One week to WorldCon starts.

The Librarian character in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series gets transformed into an orang-utan.   He takes great personal offense when people refer to him as a monkey.  Chimps and orang-utans are apes not monkeys.  But still…

One of the early episodes of The Simpsons features Homer being mistaken for the missing link and Bigfoot.  In another episode Bart expresses a desire to create a half-man, half-monkey creature.

Oliver the Chimp is a short documentary about the so-called humanzee – the spooky looking bald chimp that walked upright and was believed by some to be some kind of weird human-ape hybrid.

http://documentaryheaven.com/oliver-the-chimp/

8 Days to the World Science Fiction Convention.

Just found out that I’ll be accepting my prize for the short story competition at the awards ceremony on the Friday night.

For some reason monkeys seem particularly popular with computer programmers as well. ThinkGeek‘s logo is a monkey

And they offer a Killer Coding Ninja Monkeys t-shirt for sale.

And monkey is one of the most commonly chosen words for computer passwords.

After a security breach, researchers were able to analyse 32 million real passwords chosen by users at a photo-sharing web site.

The twenty most common passwords:

1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123
11. Nicole
12. Daniel
13. babygirl
14. monkey
15. Jessica
16. Lovely
17. michael
18. Ashley
19. 654321
20. Qwerty

One of the reasons given for why monkey is such a popular password is that many sites require a six-character minimum password and monkey is an easy one to remember.

9 Days to go to the start of the World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne.

I recently had the pleasure of reading The Society of Sinister Simians by Chet Phillips.  The book is full of gorgeous illustrations and funny character descriptions.

There is the army general who “created the framework for a series of maneuvers that called for attacking the enemy’s hospitals, orphanages, elementary schools, nursing homes, and ice cream facilities” and the anarchist who “loves the smell of burnt authority.”

10 Days Till WorldCon…

When I was in Belarus last year,  I put my card in an ATM.  It only had Russian instructions available.

I hit what I hoped was the cancel button and my card was returned.

Then a different menu appeared which had a button labelled FAQ.  I pressed it and some questions appeared in English.

Zooming in…

It’s disturbing  these questions would be FREQUENTLY asked (and why in English?  And the answer is in Russian?)

Someone translated the answer to the questions for me and it says in Russian: Because you forgot to give him food.

If I ordered a Belarussian ATM monkey, I’d be sure to feed it.

11 Days till the World Science Fiction Convention.

How many days till we find out who is governing Australia?

One of my favorite places in Japan is the monkey hot spring in Nagano Prefecture. If you’ve seen the opening scenes of the movie Baraka, that’s where that was filmed.

There are some hot springs (too hot for people) that the monkeys go and have a bath in.