MAMMALS, MEDIA , MOTHERS AND MORE.

PIC OF THE DAY:

This was on the wall at the Natural History Museum but, of course, described the entire museum, the entire city outside the museum and pretty much all of human life as we know it. One of the many compelling things I saw in the Mammal Theater that day was a little kid running around the museum halls with a T-shirt that read "It's my brother's fault."

PROPOSED BAND NAME OF THE DAY/REPURPOSING ACT OF THE DAY:

Mammal Theater

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

"The loudest sound in the world is 23,000 quiet New Yorkers."

-Andre Agassi.

TEDDY VEGAS BRANDED QUESTION OF THE DAY: (INTERACTIVE FEATURE OF THE DAY).

Rank 'em from most to least incompetent:

A) The Boulder DA's department
B) The New York Knicks' Management
C) The Bush Administration.

MEDIA QUESTION OF THE DAY:

Which was a greater abdication of journalistic responsibility: All the uncritical coverage of this Karr creep or the uncritical reporting leading up to the Iraq War?

SIGN OF THE DAY/WISH I HAD MY CAMERA MOMENT OF THE DAY

In Aisle 3 in Duane Reade:

Bath
Deodorant
Blades
Ethnic

CONCEPT OF THE DAY:

Pre-emptive defensive attack.

ARTICLE OF THE DAY:

In this week's New Yorker, there's an interesting article about this famous Harvard psychologist Something Spelkes and her attempts to prove that certain categories of cognition are innate rather than learned. She did a lot of experiments with infants..to show that--contrary to the Paigetian notion that object constancy (the knowledge that objects persists in fixed positions in space even when we are not observing them) only develops after 24-36 months of experience--babies do in fact come into the world with a certain innate, hard-wired sense of the world's geometry. Anyhow, there was one experiment (created and conducted by her mentor) in which a baby is encouraged to crawl off a trompe l'oiel glass cliff that is laid over a patterned floor. The babies evidently stopped short of the transparent fake cliff--a result that is claimed to prove that babies have innate depth perception or at least have depth perception from the time they are capable of locomotion. Anyhow, that's not what struck me. What struck me (after a friend who had actually taken a class with this Psychologist pointed it out to me) was the fact that the babies were encouraged to crawl across an apparent abyss by their clapping and encouraging mothers. It was so absurdly cruel and perversely funny and, while apparently resolving the issue of infantile depth perception, would certainly seem to be a source of future trust issues. And then I thought...isn't that really what parents inevitably have to do at some point as agents of our development--coax us smilingly and lovingly across an apparent abyss. An abyss you don't know is traversable and negotiable until you cross it and, looking back in horror, think. " I crossed that thing.?!?!?" Anyhow, whether that image resonates in some deep way or not, it certainly merits--at the risk, nay the certainty, of redundancy-- the status of our...

IMAGE OF THE DAY/SECOND REPURPOSING ACT OF THE DAY:

A mother smilingly encouraging her infant to crawl to her from across the other side of an apparent abyss.

THEME OF THE DAY:

Stretching the material.

NON-SPORTS QUESTION OF THE DAY:

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how many words is a picture of a word worth?

RANDOM SINGLE SENTENCE PORTRAIT OF THE DAY:

He had a highly refined sense of thwarted grandiosity.

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Posted on 8/30/2006 ( Permanent Link )
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