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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| One of the worst insults I could receive when I was a kid was that my jokes were old and not funny. Actually, still is. From BBC: Compared to the jokes, the article is fairly new: just three and a half years old. The phrase "the old ones are the best ones" might not always be true. But some of the oldest jokes in history are still in use today. Even if they're not funny, they're still windows into the past: into what people found funny back then, and into cultural contexts. After months spent poring over medieval texts for her PhD, Martha Bayless made a surprising discovery. She was looking at some of the earliest jokes written in Latin by Catholic scholars (some in excess of 1,000 years old). Few had ever been translated into English before, yet many were still funny – and some even made her laugh out loud. Semper ubi sub ubi? Shortly after, while waiting for her train, Bayless was reading a copy of Truly Tasteless Jokes 3 – a popular joke anthology from 1983. She was surprised to find, almost word for word, a joke that she had been transcribing just a day earlier. Oh, I remember that series. While I couldn't quote a single joke from the TTJ books now, I know for certain that they helped shape me into the clown I am today. It struck Bayless that the joke had continued to be shared through a spoken culture of joke-telling, starting with the Latin text and culminating with her modern joke book, without needing to be written down for centuries in between. But that was a more common means of joke (meme in the original sense) transfer, pre-internet: word of mouth, mostly kid-to-kid. Even the ones that were written down or, later, recorded with video and/or audio, were subject to censorship. Not so the underground joke economy: anything was fair game, be it sex, body functions, racism, or even worse topics. Now, we even have documentaries on what might be the foulest joke of all time,  but things haven't always been so permissive.This is good, in a way. But it does have a downside, which is: kids need to feel rebellious, and they'll find something to secretly transgress against. If it can't be sick jokes, it'll be something else. Bayless, now a director of folklore and public culture at the University of Oregon, has written a number of books on early comedy. She says, "the earliest jokes were dirty jokes. People couldn’t resist them." Well, she's the one with the Piled Higher and Deeper degree, and I've no doubt that many early jokes were what we'd call "dirty jokes," but you're dealing with survivorship bias here. Like I said, jokes tend to be an oral tradition, with all the generational changes that implies. If you limit yourself to the ones that were written down (or, in the case of Sumeria, etched into clay tablets), you're not getting the full picture. Flatulence, for example, is funny because it shows our "uncontrollable physicality", says Anu Korhonen, a professor of cultural studies from the University of Helsinki in Finland. I disagree. Fart jokes aren't funny. They are, in fact, the lowest form of humor. What is funny is peoples' obsession with fart jokes. Some researchers suggest that because humour brings us together it might have an evolutionary purpose. Here we go again with evo-psych speculation. At least they wiggle out of it a bit by using "might." But not all rude jokes translate well across cultures. Peter McGraw, a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder, explains that cultural norms vary so widely, finding a universally funny joke is challenging. I don't think there's a universally funny joke. It's all relative to your own culture. This goes especially for the highest form of humor: the pun. They generally only work in one language. I can't deny that part of my motivation for learning French was to be able to pun in more than one language. You might call it committing merde-er. Who knows what audiences thousands of years in the future would think if they unearthed videos of contemporary comedians. Probably the same thing I do: 95% of it isn't funny, but the other 5% makes everything worth it. |
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That's how I remember jokes. I hold onto the punchline and then just make up everything else to lead toward the ending. 
