La Bete Humaine

Not content with bombing the moon, NASA now plans to bombard monkeys with radiation, to “understand how the harsh radioactive environment of space affects human bodies and behavior.”

Monkeys were routinely tormented and tortured in the early days of space flight—on both sides of the Cold War—but this will be the first time in decades that the doubledomes of NASA have decreed it is necessary to flog our cousins for the Greater Good of mankind.

“We realized there was a need for this kind of work,” intoned Jack Bergman, behavioral pharmacologist at Harvard Medical School’s McLean Hospital in Boston. “There’s a long-standing commitment on the part of NASA to deep space travel and with that commitment comes a need for knowing what kinds of adverse effects deep space travel might have, what are the risks to astronauts. That’s not been well assessed.”

Sartre’s Crabs

From Talking With Sartre: Conversations and Debates, a selection of interviews with Jean-Paul Sartre by John Gerassi, from the 1970s, to be published this fall by Yale University Press. Translated from the French by the good folks at Harper’s.

After I took mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time. They followed me in the streets, into class. I got used to them. I would wake up in the morning and say, “Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?” I would talk to them all the time. I would say, “Okay, guys, we’re going into class now, so we have to be still and quiet,” and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang.

The crabs really began when my adolescence ended. At first, I avoided them by writing about them—in effect, by defining life as nausea—but then as soon as I tried to objectify it, the crabs appeared. And then they appeared whenever I walked somewhere. Not when I was writing, just when I was going someplace. The crabs stayed with me until the day I simply decided that they bored me and that I just wouldn’t pay attention to them.

I would have liked my crabs to come back. The crabs were mine. I had gotten used to them. They kept reminding me that my life was absurd, yes, nauseating, but without challenging my immortality. Despite their mocking, my crabs never said that my books would not be on the shelf, or that if they were, so what?

They left me during the war. You know, I’ve never said this before, but sometimes I miss them—when I’m lonely, or rather when I’m alone. When I go to a movie that ends up boring, or not very gripping, and I remember how they used to sit there on my leg. Of course I always knew that they weren’t there, that they didn’t exist, but they served an important purpose. They were a warning that I wasn’t thinking correctly or focusing on what was important, or that I was heading up the wrong track, all the while telling me that my life was not right, not what it should be. Well, no one tells me that anymore.

If I Should Die Before I Wake

Americans can be something of a complaining people. So many things a Bother or an Irritant or an Outrage. Many millions must daily lace their brains with chemicals so that they will not be depressed or anxious or afraid. In their homes sits a device known as the television set, a dark kaleidoscope splintering their lives into the Unattainable, the Menacing, and the Wrong.

Yet there are many Dangers of which even an American remains blissfully unaware. It is safe to assume, for instance, that not a single American will go to sleep this night worried that as s/he slumbers she will be set upon by a snake. This would not be so, if said American had been born in Bangladesh. In that nation, every year, 100,000 people are assaulted in their beds by snakes. Another 600,000 are victims of serpents while they are awake. More than 6000 die.

When you are an American, and you decide to frequent a restaurant, common irritants may include finding a parking spot, placement at a “bad table,” a rude or inattentive server, and food that is overcooked or overpriced. When you live in Bangladesh, and you decide to frequent a restaurant, your meal may at any moment be interrupted by a cobra that takes it into its head to slither into the place and begin sinking its fangs into anyone within reach.

So please, Americans, get some perspective. It may be bad. But it could certainly get worse.

Four On The Floor

It is well known that human beings possess a “lizard brain“—indeed, the Republican Party would not be possible without it. Now we learn, thanks to the folks at Nature, that the human heart too is linked to reptiles.

Seems a specific protein “turns on” genes involved in heart formation in turtles, lizards . . . and humans.

“This is the first genetic link to the evolution of two, rather than one, pumping chamber in the heart, which is a key event in the evolution of becoming warm-blooded,” said Gladstone investigator Benoit Bruneau, PhD, who led the study.

While bird and mammalian hearts have four chambers, frogs and other amphibians have three.

“How did hearts evolve from three to four chambers?” Bruneau said. “The different reptiles offer a sort of continuum from three to four chambers. By examining them, we learned a lot about how the human heart chambers normally form.”

He explained that with four chambers—two atria and two ventricles—humans and all other mammals have completely separate blood flows to the lungs and to the rest of the body, which is essential for us to be warm-blooded.

Reptiles, of course, are cold-blooded.

The Bruneau study indicates that turtle hearts develop in a manner that provides a “tantalizing clue” as to how mammalian hearts came to be. Lizard-heart growth, though, on the road to four chambers, just sort of . . . peters out.

Rude and abusive humor at the expense of  “Dark Side” Dick Cheney, GOoPer Lizard King, who has been afflicted with heart hiccups since his early 30s, may now commence.

Or other sorts of heart trouble can be considered.

Aquatic Exceptionalism

“America is the strongest and most prosperous nation on earth,” Nately informed him with lofty fervor and dignity. “And the American fighting man is second to none. America is not going to be destroyed.”

The old man laughed indulgently. “Rome was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you really think your own country will last? A million years? A half million? The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is the highest in the world, will last as long as . . . the frog?”

—Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Sheep Dip

The latest reality for the global-warming deniers and minimizers to ignore or explain away is the shrinkage of Scottish sheep.

Anglo-American researchers have determined that on Hirta island, located in the wild and windswept Atlantic some 100 miles west of mainland Scotland, Soay sheep are shrinking at a rate of roughly 3 ounces per year. The cumulative effect has been a 5% reduction in total body size over the past 24 years.

While evolution had previously favored larger sheep, as better able to survive Hirta’s harsh winters, “researchers have concluded that warming temperatures have made it easier for scrawnier sheep to survive, thus reducing the average size of animals in the herd.” 

As the Los Angeles Times puts it, this study “offers unusual proof that large animals are already evolving to adapt to changes wrought by climate change.” 

Bling Dynasty

Even when reading a cookbook, you can get a sense of why the Chinese had their revolution. You’ll learn that during the Qing Dynasty, for the rich folk a “light” meal consisted of over 40 courses, while dinner ran well over 100. This during a period when most of the citizenry subsisted on rice and a little soya. Rulers then were fond of dishes such as Jade Chicken, which required cooks to patiently peel mountains of grapes, or Bird’s Nest Soup, which necessitated employment of a stable of young girls “with perfect vision,” tasked with but one job: removing feathers and fluff from the nests of sea swallows.

But of course nowhere on the planet today are things quite so decadent and outre. Right?

Wrong. As Lance says in Apocalypse Now: “Jim, it’s here. It really is here.”

Here in the June 22 edition of the New Yorker, in a dotty little review of a Park Avenue tapas joint, La Fonda Del Sol:

Among the tapas . . . lamb dressed with hot peppers and roasted on a bed of grass from the field in which the lamb once grazed. The dinner version of this dish is stewed in yogurt made with the milk of the lamb’s mother.

I don’t think any more needs to be said.

Science Fiction

I guess I just don’t understand scientists.

Tuesday emerged a story from two UK universities reporting that scientists studying a fish called the nine-spined stickleback  had concluded that the creature “can compare the behaviour of other sticklebacks with their own experience and make a series of choices which can potentially lead to better food supplies.”

This diddling with the sticklebacks has apparently caused members of the scientific community to experience a huge organism, as they conclude it “could be the first in showing an animal exhibiting an important human social learning strategy.”

So my question is, do no scientists keep cats, or what? Have none of them ever fed wild birds?

The Feeling Begins

There is no foolproof way to identify potential serial killers. There do, however, exist certain indicators. One is a tendency, as a youth, to abuse, torture, kill small animals.

 

That’s certainly the way the serial killer who recently occupied the White House began. Long before he set the entire world aflame, long before he methodically, sometimes mockingly, put people to death in Texas, long before he blithely branded on the ass his Yale classmates, young George W. Bush liked to mosey on out to his backyard there in Midland, and while away an afternoon blowing up frogs.

 

“We were terrible to animals,” chortled boyhood Bush bud Terry Throckmorton in a 2000 piece in the New York Times. Seems a dip behind the Bush residence would turn into a small lake after a rain, filling with thousands of frogs. “Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them,” Throckmorton recalled. “Or we’d put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.”