Panda Porn Produces Procreation

I was killing time the other day reading The Kansas City Star while waiting to see Borat (hilarious!). I came across perhaps my favorite news story of 2006.

Many people label my work as "media effects." Without being overly verbose, this is a misnomer. I care about the psychological processing of media. In order to get a gauge of this processing, we measure effects.

To give an analogy, radiologists don't give a damn about X-rays (physicists do). Radiologists care about bones and tendons and such. But in order to know about those things, radiologists measure X-rays.

Most people lose that nuance, and I am forever labeled a "media effects researcher."

Returning to the news story, the Star carried an Associated Press story about pandas. You probably know that:

1) Pandas are endangered
2) They do not like to breed in captivity

Given that, the AP reported that one person pondering pandas (I am out of control with the alliteration thing, I know) got the idea that perhaps the captive pandas were not acclimated to reproduction.

This sparked the idea: the would-be panda lovers needed to see reproduction in action. So, out came the camera, and they started shooting. They burned some DVDs, hooked the pandas up with a new plasma, put on a Barry White album, and (hopefully) dimmed the lights.

"It works," said Zhang Zhihe, director of the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding.

Pandas are breeding like crazy!

In the realm of media effects research, pornography was a popular topic in the 1970s. Skin flicks generally produce anti-social effects.

Until now.

Score a big win for Larry Flint and Albert Bandura.

The AP reports, "The result, by [Zhang's] count: In the first 10 months of this year 31 cubs were born in captivity in China, of which 28 survived. That's up from 12 births in 2005 and just nine in 2000. Of this year's births, 14 came through natural breeding, while artificial insemination or a combination of the two produced the rest.

"Among the roughly 20 pandas outside China, no cubs were born this year through mating, Zhang told a conference here of 140 panda experts."

Panda porn. Who would have guessed that I wasted all this time studying the wrong species. Now we need to get those pandas a bobo doll!

I will spare you all of the cheesy panda porn titles that I keep thinking up.