Philobiblon

“Secret filming” (there is some point in CCTV!) has shown the complexity of chimpanzee tool use in the wild, and the way different troupe’s “cultures” is passed along.

“The film shows the moment when a chimpanzee goes searching for a meal at a nearby termite mound. A male scrapes away some soil and takes a thick stick left nearby and thrusts it into the ground, grasping it with his hands and a foot, throwing his full body weight behind it. .. After making a hole a foot or so deep, the chimpanzee pulls the stick out and puts it to one side. He then takes a long, thin strand of grass from his mouth, chews the end to fray it, then feeds it down the hole to fish for termites. Meanwhile other chimps sit, strands of grass in their mouths, waiting for their turn.”

****
In the “must be an amazing woman” category is Bibi Ayisha, 55, billed by the Telegraph as “Afghanistan’s only female warlord”.

Kaftar joined the resistance during the Soviet invasion, she claims. Her father was a powerful tribal leader and she had a naturally warlike temperament.
“It makes no difference if you are a man or a woman when you have the heart of a fighter,” she said. Kaftar claims to lead 150 men and her only concession to gender roles on the battlefield is that she requires a male relative to be present when she is fighting, in line with Afghan tradition for women outside the home.

*****
Pure barbarism: a US execution has been delayed, because doctors have pulled out of involvement. (What the hell were they doing there is the first place?!) So now officials are racing to complete the execution of Michael Angelo Morales before the warrant expires. But if it does, there’s a good chance he’ll survive.

Vernell Crittendon, a prison spokesman, confirmed that the prison has until 11.59 pm tonight (0759 GMT Wednesday) to execute Morales. After that, the death warrant expires and officials would have to go back to the trial judge who imposed the death sentence in 1983 for another warrant.
Seeking another warrant could prove difficult for the state, however, since the original sentencing judge, Charles McGrath, joined Morales this month in asking Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for clemency in the case. Judge McGrath said that he no longer believed the credibility of a jailhouse informant whose testimony helped to send Morales to death row.

So pure accidents of logistics will decide if a man lives or dies, a man whose guilt is now doubted by the judge who sentenced him … US “justice”!

In 1597 churches in England were ordered to keep their official registers (baptisms, marriages and burials) on parchment. The originals earlier in Elizabeth’s reign had been written in paper.

In Rolleston, Nottinghamshire, the vicar, Robert Leband (in post between 1583 and 1625) often recorded details of the lives of the people he buried. One of this small obituaries was about the centenarian Joane Caley. It ran to 81 words in the original. In the official parchment copy the entry read “Joane Caley an ould woman”.

Only the lucky survival of the original paper means that Joane has not been lost forever. The vicar who knew her thought she was important, some clerk who may not have didn’t think an “old woman” worth any special notice.

From Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England by Peter Marshall, OUP, 2002, p. 292. (Which is, by the way, excellent.)

If you are not a dog person, feel free to look away now …

Well after my temper had cooled I sent Battersea an email explaining that I felt disappointed in them (two days of frantic phone calls to the behaviour hotline not having produced any result), and they were immediately helpful. The story is that they thought the answerphone was working, after a period when it hadn’t been, but maybe it wasn’t. That is these days a pretty simple piece of technology, but anyway, these things do happen.

So I had a good long chat with a behaviour guy, and he broadly agreed with what I’m doing in terms of using the crate most of the time when I’m home (for no more than four hours at a time), spending time in the bedroom when he’s in the living room, and trying going out for short periods.

What worried him, as it is worrying me, is that Champ doesn’t seem to be happy about this at all, and is looking more stressed than before. The Battersea guy, unlike other sources, agrees with my view that separation anxiety isn’t always (despite what most of the books say) about a dog that has put itself too high in the status hierarchy and therefore feels it has to protect the rest of its pack.

Instead it can just be a dog that is unhappy alone, nervous and insecure, which to my mind is Champ to a T. When we’re out walking if something frightens him – and it doesn’t have to be much, a flapping bit of tape will do it – he cowers into me for protection.

Anyway, I got the feeling he is expecting to see Champ back at Battersea soon, and it may well come to that, but I am going to give it another two weeks, in the hope Champ might suddenly decide to grin and bear it …

Government ministers in the UK are being given a choice:

All members of the Cabinet have been told by the government car pool that when their car is up for renewal they can swap it either for an XL Jaguar or a Toyota Prius.
The Jaguar costs £50,000 and is regarded by environmentalists as a “gas guzzler”, although it runs on biodiesel, which contains a 5 per cent blend of vegetable oil. The Toyota – priced at £17,500 – has a “hybrid” engine, running on petrol and electricity, which cuts its carbon emissions.

The Independent reports that at least one, unnamed, minister, has already said that he’ll go for the Jag on the basis of “security”.

Complete bosh! (A discussion on Five Live this morning suggested that “security” came down to it being a bigger car, and hence more collision-resistant, and more powerful, so “able to get out of trouble”. Two questions: How much risk are ministers at? Not great – since Northern Ireland has calmed, anyway. How often has “a powerful car” saved a politician’s life? No examples that I can think of.

Any minister who opts for a Jag should be named and shamed, embarrassed out of the government.

****
Elsewhere Caitlin Moran – a sort of poor-woman’s Julie Burchill – has some interesting thoughts, amidst the sarcasm, about the apparent rash of people being convicted of varying offences that they filmed themselves on their mobile phones. Not that I’m a Baudrillard fan, but he might have something to say about it … simulation and reality and all that.

It has taken a while – I wrote the piece the best part of 18 months ago – but my first academic article has just been published, Resurrecting Our Foremothers: My Hopes as a Biographer, Journalist, and Blogger. It is on Thirdspace, a feminist internet journal “for emerging scholars”. (You might call mine a slow hatching, since I suspect most of the other contributors are rather younger.)

It draws for theory on my Mass Comm thesis, and in practice on my early experiences of blogging. Were I to be writing it now, it would include of course references to the Carnival of Feminists, but re-reading it now (when I’d pretty well forgotten what it contained) I am struck by the fact that there is a single theme in what I do, even though it is not obvious. From Miss Frances William Wynn’s account of Princess Caroline and the pumpkin, to Friday Femmes Fatales, what I am trying to do is bring women to greater prominence, to preserve and propagate their words and thoughts.

Gosh, there is some sort of coherence after all …

Do look too at other items in the journal, particularly “Writing Bridges: Memoir’s Potential for Community Building”.

Elsewhere, I recently came across a more literary feminist journal, Trivia: Voices of Feminism. (I think they are taking postmodern irony too far in the title, but there is some interesting stuff there.)

Entries need to be in today (or perhaps early tomorrow). Winter on Mind the Gap is particularly asking for posts on Feminism and the Body, although any other feminist subject is also welcome.

Submissions to: mindthegapcardiff@yahoo.co.uk