in the midst of the ten thousand things . . . .
Monday 8 March 2004 | I like a cookie
The Film Critic besottedly sends me a link to The Center for Nonverbal Studies. As Holmes is quoted on the opening page, “I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumbnails, or the great issues that may hang from a bootlace.” And as the Film Critic says, “I’m hoping to call in sick for a week sometime and read all the stuff in the dictionary.” You can’t not swoon over a webpage which without irony employs words like paleocircuits and cingulate gyrus:
Love evolved from paleocircuits of the mammalian brain (specifically, modules of the cingulate gyrus) designed for the care, feeding, and grooming of offspring. (NB: There is a strong tendency to take care of, feed, and groom the people [and objects, e.g., automobiles] we love.) [Note they know how to nest parentheses correctly!]
“You’re just like most guys, but you look for different things,” Erik [Weihenmayer, 33, the first blind climber to scale Mount Everest] says. “Smooth skin, nice body, muscles—that stuff becomes more important.” And the voice becomes paramount. “My wife has the most beautiful voice in the world,” Erik says.
At parties men claim mini-territories, marking the immediate area around them with personal possessions (e.g., newspapers, cell phones, and car keys) set in the reach-space beside their drink glasses, finger food, and napkins. His artifact scatter is a sign of presence: “I am here,” and from fixed courting stations (like those of the bowerbird [family Ptilonorhynchidae]), he and his colleagues sit and stand noticeably erect, puff out their chests, tell jokes, posture, and laugh loudly, as if to say, collectively, “We are here.”
Yowzah. Hot stuff. It’s all amphibian versus mammalian around here.
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