm back in from a road trip and the big story is why Sarah Palin's high, raspy voice is a turn on for some people. (Just kidding. Sort of.) I myself am a little more concerned about the latest round of FBI and airline security lapses that nearly allowed the Times Square bomber to fly far, far away. (What if Al Qaeda had brought their A-Team and not a bumbler?) Oh, and that ongoing environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Two and a half weeks after the billion dollar BP-leased Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, taking with it the petro giant's blatantly false efforts to portray itself as a green "Beyond Petroleum" company, there seem to be three camps regarding the disaster:

* The Shit Happens Camp that is made up of people who believe the spill is nothing more than the price of doing business, oppose clamping down on Big Oil as well as pouring billions of dollars into alternative energy programs.

* The Sky Is Falling Camp that is made up of people, most of them rabid environmentalists, who want to prohibit all new offshore drilling and view Big Oil in apocalyptic terms.

* The Pragmatic Camp, of which I am a part, that is made up of people who acknowledge that reliance on finding new sources of oil in the Gulf is necessary in the short term, that there have been relatively few spills over the years, but want to keep Big Oil on a short leash while Washington pushes hard to develop alternative energy development.

As awful as the 130-mile-wide slick is, it should be kept in mind that the nearly 12 million gallons of oil that have bellow from the ocean floor since the Deepwater Horizon burned and crashed, taking an already forgotten 11 lives, is tiny compared to the largest spills.

That so noted, it is even more important to keep in mind that the disaster is one of those (I hate the term) teachable moments, in this instance an opportunity to reverse the long slide of American environmentalism as a political force and mete out punishment to BP beyond the drubbing that its share price has taken.

But the big lesson -- yet again -- is that as extraordinary as our planet is, it cannot take care of itself.

Photograph by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Cartoon du Jour

Tom Toles/Universal Press Syndicate

What Boy Would Jesus Rent?

JUST ASKING.

Robin Roberts (1926-2010)

MORE HERE.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

MARS
(As photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope)
Courtesy of NASA

Cartoon du Jour

Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News

So This Bored Family Gets Drunk . . .

. . . and starts playing around with an air grate in their living room floor. They lift up the grate, crawl through it and under the house where they discover an entire church where the basement should be.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

RACEHORSES

(Fecamp, France -- 1996)
By Jean Gaumy/Magnum Photos

Guest Post On South Africa: Trust, Guidance & Bridging The Cultural Chasm

David Ngethu introduces emus to a new pasture

LAST OF THREE PARTS

By SUSAN WINTERS COOK

EASTERN CAPE, South Africa -- So we live in a good news-bad news time. The police commissioner is corrupt but finally gets exposed and hauled into court. The health minister is an idiot who finally gets replaced. The devastatingly cruel Department of Home Affairs is exposed by a still-free media, but a media that is either going bankrupt or becoming more and more corporate and profit oriented in structure.

The now-thinking tendency of the culture, along with limited exposure to machinery limits understanding of preventive maintenance. On the bigger scale, that makes the electricity crisis in which ESKOM, the state power institution, did not plan for expansion to cover the massive extension of electricity to communities more understandable. The result was a traumatic year of blackouts and now spiralling increases in charges for power that promise to cripple businesses and households alike.

We all learn how to survive without adequate police protection but some fall through the cracks and that's more of a crap shoot -- being in the wrong place at the wrong time -- than anything else. The same friendly local police who make regular visits to my farm to support security managed to lose valuable evidence needed to prosecute the perpetrators of a break-in.

We accept the roadblocks set up during holidays to staunch the bloody mayhem on the roads caused by bad driving but also understand that most of these drivers are operating on purchased licenses or the taxis and buses are not properly inspected because the Department of Motor Vehicles is so corrupt.

I am saddened when I attend an African event in which the canned music comes from blaring loudspeakers instead of the voices of the women. When the rendition of Nkosi Si'sikelele by a group of children is limp, when the people on the streets of a squatter community do not even tap their toes to the music being produced by a band of aspiring musicians. But the music still survives in churches and funerals, and Lord knows, we have enough of them these days. I attended a funeral recently where there were two services side by side in the church, and there were our burials happening simultaneously in the cemetery.

I watch the grannies struggle to raise the children orphaned by AIDS or opportunity, aggrieved by the tragedy and at the same time I am humbled by their diligence.

That the wages of all earners in a family are pooled and accessed by all drives those who are successful in the modern urban existence to either shy away from their extended family or else find themselves overextended as they attempt to support both lifestyles.

That most families still reel under the burden of school fees for their children for increasingly inadequate education, creating a new form of illiteracy.

For every four location homes I pass that are already crumbling from poor construction because corruption in the system that was designed to provide solid dwellings for all, there is the next one nicely painted with a flourishing vegetable garden at the side. At the same time many households sag under the burden of indebtedness to the furniture stores that charge outrageous rates for slippery credit.

My heart dances and weeps daily, right in step with the schizophrenia. That the man walking down the road past my farm sings at the top of his lungs as he walks, that the man who appears at the gate is hungry, desperately looking for work. That I understand the danger involved in meeting that stranger at the gate (one reason for four large and barky dogs) but also keep parcels of food in my cupboard for the desperate.

That David Ngethu, who was forced to leave school after the second grade but can fix anything with a stick and piece of wire, and spent 10 years working in the mines and then worked in an agriculture project that failed, now has his own 25-acre farm, a pick-up truck, electricity, 15 cows, an interest-bearing savings account and cell phone. That he most likely would not enjoy these improvements without my intervention, that the Department of Land Affairs made the transfer of a piece of my land to him possible and the Department of Agriculture supports his farming. As a skilled hardworking farmer he should be able to support his family by his labor but suffers from a burden of unanticipated costs for higher education for his daughters, a cycle of indebtedness for purchases, and his concern for a son who has been released after two years in prison for armed robbery and struggles to reintegrate into a society in which the temptations of alcohol and crime run strong. David, who is a deeply religious man and a minister in his church, could guide the young man through his frequent visits to him in prison but finds he is near helpless to protect him from more trouble that he is on the outside of prison walls.

That David depleted his water supply from his dam with irrigation for his crops of cabbage without much concern that the summer rains may fall, which they have. His cows now use my dam until God and the ancestors decide to provide.

That David and I can stand side by side and trust in each others' guidance, bridging the chasm between our cultures, his quiet patience balancing my American demand for now. That's when I share the seven-day weather forecast I find on the Internet and he looks at the sky and confirms the bad news that the rain will not arrive today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan Winters Cook is a photojournalist and humanitarian who has lived in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa since 1997. She previously was a staff photographer for the Philadelphia Daily News, where I was her editor when she made several trips to South Africa to chronicle the enormous changes in that country after Nelson Mandela's release from prison.

Cook's profile of a regional African National Congress leader's struggle to survive transitional political violence won the prestigious 1994 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. From 1997 to 2003, Cook produced an AIDS education periodical for the province, has produced documentaries for the provincial premier, and most recently produced a documentary about a Cape Town squatter community building its own housing.

Cook lives with her husband, anthropologist Cecil Cook, on a farm where she raises emus.

All photographs copyright Susan Winters Cook

Guest Post On South Africa: A Roller Coaster Ride Of Pride And Despair

SECOND OF THREE PARTS

By SUSAN WINTERS COOK

EASTERN CAPE, South Africa -- Madiba arrived in February 1990. That's what we call him, his clan name. Nelson Mandela, the rabid revolutionary, released from prison, dressed in an elegant suit on his first day of freedom, sitting under a tree in a carved chair with the newly liberation African National Congress flag draped behind him, addressing a gaggle of reporters, quiet, intelligent, thoughtful, polite. To many who stood and first introduced themselves he would reply, Ah, Mr. Jolidon. I have read your stories, how are you? The man could have announced the bombing of Pretoria for tomorrow and still maintained calm control. When he stood to leave I turned and began gathering my cameras when I heard something unexpected. I turned back to see the whole international press corps standing and applauding him. Those guys would not even applaud God if given the chance, but this man was something remarkable.

Under his leadership, despite rumors of nationalization of mines and other scary socialist ideas, South African had a chance -- an opportunity -- to do something extraordinary, and that was something for which the world hungered, a better way of doing things, an alternative to scrapping and biting and killing. With a roar of applause, the process began.

It wasn't pretty. A monster as ugly as apartheid doesn't go away politely, not to mention the swath of destruction left to fester for years to come. For the next four years the monster complained and bellowed through the violence that escalated up until the first day of the first democratic election on April 27, 1994. Then a calm settled, the people voted and the freedom train was on its way.

What has happened since Mandela walked into freedom, since that great affirmation for reconciliation over revolution? Has the grand experiment worked?

Sort of. Pretty much. We're still here.

Where are those resilient creative courageous smiling people who defied apartheid's attempt to diminish their humanity?

Once they lost the enemy that defined their unity, the chorus of humanity scattered, like the end of a sports championship. Folks stopped cheering, packed up their toys and went home. Some quietly awaited the big event, Freedom. For many, the citizenship was enough . . . for a while. Their new government promised to take care of them. Housing, infrastructure, health care, education, opportunity. Respect. Hope.

Others grasped that opportunity, the honorable kind, through education and training.

Some saw an opportunity to take back what was stolen with no consideration for the damage done in the process. The euphoria lasted for about five years. Madiba's successor Thabo Mbeki could not fill the big man's shoes and inspirational leadership flatlined. As the promises failed to materialize for the majority, or the services rendered were too corrupted to feel like improvement, a vacuum in the sense of determination resulted. Most revolutionaries make lousy bureaucrats, and compared to the adrenalin pumping challenge of revolution, government management is downright dull and too full of restrictions.

The more isolated communities fared better than the urban because the traditions that sustained African culture for centuries were easier to protect and enforce.

AIDS arrived and once again the cultural concepts of sickness threw a wrench into what seems to Westerners to be a straightforward situation. The traditional healers cannot heal HIV but the people stubbornly continue to reply on them and their belief in spells and witchcraft thwarts the cause and effect of sexual behavior. Informal polygamy based in both tradition and a history of migrant labor created the perfect storm and HIV is a great exploiter of conditions in the society as well as in the body. Mbeki's denial of the reality of HIV postponed the approval of antiretroviral medications for years, resulting in thousands of senseless deaths and making survival a class issue; only those who could afford them could have them.

I consider myself a recovering believer. A relationship with South Africa is a roller coaster ride of despair and joyous pride. The collapse of the ANC is not a bad thing. It opens the way for a truly democratic system with viable opposition parties. But as long as this presently imploding institution remains in control we are going to be subjected to some pretty desperate and self serving decisions. That ANC Youth League President Julius Malema has the makings of a Mugabe has, for the first time in over 20 years, caused me to question the viability of the Grand Experiment. If he continues to have widespread exposure for his race war mongering rantings, even the sanctioning of the party elders will not be able to stop the flow of retribution against . . . what? whom? I'm not sure they know but it's just that it's not right yet, too many people are still poor, living in shacks, unemployed, uneducated, and hungry. Those white farmers who are the symbol of past wrongs make a pretty easy way to deflect anger from the real culprits, those who have corrupted the system for their own personal gain.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan Winters Cook is a photojournalist and humanitarian who has lived in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa since 1997. She previously was a staff photographer for the Philadelphia Daily News, where I was her editor when she made several trips to South Africa to chronicle the enormous changes in that country after Nelson Mandela's release from prison.

Cook's profile of a regional African National Congress leader's struggle to survive transitional political violence won the prestigious 1994 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. From 1997 to 2003, Cook produced an AIDS education periodical for the province, has produced documentaries for the provincial premier, and most recently produced a documentary about a Cape Town squatter community building its own housing.

Cook lives with her husband, anthropologist Cecil Cook, on a farm where she raises emus.

All photographs copyright Susan Winters Cook

Guest Post On South Africa: A Humanity And Pride That Couldn't Be Destroyed

FIRST OF THREE PARTS

By SUSAN WINTERS COOK

EASTERN CAPE, South Africa -- I can't say exactly when it happened, that I said we instead of they; myself and the others living in this country, South Africa. That although I am only now applying for permanent residency, I have felt part of this rural community for over 12 years, and an inexplicable passionate affection for this country for over 20 years.

To the villagers living near my little farm I am Miz Suzen and am gently accepted as a benign curiosity. We sorted out the perception that I would be a local ATM machine long ago, that I have chosen one family to benefit from my perceived wealth (by their standards) with the intention that the head of that family, David Ngethu, would be better able to spread his honorable wisdom to others with a safety net beneath him, that he earns by being my liaison, general fixer, cobra killer and protector in exchange.

So far it works, in defiance of the high incidence of attacks on white-owned farms.

I got a brief glimpse of South Africa under apartheid during my first trip here in 1988 as a visitor who was unable to get a journalist's visa. I came under the auspices of the Quaker community in Cape Town that was promoting peaceful resolution as an alternative to the violent revolution idea, a view deemed by most as unrealistic and even collaborative with the forces of evil.

Apartheid was horrible. It was sick. The rejection of humanity seeped through every breath of air, the tragedies of the lost potential with every soul that disappeared or simply succumbed to the violence of oppression was devastating. Yet now I understand how it happened. The differences of cultures could not ever be more pronounced than here. Apartheid was driven by fear as well as disgust, but misunderstanding played a big role as well. (And don't let anyone convince you apartheid was entirely the fault of the Afrikaners, it was the custom of the colonizing British for centuries wherever they went.)

It's in the understanding of the cultural factor that the hiccups we have encountered over the past 20 years begin to make sense, at least to me.

During my first trip here, I just couldn't figure out why so many folks I encountered amidst the devastating deprivation were smiling so much of the time. Certainly in response to my American being, a rarity at that time, and the camera, but not entirely. It frightened me. It was months before I understood those smiles; an extraordinary humanity that simply refused to be destroyed. That, and the music that rose out of thin air, first one voice then another always in perfect harmony, a chorus. They were not helpless victims, they were resilient creative courageous individuals and each one deserved to be acknowledged as such. To those who prescribed bloody revolution for this faraway land I advised to go to participate in that recommended bloodbath, and take their children as well.

I had more exposure to the African townships and villages than most white South Africans who were bound by the apartheid laws that made it just as difficult for them to cross those lines as it was for the black South Africans. Even now, my willingness to voluntarily be so exposed to the African community is considered unusual. Previously discouraged by the law, it's the threat of violence that maintains that separation. One cannot afford to be afraid in South Africa, I say, but one also cannot afford to be stupid. Sometimes that line is difficult to discern.

South Africa has a long history of violence, it just changes colors every few decades. From tribal wars to slavery to pioneers hacking their way into tribal territory, to the power struggle between English and Afrikaans, the violence of oppression by the apartheid system, and now the violence of poverty and disappointment, a violence of institutionalized victimization and entitlement, similar to that which I gladly left behind in Philadelphia and hoped I would never see again.

But it's here, with a vengeance. Along with junk food, WWE Smackdown and Jerry Springer, credit card fraud, and AIDS. Explosives once used to make political statements are now used on ATM machines. Violence against children, particularly rape of young girls, sickens the community.

Some of the African customs do indeed seem barbaric, but now that I have been immersed in those of the Xhosa tribe, where I live in the Eastern Cape, for 20 years their shock value has worn off and some of them are even seeping into my own belief system, such as the relationship with ancestors. Those pesky relations do not actively punish us when we are naughty, but they simply turn their backs to us and stop protecting us. So when misfortune strikes, there are two assumptions to be made; either the ancestors are p----d off, or one has come under a spell, which brings us to the dark side of the culture, witchcraft, a belief system that still thrives and is not going to go away anytime in the near future.

A problem with the ancestors is easily enough resolved by slaughtering a goat and performing the appropriate rituals, usually involving copious amounts of homemade beer and cheap brandy, which is standard practice as a form of thanksgiving on an annual basis, as well as when one relocates, to let the ancestors know where to find you. Goats and sheep lose their lives at funerals and weddings as well.

Goats are big business around here. So are cows, they still define a man's wealth.

On the issue of witchcraft and spells, at best, a traditional healer will throw the bones and pinpoint the source of the problem and make the proper potion of ground roots and herbs. In the worst case scenario, body parts of animals, including monkeys and baboons, and reportedly human children, are included in the recipe.

The concepts of the initiation of young men into manhood by trekking into the bush to be circumcised and lectured by the elders, and the payment of lobolla -- an agreed upon number of cows -- for a bride are the antithesis to what Westerners have concluded are acceptable customs. Yet most Xhosa men who have undergone this rite claim it makes them stronger, and since Mandela, Biko, Thambo, Sisulu and Mbeki are all Xhosa, maybe there is something to that.

This is a culture that lives in the now. There is little consideration of tomorrow or possible consequences to reckon with, and if the ultimate outcome of something is bad, either God or the ancestors will provide. If the provision is not satisfactory, then it's back to the healers and witch doctors.

It's in the understanding of this colorful, musical, spirited culture and the collision with the Eurocentric thinking that is linear and structured that the real challenge of liberation is defined. The new movers and shakers meet in the elegant halls of Parliament wearing tailored suits, arriving in Mercedes and monster SUVs and legislate this new democratic republic in the modified inherited Western methods. Then, every year they go home to their ancestral villages and participate in a culture that moves and communicates in a circular pattern, that defines truth and justice in very different terms, and still tends to confuse rumor with fact. The foremost leader who champions the rights of women in the new constitution paid over 250 cows for his bride. Not Jacob Zuma, who turns African tradition into a replay of a bad Tarzan movie, but Nelson Mandela, for his wife, Graca Machal.

Multiply that 11 times, because there are 11 official languages, each representing its own culture, in South Africa. Add to that the crossing of cultures, the "colored" community, those of mixed race who also have their own unique culture, the relationships the white children developed with the black maids who raised them, the children of farmers and farm workers who grew up as siblings, or the whites who saw through the apartheid system and risked their own lives to participate in the struggle for liberation. Call us bi-polar, schizophrenic or just downright complicated.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan Winters Cook is a photojournalist and humanitarian who has lived in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa since 1997. She previously was a staff photographer for the Philadelphia Daily News, where I was her editor when she made several trips to South Africa to chronicle the enormous changes in that country after Nelson Mandela's release from prison.

Cook's profile of a regional African National Congress leader's struggle to survive transitional political violence won the prestigious 1994 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. From 1997 to 2003, Cook produced an AIDS education periodical for the province, has produced documentaries for the provincial premier, and most recently produced a documentary about a Cape Town squatter community building its own housing.

Cook lives with her husband, anthropologist Cecil Cook, on a farm where she raises emus.

All photographs copyright Susan Winters Cook

South Africa By The Numbers: Why Changing The Laws Was The Easy Part

48 million people live in South Africa.

23 percent of the population is unemployed.

12 million live in shacks.

Nearly 6 million have HIV.

The life expectancy at birth is 45 years with little difference between men and women.

Nearly 80 percent of the population is black African while the white population is less than 10 percent. Yet the average annual income of the white household of R280,870 (US $38,000) is 7.4 times higher than the African household of R37,711 (US $5,100).

Infrastructure, including roads, electrical service, educational and health facilities, are crumbling faster than they can be repaired.

Photograph copyright Susan Winters Cook

Science Sunday: When It Comes To Death, Humans Are Very Chimp-Like

DOROTHY'S FAMILY WITNESSES BURIAL PREPARATIONS

There have been a rash of reports and scientific studies lately asserting that chimpanzees and their brethren react to death very much like humans. That is ass backwards: The fact of the matter is that humans react to death very much like chimpanzees and their brethren.

This brings us to three stories in which the actions of chimps seem remarkably human:

* The death of Dorothy, a chimp in her late 40s, of congestive heart failure in September 2008 at Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center in Cameroon.

After a hunter killed her Dorothy's mother, she was sold as a "mascot" to an amusement park. For the next 25 years she was tethered to the ground by a chain around her neck, taunted, teased, and taught to drink beer and smoke cigarettes for sport.

In May 2000 Dorothy -- obese from poor diet and lack of exercise -- was rescued and relocated along with 10 other primates. As her health improved, her deep kindness surfaced. She mothered an orphaned chimp named Bouboule and became a close friend to many others, including Jacky, the group's alpha male, and Nama, another amusement-park refugee.

The Sanaga-Yong management opted to let Dorothy's chimpanzee family witness her burial, so that perhaps they would understand that Dorothy would not return. Some chimps displayed aggression while others barked in frustration. But perhaps the most stunning reaction was a recurring, almost tangible silence among creatures who usually are anything but.

* The death of Pansy, a 50-year-old chimp, in December 2008 on an island in Blair Drummond Safari Park in Scotland. At her side were three other chimps -- daughter Rosie, another adult female called Blossom, and Blossom’s son Chippie.

Pansy's fellow chimps seemed to sense that something was up when she had started becoming lethargic the previous month, and instead of sleeping on their usual platforms they nested near her. Their reaction to her passing was recorded by the park's cameras (video still, above right). The chimps seemed to care for her in her final minutes, examine her body for signs of life, and then avoid the place where she died. Rosie even conducted the equivalent of an all-night vigil.

* The deaths of five chimps in the forests of Bossou, Guinea in 2003 amidst a respiratory epidemic.

Two of the chimps were babies, Jimato and Veve, and their mothers, Jire and Vuavua, carried their babies' lifeless bodies around for 68 and 19 days respectively. They groomed the dead youngsters and chased away the flies that circled them, and even after the babies had completely mummified into dry, leathery husks, the mothers still carried them, and other groups members investigated them by poking and sniffing the bodies and lifting their immobile limbs.

* * * * *

Legendary primate researcher Frans de Waal is not surprised in the least by these stories.

"The carrying of dead infants by chimpanzee mothers is well known, and has also been reported for other primates, although never of such long duration," he says.

De Waal (photo, left) notes that ape physiology drives an enormous attachment between mother and infant that doesn’t disappear when the infant dies. As a consequence, a chimp's reproductive cycle stops for four years after giving birth.

"It would also not be adaptive to abandon an infant every time it gets sick," he explains. "The best option is for mothers to keep hope and keep caring. A rapid shutting down of attachment would be maladaptive: it might lead mothers of near-dead infants to abandon them prematurely."

Why then did Jire and Vuavua eventually let go? As their reproductive cycle restarted and all the associated hormonal changes kicked in, the mothers could have been psychologically prepared to raise another generation. The fact that Jire carried her dead child for longer than Vuavua may be because she had already had seven previous children, while Vuavua was a first-time mother.

All of these examples suggest that chimpanzees have a much greater awareness that people have previously thought, notes science writer Ed Yong (photo, above) But do chimps truly understand the concept of death? Based on these stories, the answer is most definitely yes.

Remembering The Kent State Massacre

The 40th anniversary of the murder of four antiwar protesters at the hands of Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State University is May 4, but the full truth of this abhorrent event still is not known.

The big question is whether the guardsmen, who fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, were ordered to open fire on the more than 1,000 people, who were protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia for the third straight day, or whether they believed that they were being fired on by a sniper, the story promoted by Ohio Governor James Rhodes but never confirmed.

Rhodes had ordered the guardsmen to the campus after the university's ROTC building was set afire and rocks were thrown at police and firemen.

That question may now be answered because an audio recording of the moments before the guardsmen opened fire with their M1 rifles will be professionally analyzed to try to determine if an order to fire is audible.

The recording was made by a Kent State communications student who set the microphone of his reel-to-reel tape recorder on the windowsill of his dormitory room before he went outside to watch the protest.

The news comes on the eve of the meeting of the Kent State Truth Tribunal, which will begin four days of hearings today.

Hat tip to Will Bunch at Attytood

'Tin Soldiers & Nixon Coming'

OHIO
By Neil Young

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.

Cartoon du Jour

Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News

Whopper Of The Week

The ability of corporate America to lie through its teeth is peerless, but major health insurers occupy a special place in the pantheon of obfuscation.

This bring us to insurance giant Anthem Blue Cross, the company criticized by President Obama in the run up to the passage of ObamaCare when it proposed raising rates for Californians by as much as 39 percent because . . . well, it just needed to. In fact, Anthem deserves special credit for getting health-care reform over the hump.

Then in tandem developments this week, Anthem's parent Wellpoint Inc. announced that its profits had soared 51 percent in the first quarter of the year. Before you could say "public relations disaster," Anthem announced that it was rescinding the rate increase because . . . are you ready for this? Through no fault of its own the justification for raising rates was based on flawed data.

Cough, cough.

Leslie Buck (1923-2010)

MORE HERE.