A Wombat’s Paw May Touch The Face Of God
From a review: The first structure visible from space was made by wombats
“The Wombat is a Joy, a Triumph, a Delight, a Madness !” — Dante Gabriel Rossetti
and a short piece on world sleeping patterns, with the usual implications that the West has it all wrong compared with other cultures mentions something from Indonesia:
“These are the Balinese, and this is an example of something called ‘fear sleep’ or ‘todoet poeles.’ See these two guys?” She pointed to the first picture, where two men cowered on the sand in the center of the group. “They just got caught stealing from the village kitty, and they’ve been hauled out for trial.” The villagers all had angry faces and open mouths. The two men looked terrified.
“You can see the progression. He’s starting to sag”—in the next photo one of the thieves had his eyes closed and had begun to lean over—“and here in the last photo you can see he’s totally asleep.” The same thief was now slumped and insentient, snoozing happily amid the furious village thrum. “Isn’t that amazing?” Worthman shook her head. “In stressful situations they can fall instantly into a deep sleep. It’s a cultural acquisition.”
The ability to fall into a profound slumber upon the approach of severe danger has to be the most breathtakingly moronic superpower ever unneeded.
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Anyway, these from Discover were linked to the interesting article I was reading on the genetic basis of the aesthetics of personal beauty. Dr. Langlois began her investigations in Louisiana State University — now from the University of Texas — and studies how and when concepts of beauty as a value, and thus attraction, start; coming to the conclusions that it is genetically hard-wired into our being. Which is much like Race: everyone can just see it exists by looking at different people, but progressives having determined to convince themselves it is a social construct for their own social reasons, the demonstration of the bloody obvious has to be established scientifically. Not that Herr Dr. James D. Watson will be forgiven very soon…
Certainly I had not heard of psychobiology before, but then most scientific disciplines remain welcomely terra incognita… however this gave me pause, ‘To help solve the mystery, Langlois’s doctoral student Lisa Kalakanis has presented babies who are just 15 minutes old with paired images of attractive and homely faces.’; for some reason, prolly genetically hard-wired into scientists’ psyches, the determination to cross the line into sheer pointless intrusion remains paramount. New-born infants have enough on their plates without needing to identify photos shoved dementedly before them even if, as I doubt, their eyes are entirely focussed, and that they — any more than the average person — can deliver informed judgements. Still, could have been worse: had they been rat babies, the scientists, in mafia-mode, would have been under the obligation to kill them after experimentation.
As psychologist Nancy Etcoff, author of the 1999 book Survival of the Prettiest, puts it: “The idea that beauty is unimportant or a cultural construct is the real beauty myth. We have to understand beauty, or we will always be enslaved by it.”
Uh, most of us are in no way obsessed with personal beauty, and can take it as it is merely as one attribute. But then it wouldn’t matter in the least if we were enslaved by it. Damned egalitarians… Life is unfair by it’s very nature.
