Monkeys

Hold your bets. One of the acts this year at the New Jersey State Fair is the Monkey Derby, in which monkeys ride miniature horses around a small track six or so times. Bob Steele of Leesburg, Fla., who put the act together, says it took him about six months to train the monkeys to ride and the horses to run. The horses are trained to run to a Spike Jones song. When it stops, they do.

Until Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth first came to the plains and woodlands of East Africa in 1977, most scientists thought only humans had the ability to communicate through language. But in a pioneering series of experiments during the last decade, Cheney and Seyfarth, a husband-and-wife team at the University of Pennsylvania, have found that a small black-faced monkey sounds specific alarm cries when a leopard, eagle or python approaches. When they play a tape recording of the leopard alarm call - a combination of barks and snores - the monkeys run to the nearest tree.

Government scientists have protected monkeys from infection with the deadly Ebola virus, raising hopes that a vaccine to protect people may be possible as well. The findings, being announced today by researchers at the National Institutes of Health, represent a major step forward in efforts to combat one of the most feared viruses of modern times. Although it is rare and found largely in central Africa, Ebola is fatal in 50 percent to 90 percent of cases. People typically experience severe pain, high fevers and massive internal bleeding, and die within one to three weeks.

With Michele Bachmann out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, we are left with an array of the usual suspects in American politics - namely, a bunch of men who seem to spend much of their lives bragging about how tough they are. Until Thursday, we had Rick Perry waxing macho about the number of executions he had overseen in Texas. We have Rick Santorum threatening to bomb Iran. There's Newt Gingrich proclaiming that the race is going to boil down to being between "Newt and not Newt.

Not many film students land Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis for their first feature project. Lucky for Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe, they have a persuasive casting agent. When director Terry Gilliam was in Philadelphia in late '94 preparing 12 Monkeys, he fancied that a documentary on the making of his stylish, if confounding, time-travel thriller might be fun. It would be a useful diary of the process and, perhaps, a promotional tool. So he auditioned local filmmakers to see if any shared his warp of mind.

That rumble you heard Saturday was the cast and crew of Twelve Monkeys barreling down I-95 for Maryland. On Friday night, after seven weeks of filming in Philadelphia, the Terry Gilliam futurist adventure starring Bruce Willis and Madeleine Stowe folded up its tent and decamped the next day for Baltimore, where the project will wrap late next month. Since preproduction began on the $30 million film in October, Twelve Monkeys has pumped an estimated $12 million into the area economy and employed about 900 locals, those close to the production say. It has also provided citizens with numerous rare-animal sightings.

When director Terry Gilliam arrived in Philadelphia with his video camera to scout locations for "12 Monkeys," he didn't worry about being stopped on the street. He isn't exactly a Hollywood celebrity. Gilliam's movies have never been blockbusters, and his last picture, "The Fisher King," was released four years ago. Only devout fans of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" would recognize Gilliam, who drew cartoons for the BBC program and made a few cameo appearances. Which is why he freaked out when he walked into the atrium of the former Wanamaker's department store and the giant pipe organ began to blast the theme music for "Monty Python.

Bouncing babies to stunning stars. Fluffy fleeces to fabulous fireworks. Melodious music to munchy muffins. Name something cute, zany, entertaining, intriguing, delicious, unusual or just plain fun, and you have a good chance of finding it at the New Jersey State Fair. You'll find the fair, for the fifth straight year, at the Garden State Park racetrack in Cherry Hill, starting today and running through Aug. 13. "The great family following we've developed . . . will have more fun than ever because there are even more things to do," said George Hamid Jr., president of the fair.

Something about the dark, wide-set eyes, the alabaster skin and the coffee-colored hair that streams like a shawl around her shoulders makes Madeleine Stowe suggest a Picasso demoiselle come to life. There's something ancient about the actress' face, also something very modern. "It's a compelling face, a timeless face, a face you'd travel across time to see," says director Terry Gilliam. So it figures that Gilliam cast Stowe in 12 Monkeys, his time-traveling thriller/romance curiosity co-starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt.

Doing an animal census in the wild assumes there is actually something to count and that getting the tally is feasible. So after three weeks in a soggy, bug-ridden rain forest - not to mention riding three airplanes and a small boat, hiking for two days up a river, then climbing a 1,000-foot cliff to get there - and seeing only a dozen or so animals, the term "census" is arguable. But Gail Hearn is using it anyway. It illustrates her point. Hearn, a biology professor at Beaver College in Glenside, and some of her students have been counting drills - smaller and lesser-known cousins of mandrills, the Old World monkeys with the distinctive rainbow rumps.

Remember when wine became popular enough to be "the new beer"? And then it flipped when craft beer became "the new wine"? It was inevitable the two would collide someday into one crazy fermented creature, and now we have it, an all-out "Bine" Revolution with everyone from Sonoma (Russian River) to Portland, Maine, (Allagash) aging beer in wine barrels. Victory is the latest to go grape guns on their brews, with the recent limited release of White Monkey, their popular Golden Monkey tripel aged three months in used chardonnay casks from Wente Vineyards.

TEHRAN, Iran - A gray-tufted monkey strapped in a pod resembling an infant's car seat rode an Iranian rocket into space and returned safely, officials said Monday in what was described as a step toward Tehran's goal of a manned space flight. The mission also touched on concerns that advances in Iran's rocket expertise could be channeled into military use for long-range weapons that might one day carry nuclear warheads. Iran says it does not seek atomic weapons. Launching a live animal into space - as the United States and the Soviet Union did more than a half-century ago - may boost a country's stature.

BOISE, Idaho - A 22-year-old man who police say killed a monkey after breaking into the Boise zoo has faced run-ins with the law in the last three years that include a pair of drug arrests and a conviction for driving drunk. A day after Michael J. Watkins' arrest, authorities tried to answer what may have prompted the once-promising wrestler from western Idaho to enter the facility early Saturday, officials said. Members of the community and Watkins' family also were trying to determine what could have led to the attack.

THE UNITED Arab Emirates Football Association has demanded an apology after a story on the Asian Football Confederation website referred to its national side as the "Sand Monkeys. " General Secretary Yousuf Abdulla on Sunday called the wording in Friday's 2015 Asian Cup profile an "unfortunate affair" that "revealed some racist acts by some AFC officials. " An AFC spokesman said the wording was immediately removed once editors were made aware of it. He called it a "genuine mistake" inserted by a new website writer who had seen "Sand Monkeys" wrongly listed as the team's nickname on its Wikipedia page.

Michael Johnson isn't your usual University of the Arts music teacher. At 35, the native Floridian, during his time in our fair city, has been many things, from a member of the Lilys (a Philly shoe-gaze legend) to the one-man band that is Ape School. As an Ape, he has made deeply psychedelic music that has gone from absurdist electronica (as in the 2009 album Ape School ) to glam-laced love songs (the newly released CD Junior Violence ) and, in the process, taken advantage of his university's ownership of the fourth modular synthesizer Robert Moog ever made.

RECENT news of Monsignor Lynn's sentencing and the paid patrolman in Northwood show that Philadelphia is, on many levels, a "Three Monkey" city where "see no evil, hear no evil and say no evil" has justified the attitude that no one is his/her brother's keeper. Paying the price for indifference and apathy can be high, but the lessons learned are more valuable. If more neighbors in Northwood looked out for each other and their properties, there would be no need to pay for personal security.

Our highly social species has been behaving strangely of late, and this has been noted in a flurry of recent hand-wringing articles wondering whether technology is changing our nature. The cover of the Atlantic asks whether Facebook is making us lonely, and the New York Times bemoans "The Flight From Conversation. " The authors observe what many of us have experienced: Friends invite us to get together only to spend the time texting other friends or tweeting. Everywhere, people are ignoring those in their physical vicinity so they can hold court with acquaintances farther away.

Breathtaking images of animals in the African wilderness are packaged for a G-rating and an audience of children in Chimpanzee, a documentary from the Disneynature label. Filmmaker Alastair Fothergill (who codirected Disneynature's African Cats ) spent three years in the jungles of the Ivory Coast capturing 700 hours of rare, beautiful footage detailing the complex, dramatic and, at times, quite moving lives of a chimpanzee clan. The job of narrating the material has been given to Tim Allen (was Morgan Freeman unavailable?

Anyone doubting our evolutionary tie to other apes should check out that Philadelphia festival of food and fun known as Wing Bowl. The annual event has some striking parallels to behavior outlined in the article "Chimpanzee Hunting Behavior and Human Evolution," which appeared in the magazine American Scientist. Chimpanzees sometimes "go on hunting binges, in which they kill a large number of monkeys and other animals over a period of several days or weeks," the article states. The hunting is done mostly by males, though there are a few female hunters and the party is joined by many other females in estrus (heat)

With Michele Bachmann out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, we are left with an array of the usual suspects in American politics - namely, a bunch of men who seem to spend much of their lives bragging about how tough they are. Until Thursday, we had Rick Perry waxing macho about the number of executions he had overseen in Texas. We have Rick Santorum threatening to bomb Iran. There's Newt Gingrich proclaiming that the race is going to boil down to being between "Newt and not Newt.