4/18/2002: Monkey Mountain

Hong Kong is getting overrun by monkeys in an area called "Monkey Mountain". (If they named it "Ping Pong Ball Mountain" would it be overrun by... oh never mind.)

It turns out that the monkeys roam in gangs of between 30 and 100. Gangs! It's believed that there are 1250 macaques in all, and gang leaders have been identified and given names. The one shown above is named "Longlegged 7".

At first the govt tried to ban feeding of them, thinking that the feeding was what was bringing them out to try to live amongst the humans. They now say that animal lovers scuttled that idea, despite a HK $10,000 fine. So now they are resorting to birth control for the monkeys.

They're outfitting the male monkeys with condoms in the hope that -- no, I'm lying.

They're actually catching the females, injecting them with a long-term birth control of some sort, and then microchipping them so they can be tracked.

Looks like the opening shot of an Audi commercial that we'll never see.

Where did you get the cool pictures of the monkeys? I found this site when looking for different kinds of blogs at Google.
I am new here and will try and not annoy.

Melinda =^..^=

Hey cool, you must have clicked on the paid link!

I bought the word "blog" on Google, just to see how their system worked and what kind of response rate I'd get. So far it's cost me $3.33 for 57 clickthroughs on 7765 impressions.

So, Mel, getting you here cost me $3.33. I can either send you an invoice, or I could set up a paypal link for you... your choice.

Haw haw!

This picture came from Ananova, the British news service. The full story is here .

Maybe you could do like the "talentless hack" guy did. If you look up talentless hack on Google this one guy is the first hit just because all his friends linked him. It is an old story so you probably know.

Damn, I just learned about Fark today. Talk about lame. Memepool is my fave though.

Melinda =^..^=

This one guy tried to use the Google pay-per-click ads to publish poetry on Google.

I expect poetry to be beautiful. His stuff was just rubbish that had either rhyme or meter.

*koff koff* The impressions cost money too! But it's really as much a test as anything... no big deal.

I didn't really understand all of the nuances of their system when I bought the ads. But it's clear that some words are more desireable than others, which means that words like "sex" are pricey somehow. But basically, you specify how much you're willing to pay per day, (I think I said 50 cents!) and they add you to the rotation... and if others are willing to pay more they get in first. I think.

What was cool about it is how easy it is, and how cheap. After a $5 buy-in you can start advertising on the web's most critical search engine. Damn!

Doesn't the government have anything better to do than monkeying around up there?

Steve runs for the hills. But not the mountain.

Not sure if any of you are programmers, but Google also has API's that you can use from your own web services, for free (up to a certain number of hits or something)..

http://www.google.com/apis/

With the Google Web APIs service, software developers can query more than 2 billion web documents directly from their own computer programs. Google uses the SOAP and WSDL standards so a developer can program in his or her favorite environment - such as Java, Perl, or Visual Studio .NET.

Pretty cool!

10,000 hits, yea i saw this a week or so ago, looks intersting, illl have to play with it some day.