The question has fuelled some of history's fiercest scientific and political feuds. Now we have an answer.

Murder in a bread line. Migrants drowning at sea. Solitary death in an uncaring city. Such kinds of events draw laughs on a Cairo stage.

These are some of the incongruent elements of "Q'ahwa Sada," which means Black Coffee in Arabic, an unusual theater hit in Egypt. Scheduled to run for 30 days when it opened last November, it has continued on stage at the Artistic Creativity Center near the Cairo Opera House.

[W]hen George Orwell sent Animal Farm to TS Eliot for consideration, the poet - then a director of Faber and Faber - rejected it as 'unconvincing'. In a letter from 1944 explaining why he would not be publishing the work, Eliot told Orwell that he was not persuaded by the 'Trotskyite' politics which underpin the narrative. To publish such an anti-Russian novel would jar in the contemporary political climate, explained the poet.

In 1952, Austrian big-game hunter and Africa ‘researcher’ Ernst Zwilling (a colonial revisionist and member of the Nazi party) brought a male chimpanzee from Cameroon to Schönbrunn, the Viennese zoo. In his African home, ‘Honzo’ had reportedly been a friendly and amiable animal, but in the zoo he began to show a rather violent temper. Due to his choleric outbreaks, poor Honzo was kept in solitary confinement. The chimpanzee was given beer and cigarettes. He got addicted and died an alcoholic and chain-smoker. After his death, the chimp was taxidermied and put into the Viennese Museum of Natural History. Now people from all over the world stare at him.

We want to create a page that is dedicated to Honzo: the victim, the choleric, the drug abuser.

March 24: Boston (8 PM @ Hudson Street Gallery, 18 Hudson Street, Boston)

Dutch walkthrough
English walkthrough
German walkthrough

NYCResistor; 397 Bridge Street, 5th Floor; Brooklyn, NY 11201
Saturday, March 21; 7 PM

March 19: talk; 3 PM @ Webster University, Dept. of Arts

March 19: performance; 9:30 PM @ Sunnen Lounge at Webster University

Johannes Grenzfurthner of monochrom is visiting from Vienna. He came to the Bay Area for last night’s Soviet Unterzoegersdorf Sector II release party and he’s also a speaker at ETech 2009 (Johannes is presenting at LateTech on Wednesday night).

Dan Tentler, Laughing Squid’s new web hosting sys admin is also in town for ETech.

In honor of Johannes and Dan being in the area, monochrom and Laughing Squid will be co-hosting a Drinkup on Monday, March 9th at Lucky 13 in San Francisco starting at 8pm.

If you think you can make it to the Drinkup, please let us know on Facebook.

A "time traveller's phrasebook" that could allow basic communication between modern English speakers and Stone Age cavemen is being compiled by scientists studying the evolution of language.

Research has identified a handful of modern words that have changed so little in tens of thousands of years that ancient hunter-gatherers would probably have been able to understand them.

Anybody who was catapulted back in time to Ice Age Europe would stand a good chance of being intelligible to the locals by using words such as "I", "who" and "thou" and the numbers "two", "three" and "five", the work suggests.

More nuanced conversation would be more of a challenge. The analysis of language evolution suggests that none of the adjectives, verbs and nouns used in modern languages would have much in common with those used then.

Mark Pagel, of the University of Reading, who leads the research, said that it was nonetheless becoming possible to create a rudimentary Stone Age phrasebook made up of the oldest known words.

So what is my Lacanian take on this issue of what I call, for lack of a better name, a “mind evolution”? Social networks and Web 2.0, even the computer logic in general, play a world of difference in the subject’s relation to the big Other, the socio-Symbolic order, as well as his relation to his own object-production. In the social Web, we have fluid identities (we consciously construct online identities), confusion of time (we can undo many things we did not want, we can think about what we want to say in a chat before hitting Enter), and virtually eternal memory (objects of our production never disappear and can be reproduced endlessly), to name a few that I think are the major. Is this not proof that the basis of language and society itself (the notion of forgetting, of property, of not-knowing, of spatial interaction, of temporality, etc.) is changing?

He already did one about a year ago for a brand of beer, and this one's now for a chocolate bar. I'm not going to start moaning about how big corporations want to make a buck out of skateboarding, I really don't care - in this instance. Because it's Ty. I guess if you can get good money and backing to make incredibly beautiful commercials, then you should go for it.

The beauty of this one is that there's no messing around with CGI. It's just thousands of brown balloons being blown up and blown about by giant hair-dryers. It's that kind of vision and playfulness that I have always admired in Spike Jonze's work, and I can't help but feel that it must have rubbed off from Jonze onto Evans. Jonze, of course, is very involved in the entire Crailtap/Girl-Family.

UPDATE: Oh. Right. I just found out about Dave England (remember Jackass?) having done this thing before. Ty openly says he saw that youtube-video. I still maintain, however, that the way how it was filmed, edited and executed is so special about it. I guess Ty took it and put his stamp on an awesome idea. Rumours are that Dave saw some money for the idea, too. It's all good.

N.B.: This is the director's cut and NOT the final version that is aired on TV. The link pushes you straight onto Evan's website. He's currently filming the full-length Chocolate Skateboards ideo. No pun intended.

Link (.mov)

And don't you think this is a viral-video post.

A giant Galapagos tortoise widely believed to have been collected by Charles Darwin during his famous voyage on the Beagle survived in an Australian zoo until recently. Darwin studied giant tortoises while on the journey which eventually led him to his theory of evolution. The story is that he brought Harriet (and two other tortoises) home to England, but the cold winters didn't suit them. Therefore when one of Darwin's friends and ex-shipmates from the Beagle said that he was travelling to Australia, Darwin asked him to take the tortoises along. The other two died decades ago, but Harriet lived to be a sprightly 176 year-old and was a star attraction at Australia Zoo in Queensland until her sudden death in 2006.

Horton Foote, who chronicled a wistful American odyssey through the 20th century in plays and films mostly set in a small town in Texas and who left a literary legacy as one of the country's foremost storytellers, died on Wednesday in Hartford. He was 92 and lived in Pacific Palisades, Calif., and Wharton, Tex.
[...]
In screenplays for movies like "Tender Mercies," "To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Trip to Bountiful," and in plays like "The Young Man From Atlanta" and "The Carpetbagger's Children," Mr. Foote depicted the way ordinary people shoulder the ordinary burdens of life, finding drama in the resilience by which they carry on in the face of change, economic hardship, disappointment, loss and death.

The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society.

March 7: San Francisco (8 PM @ Soviet Special, Chez Poulet, 3359 Cesar Chavez)

March 11: San Jose (9:30 @ Etech/LateTech, Fairmont Hotel)

March 14: Seattle (8 PM @ Theatre4, 305 Harrison, 4th Floor)

March 18: Chicago (7:30 PM @ Mercury Cafe, 1505 W Chicago Ave)

March 19: St. Louis (3 PM @ Webster University, Dept. of Arts)

March 19: St. Louis (9:30 PM @ Sunnen Lounge at Webster University)

March 21: Brooklyn/NY (8 PM @ NYCResistor, 397 Bridge Street, 5th Floor)

March 24: Boston (8 PM @ Hudson Street Gallery, 18 Hudson Street, Boston)

Our friends from monochrom are hosting a release party for their new video game Soviet Unterzoegersdorf Sector II at Chez Poulet this Saturday, March 7th. [...] There will speeches, Soviet science fair and a proletariat baking competition: Cake for the Common Man. Revolts crushed, potatoes mashed.

With his two Web sites (which have crashed from too much traffic), Booksthatmakeyoudumb.com and Musicthatmakesyoudumb.com, Griffith used aggregated Facebook data about the favorite bands and books among students of various colleges and plotted them against the average SAT scores at those schools, creating a tongue-in-cheek statistical look at taste and intelligence. [...]

On the book front, Lolita was favorite tome of the brightest students (a result which Griffith called "charming"), with an average SAT score of 1317. The lowest-scoring students liked the erotica author Zane, with an average score of 980. And strangely, the students who listed their favorite book as "The Bible" were smarter (1047) than those who said it was "The Holy Bible" (980).