Word: ritual
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...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...
...center sections (they were bombed to keep people from getting out or in), the whole idea of the most congested U.S. city utterly abandoned, as if everyone had finally moved to the Sunbelt or the Hamptons. I admire, and share, the movie's extended interest in Neville's daily ritual as cop (hunting down the vampire-like infectees), woodsman (looking for animals that will put fresh meat on his table) and lonely guy (setting up a table each day at noon in case any undead survivor has heard his signal). Smith, whatever mood he's inhabiting, is a watchable actor...
...grew up in the 1960s and 70s, the Christmas television specials that were a December ritual of the Johnson and Nixon eras are comfort food. Seeing A Charlie Brown Christmas, The Little Drummer Boy, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (even if it does portray Santa Claus early on as a grouchy bigot) can raise as many childhood memories of the holiday as tinsel and peppermint. And so we buy the DVDs for our kids, ensuring another generation of royalties for the stop-motion animation team of Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass...
...policy and the New Testament, back him with all the cash he will need to corner TV time in New Hampshire and then run the nominee through a quick gauntlet of primaries before anyone else has a chance at the prize. The whole thing makes for more of a ritual than a race, but there's no doubting that the formula works. In the past seven presidential elections, G.O.P. nominees have lost only twice...
...weeknight, and 19-year-old Van is out with two girlfriends on the back of her red Honda Wave, darting through ever-shifting streams of motorbikes as they look for new friends. It's a typical evening of luon lo (literally "wandering"), the nightly ritual where young Vietnamese cruise, flirt and flaunt their finest fashions...