Today I Learned

...that "oestrus" means menstruation for chimps.

I'm reading Great Apes by Will Self. It's hysterically funny. It's a clever fantasy where all the upmarket London characters become chimps overnight, which initially I thought was a terrible idea and I'd never last through it, but turns out to be hilarious.

That said, it's kind of slow going because Self has reproduced the chimps' dialogue with sound effects like "euch euch" and "nnnuhh" throughout their speech. These are realistic approximations of chimp noises but they slow the dialogue down like mad.