The Online Photographer

Short, crowdsourced videos posted for free viewing constitutes a new medium these days, and consequently it's where a lot of the dynamism is in contemporary creativity. (I know I should have moved to YouTube ten years ago, but I'm a writer, not a performer.)

First, bird imitates a camera shutter. This is a common, ordinary bird that in America is called a European starling or common starling, in Ireland and Great Britain simply a starling. They have the ability of mimicry, which may involve any of the senses. The shutter click is almost the least of this little fellow's bravura performance. I never read anything like this in a magazine when I was young.

Then, in an excerpt from a TED Talk by Frans de Waal comes the absolute perfect commentary about wealth inequality, specifically inequality of pay. The essential core of this is about seven seconds long, but it's precious, and funny as well.

Primatologist de Waal is a favorite author of mine, by the way. If you've never read Our Inner Ape, it's a marvelous book and contains one of the most touching true-life stories I've ever read in any format about any subject. Even if the book's premise is merely a metaphor it's still wonderfully drawn and the contrasts between chimps and bonobos  and their parallels with us work.

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Mike Fewster: "The TED two monkeys clip is hilarious and thought provoking. If I was still a secondary school teacher it would have given me a week's worth of lesson material."

John Krumm: "In our society, wealth is highly connected to social status, no matter how you got the wealth. If you look well off, you are immediately given more respect than if you look poor. More importantly, if you are poor, you usually give yourself less respect, and you blame yourself, even if it's caused by factors beyond your control. We are social creatures; we feel the perceived judgment of others. This has huge impact on health, as our social status is so closely connected to our health.

"My wife teaches about this in Medical School, drawing heavily on the work of Sir Michael Marmot, who wrote The Status Syndrome. Simply put, increased wealth equality is good for everyone's health." 

Mike replies: True. Put another way, the larger the Middle Class and the smaller and less extreme the outlier classes, the better off society is. Thanks for the book recommendation.

George Andros (partial comment): "Interesting, even amusing commentary: but not science."

Paul Shrigley: "An annual I had one Christmas in the 'sixties called animal magic, based on a BBC TV series fronted by Johnny Morris, had various animal stories. One I remember was about a starling that could do a perfect imitation of the milkman delivering the morning milk complete with the gate opening, walking up the path and the rattling of the glass milk bottles in the carrier. Another concerned a starling that could do the whistle of a 500-lbs. bomb as it descended onto Lndon, apparently very realistic and unnerving. The explosion not so much."