I was in a butt joint on Tuesday. We took the kids (cough!!) to Happy Hollow, a semi-nearby combination park and zoo. They have a petting zoo section there (sorry, the Evil-O-Scope needle didn't twitch once off its rest) and there is a sort of "encounter corral" with an adult-friendly gate and half-a-dozen small rotund goats. There weren't many visitors, so all the animals were in quite good moods - and the goats actually paid attention when a quarter was clinked into the lock of the chow vending machine. I was on my heels talking to Tom and showing him the what and how of these goats. Well, two young billies (same apparent age and weight class) chose the same time to make a bid for Tom's handout. Without warning, they both rocked their heads sideways, popped their front ends into the air and neatly rolled into each other's foreheads - not hard, but with as much grace and precision as any pro wrestler. Their heads made this neat little "tock!" noise.
Thinking back on it, they came to the same conclusion (i.e. Butthead next to me here has become a problem) within the same fiftieth of a second. Because the act had a seamless feel of simultaneity, no time to get their stories straight. (Unless goats, like schooling fish or flocking songbirds, rely on some fast unconscious reflex to Engage Butt Mode, just like the fish or birds somehow seem to all hang a louie at once in the same direction and at the same second and third differentials (in car talk, how far you turn the wheel and how quickly you yank it to full turn).
It was pretty cool, a display of mutual reflexive response trimmed to the bare core of sensorimotor "machine code" by millions of years of Chuck Darwin ruhlessly picking the winners.
There is a small aviary there, and I have a "dovetail joint" storyette too ... but thongs and Uzis notwithstanding this is a family thread. <deranged cackle> |
