“By trying to sing over the sound of the city, birds are risking vocal injury,” said Dr. Sue Anne Zollinger from the University of St Andrews. “This could have serious implications on how fit and attractive they’re perceived to be by females.”
Last month, Anderson married Reed in a ceremony in Colorado. “I was just walking down a street in California and I was talking to Lou, and we were always talking about getting married, and he said ‘how about tomorrow? It was very nice. It was just him and me under a tree.”
Ciar Byrne
Laurie Anderson’s anti-American attitude sparks walkout
Hundreds of listeners have contacted BBC Radio 4 after newsreader Charlotte Green dissolved into giggles while reading a bulletin on Today.
Green’s hysterical outburst started after a studio member remarked that the 1860 recording of a woman singing the French song Clair de Lune sounded like a “bee buzzing in a bottle”.
It began with three girls who were stricken with bouts of uncontrolled laughter for hours on end. Eventually nearly half the 159 school boarders were affected, laughing for up to 16 days at a time. The school was closed and the children sent home but this resulted in further spread of the condition throughout communities and to other schools. Attempts to reopen the school were disastrous. In the two-year period that the gelastic epidemic lasted, 14 boarding schools and entire villages and towns were affected round the eastern shore of Lake Victoria.
When blessed silence returns, I can listen to the butterflies that flutter inside my head. To hear them, one must be calm and pay close attention, for their wing beats are barely audible. Loud breathing is enough to drown them out. This is astonishing: my hearing does not improve, yet I hear them better and better.
These problems exist prior to us, and we gather ourselves, almost molecularly, we gather ourselves around these perplexities. And that’s what a human is: a gathering around a perplexity.