Word: getting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...often hard to love the animals. They've got too many problems: they're dirty and smelly. They never get outside of their cages. It's easy to feel sorry for them, but feeling sorry for something often makes it impossible to love it as well...
There are also too many animals at the zoo. Too many dull ones, and too many sleeping. Who wants to walk by skunks, donkeys, wild boars, and alligators to get to the monkey cage? I have nothing to say to those animals. Another problem is the bears. All real bears seem to be wildly imperfect reflections of the ideal pooh. If you don't believe me, go to the Square and look for the girl who sells home-made bears, and says in a tiny voice, "Bears for sale." In the middle of the Square. The girl is so tender...
What makes animals cute is their confused subhumanity. I enjoy my cats most when they seem stupid and ridiculous. When one of them crawls into a bag and can't get out, I use the same laugh that white people probably had when they watched Stepin Fetchit being "spooked" in the old movies. The point is that people have preconceived ideas of what's nice about animals and other people, and are happy when they can find images that conform...
Most of the animals spend their time begging for food. This is demeaning for them, and if you look them in the eye, they get embarrassed and stop. Except for the otters, who have developed a routine of begging, arfing and clapping-hands which, though clearly stolen from the seals, forces anybody who has any money to go buy them some food. Otters have learned that to eat, you've got to cute, and to be cute, you've got to parody yourself...
President Pusey said this week, "I think Fulbright's motive was to get the Defense Department out of the business of pure research and to put such research under the National Science Foundation. Some of us are a little skeptical of whether funds will actually be transferred to NSF. In theory, I think they [the Defense Department] don't feel they're financing anything that doesn't have some military application...