Hogmanay

Hope you had an enjoyable Hogmanay (Hogmanay \hog-muh-NAY; HOG-muh-nay\, noun: The name, in Scotland, for New Year's Eve, on which children go about singing and asking for gifts; also, a gift, cake, or treat given on New Year's Eve.)

I greeted the New Year on a lower east side rooftop with good company and bad champagne. It was swell.

"New studies suggest that cute images stimulate the same pleasure centers of the brain aroused by sex, a good meal or psychoactive drugs like cocaine, which could explain why everybody in the panda house wore a big grin."

As you can see, I have been ruminating on cuteness this morning, inspired by this New York Times article. I especially liked the line above, as I happen to know a couple people beyond obsessed with the baby panda at the National Zoo. They are not, apparently, the only ones with this interest: "And though the zoo's adult pandas have long been among Washington's top tourist attractions, the public debut of the baby in December has unleashed an almost bestial frenzy here. Some 13,000 timed tickets to see the cub were snapped up within two hours of being released, and almost immediately began trading on eBay for up to $200 a pair."

Anyway the article talks about the Darwinian tie to cuteness- the fact that our concept of "cuteness" is based on babies' physical characteristics, the characteristics of which are based on babies' helplessness and need for protection- and therefore our strong reaction to cuteness makes sense. For propagating the human race and all. It gets more interesting as researchers look at how much we find cute because of this ("The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession."), and how different cultures respond more to cuteness than others. Cuteness is a cultural taste- i.e.- let's add some cuteness to this product and it will sell like wildfire in Japan. That's some weird shit. -) -) -)

Also, this article corresponds to a heavy theme running through the New York Times recently- they just can't get enough Darwin. I guess this is liberals fighting intelligent design- bringing evolution to every section of the Times. I bet people with really impressive opposable thumbs are going to be on the Sunday Styles page next week. And Arts and Entertainment will have some article on how the cowboys in Brokeback Mountain represent the pinnacle of evolution somehow.