Teamworking Day: Project Nim Part 2

Dennard: Happy Very Special Teamworking Day Part 2! We're still learning about ape science. If you're reading this before yesterday's article, that's wrong. Which is fine. A few things went wrong last time too. Because it looked like Columbia bought, drugged, groped, and sold a monkey. But I've touched base with tech support. And a few other supporters.

Dennard: Things should go more smoothly now. We can start over, just like Nim. Isn't that what we all deserve, Sissyneck? A second chance?

Sissyneck: I know I do! Ive asked around and there are LOTS of folks who have water bottle accidents at there first open mic. Anyway if you recall when we left off yesterday the sign-language chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky had become simply too horny and violent for even the most dedicated of Dr. Terrace’s former students and sex-partners to handle, and so they found Nim a new home and Vaterfigur:

Sissyneck: But he dident go direct to LEMSIP. First they tried takin’ him back to “The Institute” in Oklahoma. Now, to calibrate, this is where Nim HAD been livin while enrolled at Columbia:

Sissyneck: Which I guess was just one of Columbia’s extra plantations they werent using anymore but said Terrace could if he paid for the heat. Dennard how many mansions do you get to live in for free in a academic year?

Dennard: I’m renting my first room with a closet. I share it with two “interpretive butchers,” and I still don’t know what that means. Other than my only suit smelling like old meat and dead dreams. Sort of like Nim’s new place. But it can all change if you fucking work with me and—

Sissyneck: But Nim ruined everything with his cat-humpins and face-batterins and so they said “Nope, Nim, we’re givin you like a hundred benadryl and flying you to your new home in Oklahoma we promise it will be just as good as your old one:”

Dennard: Chimp jail is tough. It makes them want to lie down forever, sans thinking or feeling. But think of introducing sign language to monkey hell! Chimp gang signs. Chimp suicide notes. Chimp prayers. And replies to the first two!

Sissyneck: Hey now He ALWAYS answers, you think hes seeing all them sparrows fallin and not hearin a kneelin monkey humbly askin for grace in incarceration? It does look rough in there tho, thats too bad no-one could have known what it wa-

Sissyneck: Oh Terrace had been there before! Okay well, “it turned out to be surprisingly more blank than i remembered” is gonna be one of my go-tos from here on out that is just manufique.

Dennard: Some people see nothing in Terrace’s eyes, especially when he tries to relate to another creature. But nothing and infinity share a lot of philosophical space. So Terrace has infinite empathy, infinite intellect, and infinite right to live on God’s Earth.

Dennard: If you ever end up in chimp supermax: the projectile spit is a test. Responding says you’re prey, and makes an attack inevitable. Not responding also says you’re prey, but louder. Expect the first month to be a blur of hairy fists. If you make it to the second, I have nothing left to teach you. Go with God, if he exists in monkey hell.

Sissyneck: Yes monkey county-lock-up is a lot like enterin a new vape store: you gotta be strategic about those first impressions or face riducule and ejection. In this case they did try to help Nim acclimate to life “in the yard” by settin him up with a kinda prison mentor named Mac but they dident get along great. Here is Dr. Terrace chaperonin them and bein a excellent behaviorist by not unintentionally modellin any undesirable behavior.

Dennard: Just like Christmas morning. And December 26. Here, Nim got more than love: he inherited the light, breezy soul of a comedy writer. The perfect post-parole job for apes blessed with language. And he paid it forward to Mac. Each one, beat one.

Sissyneck: Yeah maybe, i dunno, it doesnt like there gettin along so well to me. I woudent want to be in a dog park with those two. How are you feeling about it, Dr. Terrace?

Dennard: My fucking life is over.

Sissyneck: So i’m lookin here at Dr. Terrace’s wikepedia and for some reason instead of a “Controversys” section it says Lifetime Achievement Award

Dennard: Life’s complicated. We’re watching this, in comfort, from the world monkey torture built. But remember Roosevelt’s famous words: “Hand me the .405.” Anyone can sit on the sidelines and say “I prefer my monkey torture to have a purpose.” But that leaves you with entire forests of untortured monkeys. Is that a world you want? No need to answer that. Answering rhetorical questions makes you wrong twice.

Sissyneck: Well to be fair it wasent ALL torture, the folks running this place know that you only do the time in your head so they gave their charges “meaning and purpose” by assigning them monkey chores. Like when they saw that Nim was a compulsive hand-washer, they let him do the dishes, awww! And they gave some of the good-behavior monkeys guard duty which kinda ended up lookin like another ethical psychology experiment run by another Good Man who also enjoyed special relationships with his students

Dennard: Everything’s the Milgram experiment with you people. Monkey summer camp? Milgram. Entire US prison system? Milgram. Civilian-interview blacksite? Milgram, Milgram, Mil-Wah. Find a new atrocity to milk. Then maybe the guards will be a bit nicer. There must be something else. If morale turns up just a bit, the beatings might stop.

Sissyneck: Well i meant Zimbardo, but huh now that you mention it there are quite a few of these social science superstars who seems like there whole career is just that we dident know yet that we had to impose ethics onto some people

Dennard: Life feels long, especially in ape solitary. But it’s a flicker. How much of your career do you want to burn on ethics? You could spend those two syllables on hustle. And morals? You could grind twice. We, like Nim, live and die alone.

Sissyneck: Well not so fast Mister Raincloud-Pants! Because Nim wasn’t totally alone in there, he made a friend named Bob

Dennard: Be wary of this one. Nim’s had nice luck with people so far, but a Deadhead that turns his back on Jerry Garcia has no code. Bob is a ronin. Who knows what he’d do alone with a semi-talking chimp. I hope Stephanie stopped by to supervise.

Sissyneck: I mean. Given everything else we’ve seen an heard today…I ain’t mad a bout a little lite “The Favourite”-play between good primate buds.

Dennard: The second-best film on chaste, platonic friendship. You can really see Project Nim’s influence on culture. It’s so pervasive, we don’t even need to watch the rest.

Sissyneck: But Dennard, if we stopped here, we wouldnt get to see Nim’s special chaste and platonic visit from Herb!

Dennard: Credit to the editor: he makes Herb’s quiet pride shine. You can really tell he’s on science’s side. Especially when people talk. And he just lets them keep talking, until you know how beautiful the bond between man and stolen, isolated, breastfed chimp can be.

Sissyneck: Yes I agree I feel like you and I are here perched on the skilled and savage shoulders of that film editor. I might note here that Herb also knew the power of optics: he had a habit of takin a photo crew along with him for pretty much everything he did, so here’s what that reunion looked like to the public at the time:

Dennard: He’s keeping creatives alive. Monkey jail snapshots are art show gold. Those MFA–sorry, BFA– students got at least a tenth of their tuition’s value, and I’m sure he’s only groomed three of them, tops. Four if he’s not running a lecture.

Sissyneck: Dammit your right, everytime i get to thinking it’s safe to discount Herb as kinda a dink, you go and apologize and rehabilitate for him and I get mixed up again. He’s lucky to have you so very stonchly in his corner. But anyway, Herb did thoughtfully smuggle in some contraband for NIM:

Sissyneck: Dennard you joker, did you make that!? Like a scientist would ever bring a monkey tasteful cat erotica!

Sissyneck: Oh never mind i got my setups and payoffs confused on that one.

But I meant Nim also got ahold of some other modes of recreation:

Sissyneck: But the good times they could not roll forever the guy that ran The Institute had run into a bit of temporary embarrassment:

Sissyneck: They asked Dr. Terrace could he help:

Sissyneck: So The Institute had to just sell off “almost the whole colony” and this is when we catch up to our pallid buds at LEMSIP.

Dennard: I’ll give you ten thousand New York dollars to stop this. Right now. We unplug this library etch-a-sketch, dump it in the Tumwater reservoir, and never mention apes again. Both our lives change here. You choose how.

Sissyneck: Now, I’m scared to keep going too, I am. But if I learnt anything from this movie, its that even when life gets heavy, theres nothing we can’t lift, together.

Dennard: The world is so much bigger than this library, Sissyneck. There are places where you pay for books, and they use that money to kill libraries. That sounds worse, but it’s also unstoppable. Which side of the steamroller are you on? Cancer monkey, or bored doctor?

Dennard: Gross.

Sissyneck: Gross.

Dennard: Lord, here come the eyes of history again. Is there anyone nosier in the world? Sell one toy chimp to ape hell, and every reporter on Earth has notes. Then there’s the students. Pervasive this, hospital-bombardment that. It’s almost enough to make you think something’s wrong.

Sissyneck: Oh yeah, I get real annoyed when anyone tries to tell me what actually happened. Looking pretty bad for Nim, isn’t it! But folks if you thought you were gonna get out of a Dayle/Neck team-working day without a twist, well i dont know who in the shit you thought you were dealin with…

Sissyneck: BOOM thats right this guy, this fuckin guy i forget his name already but it turns out: he had a soul. He is actually a sweetie and did not close his eyes to the truth of his situation:

Dennard: That’s a hero. Instead of selling his soul for a sliver of prestige, he bites the hand that injects. A hand I’ve learned was funded by NYU. God may forgive those purple barbarians, but we have higher standards.

Sissyneck: NYU!!? Pee-u stinky! But yeah, hero! And arent you all ashamed of yourself for thinkin he was a bad guy just because we kept hintin he was a nazi doctor. Look, here he is warmly feedin robocop food to his lil guys:

Dennard: He makes the look work. Today, Jan Moor-Janowski’s praised as “the Schindler of primate research,” which implies our research institutions are nevermind. Less awkwardly, he survived shooting at Nazis by pretending to be an officer. Good job Jan! I would only cast you as Red Skull as a compliment.

Sissyneck: Oh yeah definitely! Anyway, Jan said: thats it, we gotta do somethin about this, and so he teamed up with Nims old bud, Bob, from the institute

Sissyneck: And they got a lawyer who was like: wait the chimp can talk? I’m puttin him ON THE STAND! which was excellent for media attention, even though:

Sissyneck: Imagine bein a judge and sayin no to makin that kind of courtroom history forever. But it turned out fine, the NYU dean who was in charge of LEMSIP heard there was a possibility of negative attention to him personally, and caved faster than a undergrad skull under a chimp fist. And so instead of more needle testin and cage rot, Nim got to go to a honestly pretty nice injured horse ranch (the horses, not the ranch) and they built him his own house and gave him a tv:

Dennard: Solid place. He only killed one dog, and it was whatever breed you dislike.

Dennard: Animals need exercise. Nim had a physique to maintain, in case he ever went back inside.

Sissyneck: Yeah, hopefully after that they got some better baby gates. But they still eventually found Nim some more chimp pards and Bob and Dr. Totenkopf actually did come and visit all the time!

Sissyneck: You cant see it but Dennard and I are both so heartwarmed right now and noddin vigorously and glancin at each other like: Fuckin A. But not too much, we havent known each other that long. Right Dennard? Your makin that face because your cloud of cynicism has also melted away into the sunlight and nothin bads ever gonna happen again? Dennard?

Dennard: One tiny loose thread.

Dennard: I’ll admit: a real tragedy follows Nim. His first and nudest guardian, Stephanie, visited Black Beauty Ranch. Maybe she saw him in the news. Maybe it was maternal instinct. Either way, they could make up for lost milk.

Dennard: Instead of a welcome-feeding, Nim chose a welcome-beating. I don’t know why HBO left this footage in. Finales should offer a little catharsis after a painful journey. Instead, an ape tombstone-piledrives his childhood dealer and sex tutor. Senseless.

Dennard: I can’t watch this. Stephanie searched for primate romance, and found a direct flight to Slamtown. A two-handed sleeping aid. A fuzzy Hundred Crack Fist. Where’s the justice? Where’s the meaning? If you can’t drug the baby you stole, what rights do you have? No one should learn “What size are your shoes?” in sign language.

Dennard: You’re laughing? Nim suplexed his first love for fifteen minutes, and you people are laughing? Well, you won’t laugh when I tell you Nim got off scot-free. That’s the world you live in. Any animal you abuse might uppercut you through the roof of their cage. I wish Terrace had been around to stop this. I’d give anything for that footage.

Sissyneck: Same! I can practically see it, Herb just comically throwin in one co-ed after another to distract Nim. That would be even funnier than police academy IV. Which, speaking of, for my own piece of my mind I’m gonna call this one a Happy Ending (Stephanie’s concussions notwithstandin) and after all didn’t we get a very important scientific breakthrough from it?

Sissyneck: I mean think about it, we breached the ape/human communication barrier! Oh wait thats a old edition of the book, Herb changed the title for the re-print, thats interesting:

Sissyneck: Hm that seems odd to remove the really sensational part of the title, maybe his follow-up book will clarity for us:

Dennard: How many surviving copies of these do you have? And do you have a lighter? I need to smoke, with the books, away from observers. Play us out.

Sissyneck: You got it, here are some of our favorite special memorial “Nim-ages” to fare us well. Dennard, could you choose a appropriate musical accompnament for the good readers to listen to while they watch, misty-eyed?

Dennard: Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.” Or The Insane Clown Posse’s “Homies.”

Dennard: I am so fucked. With joy, after how well this went! We revealed everything, as intended, since there was nothing to hide. Thanks for having me. If I die for no reason, bury me with my dolls.

Sissyneck: I will do you one better and throw a unopened otaku box in there with you. And I agree, this was a real nice visit with you! I mean, i do gotta a lot of processin to do about if i still trust science i guess. Between this and the fluoride thing its been a rough couple weeks. But if I do gotta accidentally write myself into a endless spinnin void of chaos and fear, I’m glad I got to do it with you. You know what, i bet this is just how Gaiman and Pratchett felt when they finished writing Good Omens!