Of course the cat gets away with it

It's a new trend among criminals - blaming the animal. But it's not working out too well for most of them. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be readers of this blog, so they're not choosing very plausible crimes. The woman who said the dog forced her to steal by eating her checkbook who we read about last month was the best of them - at least we know that dogs do eat money.

But what was the woman thinking who blamed her horse for being drunk? Even a quick glance at the posts on drunkenness here would show that there are much more plausible creatures to blame for that.

And now we've got this fellow in Florida. Well, he's got the cat walking on the keyboard thing right -

JENSEN BEACH, FL — A well-known mathematical theory states that a group of monkeys randomly typing on a typewriter could eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare by pure chance.

But Martin County Sheriff’s investigators said there is no chance that one cat could randomly type words on a computer keyboard to download child pornography 1,000 times.

But that’s the excuse that 48-year-old Keith Griffin, of Jensen Beach, gave after investigators found 1,000 images of child pornography on his computer, detectives say. Griffin was arrested today on 10 counts of possession of child pornography.

When deputies searched Griffin’s home and talked to him, he told detectives that he would leave the room sometimes while downloading music and when he returned, his cat had jumped up on the keyboard and strange images were downloaded.

Griffin is being held in the Martin County Jail on $250,000 bail. The cat was not charged with any crimes and is being cared for by a family friend, according to sheriff’s officials.

Ominous cat on computer by Flickr user evilpoet.

Primates pay for pornographic pictures

Our fellow primates not only engage in prostitution, a 2005 experiment found that they also like to look at pornographic pictures.

As reported by Nature News:

The researchers gave captive male rhesus macaques two options: a drink of cherry juice, or a different-sized shot of juice and the chance to look at one of a range of pictures of their troop members for just over half a second.

By varying the amounts of juice, the team worked out how much the monkeys valued each image. "Monkeys are basically juice experts; they're very sensitive to the differences," says team member Robert Deaner.

Monkeys would take a juice cut to look at powerful males' faces or the perineum of a female, Deaner and his colleagues report in Current Biology.

.... the juice-to-picture exchange rate was highest for images of female rears. "Virtually all monkeys will give up juice to see female hindquarters," Deaner says of his male subjects. "They really value the images."

Researcher Robert Deaner claims that this isn't really pornography, and his university emphasizes what the study might do to help us understand autism.

Yeah, sure. They're our relatives; it's natural to try to put a good spin on it.

But even Deaner allows a connection to some of our less admirable habits.

The monkey study might even help to explain humans' fascination with gossip magazines, Deaner suggests. The urge to keep tabs on sexy, powerful people may stem from our tribal past, when the actions of the group's movers and shakers would have influenced our own lives. "Hollywood doesn't affect our lives at all, but people still feel they get some cultural capital from knowing about it," he says.

Watching Monkey Porn by Flickr user Tracy Lee