Stinking Paws
My wife's been telling me that she hasn't been able to get to this blog for the past few weeks. She said she couldn't get there from work, which should have been a clue, but it didn't penetrate. The server that hosts www.ollerman.com and www.rickollerman.com isn't responding and is therefore not redirecting anyone to here. So I apologize to everyone who isn't reading this because of this problem. I have no idea when it will be fixed.
In the current issue of Discover magazine is a small item that talks about how much faster the brains of the lower primates are evolving relative to those of us homo sapiens. This becomes more interesting to me when you couple it with the notion that once a society becomes technologically savvy it stops evolving. Natural selection no longer has much impact when the physically weak or infirm need not outrun predators, the mentally enfeebled earn paychecks managing people like me, and we all have access to vaccinations, antibiotics and chemotherapy.
The thing that I simply cannot explain, and that brings it ALL together, is that for the past few months the History Channel has been showing the movie The Planet of the Apes. This is the movie, starring Charlton Heston from the book by Pierre Boulle, that shows what happens when the lower primates have evolved beyond humans, leapfrogging them after they've destroyed themselves in a nuclear holocaust. In other words, with the very technology that helped stop them from evolving.
Note this is on the History Channel, not SciFi. So the movie is a record of history? Or will be? Perhaps just a movie of historic cultural importance.
See the circle? Can you explain it to me? Isn't there a word that describes an unexpected result from seemingly disparate components? If there is, I can't remember. I'd ask an ape if I could find one. Now I just want someone to peel me a banana.
In the current issue of Discover magazine is a small item that talks about how much faster the brains of the lower primates are evolving relative to those of us homo sapiens. This becomes more interesting to me when you couple it with the notion that once a society becomes technologically savvy it stops evolving. Natural selection no longer has much impact when the physically weak or infirm need not outrun predators, the mentally enfeebled earn paychecks managing people like me, and we all have access to vaccinations, antibiotics and chemotherapy.
The thing that I simply cannot explain, and that brings it ALL together, is that for the past few months the History Channel has been showing the movie The Planet of the Apes. This is the movie, starring Charlton Heston from the book by Pierre Boulle, that shows what happens when the lower primates have evolved beyond humans, leapfrogging them after they've destroyed themselves in a nuclear holocaust. In other words, with the very technology that helped stop them from evolving.
Note this is on the History Channel, not SciFi. So the movie is a record of history? Or will be? Perhaps just a movie of historic cultural importance.
See the circle? Can you explain it to me? Isn't there a word that describes an unexpected result from seemingly disparate components? If there is, I can't remember. I'd ask an ape if I could find one. Now I just want someone to peel me a banana.
posted by Rick Ollerman at 9:15 PM
2 Comments:
OMG - I can't believe you caught that too. I was up late that night and flipped on the History channel and found POTA. I was so disoriented that I had to call my friend to confirm. Yes, they said. They too saw talking apes on the history channel.
If you're interested in a great satire about the impact of dumb people & evolutionary trends - rent IDIOCRACY. It is a film by Mike Judge (King of the Hill, Office Space) and deals adeptly with this issue in amusing ways.
I'd really like to know the HC's reasoning behind showing the movie. And they've been doing it repeatedly for months. Probably it's nothing more than a program director's fave or perhaps they have a relation who was an extra in an ape suit. But who knows? Maybe they know something... Maybe they're trying to warn us...
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