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Sunday 24 October 2010

Not so different...

Yesterday I had my first Open University tutorial, which was good fun and the two hours went past really quickly; my tutor is lovely - light hearted, funny, interesting - she is going to be great to work with over the next 9 months.

As usual, from a group of  15 there were 4 or 5 who were more vocal than others (er, yes I was one of them!); there were only 2 that I found a little irritating - one man who is a sergeant major in the army and liked the sound of his own voice a bit too much; and one South African lady who Knew A Lot.  It didn't help that we had a really annoying, aggressive S.A. lady in my 1st year tutorial group so of course there was an instant link when I heard the accent. But anyway they are a nice crowd and I'm looking forward to the rest of the course.

I got my first assignment finished and submitted this afternoon; I had already written it during the week but waited until after the tutorial to 'tweak' bits; in the end decided it was ok as it was, so off it went into techno never-never land - everything is submitted via the website these days.   It isn't due until 10th November so I am a wee bit ahead, as planned.

After that I watched an OU video about chimps and bonobos, which are our closest ancestors.  Wow, those bonobos are scary how like us are they are, down to walking around upright some of the time, to having sex face-to-face which has got to be pretty rare in the animal kingdom.


Apparently in the bonobo world, the females dominate, and sex is the answer to everything, kind of "make love not war". When male bonobos feel aggressive or pissed off, they just come back to camp, have a quickie and it 'calms them down' and everyone's happy again. 

I wonder what they do if they come back and find that Mrs Bonobo has popped out to the shops, or has a headache....  

9 comments:

  1. LOL then I think that Mr. Bonobo has other Mrs. Bonobos to have quickies with if the main one is around!

    http://theadorkableditzmissteps.blogspot.com/

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  2. LOL...sounds pretty interesting to me too

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  3. Very funny! Make love not war! Sounds like the bonobos got it right!

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  4. I'm ahead with my OU course, too :-) although mine's just a 10-pointer I'm doing for fun. I recognise the One Who Knows A Lot from various group settings. Once I realised, to my horror, that it was me.

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  5. Queenie: I'm not sure whether they know more or just have more opinions to voice ;-) haha that must have been awful realising it was you once!!

    Aunt Snow: yes we could take a few lessons from them! although it could get a bit annoying if your man keeps having a 'bad day at work'... ;-)

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  6. I have to talk about chimps. Lately these normally cute and adorable little recent bad boys have been getting into serious bad-boy-behavior. In the US anyway! major attacks. Are they becoming more human? Not so funny in Kansas last week when someone's chimp went crazy and even attacked a police car smashing the windows out....so much for a chimp for a pet these days!

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  7. I thought it was only people like M.Jackson who had pet chimps - are they common?

    One of the main differences between chimps and bonobos is that chimps solve problems with agression, they sure don't sound very cuddly to me.

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  8. I am NOT sharing any of this information with himself and you can't make me. :-/

    JUST sayin'!

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