Talk about a Long Tail!
The always-vigilant Searchviews directs our attention to the appalling variety of hapless “exotic animals” available down there at the weird and wooly end of the “Long Tail.” Ok, that appalling pun was the main reason for this post. That, and we felt it was time to publicly acknowledge that the Searchviews blog is, in our opinion, the reigning Internet champion when it comes to the insertion of amusing and marginally-relevant images into blog posts. Admittedly, the post referenced above did not present much of a challenge — the photo of the capuchin monkey nestled in a flower patch was probably borrowed from the syrupy exotic animal website that the post links to. Even so, the Searchviews image-selection strategy is, together with the Woot product copy, one of our guilty pleasures. Ok, so we don’t get out much…
And if you are seriously thinking of investing in a Capuchin monkey, peruse this lovely description before you enter your credit card number:
The capuchin is a New World monkey, brown and cute, the size of a scrawny year-old human baby plus a long tail. ‘’The capuchin has a small brain, and it’s pretty much focused on food and sex,'’ says Keith Chen, a Yale economist who, along with Laurie Santos, a psychologist, is exploiting these natural desires — well, the desire for food at least — to teach the capuchins to buy grapes, apples and Jell-O. ‘’You should really think of a capuchin as a bottomless stomach of want,'’ Chen says. ‘’You can feed them marshmallows all day, they’ll throw up and then come back for more.'’
Quoted from: Monkey Business By Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt (co-authors of Freakonomics)
