Meerkat Monocle Mannerism

The meerkat is a clueless societal animal like me. The actual meerkat is originally from the southern African region. As always nature was kind enough to give us enough variants just to have a laugh with the names we give it.

It has one quirky mannerism which I share.I was probably once bitten by one of their distant cousins or some concoction of the sort. If you look at the meerkat outside of its burrow which is usually how you would have seen it, it keeps shifting its gaze. The meerkat does this to check for predators and makes an early warning system. How I wish we could teach them the notion of money, and then charge them for inventing a infra red/motion sensor predator alert system. (Thats another science fiction I am working on secretly in my burrow while a meerkat keeps a watch for me outside.)

In much the same mannerism, but in the sense of wearing a monocle. Imagine a grad student in a research group meeting, the lead researcher or primary investigator or my favourite "the brains of the operation"  has gone on vacation. So now you need to talk about the progress you made that week, for the pennies worth, you are clueless about what goes on, you just sit in your corner and watch youtube videos and kill your time. The professor starts with the infamous question, "so whats the progress on the transmogrifier?". For a moment you can't believe your ears, you just look around once to see if this is a dream, when you signed for the war you never expected to be at the front-lines. I should explain the monocle now, have you seen a person wearing a monocle, does he not have a quizzical look on him. The grad student in this scenario generally has the same look and the hence the inclusion of the monocle.

Well disaster aversion mode, some other "researcher" in the group, the unwise fool I call him, takes the "lead" and starts pouring out what he has been doing all of last week, and the results on the transmogrification. Obviously this guy was such a jerk, the know it all wizard eh, you look around to your friend with a stamp of "what's he acting so pious for?" on your face. That betraying rascal is actually listening to him and has no clue of your irreverent telepathic phonecall. You look around the room, with a look on your face still hanging like it was painted on. The "researcher"'s close friend looks at you with the mocking "what an idiot!" look. You go all crazy and start fervently shifting your gaze to check for attacks before you hear a familiar reference to the KL divergence and flashbulb remember "your  research" ages ago.

The period of frenzy gazing to avoid looking like an imbecile, while proving your idiocy is what I call the "Meerkat Monocle Mannerism". You might see a publication of this in nature in the far future.

PS:
For people who have never heard of the transmogrifier - http://members.shaw.ca/newsong/calvin.html

For people who don't know what the KL divergence is; take a course in linear algebra, I'm sure wikipedia doesn't do justice

For people who have never seen a meerkat in action - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWKW-dw9cuY (albeit the video claims its wales, its thanks to the work of the transmogrifier)