Plenty of Nothing

Miss Baker

Memorial to Miss Baker, who flew into space aboard Jupiter missile AM-18 on this date in 1959. She went on to live to the ripe old age of 27. Before Miss Baker's flight no monkey had survived a US space launch. Alan Shepherd's flight aboard Mercury-Redstone 3 occurred just two years after hers. Source.

Bitten by a Macaque

King Alexander of Greece died on this date in 1920 after having been bitten by a macaque. Source.

Emily Carr's Monkey

Source.

European Macaques of the Mist

Source. Dr Caitin Green writes about the Wroxeter macaque burial.

European Macaques

Monkey Forest, Stoke-on-Trent. Source.

Europe has a string of parks that act as sanctuaries for the Barbary macaque: La Forêt des Singes in Rocamadour, in the Dordogne; La Montagne des Singes, in Kintzheim, Alsace; Affenberg Salem in Salem, Baden-Württemberg; and Trentham Monkey Forest (above). Each park has 140 to 200 macaques. The Barbary macaque is indigenous to Algeria and Morocco, but also has a toehold in Gibraltar where about 300 of them live.

Paprika As Monkey

Satoshi Kon's 2006 anime Paprika is Inception four years before Inception, plus a lot of film history (The Collector provides an important scene) plus a huge trundling mountain of Asian and Western cultural reference.  Here is Paprika cloud-hopping over Tokyo in the guise of Monkey.

Monkey

I'm reading Monkey, Arthur Waley's 1942 abridged translation of Journey to the West, one of the Four (or Five) Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, about a monkey in search of immortality. If like me you know next to nothing of Chinese cosmology this is the place to start because the story scampers along, picking up universal truths and throwing them over its shoulder, way too quickly to get loaded down by their significance. I think Monkey could contend for top avatar of the hero with a thousand faces, and really ought to supplant Gilgamesh in those introduction to world literature courses.

Jamie Hewlitt, of Tank Girl and Gorillaz fame, made this animation for the 2008 Olympics. D