"12,000 years ago... In a cave, 12 miles from Nazareth...."

I'm reading to the Ice Weasels again. Most stories, they don't like. This one, they're wearing it out. Or rather, wearing me out. 

It's time-consuming, and a bit frustrating, because I know that they can read. For instance, just this afternoon I sat with Sir Charles Kerwallop-Bollock while he tabbed back & forth through the 87 plastic-encased pages of the "Operating Instructions for a Pioneer PDP-4360HD Plasma TV" (translated by one Sulaiman bin Bedlam of Kuala Lumpur), and lemme tell you, Chuckie's paws were a blur. 

See, Tech manuals are easy, 'cause there's no emotional content. You see a Weasel reading one, and the only unusual thing you'll notice is an excess of drool. The only thing they "feel" is a straight-up surge of information on how to dismember these suckers. After the info's been absorbed, comes the metallic disembowelling, and devouring.

But stories? No chance. They won't touch 'em. When they want a story, they haul one over to me, plunk themselves down in a circle, hold each others paws, steady themselves, and ask that I read it to them. And then, if they like it, reread it. And reread it again.

The problem with them reading directly is that the Weasels respond, quite actively, to what they read. They'll act out the moods, the conflicts, the twists & turns of the stories. They call it "dancing," and sometimes it's got that feeling to it. They bounce along on their toes, little paws held up in front of them, bobbing up and down, and it's kinda cute - sortof  B-52's, Love Shack. 

But the dancing tends to "escalate" with the quality of the story. The more twists & turns, multiple characters & (better) multiple personalities, bad puns & cosmic haha's, made-up spacemen & inside-outskie parallel universes get thrown in - the faster they rev.

Most news stories, TV shows, sitcoms, Hollywood movies - to them, that crap might as well be a Tech manual. They get the message, of which there's always & only ever one per story, and respond accordingly. They spit. Throw old appliances. Hurl. Heckle. "Caaaaaaaake," they mock.

But a good story - well, those are dangerous. Huck Finn gets 'em running around in a circle, whooping like mad, doing this aerial somersault thing that's quite impressive, even if it does end up with a lot of blood & bandages. You escalate to Alan Moore, and they'll start gnawing themselves, then the neighbors, and by the end, I'm damned hard-pressed to call the sight of a couple of hundred Ice Weasels clawing at their own flesh "dancing." 

And Tom Robbins? Forget it. I won't read that shit to 'em anymore. It's like crack meets ecstasy meets, I donno, naked Natasha Kinski in Cat People. They're ecstatic by the Foreword, leaping & piling-on in great fur-heaps when the pleasure hits, carnassials gnashing & shearing in despair if it looks like the joy juice is gonna stop flowing, and at the climax, all those anal scent glands release, and the level of sexual & sensual arousal reaches heights probably only matched by a Pentecostal Girls Choir watching Elvis in leather.

Thus, the need for prophylactic measures. i.e. Me. Doing the reading. To them. And lately, they can't get enough of this one story. So I read them version after version, from the original scientific report in pdf through the mass media coverage, even throw in a couple of blogs. (They hate blogs. "Reading that TPM gruel again, are we multigrain?" Once they start in on the nasty stuff about "wanting to be Josh's boytoy," I tend to give in & read 'em whatever the hell they want. On the plus side, it does mean I'm fairly safe reporting on them here. Not like they're gonna read it.) Anyway. A riff in Time they've taken a liking to: 

"A new figure in humanity's history emerged last week when archaeologists announced the discovery of what could be one of the world's oldest known spiritual figures. After years of meticulous excavation just miles from Israel's Mediterranean coast, scientists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem unearthed a 12,000-year-old grave that held the remains of a diminutive 'shaman' woman...."

"The grave is thought to belong to the Natufian culture, a nomadic society which existed roughly between 11,500 and 15,000 years ago. Located near other burial sites in Hilazon Tachtit, the woman's body was distinctly encased in a limestone enclosure, a tomb sealed by a rock slab that Grosman's team managed to lift in 2006."

Which got them pretty excited. Picture a stuffed furry animal, 4 feet tall, titanium teeth, Taser in one paw, blowtorch in the other, cartwheeling, and shouting in an extremely high-pitched chittering language. Now picture 280 of them cartwheeling, blowtorching & Tasering - each other - in perfect harmony, and you've got a show that would intimidate the Chinese Olympic Organizing Committee.

That's the gist of the story. If you're up for a long ramble, there's more. And if you don't know what an Ice Weasel is yet, well, that's damned sad. And you can look here. But meanwhile, it'll cost you a Rec for the rest of the story. Life is hard.

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