You name it

So Bruce accidentally says, "Hello Ohio" when he's in Michigan and everybody piles on with the giggles. They should show more respect. First, he's sixty years old, and he's been on tour about nonstop for the past 35 years! Second, touring at the megastar level is like: hurry get on the jet-hurry get in the limo-hurry get on stage... and the next night you have to do it all over again.

Third, I'd like to point out? I've been to concerts, and I bet several audience members didn't know what state they were in anyways.

I understand why states have names, but why must they have nicknames too? My opinion, one smart alec state started it, and then the rest "me-too'ed" right off the cliff. Because some states have really goofy nicknames... you know who I'm talking about, 'Nutmeg' state.

The whole concept of names comes to us via father Adam. He did really good work, especially considering he was running against a hard deadline. Yeah, he knew as soon as Eve came along, she'd be wanting to get in on the action and there'd be arguments.

And near the end of the project, Adam got tired and you know how hard it is to be creative under those circumstances. That's why we have some animals with compound names.

Like spider monkey for instance? It doesn't look like a spider or spin webs, so why spider monkey? Or turtledove. What's that supposed to be, a really slow flying bird?
The only thing that explains it is everybody cuts corners when a deadline is approaching fast.

So I know why we need to name animals, else menus would be fairly meaningless. But I never knew until recently that animals need us to name them.

Newcastle University (that's in Ohio--- I mean England) did a study involving 500 dairy farms. Dr. Catherine Douglas found very conclusively that cows with their own names give more milk than cows named 'cow.' And not just a little bit more milk either; up to 500 pints more per year, which I think is a couple of gallons probably.

It's theorized that when cows are treated as unique individuals they feel more comfortable and productive. I wonder how far this goes through the animal kingdom, a need to be acknowledged as an individual?

Who knows? That treatment could actually work on people too... naw, what was I thinking? Well, reasonable folks can disagree whether it'd be a good idea to treat humans as individuals, I suppose. But one thing we can all agree on; Michigan does look a lot like Ohio.