One Little Monkey, Fishing In A Stream

I try to find time to blog about non-monkey related issues, but ever since this threat was made clear to me, I can't help but spread the word when new secrets of the monkey revolt are uncovered.

The latest monkey business to fear? Monkey anglers: "Scientists find monkeys who know how to fish." According to a couple of scientists, "'[This behavior is] an indication of how little we know about the species'" and "'If you provide them with an opportunity to get something tasty, they will do their best to get it.'" A species, about which we know very little, willing to do whatever it takes to get something tasty? If you're still willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe you'd better take a look at another skill monkeys have been cultivating in their tree houses:

I bet they're already better cooks than the British.

Oh, and just in case Robochimps with a taste for human meat aren't enough for you, take a look at one last passage from the article: "[Fuentes] said it affirms his belief that their ability to thrive in urban and rural environments from Indonesia to northern Thailand could offer lessons for endangered species." When these lint-pickers pass on cooking lessons to other species, we will be overrun. Our bacon is literally and figuratively fried if we don't act quickly.

Monkey Defense

Recently, I blogged about the gravest yet coolest metallic threat to humanity since Mechagodzilla: Robochimps (small wonder then that "the first Mechagodzilla was created as a weapon of destruction by a race of ape-like aliens, sometimes known as Simians or the Black Hole aliens [emphasis added]"). After the horrifying video and my particularly chilling artist's rendering of the likely fate of the human race, you were all ready to swallow your cyanide pills and take your chances with an angry God.

Well, not ALL of you. Having been burned before by monkey-transmitted diseases, those troopers on the front line in Africa have turned the tables: "Humans Likely Making Chimps Sick."

As very few of you probably know, one of my dreams is to be a zeppelin pilot, which, while ridiculous, is feasible, considering they're still flown near Lake Constance in Germany. In case that isn't enough to convince you, I present another article as Exhibit B: "Could Zeppelins airships soon be gracing our skies again?" Through my staggering powers of deduction, I can tell you that the answer to that question is a resounding "YES." Rather than use my words, I will again resort to an infinitely more useful and amusing crudely drawn explanation:

Too many robochimps, not enough zeppelins?
Problem solved.

Sunny Heidelberg

I found out on Tuesday that Dave, a close friend from college, would be spending Wednesday night in Heidelberg. He's on a 25 day European tour with a busload of Americans, so I suppose Heidelberg was the perfect place for them to stop in Germany. Heidelberg is the ultimate in American, or simply English-speaking, destinations in this country. It seems like it's a beautiful city, but every time I go there it rains on my parade. It rained right as we got there for Walpuergisnacht about a month ago and it rained the entire time I was there on Wednesday.

Dave and the girls were supposed to arrive between 6 and 7 PM, so I got there at 6. I then found out that their bus driver had gotten held up in the matter of a ticket that the company had left unpaid since 1999, so they wouldn't be arriving until 10. We eventually had an awesome night, but before that...well, I did what I could to kill 4 hours alone in Heidelberg, including nursing a drink at a bar and eating dinner very slowly, but I still spent ages wandering or simply twiddling my thumbs in the drizzle.

At one point I was sitting in a square near the old town hall and the Holy Ghost Church, when some strange German man came by, asking in a slurred English, "Are you English?" I replied in the negative, which elicited a, "Oh. You look English." I repeated, "Well, I'm not," which he took as an invitation to sit near me. What he asked next was hilarious in its rudeness and absurdity. But I don't think I should write it.

Since anyone can view this, and in fact I offer it to employers as evidence of my writing skills, I still haven't quite figured out what level of language I should use on this blog. It's not even as if I'm personally using controversial language, I'm simply trying to tell a story, and stories need the facts. But when certain language is involved, people have a hard time looking past it to see the big picture.

I could pull the standard "s***," but I'm not about to censor myself with a line of asterisks because that's about as repressed and immature as it gets. Contrary to popular belief, censoring things only gives them power. You're better off trying to educate people as opposed to "protecting" them by pulling a curtain in front of everything you find morally reprehensible.

On the other hand, it's wise to pick one's battles, and while employers are hopefully impressed by independent and challenging thoughts, I'm not sure it's worth the risk right now. I suppose there's a thin line between "asset" and "liability" in this world, so for now I'll just leave the best part of the story up to your imagination. I still can't tell if this is the right decision: I'd love some feedback on if I should just go ahead and say what happened despite the inclusion of a word that has a long and unfortunate history in America. I need a different perspective on it.

Luckee Mee Follow-Up

Wayne, chief strategist, tireless organizer, and fearless leader of Mother Tongue Ultimate (new homepage eventually here), left an interesting comment on a recent post, "Luckee Me." It was refreshingly concise compared to his post-game speeches (no offense, but unless I'm caught standing between two beautiful girls, I'd rather wrap things up quickly and get a drink of water!), but I'll still cut right to the most important part, regarding Robert Pesch, whom you might remember as one of the best players in Europe:

"Sure he's good to play with; I just wish he'd smile every now and then! :-)"

This comment, combined with my second Mother Tongue tourney from this past weekend, did remind me that while playing with the Mainz experts is like attending a private, prestigious Ultimate University Grad School, playing with a motley crew of middling to excellent Mother Tongue pick-ups is like attending a public, partying Frisbee State U. And I was never one to keep my head in the books at the complete expense of my personal enjoyment.

Case in point: another triumph for personal enjoyment.

Maybe it's my skill level, maybe it's that my last couple unfortunate years of track gave me an aversion to strictly organized team sports (or maybe it's my injured foot right now), but whatever it is, I get more kicks playing in tourneys in the more relaxed MT atmosphere than I do playing in tourneys with the highly focused Mainzers.

That's not to say I don't try to win when I'm with MT or that I don't have fun when I'm with Mainz. But when it comes to certain things, especially leisure time activities, I'm less competitive by nature than some people. And Frisbee is a strange mix of intense training/competition and casual socializing where I lean toward the casual aspect. If it involves throwing a disc around and it happens on a weekend, it still feels like having a picnic or hanging out with friends at the beach.

Maybe I'll get to the point where I'm completely focused on training and winning, but it's more likely I'll continue in this vein, similar to my sister with her various weekend sports, playing as much as I can but more for the camaraderie and cocktails. As I said, I enjoy a fierce struggle and a well-earned win, but it doesn't kill me to lose on the field as long as I'm enjoying the whole experience, which is easier with some groups than with others.

Win The Party

I was at an Ultimate Frisbee tournament in Duesseldorf this weekend with Mother Tongue, the native English-speaking team. The tourney was called either "Splatsch" or "Splash" depending on which sign you walked past, but either way the location was appropriately placed next to a large indoor and outdoor swimming pool.

The weather was terrible on Saturday, but we won a few games and held our own against some high level opponents, including the eventual tournament winners, the German Masters. "Masters" in this case means they're all over 30 years old, which means they might have some aches and pains but they also have a boatload of experience. We, on the other hand, have mostly students, and at this tourney we even had Louis, the 11-and-a-half year old son of another member, Ian, playing. He scored his only point of the tourney against the German Masters, which seemed appropriate. After our 7-4 loss, we asked the Masters to add up their years of experience: 196. In comparison, our team had 70 at most. What can ya do?

Saturday night, after dinner at perhaps the only tasty Mexican restaurant in Germany, a bunch of the team gathered to sample some liquid wares. Some of the Duesseldorf team members were still up since they were hosting the tourney, but most everyone else had gone to bed by midnight for some reason. We had beaten the hosts that morning, but our first game on Sunday at 9:30 was scheduled to be a rematch, which explains why they were so generous when we started calling for free shots. Of course a plan like "let's make them useless for the game tomorrow" isn't hard to pull off when the "victims" are the ones who start demanding unlimited free shots. The best drink of the night was a Jaegermeister-style liquor called "Killepitsch," which as you might notice lends itself to a couple of crude mispronunciations, which as you have already surmised we exploited to the fullest.

As the night continued, Ben, Garrett, and I were the ones from our team clearly enjoying ourselves the most, and eventually were the only ones left. We noticed that there was only one other group of non-hosts still up. It was maddening because couldn't they see that WE were going to win this party? They were sitting around playing some strange card game and not even drinking, yet preventing us from being the last men standing. So we told our host/enabler, Nico, to bring a bottle over there and make them indulge. Allegedly they took a shot each and then accused us of not having done so, and things were just pretty strange, and at some point they left. Awesome, right? No, because then three more guys showed up.

Kyle, an American from Oregon who had played one game with us before some of our other teammates arrived, and two of his regular teammates had been swimming and now they were back, claiming that WE couldn't win the party because THEY were still at the party. After an extended standoff, we got the Duesseldorf hosts to declare us the winners for sticking with it the whole time. But to quell the protests of the other three, we magnanimously offered a final challenge: arm wrestling.

It was agreed, and we faced off at a picnic table. Let's put it this way: they had one guy who was either Danish or Dutch, I forget now although maybe Dutch since Ben kept calling him the Flying Dutchman, and he was the individual champion. He put down all three of us like infants. Unfortunately for him, his two buddies were featherweights even compared to us, and we ended up winning 6-3. PARTY WINNERS.

Our carousing and celebratory dip in the pool was enough to wake the dead, or at least every person camped out in a tent, each of whom knew at 5 AM that we three had won the party. Obviously they were delighted for us.

Then the next day we got destroyed by Duesseldorf. Before you say it, this actually had little to do with their plan of exhausting us since most of the team hadn't fallen for it/embraced it the way Garrett, Ben, and I did. We had plenty of subs and fresh legs and eager beavers. We just couldn't beat the same team twice. Nico spent almost the entire game just slumped in a lawn chair on the sidelines, engaging in some serious schadenfreude, until Ben roared across the field for him to get up and play a freaking point, which he sheepishly did.

It came down to the whistle for the last point, and when Duesseldorf got the frisbee on a turnover, Wayne called an audible, which resulted in everyone on our defense tackling Nico off the field. Annabelle, Ian's 8 year old daughter who was in since we were down 12-2 anyway, stayed on the field, apparently frightening the Duesseldorf team, beause they managed to drop the frisbee even with a seven against one tiny girl situation. We scored the final point, which felt like a victory after our satisfying tactic.

We ended up 13th out of 23 teams, and the announcer graciously reminded those gathered that although we hadn't won the tournament, we had won the party. Sometimes the highlights happen off the field.