How Do you Spell Relief?

I really shouldn't have provoked those boys yesterday. It's just that I find people's squaemishness towards defecation to be hilariously interesting. The feces taboo is what I call it. All this anxiety over a lump of bacteria-laden food that has been miracuously transformed to the point that it is no longer even associated with its former self. Now that's a magic trick. The dog was squatting in the yard, and a group of boys walked by. I said, "Say 'Trick or Treat' and I'll give you some." Today they twittered as they walked by. They enthusiastically related to another boy who wasn't with them what they had seen the day before. Apparently, I share the same fascinations as a 6-year-old.

But I am actually making gains, mentally speaking. Yesterday I was an animal. I spent the better part of the afternoon reading Temple Grandin's new book Animals in Translation . [ Temple Grandin ] There was a fascinating chapter about animal minds, in particular about animal language. She made some very interesting points and gave some very interesting examples of animals' use of music as language. Then she made the case for autistic people having a similar predisposition towards the communicative properties of language, suggesting, for example, that tone of voice is much more communicative than the vocables which the non-autistic hear. She relates how her mother decided that she could be given therapy and make progress because she could hum Bach before she could learn to speak. Then also, at the end of the chapter she relates an anecdote about Irene Pepperberg's famous parrot Alex. They are teaching the bird phonics by giving the bird a nut for each correct sound it can recognize and then make. One day one of the corporate sponsors came into her lab. Wanting to illustrate the progress they were making, Pepperberg picked an orange piece of felt with the letter "s" on it. Whe asked Alex "What color orange?" The bird made the correct "s" sound. However, wanting to save time, she did not reward Alex with a nut. She asked the same question with a a red piece of felt with the letters "sh" on it. Again Alex made the correct sound, but again Pepperberg did not reward Alex. This procedure was repeated a third time, and then on the fourth time, and after correctly vocalizing the letter, Alex finally showed her frustration. alex said " ennn uhhh tuhh." Pepperberg interpreted this to be the phonetic spelling of what she wanted. This behavior was totally unprompted and surprised Pepperberg who has been working with Alex for the last twenty years. She had no idea that Alex might have had the capability to go way beyond the simple phonics he was being taught and to show some form of rudimentary aptitude for spelling.

But I know what you're thinking: How does Alex do with three syllable words?

And by the way? Whatever happened to the Shamrock shake? I am going to McDonalds today to do a little bit of research on this.