Think about this when you see chimpanzees drinking tea and playing pianos on TV.

Chimps also have, like us, minds enough to lose and memories that can hasten the process. Wild chimps “recruited” by poachers for entertainment watch as their mothers are gunned down — the only way a chimp mother would ever relinquish a child. Chimps born in captivity are spared that experience, but they suffer the same premature separation from their mothers, isolation from their normal social groups and often mistreatment from trainers and keepers, all traumatic events that have been shown to cause deep psychological scarring and, as in human beings, can lead an animal to overreact to the slightest stimuli: the look in someone’s eye, the color of someone’s hair or, as with Ms. Herold’s friend that day, hair done up in an unaccustomed style. These are, in short, deeply conflicted beings, evolutionary anomalies that only we could have created: chimps with names and yet no recollection of trees.

…and those chimpanzees that you do see?

chimps work as actors only until about the age of 6, after which they become too strong and willful; they then spend the rest of their lives, often 40 to 50 more years, behind bars

It was a reminder of how far the peace process in Northern Ireland has come when former leaders of the IRA and its political twin, Sinn Féin, condemned the murder of two British soldiers by the so-called Real IRA.

Politicians and communities from across the political divide united yesterday in condemnation of the attack. In a historic moment for Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness backed the police manhunt and denounced the attackers.

McGuinness, the deputy first minister, said: “I was a member of the IRA, but that war is over now. The people responsible for last night’s incident are clearly signalling that they want to resume or restart that war. Well, I deny their right to do that.”

He said: “I will stand for all democrats against their attempts to plunge us back into conflict, to see soldiers on the streets, to see more checkpoints, to see houses being raided and to see people being dragged back to interrogation centres. Those days are over. They can never come back again.”

One day it will be the former leaders of Hamas and Hezbolla condemning suicide bombers in Israel. We’ll have to engage them first though.

James Bach blogged last week about the Death of Quality

Quality is dead in computing. Been dead a while, but like some tech’d up version of Weekend at Bernie’s, software purveyors are dressing up its corpse to make us believe computers can bring us joy and salvation.

You know it’s dead, too, don’t you? You long ago stopped expecting anything to just work on your desktop, right? Same here. But the rot has really set in. I feel as if my computer is crawling with maggots. And now it feels that way even when I buy a fresh new computer.

and it occurred to me that if quality is dead, it is because we have been neglecting to pay its medical bills.

If we want to resurrect quality, we all need to chip in and, in an attempt to do my bit, I bought a Mac.