Performing Monkey Quotes

Monkey mind is actually a Buddhist term that refers to a mind that is restless, agitated, confused, or that is hard to control.

Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens. Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money. Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it.” “Company culture is what goes without saying. There are no real rules, only laws. Success forgives all sins. People who leak to you, leak about you. Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade. Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society. Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics. Lawsuits are merely expensive feints in a well-scripted conflict narrative between corporate entities. Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player—investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer—is complicit.

There’s a whole lot of people don’t seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he’ll take you seriously. If you talk tough and quote Shelley they think you’re cute, like a performing monkey or something, but they don’t pay any attention to what you say. You have to talk the kind of lingo they’re accustomed to taking seriously. And it works the other way too. Half the political intelligentsia who talk to a working audience don’t get the value of their stuff across—not so much because they’re over their audience’s heads, as because half the chaps are listening to the voice and not to the words, so they knock a big discount off what they do hear because it’s all a bit fancy, and not like ordinary, normal talk.

the more hints that were available during training, the better the monkeys performed during early practice, and the worse they performed on test day.

The overall experiment results went like this: the more hints that were available during training, the better the monkeys performed during early practice, and the worse they performed on test day.

If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.” —James Cameron “If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn’t plan your mission properly.” —Colonel David Hackworth “Not my circus. Not my monkeys.” —Polish proverb

Not that parents are alone in their extreme behavior. That have more than enough company among school boards and high-ranking politicians who think if you "fix the schools, they'll fix the kids." So, in Gadsden, Alabama, school officials eliminated kindergarten nap time in 2003 so the children would have more test-prep time. Two hours away in Atlanta, school officials figured that if you eliminated recess, the kids will study more. And just in case those shifty teachers try to sneak it in, Atlanta started building schools without playgrounds. "We are intent on improving academic performance," said the superintendent. "You don't do that by having kids hanging on the monkey bars." Meanwhile, Georgia's governor wanted the state to give Mozart CDs to newborns because research showed Mozart improved babies' IQs (which later proved to be mythical research). Right behind him is Lincoln, Rhode Island, where they canceled the district spelling bee because only one child would win, leaving all others behind, thus violating the intent of No Child Left Behind--or, as they might say in Lincoln, no child gets ahead.

We know of ESB's potential for mind control largely through the work of Jose Delgado. One signal provoked a cat to lick its fur, then continue compulsively licking the floor and bars of its cage. A signal designed to stimulate a portion of a monkey's thalamus, a major midbrain center for integrating muscle movements, triggered a complex action: The monkey walked to one side of the cage, then the other, then climbed to the rear ceiling, then back down. The animal performed this same activity as many times as it was stimulated with the signal, up to sixty times an hour, but not blindly— the creature still was able to avoid obstacles and threats from the dominant male while carrying out the electrical imperative. Another type of signal has made monkeys turn their heads, or smile, no matter what else they were doing, up to twenty thousand times in two weeks. As Delgado concluded, "The animals looked like electronic toys." 
Even instincts and emotions can be changed: In one test a mother giving continuous care to her baby suddenly pushed the infant away whenever the signal was given. Approach-avoidance conditioning can be achieved for any action simply by stimulating the pleasure and pain centers in an animal's or person's limbic system. 
Eventual monitoring of evoked potentials from the EEG, combined with radio-frequency and microwave broadcasts designed to produce specific thoughts or moods, such as compliance and complacency, promises a method of mind control that poses immense danger to all societies —tyranny without terror.

There’s a whole lot of people don’t understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he’ll take you seriously. If you talk tough and quote Shelley they think you’re cute, like a performing monkey or something, but they don’t pay any attention to what you say. You have to talk the kind of lingo they’re accustomed to taking seriously. And it works the other way too. Half the political intelligentsia who talk to a working audience don’t get the value of their stuff across—not so much because they’re over their audience’s heads, as because half the chaps are listening to the voice and not to the words, so they knock a big discount off what they do hear because it’s all a bit fancy, and not like ordinary, normal talk. So I reckoned the thing to do was to make myself bilingual, and use the right one in the right place—and occasionally the wrong one in the wrong place, unexpectedly. Surprising how that jolts ‘em.

They also observed that the amygdala in the vaccinated monkeys didn’t mature with time as it was supposed to. The amygdala, incidentally, plays an important role in social interactions. Maybe it’s not so surprising they also observed that in the vaccinated monkeys the opioid antagonist diprenorphine (DPN) levels never lowered throughout the study. In the placebo group, the DPN levels decreased noticeably. One function of DPN is to block social interaction. What this means is the research showed that the social behavior of those monkeys that received the actual vaccines, where the DPN levels did not decrease, turned anti-social. We found there was at least one more study undertaken to verify the association between DPN and social behavior. Performed in 1981[141]. The authors of that study believe the release of opioids in the brain encourages social interactions. So, when the body fails to decrease the amount of the antagonist DPN, it not only blocks the opioids that encourage social interactions, but it blocks the desire to socially interact.

According to his diary he worked hard and without scruple to discover what he could on his own. Of course, in principle I have no objection to using human subjects, as long as they are already dead,” she adds. “Have you heard of the anatomy theatre? It is where the medical school’s dissections are performed. They use bears, monkeys, dogs, and human corpses too, when the weather is cool enough. The students have been known to kidnap a body the night before its dissection, dress it up, and take it for a gondola ride down the canal.

The alienating effects of wealth and modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and never let up. Infants in hunter-gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 90 percent of the time, which roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates. One can get an idea of how important this kind of touch is to primates from an infamous experiment conducted in the 1950s by a primatologist and psychologist named Harry Harlow. Baby rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and presented with the choice of two kinds of surrogates: a cuddly mother made out of terry cloth or an uninviting mother made out of wire mesh. The wire mesh mother, however, had a nipple that dispensed warm milk. The babies took their nourishment as quickly as possible and then rushed back to cling to the terry cloth mother, which had enough softness to provide the illusion of affection. Clearly, touch and closeness are vital to the health of baby primates—including humans. In America during the 1970s, mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with babies as little as 16 percent of the time, which is a level that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse. Also unthinkable would be the modern practice of making young children sleep by themselves. In two American studies of middle-class families during the 1980s, 85 percent of young children slept alone in their own room—a figure that rose to 95 percent among families considered “well educated.” Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near them. The point of making children sleep alone, according to Western psychologists, is to make them “self-soothing,” but that clearly runs contrary to our evolution. Humans are primates—we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees—and primates almost never leave infants unattended, because they would be extremely vulnerable to predators. Infants seem to know this instinctively, so being left alone in a dark room is terrifying to them. Compare the self-soothing approach to that of a traditional Mayan community in Guatemala: “Infants and children simply fall asleep when sleepy, do not wear specific sleep clothes or use traditional transitional objects, room share and cosleep with parents or siblings, and nurse on demand during the night.” Another study notes about Bali: “Babies are encouraged to acquire quickly the capacity to sleep under any circumstances, including situations of high stimulation, musical performances, and other noisy observances which reflect their more complete integration into adult social activities.

The discovery of mirror neurons was made by Giacomo Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallase, and Marco Iaccoboni while recording from the brains of monkeys that performed certain goal-directed voluntary actions. For instance, when the monkey reached for a peanut, a certain neuron in its premotor cortex (in the frontal lobes) would fire. Another neuron would fire when the monkey pushed a button, a third neuron when he pulled a lever. The existence of such command neurons that control voluntary movements has been known for decades. Amazingly, a subset of these neurons had an additional peculiar property. The neuron fired not only (say) when the monkey reached for a peanut, but also when it watched another monkey reach for a peanut! These were dubbed “mirror neurons” or “monkey-see-monkey-do” neurons.

It is well known that animals respond poorly to living conditions that do not stimulate them mentally or physically. Rats, mice, monkeys, and other mammals confined for long periods in laboratory cages where they have little or no opportunity to engage in such natural behaviors as foraging, hiding, nest-building, or choosing social partners develop neurotic behaviors. Termed “stereotypies,” these behaviors involve repetitive, functionless actions sometimes performed for hours on end. Rodents, for example, will dig for hours at the corners of their cages, gnaw at the bars, or perform repeated somersaults. These “behavioral stereotypies” are estimated to afflict about half of the 100 million mice currently used in laboratory tests and experiments in the United States.16 Monkeys chronically confined to the boredom, stress, and social isolation of laboratory cages perform a wide range of abnormal, disturbing behaviors such as eating or smearing their own excrement, pulling or plucking their hair, slapping themselves, and self-biting that can cause serious, even fatal injury. Severely psychotic human patients display similar behaviors. If you’ve seen the repetitive pacing of caged big cats (and many other smaller animals) at the zoo, you’ve witnessed behavioral stereotypies.

I am glad when we enter the conference room that Chihiro made sure I wasn’t late to the meeting. Not only does my appearance cut short several whispered confabs in the corners of the room (confirming her suspicion that people would have used my lateness as a chance to talk about me), but I also get to take my favorite seat: at the far end of the table next to my favorite monkey. I’ve never quite understood how the monkeys got here. The fresco on the ceiling of this room –originally the formal dining room- is modeled on the one in the formal dining room at La Civetta. It depicts a lemon-covered pergola in a garden. An assortment of birds –doves, sparrows, and long-tailed peacocks – roost on the wooden struts. In the original fresco, fat cupids also frolic amidst the greenery, their chubby feet dangling precariously from their perches. In one corner a plaster foot even protrudes from the frescoed surface. In this New York version of the fresco, there are monkeys instead of cupids: monkeys peering out between leafy branches and monkeys dangling by their tails from the wooden slats of the pergola. If you look carefully (and I have had ample opportunity through long and tedious budget reviews to examine every inch of the palatial room), you can even find a few monkeys that have climbed down from the pergola and found their way into the formal dining room to perform rude and unspeakable acts... My favorite monkey, though, is the little one who peers out from behind the leafy fronds of an aspidistra, making an obscene gesture I have seen only on the streets of Italy. I always sit right next to him. He gives me some relief for the sentiments I am unable to express in the course of department meetings.

Here’s some startup pedagogy for you: When confronted with any startup idea, ask yourself one simple question: How many miracles have to happen for this to succeed? If the answer is zero, you’re not looking at a startup, you’re just dealing with a regular business like a laundry or a trucking business. All you need is capital and minimal execution, and assuming a two-way market, you’ll make some profit. To be a startup, miracles need to happen. But a precise number of miracles. Most successful startups depend on one miracle only. For Airbnb, it was getting people to let strangers into their spare bedrooms and weekend cottages. This was a user-behavior miracle. For Google, it was creating an exponentially better search service than anything that had existed to date. This was a technical miracle. For Uber or Instacart, it was getting people to book and pay for real-world services via websites or phones. This was a consumer-workflow miracle. For Slack, it was getting people to work like they formerly chatted with their girlfriends. This is a business-workflow miracle. For the makers of most consumer apps (e.g., Instagram), the miracle was quite simple: getting users to use your app, and then to realize the financial value of your particular twist on a human brain interacting with keyboard or touchscreen. That was Facebook’s miracle, getting every college student in America to use its platform during its early years. While there was much technical know-how required in scaling it—and had they fucked that up it would have killed them—that’s not why it succeeded. The uniqueness and complete fickleness of such a miracle are what make investing in consumer-facing apps such a lottery. It really is a user-growth roulette wheel with razor-thin odds. The classic sign of a shitty startup idea is that it requires at least two (or more!) miracles to succeed. This was what was wrong with ours. We had a Bible’s worth of miracles to perform:

As respects its isolation and its indifference to the basic requirements of all organic activity, the pecuniary power complex discloses a startling resemblance to a newly discovered center in the brain-that which is called the pleasure center. So far as is known, this pleasure center performs no useful function in the organism, unless it should prove that in some still obscure way it plays a part in more functional pleasure reactions. But in laboratory monkeys this localized center can be penetrated by electrodes which permit a micro-current to stimulate the nervous tissue in such a fashion that the flow of current-and hence the intensity of pleasure-can be regulated by the animal himself. Apparently the stimulation of this pleasure center is so rewarding that the animal will continue to press the current regulator for an indefinite length of time, regardless of every other impulse or physiological need, even that for food, and even to the point of starvation. The intensity of this abstract stimulus produces something like a total neurotic insensibility to life needs. The power complex seems to operate on the same principle. The magical electronic stimulus is money. What increases the resemblance between this pecuniary motivation and that of the cerebral pleasure center is that both centers, unlike virtually all organic reactions, recognize no quantitative limits. What has always been true of money, among those susceptible to its influence, applies equally to the other components of the power complex: the abstraction replaces the concrete reality, and therefore those who seek to increase it never know when they have had enough. Each of these drives, for power, for goods, for fame, for pleasure, may-it goes without saying-have as useful a part to play in the normal economy of a community as in the human body itself. It is by their detachment, their isolation, their quantitative over-concentration, and their mutual re-enforcement that they become perverse and life-corroding.

The alienating effects of wealth and modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and never let up. Infants in hunter-gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 90 percent of the time, which roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates. One can get an idea of how important this kind of touch is to primates from an infamous experiment conducted in the 1950s by a primatologist and psychologist named Harry Harlow. Baby rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and presented with the choice of two kinds of surrogates: a cuddly mother made out of terry cloth or an uninviting mother made out of wire mesh. The wire mesh mother, however, had a nipple that dispensed warm milk. The babies took their nourishment as quickly as possible and then rushed back to cling to the terry cloth mother, which had enough softness to provide the illusion of affection. Clearly, touch and closeness are vital to the health of baby primates—including humans. In America during the 1970s, mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with babies as little as 16 percent of the time, which is a level that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse. Also unthinkable would be the modern practice of making young children sleep by themselves. In two American studies of middle-class families during the 1980s, 85 percent of young children slept alone in their own room—a figure that rose to 95 percent among families considered “well educated.” Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near them. The point of making children sleep alone, according to Western psychologists, is to make them “self-soothing,” but that clearly runs contrary to our evolution. Humans are primates—we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees—and primates almost never leave infants unattended, because they would be extremely vulnerable to predators. Infants seem to know this instinctively, so being left alone in a dark room is terrifying to them. Compare the self-soothing approach to that of a traditional Mayan community in Guatemala: “Infants and children simply fall asleep when sleepy, do not wear specific sleep clothes or use traditional transitional objects, room share and cosleep with parents or siblings, and nurse on demand during the night.” Another study notes about Bali: “Babies are encouraged to acquire quickly the capacity to sleep under any circumstances, including situations of high stimulation, musical performances, and other noisy observances which reflect their more complete integration into adult social activities

Mastering Mirror Neurons   In 1992, a team at the University of Parma, Italy discovered what is now known as “mirror neurons.” In tests, performed upon monkeys, the researchers found that an area of the brain activated not just while performing an action, but also while seeing someone else perform the same action. These areas deep within the brain ‘lit-up’ whenever the monkey grasped a banana or when seeing a man grasp a banana. In a sense, they were personally experiencing the act of grasping a banana even when there was no banana was in their hand. They experienced it just by watching the man grasp the banana. It has been founded that humans are in possession of mirror neurons as well. Only ours is much stronger and more complex.

But here was Chase, showing me quite clearly that my mannerisms were just as ridiculous as anyone else’s. It was unbelievably infuriating to have him copy me right back at me, and it still didn’t explain the most important part of the question. “Why do you have to do it, too?” I said. He shook his head, one quick jerk to the side, as if I was the one asking stupid questions. “I’m learning you,” he said. “For my character.” “Couldn’t you learn Vince instead?” I said, and even to me I sounded peevish. Chase shook his head. “My character isn’t gay,” he said quite seriously. By the end of work on Thursday, I was very willing to become gay myself if it meant that Chase would stop copying me. I watched him as he aped everything I did, each small unconscious tic, and I learned that I slurped my coffee, washed my hands too long, and stared at the ceiling pursing my lips when I was talking on the phone. I have never had any problems with my self-esteem; I like Dexter very much, just the way he is. But as Chase’s performing-monkey act went on and on, I discovered that even the healthiest self-image can erode under a barrage of constant, solemn mockery.

Evolutionary scientists Michael McGuire and Michael Raleigh conducted experiments on vervet monkeys and found that males with high social rank had almost twice as much serotonin in their blood as did the low-ranking monkeys (McGuire & Troisi, 1998). As with T, however, the causal paths can run in both directions. When alpha males were overthrown, their serotonin levels plummeted. When a lower-ranking male ascended to power, his serotonin levels rose. McGuire and Raleigh discovered that they could dramatically reduce the serotonin levels of an alpha male simply by keeping him behind a one-way mirror so that the other monkeys could not see him and thus they did not perform the submissive displays. Apparently, the alpha males interpret the failure of others to submit as a sign of lost status, so their serotonin levels plummet.

Every time I hear about manspreading—a term that entered the Oxford English Dictionary only in 2015—I can’t help but think of primate males showing off their genitals. Women complain about the space men take up by sitting with their legs apart on public transportation. This unconscious male posture is often attributed to socialization and male entitlement, but it’s universal among primates. For example, if you walk behind a male vervet monkey, you won’t be able to miss his bright blue testicles, but they also stand out frontally when he sits down with his legs apart. Male primates often sit like this, as if everyone needs to know what sex they are. They also adopt this posture while soliciting a female. By showing off a stiff penis, they signal both eagerness and ability to perform.

This problem enters the business world more viciously than other walks of life, owing to the high dependence on randomness (we have already belabored the contrast between randomness-dependent business with dentistry). The greater the number of businessmen, the greater the likelihood of one of them performing in a stellar manner just by luck. I have rarely seen anyone count the monkeys. In the same vein, few count the investors in the market in order to calculate, instead of the probability of success, the conditional probability of successful runs given the number of investors in operation over a given market history.

Sonnet 1306 Doctors are not official representatives, Yet they do their job quite efficiently. Teachers are not official representatives, Yet they do their job quite respectfully. Public transport drivers ain't representatives, Yet they carry their duties quite diligently. Factory workers ain't official representatives, Yet they fulfill their tasks rather honorably. All the professions that actually require some tangible skillsets and expertise, don't rely on the jungle whim of democracy. Yet the most glorified profession of all, has no performance standards compulsory. If this is your idea of a civilized democracy, No wonder you still crave peace in nuclear weapons! Only monkeys could confuse homicide with defense, It takes a human to plant peace through illumination.

I feel like a circus monkey being forced to perform for other monkeys.

After traversing the open plain, the road led through a grove of young ebony trees, where guinea-fowls and a hartebeest were seen; it then wound, with all the characteristic eccentric curves of a goat-path, up and down a succession of land-waves crested by the dark green foliage of the mango, and the scantier and lighter-coloured leaves of the enormous calabash. The depressions were filled with jungle of more or less density, while here and there opened glades, shadowed even during noon by thin groves of towering trees. At our approach fled in terror flocks of green pigeons, jays, ibis, turtledoves, golden pheasants, quails and moorhens, with crows and hawks, while now and then a solitary pelican winged its way to the distance. Nor was this enlivening prospect without its pairs of antelope, and monkeys which hopped away like Australian kangaroos; these latter were of good size, with round bullet heads, white breasts, and long tails tufted at the end. We arrived at Kikoka by 5 P.M., having loaded and unloaded our pack animals four times, crossing one deep puddle, a mud sluice, and a river, and performed a journey of eleven miles. The settlement of Kikoka is a collection of straw huts; not built after any architectural style, but after a bastard form, invented by indolent settlers from the Mrima and Zanzibar for the purpose of excluding as much sunshine as possible from the eaves and interior. A sluice and some wells provide them with water, which though sweet is not particularly wholesome or appetizing, owing to the large quantities of decayed matter which is washed into it by the rains, and is then left to corrupt in it. A

Modern art is a waste of time. When the zombies show up, you can't worry about art. Art is for people who aren't worried about zombies. Besides zombies and icebergs, there are other things that Soap has been thinking about. Tsunamis, earthquakes, Nazi dentists, killer bees, army ants, black plague, old people, divorce lawyers, sorority girls, Jimmy Carter, giant quids, rabid foxes, strange dogs, new anchors, child actors, fascists, narcissists, psychologists, ax murderers, unrequited love, footnotes, zeppelins, the Holy Ghost, Catholic priests, John Lennon, chemistry teachers, redheaded men with British accents, librarians, spiders, nature books with photographs of spiders in them, darkness, teachers, swimming pools, smart girls, pretty girls, rich girls, angry girls, tall girls, nice girls, girls with superpowers, giant lizards, blind dates who turn out to have narcolepsy, angry monkeys, feminine hygiene commercials, sitcoms about aliens, things under the bed, contact lenses, ninjas, performances artists, mummies, spontaneous combustion, Soap has been afraid of all of these things at one time or another, Ever since he went to prison, he's realized that he doesn't have to be afraid. All he has to do is come up with a plan. Be prepared. It's just like the Boy Scouts, except you have to be even more prepared. You have to prepare for everything that the Boy Scouts didn't prepare you for, which is pretty much everything.

Take that absurd fool Elipas Levi who was supposed to be the Grand High Whatnot in Victorian times. Did you ever read his book, The Doctrine and Ritual of Magic? In his introduction he professes that he is going to tell you all about the game and that he’s written a really practical book, by the aid of which anybody who likes can raise the devil, and perform all sorts of monkey tricks. He drools on for hundreds of pages about fiery swords and tetragrams and the terrible aqua poffana, but does he tell you anything? Not a blessed thing. Once it comes to a showdown he hedges like the crook he was and tells you that such mysteries are far too terrible and dangerous to be entrusted to the profane. Mysterious balderdash my friend. I’m going to have a good strong nightcap and go to bed.

At that point in time, Gokul Rajaram was a legendary éminence grise in the ad-tech world. The so-called godfather of AdSense, Google’s secondary gold mine after AdWords, Gokul was a constant presence on the conference circuit, and an omnipresent adviser or investor in just about every advertising technology company worth talking about. He too had come to Facebook via a small acqui-hire, though really that had been just a career breather between his time at Google and his hiring at Facebook. University at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), followed by an American MBA, he was your standard-issue Indian techie, and probably that country’s most valuable export after steel and Tata Motors. “What’s the first thing you would change about Facebook Ads if we hired you?” There was about as much polish and prologue to Gokul as that of a North Korean diplomat. “I’d build a conversion-tracking system. It’s unbelievable you don’t have one yet.” A conversion-tracking system is software that tells you if an advertisement has worked in driving a conversion (or “sale” in marketing-speak), and lets you retweak your marketing campaigns based on performance. An ads system without conversion tracking is like a car without rearview mirrors; nay, it’s like a car without even rear or side windows. All you can see is forward, merrily driving along, not even understanding what’s behind you or what you just ran over. It’s a danger to yourself and others, and it was a sign of just how out-of-touch Facebook Ads management was that this somehow never got prioritized. From Gokul’s smile the conclusion was clearly . . . right answer! And so the conversation went, traversing various potential aspects of the Facebook Ads system, and what the company needed to build. It was a giddy Gokul—I’d soon learn he was almost always giddy—who escorted me out the door. The boys and I had arrived separately, assuming we’d get out at different times, and separately did we go back to the GrokPad. There, we compared notes. MRM and Argyris weren’t exactly rousing in their reviews of the experience. In fact, it was clear that the fascist vibe the company gave off had very much rubbed them the wrong way. They had never really liked Facebook, as either product or company, going back to our visits to their developer events. The daylong hazing had done nothing to charm them.

2. I’m just caging my monkey mind on paper so I can get on with my fucking day.

My mother folded each pair of trousers over her arm, pulling the legs out so that the creases lay perfectly. She handles clothes meticulously. S did Nai-nai. But there was a difference in attitude. To my grandmother, clothes held a kind of magic--they could change your destiny one way or the other. To my mother, they were servile, like farm animals in China. Treat them well and they'll perform their function.

Not my circus. Not my monkeys.

That's not me. That's my subconscious, see, he's talking to. It is kind of like a dog of a monkey, for his purposes. It's not rational, but it can be trained to perform

So Roy's tears were understandable when he remembered tying animals to all those stakes. Such a cruel experiment had been performed on animals, of course, on sheep and pigs and cattle and horses and monkeys and ducks and chickens and geese, but surely not on a zoo such as Roy described. To hear him tell it, he had tethered peacocks and snow leopards and gorillas and crocodiles and albatrosses to the stakes. In his big brain, Bikini became the exact reverse of Noah's ark. Two of every sort of animal had been brought there in order to be atom-bombed.

Each feature of a woman stimulates and induces its opposite sex to relent. In this perception and notion, whoever and whatever one is, with all its status, dignity, and ascendancy, collapse with the naked woman, on the bed, performing the play and replay actions as like a monkey. Can anyone deny that the grain or apple symbolic authority?

Farm animals aren't the only ones that suffer at the hands of human beings. Scientists use animals for their research. It's not just rats and guinea pigs – cats, dogs, monkeys and even chimpanzees can be found in laboratories, many of them suffering pain and distress as they are drugged or given electric shocks. Singer's test to see if any research is morally acceptable is this: would we be prepared to perform the same experiment on a brain-damaged human being? If not, he believes, it is not right to perform the experiment on an animal with a similar level of mental awareness. This is a tough test, and not many experiments would pass it. In practice, then, Singer is very strongly against using animals in research. The

Be it sports, or be it anything in life … everything boils down to how you handle your idle time (the free time between two balls, innings etc.). The time between two balls in cricket, the time between two shots in shooting or the time a person spends idle dictates how he will perform. What happens generally is that what your mind tells you in your free time, defines your complete story in cricket or for that matter in life.

In what’s fondly called the spinning disk experiment, Jenkins trained them to reach through the bars of their cage and keep a couple of digits in contact with wedge-shaped grooves in a four-inch disk that was spinning like an old LP. The monkeys had to modulate carefully the force they applied to the disk: too little, and their fingers would lose contact with the disk; too much and their fingers would ride along as if on a carousel. But if the animals did it just right, maintaining contact without getting taken for a ride, they were rewarded with a banana-flavored pellet. “I’d sit there for hours, hand-training a hungry monkey until he got it,” says Jenkins. Then, some 500 times a day, the monkeys practiced the move; if successful, they got a pellet. “We made sure the monkeys were hungry, and put the disk near them,” recalls Allard. “Once they had mastered the task and were performing it hundreds of times a day for several weeks, we went in to their brains. We found a fourfold increase in the area of the somatosensory cortex responding to signals from these fingers.” This wasn’t a response to something as traumatic as an amputation, a lesion, or a nerve transection, as the earlier work had been. The researchers didn’t have to cut the animal to get a change in its brain: the rezoning was purely a response to purposeful behavior.

One of the most intriguing theories about why Mosquitia began to look Maya involves what archaeologists call the “esoteric knowledge” model. In many societies, the elites rule over the common people and get them to do what they want by displaying their sanctity and holiness. This ruling class of priests and lords awe the populace with arcane rituals and ceremonies using secret knowledge. The priests claim, and of course themselves believe, that they are performing rites that are essential to appease the gods and gain divine favor for everyone’s benefit—to avert disaster, sickness, and defeat in battle, while encouraging fertility, rainfall, and bountiful crops. In Mesoamerica and probably also in Mosquitia, these rituals were dramatic and involved human sacrifice. Those noble lords with access to the “ultimate truths” leveraged that knowledge to control the masses, avoid physical labor, and amass wealth for themselves.* Part of the allure and prestige of esoteric knowledge, the theory goes, is its association with distant and exotic lands—in this case, the lands of the Maya. The “Mayanization” of Mosquitia, therefore, may not have required an invasion; it might instead have been a method for local elites to gain and hold supremacy over the common folk.

Each feature of a woman stimulates and induces its opposite sex to relent. In this perception and notion, whoever and whatever one is, with all its status, dignity, and ascendancy, collapse with the naked woman, on the bed, performing the play and replay actions as like a monkey. Can anyone deny that, the grain or apple symbolic authority?