Peterkin

It's all been so anthropocentric as to be meaningless in terms of natural animal behaviour. Intelligence, self-awareness, communication - everything has been measured in units of like-us-ness. As for self-awareness, consider the logic of it. I am I: what's in here is me; everything out there is not-me; other (this includes mirrors, pictures, videos) Whether any 'other' has significance for me depends on a whole lot of factors. Food is most important; predators are very important; potential mates are very important - and to domesticated or captive animals, their human companion/trainer/handler/master/family/jailor/tormentor and other pet or captive friends are significant - to be studied and adapted-to. Everything else takes a number on the priority scale, depending on species requirements, range of cognition, situation, etc. Depending on the specific capabilities and sensory perceptions, the organism detects and perceives other entities in different ways and assigns different priorities to them. Up to this point, intelligence isn't a factor. The natural role of intelligence is primarily to enhance the entity's ability to replicate its DNA. Being smarter than the next crow means winning a superior mate and raising more children successfully. To a crow, being smarter than an octopus or less smart than an orangutan are equally irrelevant. Only humans do those comparisons.

I never gave it much credence applied to other animals. Not every species is primarily interested in visual cues. Besides, it's not themselves they are recognizing; it's a mirror image. Once a visually sensitive entity realizes that the mirror image has no smell or physical presence of any kind and not acting like an intelligent dog, its interest value is reduced to "image", just like a stuffed toy or cardboard cutout. For vain chimps and orangutans, mirrors would no doubt hold endless fascination. Has anyone given them makeup? I think it's a marker of visual self-recognition. ttps://www.quantamagazine.org/a-self-aware-fish-raises-doubts-about-a-cognitive-test-20181212/

So do I. Freedom of speech, like every other freedom guaranteed by a constitution or law, is limited and conditional. That always, everywhere, about anything nonsense is just that. Every private entity has a right to make rules in their own property, under their own jurisdiction. Smoking may still legal, but schools and hospitals have always had the right to ban it on their grounds. A property owner can post No Hunting signs or No Spray signs on their fence, and it's a binding rule. No publication is obliged to accept every article submitted to is, and every civilized person in the world exercises a degree of self-censorship for the sake of good manners. I wonder what you intend to do with the little list of those who disagree.

I've heard it. In fact, I head it before you did. And I corrected it, but I won't tell you what the mistake was.

Ah! At last, a foolproof weight-loss regimen! (Can I propose FUX news for the western version?)

I don't follow the news very closely anymore. Primary source for Canadian and world news is CBC. If I want to follow to follow up a particular event or topic, I seek out the reliable on-line sources that are most knowledgeable on the topic, and that still let me. I also read most of Gwynn Deyer's colomns. Previously, when I was both more interested and had satellite tv, I watched PBS NewsHour and TVO's The Agenda regularly and several late-night talk shows and weekend newsmagazines. I still sometimes look in on them on You Tube.

Probably because it was so often made cinematic. There were stories I liked better, too. Vividly recall the Red-haired League and The Blue Carbuncle... maybe because an affinity to colour.

Only the Sherlock Holmes stories, and those later in life, when I traded sci-fi and social commentary in for mythology and history, with murder for dessert. Those books left hardly a trace - but I did recently revisit and enjoy the tv series with Simon Brett.

For me, just Call of the Wild . I know I read several others and one passage from - I'm pretty sure it's The Star Rover stands out. Otherwise, blank. Same with most of the books I read in those years. Only a few authors from my early 20's have stayed with me: Bradbury, Vonnegut, Golding, Findley... Atwood, I guess, though I don't like all of her books. In those years, I bought paperbacks for $0.10 at the thrift store and carried one at all times. One notable exception: the first year I was working, I gave myself an extravagant Christmas present, a great big illustrated hard-cover edition of The World of Pooh. Cost $25, two weeks' rent. Damn silly, but I loved that book.

Social animals naturally abide by social rules. If the pack leader decrees an order of precedence, it's binding. Except sometimes the human pack leader is not looking, when certain liberties are taken. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9kZd1q4TXw I expect you're familiar with the psychology experiments involving children and candy. We are not so different!

I can't quite see that persisting into adulthood. Status seems a more plausible motivation for adults of any species. Also, personalities differentiate over time, vary more in maturity than in infancy. One individual may be greedy and selfish, while another individual may be altruistic and generous. My mother had an exceptionally bright German Shepherd one time (even spelling the bad words didn't fool her). One evening, I went to their house straight from work and told my mother "I'm so hungry!" The dog ran to kitchen, fetched her dish of kibble, brought it back and dumped it in my lap. One of our neighbour's dogs (different time, place and dogs) took a fancy to one of ours and kept bringing her presents: a deer's femur, the remnant of a road-killed woodchuck, a slightly chewed apple, a bone with some fried pork-chop left on it...

I hadn't thought of that. Could be what the cats are doing, too. They move around like Mexican jumping beans, so it's impossible to keep track long enough to discern a pattern of who pushes whom aside. I'll try to pay closer attention.

The cats do that too. Move from one dish to another, nudging one another aside, or sharing, sampling each portion. It's not hostile - I used to think it's of curiosity, the same way dogs sniff one another's fur and lips after an absence: "Where have you been? What did you eat there?". Since I always dole out the exact same food into as many dishes as seems appropriate, they've had plenty of opportunity to learn that nobody's food is better or worse. Maybe it's just a game? Or else they're dumber than they look.

A history of food- and status-insecurity. Makes sense. When you haven't known where your next meal is coming from, you want to make sure of the one in front of you. I have noticed this about cats, though: once adopted, they seem to become complacent - take meals, laps and windowsills for granted - much faster than dogs and humans from similar backgrounds. For dogs, possessiveness of food and territory can persist for a long time after they're settled. Human children may carry that insecurity on into adulthood. Not uncommonly accompanied by a chronic weight problem.

I don't think so. I suspect that the big guy - senior resident? - had a healthy appetite to match his size, and set the 'tone' of the dinner table -- "This is how we eat here." Or, like the feral cats that live on our back porch, she may have been afraid that the bigger cat would hoover it all up and not leave enough for her. It's not unusual in families with many children to have some rivalry over the food; the least favoured, most bullied or most anxious child may well overeat in compensation for perceived disadvantages. In uncertain times, too, we tend to eat as much as we can, every chance we get, because we're not sure of a next meal. My aunt had her own twist on the adage "never put off till tomorrow what you can do today" (The change of 'do' to 'eat' doesn't work in English. )

It's much easier to trace back actions and even conversations than trains of unexpressed thought. The act of speaking aloud helps to fix words in memory and if you recall the words, you may recall the thought which gave rise to them. Unspoken thoughts seem nebulous; as soon as you try to catch them, they disperse like vapour. Even so, I can sometimes recapture the idea that started a train by looking for landmarks, e.g. if I ended up with "better check if Scruffy's come in", I can look for associations with cat, rain, night, front door, porch, greenhouse, plants... Oh, yes! I wondered whether the squash needs watering. Or something like that.

Here's a list : Red River Valley, The Grapes of Wrath* , The Ox-Bow Incident* , The Last Picture Show, Sweet Savage, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Desperate Hours, Tombstone, A Prairie Home Companion, Hemingway & Gellhorn, Wild, Lucky *most likely candidates for earworm My tastes ran similarly toward my mother's. I wonder whether genetics has a role in musical - or, more broadly, aesthetic - sensibility, as well as musical/artistic talent. I have some reason to think it's not because we felt closer to one parent. HM A whole new, interesting subject to explore. I wonder how to broach it as a topic of discussion.

My father bought a record player - Telefunken, big extravagance - at the first CNE we ever attended. It came with a selection of LP's. Tea for Two, I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen, Ghost Riders in the Sky.... Yes, they stuck with me. The awful Caruso numbers he played over and over are totally erased. But then in the 60's I got my own clock radio and woke up every morning to the hit parade... day after day after Groundhog Day. Couldn't forget those songs if I tried. The red river valley song was featured in the soundtrack of several popular films: you could easily have picked it up there without ever knowing the title.

Like Harry the lizard in Death in Paradise - oh, the disillusionment!

Do you understand the mechanism? I always assumed ideas, narratives, series of events etc. were fixed in long-term memory through association. Either because they were significant in themselves, or because they are part of a pattern or system of thought and experience. But then, there are these seemingly random pieces of flotsam that bob up for no reason. If I remember poems, that's due to diligent memorizing - and subject to fragmentation if not practiced often. Half The Highwayman (Gr eight) and Walrus and the Carpenter (around the same time, but extracurricular) are gone now. Song lyrics flake away, as well, even the ones I used to sing often are down to the refrain. The old folk songs my mother used to sing have fared better - maybe because there was so much vacant room in my head back then. As for contemporary songs, I don't understand a word of them to begin with and there's no melody to hook onto.

Genady posted a passage from a book I read 50-odd years ago, and I recognized the source instantly. It's a book with no political or philosophical significance whatsoever, and at the time, I was intensely political and philosophical - who isn't at 21? So why did Three Men in a Boat (to say Nothing of the Dog) leave a life-long impression? I read Stephen Leacock, Mark Twain, Thurber, Mikes in that same decade, and can't recall much from any of those books - not even Connecticut Yankee. Humour generally doesn't leave a deep impression. Why this particular story? Do you have any books like that? Unimportant, non mind- or life-altering books that, nevertheless became embedded in your psyche?

Three Men in a Boat? I once tried to read that aloud to bedridden friend and couldn't, for choking on laughter.

No doubt the corporate sponsors were pleased and therefore the board of governors was pleased, so they didn't delve too deeply.

I'd call that a fairly spectacular association!

It's true that memory can be tricky. We recall what seems to us significant for whatever reason - the commonest reason being association with some other idea or event. Seems that thoughts and the noticing of things gain buoyancy as more of them are linked in some way: the larger the association-cluster (if I can call it that without treading on more knowledgeable toes), the more frequently and easily it bobs to the top of memory. Meanwhile a random thought or feeling or observation that doesn't become with linked with an event or person is dismissed, ignored and allowed to sink out of our awareness. That doesn't necessarily mean that such random observations are utterly forgotten: sometimes they can be coaxed forth under hypnosis.... But then, they can also become associated with a suggestion from the hypnotist and become distorted. Minds are weird!