The promised monkey post ... and some bragging!

It's not quite the Semi-weekly Monkey, but I found this the other day, and I thought it was pretty funny.

From Time magazine:

It turns out that one of humanity's oldest professions may be even older than we thought: In a recent study of macaque monkeys in Indonesia, researchers found that male primates "paid" for sexual access to females — and that the going rate for such access dwindled as the number of available females went up.

According to the paper, "Payment for Sex in a Macaque Mating Market," published in the December issue of Animal Behavior, males in a group of about 50 long-tailed macaques in Kalimantan Tengah, Indonesia, traded grooming services for sex with females; researchers, who studied the monkeys for some 20 months, found that males offered their payment up-front, as a kind of pre-sex ritual. It worked. After the females were groomed by male partners, female sexual activity more than doubled, from an average of 1.5 times an hour to 3.5 times. The study also showed that the number of minutes that males spent grooming hinged on the number of females available at the time: The better a male's odds of getting lucky, the less nit-picking time the females received.

That's right. Monkey men trade grooming favors for sex.

Whoever said there's no evolution obviously has never seen how much I spent in college at Bath & Body Works!

And now for something completely different...

I discovered the other day that I've been on Weight Watchers for almost exactly a year! Since Jan. 12, 2007.

So in one year... I've lost, depending on the day, a grand total of 25 pounds!

Yay!

Just 10 more by the wedding and my life will be complete! Well, I'll be at my target, anyway. Wish me luck!