Category: Apes

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Council House Facelift

Andrew Sullivan relates that he introduced Chris Hitchens to the term “chav”, which I first came across last September in a great NYTimes article about chav culture.

The article focused on a lottery winner who, post-millions, continued to get arrested for shooting the rear-view mirrors out of cars with his wrist rocket.

Anyway, Sullivan’s post also includes a link to ChavScum, our newest favorite site. Enjoy the Agony Aunt. I, for one, would love to be a fly on the wall for the conversation in which Sullivan explains the chav concept to Hitchens.

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LAX morals?

In response to the gang-rape case involving members of Duke’s lacrosse team, Dave Jamieson writes on Slate about the unique messed-up-edness of lacrosse, framing it as a perfect storm of jockdom, class elitism, and the permissiveness of contemporary university life:

More than any other sport, lacrosse represents the marriage of athletic aggression and upper-class entitlement. While a squash player might consider himself upper-crust, he can’t prove his superiority by checking you onto your ass the way a lacrosse defenseman can. And while lacrosse may share with football a love for contact, it is far more socioeconomically insulated than the grid game (except in odd places like Maryland, where it’s managed to cross class lines). Some aficionados take pride in the fact that their sport was invented by Native Americans, but I don’t imagine many members of the Onondaga Nation end up playing lax at Colgate.

Still, how could college lacrosse players be any more misogynous than your typical football-team steakhead? Perhaps it’s because, unlike their football brethren, an unusually large proportion of college lacrosse players spend their high school years in sheltered, all-boys academies before heading off to liberal co-ed colleges. Most guys from single-sex schools are able to adjust. Others join the lacrosse team. The worst of this lot become creatures that are, in the words of a friend of mine, “half William Kennedy Smith, half Lawrence Phillips.”

Of course, at my alma mater, we didn’t have issues like this. Our ultimate frisbee team was too stoned to get into trouble.

Read on.

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Go ape, part 753,215

Dinner at Erik’s Gondolen with the Life Science project maanger from Business Arena Stockholm (hey, Ylva!). Here’s the view from the restaurant. And here’s the menu:

Dill marinated salmon with crayfish tails in mustard

Breast of duck with chantarelles and potato muffin, herb and garlic bouillon

Apple parfait with cinnamon and sweet-pickled cherries.

I violated my “don’t mix your drinks, you idiot!” rule by drinking the following in 5 hours: G&T, beer, fruity-tasting vanilla vodka concoction, red wine, two capuccinos, beer, and 4 cigarettes.

But I had a nice evening, with good conversation, and I didn’t smoke NEARLY as much as this guy.

Here are some pix from the first two evenings. I haven’t taken a ton of pix, and I haven’t written much about the city (I DO keep a notebook, okay?), but I’ll try to work on that tomorrow.

The view outside my hotel.

Down the block.

The sculpture outside an academy.

One of the locals.

Pedestrian walk, on the way to dinner tonight.

Take it to the bridge.

Look, kids! Parliament!

Another view from the restaurant.

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Go, Ape, Go!

Following up an ape rampage story from several months ago, it seems that investigators finally figured out how Jabari got escaped his exhibit in the Dallas Zoo: he took a running jump over a 12-foot moat and a 14-foot wall.

“All it does is give you pause and you think, ‘This may be one championship gorilla here, but I’ve got to be careful because maybe I’ve got one too,'” said Terry L. Maple, former director of Zoo Atlanta for 17 years, who has written about gorilla behavior.

It’s a pity Jabari was shot and killed, and that Grape Ape got nailed for steroids. Otherwise, we were looking at a pretty good matchup at the Laff-alympics this summer.