Underblog.co.uk

Underblog here bringing you the latest MonkeyNews. The Tokyo Galley is now showing paintings by Asuka, a three year old chimpanzee.

The chimp’s painting style is seldom subtle. She attacks the canvas, whacking it with a stiff brush, but usually keeps her strokes within its boundaries. Asuka seems to favor yellow and red — the colors of her favorite foods, bananas and apples. Her minders say she seems to draw satisfaction from her work.

Pakistan’s Daily Times has the full story.

Another great ape, who goes by the moniker “underblog”, is returning to university at the weekend. I hope to be able to continue blogging but if it comes down to a choice of either pissing around on the internet or getting a degree, I hope I shall have the will-power to make the correct one.

Finally, check out the surreal antics of UKIP “star” Robert Kilroy-Silk, aka the orange slimey creep off the telly. (Requires flash, NSFW)

–Update: You can see some photos of Asuka painting here. To be honest, she’s rubbish.

Has it really been a whole week since I posted? I guess I’ve been busy filling in forms and playing Weboggle. (No link this time because Hads will get annoyed. Anyway, all the form-filling is over for the time being, so I thought I’d bring you this from a recent news article:

The thief threatened children with bricks and ripped the buttons off shirts. He stole tomatoes from one home and snatched bread from another. Down the street, he briefly fled with a differential equations book and beat a calculator with his fist.

But this isn’t any old news, it’s MonkeyNews! That’s right, this week the Chicago Tribune brought us the story of a monkey jail in India, although the article can now be read (without the hassle of the Tribune’s cumpulsary registration) at the Kansas City Star.

It is illegal to kill monkeys in India, because they are considered sacred by Hindus.

Sexually frustrated Feili has become grumpy and lethargic. She has even been driven to take up smoking because her partner, who is 28 years her senior, is unable or unwilling “to meet her sexual demands” according to the BBC. What makes Feili’s plight so news-worthy? Because she’s only thirteen years old. Oh, and she’s a chimp.

Despite her 41 year old cage-mate being crap in bed, Feili has turned her nose up at other potential suitors introduced to her by staff at the Zhengzhou zoo in central China. It is not thought that Feili is addicted to nicotine but rather that she is bored and passing the time by imitating smoking tourists. However, she certainly seems very keen to get her hands on the fags, spitting at passing visitors who ignore her requests for cigarettes or a light. It seems that it isn’t just humans who can get grouchy if they aren’t getting any.

Elsewhere in the great-ape world: “Gollum to play King Kong” headlines. Andy Serkis, the voice and movements of Gollum in the Lord of The Ring trilogy, is to once again work under Peter Jackson as King Kong in the forthcoming remake of the 1930s film. Serkis has been “hanging out with gorillas in Rwanda to prepare for the role”.

My primate obsession has got a bit out of hand, so I’ve decided to create a seperate category called Monkeynews, where I can write about our hairy cousins to my heart’s content.

Koko, the “talking” gorilla, used american sign language to tell her handlers that she had bad toothache. An appointment was made for a dental operation and, since a full anesthetic was required, the opportunity was taken to give her a head-to-toe medical exam. Koko insisted on meeting her specialists before the procedure, according to abcnews:

They crowded around her, and Koko, who plays favorites, asked one woman wearing red to come closer. The woman handed her a business card, which Koko promptly ate.

Koko, 33, was given a clean bill of health. She knows over 1000 signs.

Last Sunday, London Zoo were offering a 2 for 1 ticket deal for red-heads. The special offer was to celebrate the birth of Laa Laa, a criminally cute Francois Langur monkey. Monkeys of the species are born with bright ginger fur to help their parents to keep an eye on them and turn black after a few months.

Finally, in May a mountain gorilla in Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda gave birth to twins, one male and one female. They are only the third ever set of twins born to the endangered species to be recorded, and it is the first time that both twins have survived past a month.

More monkey news today: The Times of India reports that residents in some areas of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh are coming under increasingly violent attack from thuggish simians. Many people have been bitten and others have taken to carrying sticks and stones around with them with which to defend themselves in case of attack.

The problem that was a simple nuisance a couple of months ago, has now turned into an ever-looming horror for them as the battalion now charges at the residents even inside their flats and very often inflict severe injury

Underblog can only speculate as to the cause of the increase in aggressive behaviour, but a couple of years ago several chimpanzee populations became agitated by suggested similarities between the facial features of chimps and George Bush.

Also, The Guardian reports that recently released documents from the British National Archives reveal Winston Churchill’s wartime concern over the population size of the Barbary Apes of Gibraltar, which are actually a type of tail-less monkey rather than ape. Superstition held that were the monkeys to leave the rock the British Empire would fall. The Barbary Apes have had a more recent role in global politics: When the government of Morocco offered the US 2000 landmine-detecting monkeys to help in the war in Iraq, it was Barbary Apes who would have been drafted.

I’ve written of my thoughts on monkeys before. There’s a story in the news at the moment about a macaque in an Israeli zoo who has abandoned walking on all fours in favour of a bipedal gait after recovering from a severe illness. Monkeys usually alternate between the two walking styles. It is thought the change in behaviour may be a result of brain damage.

In other primate news, the New Scientist reports that, like humans, chimps suffer from “contagious” yawning. Here’s a pic of a yawning chimp.