Today we took the family to the zoo. As a special treat it was a new zoo that we had never been to before – the Southwick Zoo in Mendon, Massachusetts. As I told the kids, when you to go a zoo for the first time, you'll often see animals you've never seen before. We were not disappointed.

In the Terry Pratchett scifi/fantasy series Discworld, there is a character who happens to be an orangutan. He is a librarian. One of the going jokes is that every book, somebody has to explain this to an incoming administrator. I wish I could recall which book it was, but at some point someone asks, "He doesn't go around showing his bum at people, does he?" to which the assistant replies, "I believe you're thinking gibbons, sir."

Now, I always interpreted this as meaning a monkey that just had a rather pronounced rear end. Ummm….no. Have you ever seen a gibbon? It dawns on me that either I've never seen one, or I've never seen a particularly active one. Today we found the gibbon. We didn't know this at the time, all we knew is that there was a family coming the other way saying, "Be careful, that's a very fresh monkey."

"Is he throwing things?" I asked.

"No," said the other dad, "But he's showing things."

And there, hanging onto the fence and putting on a show for anybody who was interested, was some sort of monkey who wanted attention. He'd hang out for a while, swing back and forth, do a little dance, make a little "woopwoopwoop" noise, and then for no reason, whammo, check out my ass. It's hard to really appreciate the move without seeing it first hand. It wasn't a traditional moon, like he spun around 180degrees and stuck his butt up in the air. It was all in the hips. He's there, he's talking, he's got your attention, and then bam, look at my butt. Just a quick flash, like he's playing a trick on you. Once you realize that you're looking at a gibbon and that's just their thing, it's pretty funny. You could almost imagine the little monkey thought balloon over his head with a "Psych! Showed you my butt!" caption.

In other news, an excellent zoo all around. They had wallabies, which I'm not sure I've ever seen in a zoo around here. At least half a dozen different kinds of monkey cages, including a whole "chimpanzee habitat". Lions, tigers and leopards. Elephants, rhinos and giraffes. Highly recommended. Don't go on the train ride, though, it's lame. All you see are "wetlands" (translation: nothing), and it's infested with hornets).

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