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It’s been a tough week here in the Spirit Lounge, what with the state of humanity being such a goddamn clusterfucked trainwreck of horror and all. So when I found this old Onion article from 2000, my heart leapt with an irrational wild hope. Let it come true, I thought. I’m a Spirit, I’m in the Spirit Lounge, God stops by for tequila shots every now and then — maybe I can talk Her into it!

Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs
‘Oh, Shit,’ Says Humanity
August 30, 2000 | Issue 36•30

One of the evolved dolphins, whose opposable thumbs
have struck fear in the hearts of humankind.

Delphinologists have reported more than 7,000 cases of spontaneous opposable-digit manifestation in the past two weeks alone, with “thumbs” observed on the bottle-nosed dolphin, the Atlantic humpback dolphin, and even the rare Ganges River dolphin.

“It appears to be species-wide,” said dolphin specialist Clifford Brees of the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory, speaking from the shark cage he welded shut around himself late Monday. “And it may be even worse: We haven’t exactly been eager to check for thumbs on other marine mammals belonging to the order of cetaceans, such as the killer whale. Oh, Christ, we’re really in the soup now.”

Of course this wouldn’t actually be evolution, but rather a kind of synchronized mass mutation. But I’m sure God could handle that.

Thus far, all the opposable digits encountered appear to be fully functional, making it possible for dolphins – believed to be capable of faster and more complex cogitation than man – to manipulate objects, fashion tools, and construct rudimentary pulley and lever systems.

“They really seem to be making up for lost time with this thumb thing,” said Dr. Jim Kuczaj, a University of California–San Diego biologist who has studied the seasonal behavior of dolphins for more than 30 years. “Last Friday, a crude seaweed-and-shell abacus washed up on the beach near Hilo, Hawaii. The next day, a far more sophisticated abacus, fashioned from some unknown material and capable of calculating equations involving numbers of up to 16 digits, washed up on the same beach. The day after that, the beach was littered with thousands of what turned out to be coral-silicate and kelp-based biomicrocircuitry.”

See? It could go fast! They could be ready to take over the U.N. by this weekend if God got started tonight!

Today the Supreme Court decided to wish the El-Masri case into the cornfield, thus providing the second half of the one-two punch that began with Torture President’s sneering TV appearance last week when he said that our government doesn’t torture people. No, it just beats them, rapes them, freezes them, waterboards them, terrorizes them. Hey, el-Masri’s crime was that he had the same name (approximately) as a known terrorist, and for this he was kidnapped by the CIA and sent to a prison in Afghanistan and tortured. Sorry, not tortured: beaten, raped, those other things. But we won’t be hearing about that any more, ’cause el-Masri is in the cornfield now. Along with the Geneva Convention, the Constitution, all that bogus reality-based community crap.

And what can I, disgruntled citizen, do about it? Not a goddamn thing as far as I can tell. Have a drink, maybe. That sounds good. What time is it? Is the sun over the yardarm yet?

Meanwhile, the bobble-heads on TV hosted another debate today to see who gets to be the next Republican candidate for Merovingian king. Why not just wheel them out in carts so we can look at their long hair, see how pretty they are, how nice they look in their king suits, that sort of thing? Why bother with the questions? We might as well have them tap dance instead. Actually that would be better! Tap dancing!

Definitely time for a drink.

And more importantly, what is they learning?

I was shopping for a new head for Raoul when I came across a terrifying place called einsteins-emporium.com, “The Internet’s Largest Science and Nature Store.” Please, god, don’t let it be true.

So, does that mean that a biography is the story of two people’s lives? Or is it perhaps the story of a bisexual’s life? Are biologists bisexuals?

Oh, that’s why they’re called zoologists! ‘Cause they take care of the animals in the zoo!

Who wrote this shit? Are they Creationists? Are they Republicans?

They’re definitely sexists, ’cause that crap is all over the site:

So was Thales just a pre-Socratic punk band?

Never mind — let’s just thank our lucky stars that men are still asking all those science-y questions. Cause we women are too busy getting our hair done.

Gee, I wonder if there’s a branch of science that deals with gender-neutral language? Probably not, since the great men of science have assured us that something as ephemeral as language has no impact whatsoever on man’s attitude to the world around him. Science is open to all men! Normal men, female men — everybody!

There are two excellent carnivals up today:

The Carnival Against Sexual Violence #32
The Sixth Carnival of Radical Feminists

Both are very well done and full of intriguing posts. Go read!

I’ve been tagged with a new meme by Mr. Hotty McNature Pants himself, and since he also happens to be my control in the Illuminati cell that runs this part of the tubes, I have no choice but to comply.

An interesting animal I had

I could go with the “most exotic pet” thing here, but in truth, when I think of an interesting animal I think of my late dog Katie. She was not only the most interesting animal I’ve ever known, but she was significantly more interesting than a lot of humans I’ve met. Smarter, too.

An interesting animal I ate

I’m not big on eating animals, but an interesting animal I almost ate was a soft-shelled crab.

My friend and I were in a tiny fishing village one day, and the only place to eat was a little crab shack down by the water.

“Whaddya got?” we asked the attendant.
“Soft-shelled crab sandwich.”
“Anything else?”
“Nope, just soft-shelled crab sandwich.”
“Okay, then, guess we’ll have the soft-shelled crab sandwich.”

The soft-shelled crab sandwich turned out to be two slices of Wonder bread, some Miracle Whip, and a big spider-looking thing.

“It’s a spider sandwich,” my friend and I whispered to each other at almost the same moment.

We ate the bread.

An interesting thing I did with or to an animal

Toured the country with the aforementioned Katie. We agreed that Mount Rushmore was an absurd monument to honky hubris, but we loved the Badlands. Other thrills included almost running out of gas on Pine Ridge reservation, almost dropping our car keys into the Grand Canyon, and herding the waves at Carmel beach.

An interesting animal in the Museum

The prairie dogs at the Prairie Homestead outside Badlands National Park. The original 1909 sodhouse is mesmerizing, but so are the prairie dogs popping in and out of their little hills. Oddly enough, Katie wasn’t remotely interested in them.

An interesting animal in its natural habitat

The mountain goats on the upper slopes of Mount Evans in Colorado. They had the raggediest coats I’ve ever seen, plus space-alien eyes and a weird fixed stare. Though maybe that was the altitude sickness getting to me.

(Note: Turns out Mount Evans isn’t really their natural habitat.)

I’m supposed to tag nine more people with this thing — nine! Oh man, at this rate we’ll have taken over the entire internet in four days. It’ll be like the Andromeda Strain.

Okay, consider yourselves tagged:

Ann Bartow
Burrow/Lost Clown
Echidne
Foilwoman
Professor Zero
Richard (aka Simply Wondered when he’s not pretending to be Dave Cameron)
The Lovely and Talented Timothy Shortell
Twisty (who typically eschews memes, but maybe this one will jolt her out of her writer’s block. I’m offering you a lifeline here, woman.)
Victoria Marinelli (when she gets back from doing important stuff)

And to all my readers who feel like chiming in — chime away. Use the comments to tell us about your animal encounters.

Neanderthal: bigger, longer, and uncut.

Yesterday in the comments we were having a bit of a giggle over the elusive genitalia of prehistoric male hominids. So I thought you all might enjoy this Neanderthal sculpture from the Neanderthal Museum in Germany. Usually he’s clothed, but the curators stripped him for a special exhibit earlier this year on “100,000 years of sex”:

He looks happy, doesn’t he?

Caveat: I’m under-slept and under the weather and I probably ought to be under the covers, so this post will suck. My brain is all sludgy and shit. Read on at your peril.

(And yes, goddamnit, even Spirits get sick. It’s a metaphysical thing. Deal.)

Okay, notice anything about this picture?

When I was a kid I was utterly enthralled with paleontology. I started out grooving on dinosaurs, but when Lucy was discovered (ah yes, I remember it well) my fascination switched to human origins. I wanted to be Donald Johanson, or at least Tim White; I wanted to go to Olduvai Gorge and dig up hominid fossils and make startling discoveries. Then I grew up and realized that squatting for hours in the sun picking at the dirt with a tiny toothbrush was not really my thing.

What annoyed me even as a kid, though, was the androcentric Early Man presentation of all the material. It was always man this and man that, and endless pictures showing an endless series of males — always males — marching into the future:

A visitor from Mars would be forgiven for thinking that somehow all of our ancestors were male. I think one reason I liked Lucy so much was because she was (probably) a she. Other female fossils had been found before, but she was the first to be named and popularized unapologetically as female. As Lucy, not as the Ape-Man of Afar.

As a young feminist I was confident that all the androcentric bullshit would soon fade away; it would have to. “Humankind” would replace “mankind,” people would talk about early humans instead of early men, and evolution illustrations would sometimes show female figures marching from simian stoop to upright stride.

Some of that has happened, yes. A little bit. But not nearly enough. The image at the top of this post was published in 2005. “Meet the Folks,” it says. Wouldn’t you know, they’re all still male.

Last week I received my copy of The Last Human, the new book of hominid reconstructions sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History. Since I’ve been feeling too sick to work for the past couple of days, I decided to cozy up in bed and read my new book. Jesus Fucking Christ, I should have made sure to have a puke bucket with me.

I’m too sludgy-brained today to go into all the problems with the book, but let me share a little of my joy with you. The nomenclature the authors have chosen for the lifeways scenarios is just horrendous. (The lifeways scenarios are the little fictional “day in the life” episodes designed to show how each of the creatures lived.) All the hominids are referred to as man-apes, apemen, or men, depending on the genus. This does absolutely nothing for clarity and simply sounds offensive. They go with the relentless man terminology even when the text is referring to females, so you have female men, or an ape-man and a female ape-man sitting next to each other (paging Samantha Bee), or a group of men, no modifiers, even though the rest of the story indicates that some of the “men” in the group are female.

But what’s even more bizarre is the chapter on Homo floresiensis. Back when H. floresiensis was discovered, all the big media outlets ran with the same illustration:

The only problem was, the type specimen was a female. “Flo,” the discoverers called her. The papers should have run with a reconstruction of a female H. floresiensis; that would have made sense. Flo, the little lady of Flores; Flo the hobbit. What’s wrong with that? Why was it necessary to transform her into a male? Do even prehistoric females have cooties?

In The Last Human, the H. floresiensis reconstruction is, thankfully, of a female, which is unsurprising given that these reconstructions are advertised to be as realistic as latex and human imagination will allow. Here’s a picture.
But dig it: the lifeways scenario they include in the text isn’t about her at all. Instead, the scenario is entirely about a male Homo floresiensis. In fact, the whole thing is unmistakably based on that bogus illustration that ran in all the papers, the one with the manly little dude carrying a giant rat. We are treated to the (imaginary) thoughts of this (imaginary) mature male as he goes about his day: catching the rat and slinging it over his shoulder, thinking about women (whom he regards as possessions that can be stolen), about his sons, about his mighty deeds as a mighty hunter — in other words, your basic 1960s-era male anthropologist’s Caveman Fantasy masquerading as science.

“Flo” — the real fossil, the little lady of Flores — is nowhere on the scene. I guess she’s one of those possessions waiting back in the cave for Mighty Man to bring home the rat.

2007 and they’re still doing this.

“Just in case you have been living under a rock,” the columnist begins, and I think well, not a rock exactly, but the Spirit Smoking Lounge does involve a certain level of disconnectedness. With no death, taxes, or cable TV, it’s easy to drift. Also, infinity totally fucks with your internal clock.

Still, even here in the Smoking Lounge we’ve heard about the Jena 6 case.

Today is the Jena 6 National Day of Action. There will be rallies all over the country to show support for the accused and to protest racism. A bunch of people are even taking buses to Jena for a big demonstration there. Although the conviction of Mychal Bell was vacated last Friday, the case is far from over:

Bell remains in jail, and the prosecutor, District Attorney Reed Walters, has stated his intention to press on with an endgame of appeals. Plus, the other five black students who were involved in the fight–Robert Bailey Jr., Theo Shaw, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis and Jesse Beard–are still awaiting trial on similar charges. None of their cases will be directly affected by Friday’s ruling, which addressed the jurisdictional problem of trying Bell, a juvenile at the time of the fight, as an adult. (Beard is being prosecuted as a juvenile; the other four of the so-called Jena Six were 17, the age of majority in Louisiana.)

Here’s how you can help. Even if you’re not going to a rally, you can sign the petition online or make a donation.

That was what jumped out at me as I was reading about the OJ Memorabilia Quest this past weekend. Some report referred to his “girlfriend of 11 years,” with a picture of her and everything. Since I’d rather clean the men’s room at the local Exxon Quik Stop than keep abreast of goings-on in OJ land, this lady’s existence had escaped me. “A girlfriend?” I thought to myself in a brief moment of forgetting what planet I’m on. “Who the fuck would fuck him?”

But of course he has a girlfriend. In a world where some woman drove across country to Tex Watson’s jail cell so she could persuade him to marry her, of course OJ has a girlfriend. According to this item from four years ago:

Prody, 28, entered OJ’s life in 1996. She met him after standing outside the gate of his Rockingham estate in Brentwood, California, wearing sexy clothing to get his attention.

[Insert appropriate feminist analysis.]

I saw this image over at Echidne’s and was instantly captivated. She’d lost the credit for the picture, so I hunted around a bit and found that it was taken by Hungarian nature photographer Bence Máté. The two grey herons were fighting over a fish (they both lost — the fish fell to the ice and another heron snapped it up).

All I can think is: they look like such dinosaurs! Just so gratifyingly dinosaury.