Foxes and Other Vocalizing Animals

Our neighbors mentioned to us a few nights ago that the foxes that hunt in our back yards also vocalize when they are mating. “If you hear what sounds something like a baby being murdered, it's the foxes.”

However, some of what I've recently heard in the night wasn't foxes. It is a fact of city life that with people living close to one another, their privacy is compromised. Sound travels. I think that's as explicit as I care to be except to say that I heard loud vocalizations three times during the night, and only once do I think it could possibly have been foxes.

I bring this up at all, really, to reveal the sort of life that Holly and I have together. These incidents in the night resulted in the two of us having a breakfast conversation about the evolutionary significance of sexual vocalizations. We made distinctions between communicative and expressive speech acts, talked about the function of emotional expression as a mechanism for both intensifying the emotion and for informing the individual about what he or she is feeling. We used the word “teleological.”

We are, in short, science geeks.

Odd and Ends

Our British Telecom phone line was supposed to be turned on on September 11, but we still don't get a dial tone. Holly called BT from her office phone at the London Business School. “It seems there is a problem with the exchange,” said the woman she spoke to. “We'll get it sorted out.”

“I want to make sure,” Holly said, “that we won't start being billed for phone service until we actually have phone service.”

“We're bad,” said the BT agent, “but we're not that bad.”

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We have made appointments to be interviewed for our National Insurance Numbers. Unfortunately, the appointments we made conflict with travel plans, so we want to change our appointments. The local job centre where we are to have our interviews is impossible to call. At any time of day or night, the line is busy.

Holly called the central job centres office, where we made our initial appointment. They told her that while they could book initial appointments, they could not book changes. They looked for an alternative number for our job centre and found none. Holly asked them to try calling the local centre themselves. They tried, but could no more get through than we could. Finally, Holly tried e-mail.

“Thank you for your comment,” said the automated reply. It went on to say that one should not expect a reply, or even that the message would be read any time soon. For matters requiring a response, a phone call was advised.

“At least it's better than the old Soviet Union,” Holly said, remembering that Russian has no native word for “efficiency.”