Sunny Musings by Afish

He ain't gonna email you!

whatshouldwecallsocialmedia:

WHEN I TRY TO EXPLAIN TO MY PARENTS WHAT MY JOB IS.

discoverynews:

Zoo Chimp Makes Elaborate Plots to Attack Humans

“Santino,” a male chimpanzee at Furuvik Zoo in Sweden, is devising increasingly complex attacks against zoo visitors.

At first Santino was famous for throwing rocks and other projectiles at visitors who annoyed him. Now he has improved his technique, which requires spontaneous innovation for future deception. Researcher Mathias Osvath, lead author of a paper about Santino in PLoS ONE, explained what the clever chimp did:

“After a visitor group had left the compound area, Santino went inside the enclosure and brought a good-sized heap of hay that he placed near the visitor’s section, and immediately after that he put stones under it,” Osvath said.

keep reading

Photos: Top: Here, Santino postures, looking tough, in front of zoo visitors.

Bottom: Santino may not be fond of human visitors, but he loves playing and spending time with Selma, a young chimp also at Furuvik Zoo.

more photos of Santino here

andrewromano:

When I heard this morning that Maurice Sendak had died, I sat down and wrote a little essay about what made his stories so unforgettable:

One of the first things I noticed, sitting down across from Maurice Sendak at his rambling home in Ridgefield, Conn., back in 2009, was the mantelpiece. Or rather what was on the mantelpiece: a raucous plastic menagerie of Disney figurines. Donald Duck was there. So was Goofy. But most of all, there was Mickey Mouse.

I had traveled up to Ridgefield, along with my Newsweek colleague Ramin Setoodeh, to interview Sendak, who died Tuesday at 83, about the soon-to-be released screen adaption of Where the Wild Things Are. Spike Jonze, the director, had come, too; his co-screenwriter, Dave Eggers, was on the line from San Francisco. Sendak’s lumbering German Shepherd, Herman—named after Melville—was snoring at our feet.

At some point, we started to discuss whether Wild Things was a movie “for children” or a movie “about childhood.” Sendak—squinty-eyed, sly, and ever snappish—took exception. He didn’t see a distinction. Citing Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Lasse Hallstrom’s My Life as a Dog—European films that confronted the disorienting strangeness of childhood head-on—he accused Americans of being “squeamish” and “Disneyfied.”

But what about those Disney characters on your mantelpiece? we asked.

Sendak arched his long, devilish eyebrows. “Oh, I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child,” he said. “He was the emblem of happiness and funniness. You went to the movies then, you saw two movies and a short. When Mickey Mouse came on the screen and there was his big head, my sister said she had to hold onto me. I went berserk. I stood on the chair screaming, “My hero! My hero!” He had a lot of guts when he was young. We’re both about the same age; we’re about a month apart. He was the little brother I always wanted.” Maurice Sendak, 2002.

Jonze was fascinated. He leaned forward and put his hand on Sendak’s shoulder. “What was he like when he was young?” he asked.

“He had teeth,” Sendak said. “Literally?”

“He had literally teeth,” Sendak continued. “I have toys in the other room.”

“Was he more dangerous?”

“Yes,” Sendak said. “He was more dangerous. He did things to Minnie that were not nice. I think what happened, was that he became so popular—this is my own theory—they gave his cruelty and his toughness to Donald Duck. And they made Mickey a fat nothing. He’s too important for products. They want him to be placid and nice and adorable. He turned into a schmaltzer. I despised him after a point.”  

Maurice Sendak liked things with teeth. If I had to explain, in short, why I love his work—why pretty much anyone who had the weird, wonderful privilege of being a child in the second half of the 20th century loves his work—that is what I would say. The things Sendak made, Wild or not, always had teeth. Max almost got eaten; Pierre actually did, by a lion. In Outside Over There, a gang of goblins abducts a baby. Elsewhere, a naked boy almost gets baked to death. When Sendak made an alphabet book, he called it Alligators All Around. With him, M was for menace.

Read the rest here. 

(via newsweek)

How to Ditch Happily-Ever-After and Build Your Own Romantic Narrative

“This can take many forms. GOOD executive editor Ann Friedman, who has no interest in getting married, has proposed reframing the term ‘spinster’: ’I want to reclaim it, like ‘bitch,’ until it carries the same connotation as ‘bachelor’: free, fun, independent, loving life.’”

Source:

Must get my hands on this!

awesomemitten:

We’re loving OPI’s newest nail shade..Skinny Dip’n in Lake Michg’n!

#mittenlove

Incredibly fascinating! via @nprmusic:

If you have not seen the video of Henry, an elderly Alzheimer’s patient in an American nursing home, suddenly become revived by hearing the music of his youth through an iPod, then stop whatever you’re doing and watch it. A week later, it still makes me tear up.

The clip is part of a documentary called Alive Inside, which follows social worker Dan Cohen as he creates personalized iPod playlists for people in elder care facilities, hoping to reconnect them with the music they love. Cohen tells NPR’s Melissa Block that the video of Henry is a great example of the link between music and memory.

Why we don’t text and walk via @buzzfeed:

michaelhayes:

gifhound:

Giant black bear spotted walking around the suburbs of Los Angeles today. One local man nearly had a miserable run in with the bear while texting.

(Via Boing Boing // KTLA)

Today in “It’s funny because no one got killed.”

So far, this is the best video of the day.

Spotted ya. (Taken with instagram)