Picture book extraordinaire Tara Lazar and the frightfully creative S. Britt interview each other about Normal Norman (Sterling Children's Books, 2016), a laugh-out-loud book that explores the meaning of normal through the study of an exceptionally strange orangutan.
Add a CommentViewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: primates, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 7 of 7
Blog: The Children's Book Review (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Orangutans, Sterling Children's Books, Social Graces, Ages 4-8, Picture Book, Picture Books, Humor, Illustrator Interviews, Author Interviews, featured, Primates, Animal Books, Tara Lazar, S. Britt, Add a tag
Blog: OUPblog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: animals, mythology, India, monkeys, hinduism, christianity, Ramayana, Egypt, South America, primates, Oxford Reference, *Featured, Images & Slideshows, thinglink, Oxford Dictionaries Online, Online products, Earth & Life Sciences, Monkey Day, Catherine Fehre, Hanuman, monkey facts, Add a tag
December 14th is Monkey Day. The origin behind Monkey Day varies depending on who you ask, but regardless, it is internationally celebrated today, especially to raise awareness for primates and everything primate-related. So in honor of Monkey Day, here are some facts you may or may not know about these creatures.
Headline image credit: Berber monkeys. Public domain via Pixabay.
The post A few things to know about monkeys appeared first on OUPblog.
Blog: The Indubitable Dweeb (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Nature, Celebrity, Monkeys, adoption, Parody, sully, orphans, cucumbers, sullenberger, primates, World Cultures, atilla the hun, bushbabies, bushbaby, little orphan annie, Add a tag
I’ve written before on this blog that I don’t have many pet peeves. It’s true. I really don’t. Perhaps I should qualify what I mean though. For there are some things that I hate with the passion of a lambada dancer. But that’s different than having peeves. Peeves are annoyances. Hate is at once emotional and, in my case, completely rational. It’s about seeing something that’s throwing the world off its axis and knowing you must condemn it for the travesty that it is. I will list some things that I hate here:
Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberg: Look at this smug son-of-a-farmer. He lands a plane in the Hudson River and they book him on Oprah and 60 Minutes. Next thing you know, they’ll be knighting Toonces the Driving Cat for swerving off a friggin cliff. That’s right. Sully ain’t no better than Toonces. I mean, from where I stand, any pilot who can’t land his plane on a runway is a fascist, socialist, French food-eating, soccer-loving kamikaze! You can, and you should, quote me on that. Want a hero? Try John Travolta. Not only was he the yin to Kirstie Alley’s yang in all those Look Who’s Talking movies, but he also never lands his planes on rivers. Case in point.
Sustainable Agriculture: Cucumbers are like albino rhinos. When I buy a one, I’d like to know that there ain’t any others like it. It’s the last of its line. So, I would hope that after my cucumber has been plucked from its cucumber bush, the entire plant is torched, the soil is drenched with kerosene, and some overalls-clad hillbilly is tossing his corncob pipe down and banjo plucking the inferno into the night. An extreme view? Not if you’ve ever suffered the humiliation of showing up at The International Cucumber Festival in Suzdal to find that some woman also has a kirby shaped like a duck.
Orphans: I’m not talking the Dickens variety or those Slumdog Millionaire tots, though I’m certainly not big fans of their pickpocketing, gameshow-winning ways. What I’m talking about are the ones who are always hanging out at the hotspots with Sandra Bullock and Madonna and Angelina Jolie. Clearly all they want to do is wink and shoot finger-guns at the paparazzi, then parlay the TMZ coverage into a book deal and a perfume line. I’ve had a hard enough time getting department stores to even sniff Dusky, A Fragrance by Aaron Starmer, now I got some 4-year-old Javanese celebutante to compete with for shelf space! It’s enough to make a man cancel his subscription to OK! Magazine.
<Blog: OUPblog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: family, Science, Medical Mondays, evolution, females, grandmothers, grandchildren, primates, Jane Goodall, flint, Ancient Bodies Modern Lives, Wenda Trevathan, fifi, reproductive, reproducing, Health, A-Featured, Anthropology, Add a tag
Julio Torres, Intern.
Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives: How Evolution Has Shaped Women’s Health written by Wenda Trevathan, Ph.D., a Regents Professor of Anthropology at New Mexico State University, we learn about a range of women’s health issues. Trevathan’s hypothesis is that many of the health challenges faced by women today result from a mismatch between how our bodies have evolved and the contemporary environments in which we live. In the following excerpt, Trevethan draws from Jane Goodall’s observations of primates to illuminate how grandmothers, by virtue of being present in the family, contribute to the growth of prosperity of the grandchildren and the family unit as a whole.
Grandmothers and Reproductive Success
Most long-lived, group-living mammals have in their social groups as many as three generations present at any one time. Examples include elephants, whales and many primates. For primates who live in matrilocal groups, that usually means three generations of females: Infants, their mothers, and their grandmothers. A famous example comes from Jane Goodall’s studies of a Tanzanian chimpanzee social group in which Flo, her adult sons Faben and Figan, and her daughter Fifi lived together. Flo was a high-ranking female and her presence had a number of positive effects on her offspring. For example, Fifi was able to stay in the troop into which she was born, whereas the more typical pattern among chimpanzees appears to be for young females to leave their birth troops at maturity. By staying with her mother, Fifi was also able to rise to a high status. She began reproducing much earlier than most chimpanzee females and not only set the record for reproductive success at Gombe, but one of her sons became the largest male ever recorded at Gombe. Two of Fifi’s sons rose to high status in the dominance hierarchy and her daughter began reproducing much earlier than Fifi did. There is little doubt that grandmother Flo’s status had an effect on her daughter’s (and thus her own) reproductive success. There is no evidence, however, that Flo contributed directly to the care and feeding of her grandchildren, although it is true that she was not in good health at the time Fifi’s first infant was born in 1971.
Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy notes that despite her reproductive success, Flo serves as a good example of why having offspring at later ages may not be a good way to achieve this success or why “stopping early” might be selectively advantageous. Flo reproduced for the last time when she was very old and in poor health, but that infant did not live long. Goodall proposes that this last pregnancy was so draining for her that she was unable to mother her other young offspring, Flint, and when Flo died, Flint died also, even though he as at an age when he should have been able to survive on his own. In fact, if Flo had stopped reproducing after Flint, he probably would have lived, perhaps going on to sire another offspring and increasing Flo’s reproductive fitness through her grandchildren.
Similar evidence that the presence of grandmothers has positive effects on reproductive success comes from observations of a number of other primate species. Again, it is not usually resources and direct care that older female grandmothers provide; rather, they help to defend the infants from other troop members (including infanticidal males) whose behaviors endanger them. In fact, observers report that grandmothers will often act even more vigorously in defense of infants than younger kin. Grandmother Japanese macaques make a significant difference in survival of their grandchildren through the first year of life. Furthermore, females have much greater reproductive success if they have living mothers, even when those older females are still r
Blog: Book Binge (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Uncategorized, publishing, Writing, 2.0, Planet of the Apes, Pulitzer Prize, primates, Future of Publishing, Kona Inn Banana Bread, The Apple, books, Add a tag
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of posts written about the future of publishing. This weekend I also watched The Planet of the Apes and howled at the trailer for the 1980 crap-tastique movie The Apple, a dystopian pastische about the year 1994 (Watch out, this one will burn your eyes out!)
I’m not sure if it was the post-apocalyptic cinema or the glue I was sniffing, but I had an epiphany, a profound vision. Move over Nostradamus, Scarlet Whisper has seven predictions about the death (and resurrection) of print:
1. In 2012 (of course), a Malaysian scientist discovers Bibi, an orangutan capable of writing paranormal romances and techno-thrillers.
2 In 2014, after the Rand Corporation analyzes Bibi’s manuscripts against the slush pile, major publishing houses around the world begin to outsource selected projects to primates.
3. When Oprah’s book club pick, A Million Opposable Thumbs, a poignant memoir written by a red leaf monkey, skyrockets to the top of the NYT bestseller list, publishers begin to bypass agents and work directly with zookeepers in filling their lists.
4. Even as primates take over the industry, Sony capitalizes on the continued rise of e-books. Their banana shaped e-reader dominates the market. Each device comes preloaded with Stephen King’s Cell and Bibi’s first book, A Confederacy of Buttons.
5. In 2016, rabid neo-Luddites hack into Sony’s system and dump a virus into the big banana’s server. The conspiracy backfires when the virus causes banana readers to fall into a catatonic stupor after visually scanning the title page of any e-book. Biblio-zombies outnumber the uninfected within six months.
6. A death blow to publishing is struck when writer Joan Didion’s suffers a fatal heart attack after her book is passed over for the Pulitzer. Bibi’s latest opus steals literature’s top prize. The orangutan’s novel is comprised of one single word typset in Comic Sans: Meep.
6. By the fall of 2017, a ragtag cadre of librarians moves underground and operates small lending institutions. A handful of self-published authors are the only remaining uninfected human writers. These scribblers hide in bunkers and study the simian books. They learn to write.
7. In 2020, Optimus Primate, a silver Gibbon from Brooklyn, deactivates the virus by hurtling his body into Sony’s supercharged mainframe. After the brain numbing banana readers are neutralized, publishing rises from the ashes. Although Optimus Primate’s heroics proved fatal, he is immortalized in an award winning, 666,000 word novel. Written by Scarlet Whisper.
Hungry for More?
Try my moist and delicious Kona Inn Banana Bread.
1 stick real butter
3 bananas, ripe and mashed
2 well beaten eggs
1 1/4 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
Blog: Time Machine, Three Trips: Where Would You Go? (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Trivia, german, energy, absorb, water, body, Heat, drinking, primates, calories, burn, celery, muscle, reading, Add a tag
- Cold things don’t give off the cold, they take in the heat.
- Every time you move your muscles, 100’s of millions of tiny molecules call adenozine triphospahte are broken down into adenozine diphosphate and energy to make your muscle move.
- Eating celery burns more calories than is actually in the celery itself.
- Drinking cold water helps to burn calories. Your body has to heat up the water to absorb it. Heating the water up is what burns the fat.
- People who aren’t or don’t speak German sound funny when trying to speak it.
- Women get a heroine like rush from hearing themselves talk.
- Jumping on a grenade that’s just landed in your trench to use yourself as a human sacrifice will work and save all the other men in your trench.
- Emos are funny.
- We are closely related to primates
- I’m not sure why you’re reading this.
Blog: Time Machine, Three Trips: Where Would You Go? (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: reading, Trivia, german, energy, absorb, water, body, Heat, drinking, primates, calories, burn, celery, muscle, Add a tag
- Cold things don’t give off the cold, they take in the heat.
- Every time you move your muscles, 100’s of millions of tiny molecules call adenozine triphospahte are broken down into adenozine diphosphate and energy to make your muscle move.
- Eating celery burns more calories than is actually in the celery itself.
- Drinking cold water helps to burn calories. Your body has to heat up the water to absorb it. Heating the water up is what burns the fat.
- People who aren’t or don’t speak German sound funny when trying to speak it.
- Women get a heroine like rush from hearing themselves talk.
- Jumping on a grenade that’s just landed in your trench to use yourself as a human sacrifice will work and save all the other men in your trench.
- Emos are funny.
- We are closely related to primates
- I’m not sure why you’re reading this.
By anoiting Travolta and K. Alley as the Ying Yang twins, I think you are totally discounting the work of Bruce Willis in LWT and LWT2. His work blazed the way for those Etrade ads….Recognize