Get
To Know
|
The
Long-tailed Macaque Long-tailed macaques are found in primary, secondary,
coastal, mangrove, swamp, and riverine forests in Southern Indochina,
Burma, Indonesia, Philippines, and India's Nicobar Islands. These monkeys
sport gray to reddish brown body hair, which is lighter on their undersides.
The hair on the crown of the head grows into a pointed crest. Male long-tailed
macaques have whiskers and mustaches; females have beards. While males
grow to between 16 and 25 inches tall, females only reach an average height
of 15 to 19 inches. Males weigh approximately 10 to 18 pounds and females
5 to 12 pounds. Long-tailed macaques live in groups of 10 to 48 individuals.
Their average lifespan is 37.1 years. Sixty-four percent of the long-tailed
macaque's diet consists of fruit. Seeds, buds, leaves, other plant parts,
and animals such as insects, frogs, and crabs make up the rest.
|
|
|
|
Giving in the Holiday Season
by
Barry
Pomeroy
Since it is that time of
year again, when kindness runs through everyone's bloodstream as readily
as their blood, now is the moment to think of others. In this holiday
season some people have not been as fortunate. Although they have leapt
through the various hoops, all the while keeping their eye on the fundament
of those before them, some are still trapped into low paying menial work
without an end in sight. They often live below the poverty line and only
you can change that by, Giving to a Starving Professor.
Speaking of low-paying contract labour,
Lary and Young argue that "between 40 and 50% of teaching of undergraduates
was done by contract faculty and by graduate students working as TAs"
(Reflections on the CAUT Conference on Contract Academic Staff, Ottawa,
Jan. 20 - Feb. 1, 2004). But you have it in your hands to change this
terrible situation. Many desperate professors live in substandard housing,
often in a parent's basement, and here, below the frost and poverty line,
they suffer the humiliation of never knowing if their last minute contracts
with no hope of seniority are going to thrust them onto the street this
Christmas season or the next.
Our organization is going to be compiling
a list of needy professors, whose Christmas stockings are empty of all
except their goose-bumped flesh and hundreds of first-year papers waiting
to be marked. When this list is posted, it is hoped that the other faculty
dig deep. They earn easily four times as much as their colleagues-a word
they are increasingly loathe to use-for the same or less work, and they
will no doubt recall that when giving is asked for.
Remember your fellow instructors as you
are reaching for your Gucci wallet. Remember that the starving professor
also has a PhD, and therefore is deserving of a few dimes. Remember that
the starving professor teaches the voluminous undergraduate courses and
thus leaves you free to sing and dance your way through honours courses,
with students well tutored in imitating your voice and temperament. Remember
also, that regardless of appearances and bank accounts, that the starving
professor is a human too, and as much deserving of a wage as any other
on campus.
If you are unwilling to support their struggle
to get fulltime positions, if you are unwilling to share the department's
travel funding and grants, if you cannot honour their labour financially
by more secure contracts, if you cannot give them their own office space,
so they needn't share their cubicle with twenty others, if you refuse
to have cookies and coffee at the meetings or invite them to your parties,
then at least give them your used bus transfer so that when they ask students
waiting at the bus stop for change they have something to offer.
Give Generously. Both Santa and Jesus would
want it that way.
|
Macaque - Issue Two