Birds of Paradise

With the recent advent of sunshine in Utah Valley, I have gotten to pondering. The following is (to coin a phrase) a ponderment.

For Christmas the Finlinsons got this awesome Discovery Channel series called Planet Earth on DVD. In it there is this cool segment about these birds of paradise that have beautiful plumage and dance these awkward (though amusing) dances to find a mate.

While these birds are intriguing, I have found that I do not need to travel to exotic New Guinea to see such displays. The HFAC at BYU provides a comparable and equally exotic setting for watching the mating "dances" of another species entirely: homo zoobus more commonly know as the Zoobie. Of late, I have made some observations that seriously concern me as to the survival of the species.

Case in point: The male zoobus.

So there I was in the HFAC at BYU. I was sitting at a bench when a male zoobus comes and sits next to this girl. He looks to be of RM age. Through the course of the conversation he compliments the girl he is talking to on being a mature freshman then he continues to explain how he likes freshmen ever since he lived in the dorms a couple years ago (which was when he was 26!). Then he finished off the conversation by defending the reasons that he lives with his mother to this (at best) mildly interested girl. His argument was that he isn't emotionally attached. Well it wasn't too long until the girl flew out of there.

To make matters worse, the disgruntled look on his face was all too telling: he was, in fact, attemting to flirt with this girl. Sometimes I find it miraculous that our species is even able to survive.