DOG (R)EVOLUTION. Scientists are pretty sure that modern humans are related to Lucy, the three-foot-tall primate who walked sort of erect in the African savannah umpty-thousand years ago and left a half dozen bones behind for Harvard to glue back together. Okay. Dog experts have been pretty sure that the pharaoh hound and the Ibizan hound are direct descendants of the most ancient dogs rendered in art, namely the Anubis figures of Egypt. But now it turns out that the dog experts are wrong:

The findings have sent reverberations though the ranks of dog fanciers, who primp and preen their beloved companions for shows and take great pride in their pedigrees.

"This is clearly going to raise some eyebrows in the Pharaoh hound world," said Greg Witt, vice president of the Pharaoh Hound Club of America. "It goes against our belief system. People are pretty passionate about their dogs. There is going to be disbelief."

If you're wondering who else is sporting a fraudulent coat of arms, here they are: Norwegian Elkhounds (not Vikings) and German Shepherds (not wolf cousins).

And there's more to the story. DNA analysis suggests that the dogs which are most closely related to each other, and to wolves, are the Samoyed, basenji, Saluki, Afghan, Lhasa apso, Pekingese, Shar-Pei, Shih Tzu and Akita.

Kissing Cousins

These guys don't look much like wolves. They don't look much like each other. So why do scientists think Lucy is related to us? Fossils don't have DNA. It must be because she's bipedal and therefore looks (to scientists) somewhat human. Just like a German Shepherd looks (to us) like a wolf. Maybe it's more than dog breeders who have some rethinking to do. Who knows what else might turn up in the human family tree?

What didn't Darwin know and when didn't he know it?

Wednesday, June 02, 2004

Modesty? I never saw it, but I think I know what you mean.

MALLITES. CNN is claiming that there's a teenage girl who doesn't want to be half naked when fully dressed. Here's an excerpt:

So she wrote to the Seattle-based chain's executives.

"I see all of these girls who walk around with pants that show their belly button and underwear," she wrote. "Your clearks (sic) sugjest (sic) that there is only one look. If that is true, then girls are suppost (sic) to walk around half naked."

Nordstrom executives wrote back and promised Ella the company would try to provide a variety of fashions for youngsters.

This is promising, provided Ella isn't the only girl who thinks looking like a slut isn't the be-all and end-all of fashion. We suspect, however, that modesty is but a brief niche market (pun intended). Note that CNN doesn't quite approve of Ella, going out of its way to embarrass her by reproducing her (probably normal) misspellings. When a professional or presumptuous adult botches his spelling, we can see the value of that lordly "[sic]," but it's a mite heavy-handed to insert into the prose of an 11-year-old.

The fashion mavens seem a bit patronizing too. Here's how the new modest look is characterized by an editor at Seventeen:

"We like to call this new girl Miss Modesty," said Gigi Solif Schanen, fashion editor at Seventeen magazine. "It's such a different feeling but still very pretty and feminine and sexy. It's just a little more covered up."

Shoppers are starting to see higher waistlines and lower hemlines, and tweeds, fitted blazers and layers are expected to be big this fall, Schanen said.

"It's kind of like a sexy take on a librarian," she said. "I think people are tired of seeing so much skin and want to leave a little more to the imagination."

A librarian? Uh, sure. Every girl would want to look like a librarian. And are we starting to understand why CNN launched the "[sic]" weapon? Ella wants to look like a librarian and can't spell. She must be one of those fake girls, you know, the ones who don't want to be a shouting TV lawyer or slutty singer.

Test

Tuesday, June 01, 2004

THE FORGERS' DAY WEEKEND. There was so much to keep everyone busy over the long holiday weekend that no one remembered to post anything in this space. I suppose we owe an accounting.

Who could have known that in the space of a few days we'd be reliving all of World War II? The first hint was Krauthammer's review of the new WWII Memorial in Washington, DC. He didn't like it much. After reminding us of the great conflict's "transcendence of geography -- and class and ethnicity," he invokes the image of "the now-cliched platoon of the Polish millworker from Chicago, the Jewish kid from Brooklyn, the Appalachian woodsman and the Iowa farm boy bonding and fighting and dying for each other as a band of brothers." Then he turns to the memorial and its...

But that is just the beginning of the banality. The monument is strewn with quotations inscribed in stone, meant to inspire. You descend into the parenthesis from street level and the first large stone panel on your right reads: "Women who stepped up were measured as citizens of the nation, not as women . . . this was a people's war, and everyone was in it."

"Stepped up"? "Everyone was in it"? Is this the best we can do? Are we not embarrassed to put such pedestrian prose by the biblical cadences of the Gettysburg Address and the second inaugural speech carved in stone at the Lincoln Memorial just a few hundred yards down the Reflecting Pool?

What Charles forgot is that for most Americans, World War II happened in the movies. All one had to do was catch a few hours of the many runnings of "The Longest Day" to realize that everyone was in it, and this is just D-Day we're talking about. In the parts viewed by our little band of brothers, we saw John Wayne (of course), Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Robert Wagner, Eddy Albert, Stuart Whitman, Sean Connery, Red Buttons, Richard Burton, Paul Anka, Kenneth More, Richard Beymer, Ray Danton, Fabian, Jeffrey Hunter, Peter Lawford, Roddy McDowell, Sal Mineo, Edmund O'Brien, Robert Ryan, George Segal, Rod Steiger, Richard Todd, and Tom Tryon. In the parts we missed because we had to run out and get hot dogs and hamburgers like everyone else, we almost certainly would have added more to the list -- Gary Cooper flanking the Atlantic Wall with his Kentucky long rifle, Humphrey Bogart steering his war-weary tank crew across the sands of Omaha Beach, and Erroll Flynn arriving in the nick of time at Sword Beach in his dive bomber.

And all that was just one movie. If you answered the call of duty over the rest of the weekend, you would also have witnessed "Above and Beyond" with Robert Taylor piloting the Enola Gay, "Action in the North Atlantic" with Humphrey Bogart leading a great merchant marine convoy to Britain, "Twelve O'Clock High" with Gregory Peck agonizing over the casualties of the Eighth Air Force, "In Harm's Way" with John Wayne leading the naval effort in the Pacific, "To Hell and Back" with Audie Murphy playing himself, "Torpedo Run" with Glenn Ford commanding a submarine in the Pacific, "Run Silent, Run Deep" with Clark Gable commanding another submarine in the Pacific, "Stalag 17" with William Holden cutting up rough in a German POW camp, "36 Hours" with James Garner as a POW trying to fool Rod Taylor into believing the invasion wouldn't be at Normandy, "Von Ryan's Express" with Frank Sinatra leading a daring POW escape in Germany, "Patton" with George C. Scott chewing up the French scenery something awful, "The Devil's Brigade" with William Holden assembling a deadly commando unit, and "The Dirty Dozen" with Lee Marvin assembling an even deadlier commando unit.

And if combat fatigue hadn't set in by then, you could have sat through a double feature of "A Bridge Too Far" and "The Great Escape," both featuring enormous casts. This means that the long list above has to be augmented with Dirk Bogarde, James Caan, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Edward Fox, Elliott Gould, Gene Hackman, Anthony Hopkins, Hardy Kruger, Laurence Olivier, Ryan O'Neal, Robert Redford, Maximillian Schell,.James Garner, Steve McQueen, Donald Pleasence, James Coburn, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, and David McCallum.

Even the TV production companies were trying to serve. The mysteriously long-running show "JAG" time-travelled its whole cast back to Iwo Jima to participate in that epochal struggle, while A&E mounted the most physically demanding WWII movie in recent history, depicting Eisenhower's planning of the D-Day invasion despite the contributions of Montgomery, Patton, and de Gaulle. Those who tried to light up a smoke every time Tom Selleck fired up a Camel unfiltered are probably on a respirator by now. (It was actually an impressive production and, oddly, about the only time we can remember anyone playing "Ike" in more than a cameo role.)

All in all, we think Krauthammer is wrong to carp at the statement "everyone was in it." It's the truth. And all this celluloid represents a huge ongoing investment in the nation's World War II memorial. It's one thing to quibble about a few pillars that are insufficient to their task; it's another to consider the tremendous fleets of planes and ships and tanks and guns that have been deployed to make sure that Americans never forget the heroism of the Greatest Generation. In this context, it seems a little dense of Mr. Krauthammer to display such bewilderment about the centerpiece of the new memorial in DC:

And then, alas, the ultimate banality. The centerpiece of the monument is a low curved wall, closing the top of the parenthesis, as it were, straddling the central axis of the Mall and adorned with 4,000 gold stars.

The gold star, of course, was given to those who had lost a son in the war. Why 4,000 stars? To represent the more than 400,000 American dead: each star represents a hundred.

Why a hundred? Did they die in units of a hundred? Did they fight as centurions? The number is entirely arbitrary, a way to get the stars to fit the wall.

Of course, he may have been put off the scent by the seeming imitation of the Vietnam Memorial. A wall enumerating casualties. Hmmm. Derivative perhaps. But the stars are an interesting touch. Do they not remind us of the ongoing cinematic tribute to the fallen, all the starpower that Hollywood can muster pressed into service in the name of memory? It may well be that 4,000 stars have donned the uniform for this task. No doubt, each of them has stood in for hundreds, thousands of the real men and women who perished in the most sweeping conflict of all time. And it's not trivial or demeaning to point out that this is a tribute which continues and will continue for many years to come.

Tonight, for example, the excellent miniseries "Band of Brothers" resumes on the History Channel, and a new documentary promises us the truth about "The Lost Tanks of D-Day." If the weekend exhausted you, suck it up and get moving, soldier. This particular assignment is never done, and D-Day is less than a week away once more.

Back to Archive Index