Tale Of Our Tail

Our distant relatives, monkeys, have tails. Humans, and our closer relations the great apes, don’t. We’ve got a tailbone, to be sure, but we lack the unit extending from it.

So, what gives? How did homo sapiens, chimpanzees, and gorillas become de-tailed?

A new study concludes that the answer to that question, as is true of so many questions about human development, lies in our genes. Researchers determined that a snippet of DNA found in apes and humans, but lacking in monkeys, affects tail development. The DNA segment is called AluY, and it is inserted into a gene called TXBT. When scientists tested the segment on laboratory mice, they found it affected tail development and led to some mice born without tails.

The ancestors of humans and the great apes are believed to have lost their tails about 25 million years ago, when they evolved away from the ancestors of modern monkeys. The evolutionary change resulted in fewer tail vertebrae and the development of the coccyx–our tailbone. Scientists believe the loss of the tail may have been an evolutionary advantage that better allowed our ancestors to shift from living in trees to living on the ground–a key development in human history that led eventually to walking upright, freeing hands for tools, and other activities that are associated with human brain development. Scientists also believe, however, that the insertion of the DNA snippet may have also resulted in an increase in neural tube birth defects, like spinal bifida.

What the study doesn’t tell us is why the loss of a tail might have been an advantage to our ancestors. We know from the theory of natural selection that evolution is all about surviving to reproduce and pass on your genetic code. That suggests that tail loss either made our ancestors better able to defend themselves against predators, or better able to hunt and forage and obtain food, or it made them more attractive to potential mates. Would a prehensile tail that could be snagged or grabbed be a disadvantage in a struggle on the ground, or did ancient females find tails off-putting and a key determinant in mate selection? We’ll probably never know.

The Closed Captioning Playlist

From time to time we’ll watch a TV series with the closed-captioning function on. The sound quality on some shows seems to be more muddied than on others, and if you’ve got a character who speaks with an accent it also can be hard to follow the dialogue. (I ruefully concede that age and hearing decline might be a factor, too.) In any case, in some situations closed-captioning definitely comes in handy.

One feature of the closed-captioning function is particularly enjoyable: the effort to describe the incidental background music during the no-dialogue scenes. In fact, in my view it’s often hilarious–as in the closed-caption example above. You can imagine the closed-captioner, listening to the music, and then searching for the right words to best describe it to someone who can’t really hear it. In the example above, for example, you wonder whether the closed-captioner was wrestling with the choice between “eerie” and “creepy,” or between “chimes” and “tubular bells.” Sometimes the closed-captioner gets a little more granular on the music description, too, and you’ll learn that what you’re hearing can be described as “techno pop” or “industrial synth” or some other genre you’ve not heard of before.

The adjective choice in the music descriptions can have a bit of a spoiler effect, too. Among the more common music descriptors are “suspenseful,” “ominous,” and “menacing.” Those three words seem to form a spectrum. If music is described a “suspenseful,” that probably means a character is just walking through a darkened alleyway, but there’s a good chance nothing will happen. “Ominous” kicks it up a notch, and tells you that the character is going to at least be confronted by a bad guy emerging from the shadows, so be prepared. And “menacing” is even more heightened. If you see “menacing” used in a music description, brace yourself– the hapless character on the screen is going to be the victim of imminent bodily harm and perhaps a grisly death at any moment.

I wonder if the composers of music for TV shows like the closed-captioning takes on their creations, and work with the closed-captioners to come up with apt descriptions?

Spring Cleaning

It’s not quite spring . . . yet . . . but the weather has warmed up a bit over the last few days, and this morning I felt the urge to do something productive. That meant a little spring cleaning was in order.

I started by opening the windows and letting in some fresh air to replace the stale air that had been trapped inside for months. I stripped the beds and washed the bedding, then assembled the big three of the cleaning world—Windex, granite cleaner, and paper towels—and tackled the countertops, stovetop, and refrigerator and its shelves. In the bathroom, I let those industrious scrubbing bubble work their magic, cleaned the mirror, and wiped down the bathtub and tile work. Then I turned to the living room, cleaned the tables, straightened the clutter, and wiped some winter dust from the TV screen. After that, I emptied the wastebaskets and recycling bin.

The last step was sweeping and vacuuming. I like that best and save it for last because it demands care and precision, to try to remove every last crumb, piece of lint, and speck of dirt. Of course, that’s not possible, but I like the smell of a freshly vacuumed carpet, anyway. It’s a nice capstone to a spring cleaning exercise.

In fact, in addition to the scent of flowers, that’s what spring smells like to me: vacuumed carpet, lemon Pledge, and a whiff of ammonia.

Happy Prolong Day

Well, it’s February 29, 2024–the “leap day” in this “leap year.” And that gives rise to a question: why do we use the word “leap” in describing the calendar manipulation that happens every four years to account for the fact that the Earth doesn’t take precisely 365 days, and not a second more, to complete its lap around the Sun?

Here’s the problem, from my view: it’s the end of February, and no one really feels like “leaping” anywhere. “Leaping” contemplates springing ahead with force and enthusiasm and perhaps a bit of youthful hopefulness and exuberance–which is why the saying “look before you leap” came about. But at the end of February, most of us aren’t really brimming with qualities like enthusiasm and hopefulness and exuberance, are we? Instead, we’d prefer that the month would be over and it would be March, already–but instead we’re saddled with another day in February, and we’re not exactly “leaping” about it.

In short, “leap” is not only inapt, it’s kind of a slap in the face.

Why the use of “leap”? Here’s how the National Air and Space Museum explains it: “a common year is 52 weeks and 1 day long.  That means that if your birthday were to occur on a Monday one year, the next year it should occur on a Tuesday. However, the addition of an extra day during a leap year means that your birthday now “leaps” over a day.  Instead of your birthday occurring on a Tuesday as it would following a common year, during a leap year, your birthday “leaps” over Tuesday and will now occur on a Wednesday.”

So, it’s the days of the week that are “leaping,” not us. Well, I say the heck with that! I say we should come up with a more people-centric term that describes how this day affects human beings, not inanimate squares on a calendar.

I suggest that we use “prolong” rather than “leap,” as in “prolong the agony”–because that’s how we feel about adding another unwelcome day to an unwelcome month in an unwelcome time of year. So, happy Prolong Day! Let’s get through it, and get on to March.

Hot Stuff

Normally I avoid having snack foods around the house, but sometimes you need to give yourself a treat. When I checked out to the snack aisle of our neighborhood grocer in search of something to try on a cold February weekend, the choices seemed to be overwhelming. Fortunately, my eye was caught by this bright red bag featuring Mama Zuma herself sporting a bandolier of peppers and hiking through a desert landscape of flaming saguaros–and suddenly my choice became easy.

I like hot, spicy food, and red-hot habanero kettle-cooked potato chips were something I just had to try. Mama Zuma’s Revenge potato chips, made by the Route 11 Potato Chips Company, fit the bill very nicely. The chips had that nice, crispy, non-greasy kettle method crunch and were coated with a red, peppery dusting that produced a great fiery taste. The chips created some enjoyable lip burn, too–making an accompanying glass of cold water essential. With each handful of chips, your fingers were left with a residue of the pepper dusting that you needed to lick off, which produced a second helping of the heat and increased the residue left by your next handful. And like any good snack, once you started, you just couldn’t stop until the entire bowl was done.

Mama Zuma’s Revenge was most enjoyable, but also reaffirmed why the snack aisle is best left unvisited.

Acquired Skills

You may not recognize just how many skills you have acquired over your lifetime. In modern parlance, they might be called “hacks.” They are the little techniques that we’ve mastered that allow us to easily perform certain tasks–techniques that make our lives a little bit easier.

The pillowcase tug is a good example. You use it when you’ve removed, washed, and dried the pillowcases, and then you’ve got to put the pillowcases back on the pillows. That’s not necessarily an easy or intuitive thing to do. You could use your hand to grab the pillow at one end and try to forcibly pull it (with your arm) into the pillowcase, but this approach is clumsy, and the pillow often gets twisted up in the process.

But at some point, someone demonstrated the pillowcase tug maneuver to you. You slip the pillow into the opening of the pillowcase, then grab the top sides of the pillowcase with both hands, place the pillow protruding out of the pillowcase under your chin, and give the pillowcase a firm tug. With each tug, the forces of gravity and friction work to gradually slide the pillow smoothly into the pillowcase. A few tugs, and voila! The pillow is in the pillowcase, and the chore is done.

Once you get the knack for doing the pillowcase tug, you’ll never forget how to do it. It’s like learning to ride a bicycle. And it’s just one of many little skills you’ve developed.

Congratulations! When you think about it, you’re a lot more accomplished than you probably realize.

The Frosted Pop-Tarts Period

I saw that William Post, widely recognized as the creator of Pop-Tarts, died recently at the ripe old age of 96. According to his obituary in Newsweek, in 1964 he was asked by the Kellogg’s Company to create a new product that could be made in a toaster. Within a few months he and his team came up with Pop-Tarts . . . and the kid breakfast world would never be the same.

Pop-Tarts were a staple in our household from the point Mom first brought a box home from the grocery store, which was probably shortly after they were introduced. (Our household tended to be a first mover when it came to new breakfast food options.) I liked the original unfrosted version–especially the strawberry variety, which the Newsweek article says was the original flavor–but my Pop-Tarts consumption really took off later, when frosted Pop-Tarts hit the market.

My favorite was the frosted blueberry Pop-Tarts. They came in a foil packet containing two of those rectangular pastry delights. I actually preferred them right out of the packet, without using the toaster. The delectable goodies had a hard icing crust that crunched and cracked when you took a bite, which provided a nice textural element to the whole frosted Pop-Tart experience. If you put them in the toaster, in contrast, the icing melted a bit, and you lost that. (You also risked taking a bite of superheated filling.) The stiff white icing coating was an excellent contrast to the rich, dark blueberry filling. Strawberry frosted Pop-Tarts were good, but a packet of two blueberry Pop-Tarts with a glass of cold milk made for a perfect post-high school snack.

Blueberry frosted Pop-Tarts entered the “forbidden foods” category, along with Frosted Flakes and Cap’n Crunch, when an adult metabolism made me start paying attention to my calorie intake, but the memories of the first bites of them live on. Thank you for the memories, Mr. Post!

The Power Of A Uniform

When I was boarding my Southwest flight yesterday, I noticed one of the pilots just ahead of me. I could tell he was a pilot because, unlike the vast majority of the people in line, who were dressed like they were getting ready to grab a bag of Cheetos, stretch out of the sofa, and watch some late-night TV, the pilot was wearing his uniform: a starched white shirt with the standard epaulets on the shoulders, a necktie, black slacks, and well-shined shoes.

There has been a decided trend against the wearing of non-military uniforms in the U.S. over the past few decades. People working in service industries, such as milkmen and gas station attendants, used to wear specific uniforms as a matter of course, but those days are long gone. Outside of the military world, uniforms now seem to be limited to postal service workers and commercial airline pilots. And unlike your basic white-collar office workers, airline pilots never get to have a “casual Friday,” either.

Why have uniforms continued to prevail in the commercial airline world, when you don’t see them much in other places? Obviously, it’s a confidence-building device–you see a person wearing a pilot’s uniform and you automatically think they are capable of flying the plane and getting you to your destination safely.

I wonder: how would passengers react if they saw someone dressed like the guy in front of me on the jetway, wearing crocs, sweat pants, and a tattered shirt, heading to the cockpit?

Horses On The Loose

Yesterday Richard and I were returning from a walk around Marfa at about 4:30 p.m. It was a quiet Sunday afternoon. There wasn’t much traffic or many people out on the streets.

Just after we crossed the railroad tracks that run through the middle of town we heard a commotion coming from one of the streets we were approaching. Suddenly a group of riderless horses and at least one mule (we think) came galloping down that street, took a sharp right onto our street, and went clattering by. They were magnificent to see, but were unattended and unpursued, by cowboys or anyone else.

At first we thought it might be some kind of event, but it clearly wasn’t. The horses swerved through an area dotted with agave plants, then stopped by the railroad tracks and gathered together, where no one paid them any attention and I took the picture above. Fortunately, no train was approaching and no cars were coming in either direction.

We had no idea what to do in these circumstances, so we moseyed along back to our hotel. When the passed by the same spot a half hour later, the small herd was gone. It apparently was just another day in west Texas.

National Park Throwback

The lobby of our lodge at Big Bend National Park includes this curious object, which must be mystifying to every visitor under the age of 50. The phone booth was built into the structure of the lobby, and I assume the National Park Service just thought it was too much of a hassle to remove it. A sign in the phone booth says: “Payphone does not work. For entertainment only.” That made me wonder if people like getting their picture taken in it.

I did actually use the booth to make a cell phone call, because the lobby area gets good reception. Those booths were uncomfortable and cramped, but they still serve their purpose. in fact, I’d like to see more phone booths. Wouldn’t it be nice if people stopped having their loud cell phone conversations in public, and instead stepped into a phone booth so we didn’t have to hear their end of the conversation?

Honest Signage

We took a stroll around downtown Marfa yesterday, and saw this sign in one of the storefronts. According to the notices at the bottom of the sign, the store sells a pretty eclectic mix of goods–the combination of t-shirts, wine, and western hats alone tells you something–but the last entry was the one that gave me a chuckle.

“Things you do/do not need”–isn’t that shopping in a nutshell?

I would have gone into the store to see what it offered in those two very broad categories, but it wasn’t open yet.

Cactus Weeding

We’ve just passed through a wet period in Marana. Even in the desert, the mixture of rain followed by sunshine means one thing: weeds. As a Midwesterner, my reflexive reaction is to pull those ugly, unwanted plants. I’ve learned, though, that desert weeding has its perils.

If you take a close look at the cactus plant above, you’ll see some green leaves that don’t belong. But here’s the problem: weeds, by their wicked nature some of the most difficult living beings on the planet, inevitably find the most inaccessible locations in which to engage in their weedy lifestyles. In this case, they are nestled among the stalks of the cactus plant, right down at the base. That means to get down to the ground level of the weed, so you can grasp its base and give it the firm but gentle tug that allows you to remove the entire root system, your hand has to navigate through the thorny stalks of the cactus plant–which weren’t exactly designed to facilitate weeding. 

Under these circumstances it requires a delicate surgeon’s skill to get down to the base of the weed without being pricked by the thorns, and if you make one false move, feel a thorny stab, and react to it, you’re likely to end up with a hand with a lot of fine puncture marks and some vigorous anti-weed epithets on your lips. Some might say that means you should live and let live, but in my view weeds should be given no quarter. 

Thin, long-handle tweezers are a necessary addition to a gardener’s toolbox out here. 

Trial Ending, Trial Beginning

A few months ago we signed on for a service for a promotional period. We liked the service and decided that when the promotional period ended we would renew it. Then one day we received a notice from the service in the mail that stated, in large font, all capital letters: ”YOUR TRIAL IS ENDING.”

That statement could not have been more inaccurate, because the real trial was only beginning. The real trial, of course, was the challenge of renewing the service in a world that is designed to encourage you to do everything yourself, on-line. 

Our mailed notice gave us a new promotional rate and three options for renewal: scanning a QR code, entering a website address, or calling a customer service number. No rational person wants to call a customer service number and enter the “your call is important to us” prolonged hold zone, so I started by scanning the QR code, figuring that would be the quickest method. The code took me to a website, but when I tried to enter my information I kept getting odd error messages that told me my renewal couldn’t be processed. 

By then, my naive initial hope for a speedy and painless process had faded, and my mindset became one of grim determination to do whatever was necessary to see the process through to conclusion.  

Next I tried to renew by typing the website link for the renewal offer into my browser. That approach required me to go through a few layers of text message and email multi-factor authentication, then typing in few twelve-digit codes–all of which were masked, so you didn’t know whether you had made an error in your typing. That time-consuming process didn’t work, either, for some reason known only to the computer, so finally I gave up and just called the customer service phone number, knowing that I would inevitably be put on hold for an extended period–which is exactly what happened. 

Ultimately, though, talking to an actual human being who knew what she was doing worked, and I succeeded in getting the service renewed. If I’d just called the 1-800 number initially, I would have saved myself time, annoyance, and aggravation. Could it be that the deep-seated instinct to avoid calls to a customer service line is wrong? I’ll try to remember that the next time I’m given options for how to accomplish something on line. 

Surviving A Bad Review

Yesterday marked the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ first performance on the Ed Sullivan Show. From our vantage point decades later, we know that the Beatles’ performance was an epochal event for popular music and for culture that forever changed the direction of the ’60s. It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of the Beatles’ impact and influence.

73 million people watched that broadcast, which smashed all TV viewing records up to that point. And, hard as it is to believe today, not everyone was impressed by the Beatles. In fact, they got some blisteringly negative reviews–some of which are collected in this piece from the Los Angeles Times published on the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ broadcast. The reviews are interesting to read, in retrospect. Some of the critics couldn’t get past the Beatles’ suits or hair–a good example of how the Beatles provoked a cultural revolution as well as a musical one–but some of the critics hated the songs, too. Newsweek‘s take commented on both of these points, and couldn’t be more dismissive:

“Visually they are a nightmare, tight, dandified Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically they are a near disaster, guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of “yeah, yeah, yeah”) are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments….”

William F. Buckley, in a review for the Boston Globe, focused more on the music and wrote:

“The Beatles are not merely awful; I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are god awful. They are so unbelievably horribly, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music, even as the imposter popes went down in history as ‘anti-popes.’”

Ouch! But of course, Newsweek and William F. Buckley and the other biting naysayers turned out to be totally, hilariously wrong. The stiff-necked critics who reamed the Beatles didn’t understand–and weren’t really the audience, anyway. The young people who watched the Ed Sullivan Show that night, though, did get it. They felt the energy, they sensed the coming change, they loved the music . . . and the rest is history. It’s worth remembering that the next time you get a bad review, or a negative comment. 

The Inoffensiveness Challenge

With the Super Bowl coming up on Sunday, and two weeks of constant game analysis and predictions and Taylor Swift chatter behind us, people have started to focus with anticipation on the really important issues, like the halftime show and the commercials. And speaking of the commercials, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that this year’s crop of ads is facing a really tough challenge: to be funny and memorable without offending anyone.

Good luck with that!

Modern America is a pretty hypersensitive place, and trying to avoid offending anyone may just be an impossible task. If you think about the famous Super Bowl ads of the past, like the weird Apple 1984 ad, or the Mean Joe Greene jersey-tossing Coke ad, would they have met the totally inoffensive to modern America test–or would someone, somewhere have been upset by the notion that our country had turned into a dark and dystopian Big Brother society, or that Mean Joe at first was gruffly dismissive of the Coke-bearing little kid? Can any commercial’s language and phrasing actually survive minute dissection for potentially offensive elements? Would Spuds MacKenzie or the football-kicking Clydesdales be well-received–or would some organization argue that they unfairly exploited animals?

Part of humor is surprise–even shock. And when you surprise people, you might also upset them . . . and a perception of offensiveness could follow. In a world where some people evidently believe that Taylor Swift’s relationship with Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs is some kind of deep-state “psyop,” all bets about where the “offensiveness” line really lies are off. Why, it makes you want to watch the Super Bowl just to see how the ad makers try to rise to the challenge and thread the needle–if an eye of the needle even exists.