Charming Noveltees

Fourth Time's a Charm, A Cruise to Yugoslavia
Then I asked with sign language for f the Italians to go overboard and get my anchor >ut of his propellor and rudder. This we finally iplished, ...

The author and his wife, having sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in 1984, beginning with the race from Newport, RI to Bermuda, lived for the next fifteen years on the Cote d'Azur, their yacht (a 48-foot NY 40 Swan, built in Finland), moored at the Chantir Navale at Beauleu-sur-Mer, halfway between Nice and Monaco. They rented a villa in St. Jean-Cap-Ferrat for the three months of winter, and cruised the Mediterranean the rest of the year. This story is about their attempts to sail all the way around the Italian boot, to cruise the Dalmation coast of Jugoslavia. Three times they left for Corsica, Sardinia,and dozens of other Italian islands but, before they reached the Adriatic, all three times they had some disaster, such as losing all engine power. Finally, the fourth year they attempted the journey, again, it was a howling success. Various members of their family (six children, fifteen grandchildren) were with them every summer. There...

When Making Apes Into Movie Stars, It's All in the Eyes

, Oscar-winning documentary maker James Marsh creates his primate portrait by stitching together home movies shot by a succession of caretakers who fed, clothed and befriended a chimpanzee named Nim.

Separated from his mother as an infant, Nim is brought to New York in 1973 by Columbia University behavioral psychologist Herbert Terrace, who wants to disprove linguist Noam Chomsky’s theory that language skills are uniquely hardwired in humans. He recruits former student Stephanie LaFarge, now presiding loosely over a family of seven children, to raise Nim as one of her own. The hypothesis: If Nim is nurtured as if he were a human child, the chimp might acquire humanlike language skills.

Nim wears diapers. He rolls around on the floor with the toddlers. He hugs the kids and plays tag. Later, when Nim gets the run of a 25-acre estate in upstart New York, he smokes weed with his handlers.

The temptation to view Nim as a kind of alterna-human companion becomes especially compelling when the chimp appears to banter with his keeper using sign language. According to the film’s subtitles, Nim says, “The banana taste good, give me more,” and “I’m sorry,” among other expressions.

Source: Wired News (blog)