Koko was a newborn struggling for life at the San Francisco Zoo.

TV is her only window to wider culture, and she gets crushes on the guys she sees there.If you haven't seen it shared by every member of your family and graduating class yet, you should check it out. It's not Patterson's mission or responsibility to constantly heighten the experiment or position Koko as some pop culture hypebeast.The missed opportunity here is that they've essentially raised a great ape into a human teen, and they're not letting her blog about it. A video of her adopting two kittens for her birthday was uploaded to her You Tube channel Tuesday and already has over a million views. "She went viral as hell this week." And you're right.On this day in 1971, Koko the sign-language gorilla was born.The day also commemorates the United States of America’s Declaration of Independence from the United Kingdom on 4 July 1776.She met her current boyfriend by video dating, but they're not having sex yet.I just want Koko to have the social presence of any red-blooded American teenager locked in her bedroom and pissed off at her mom.So, as a service to The Gorilla Foundation, and maybe also as a job application, here are my (free!) suggestions for how to improve Koko's social presence: It's nothing too crazy, to be honest.Indeed, by her first birthday she was mature enough for her first meetings with Patterson, who planned to spend just several years working with the ape in a communications experiment.In those early days, Patterson was intent on finding out whether Koko could learn American Sign Language, a complex set of gestures pioneered by the deaf.So the gems plucked from the schedules are not quite as shiny as you’d hope.They’re the ones you might not watch ordinarily on a June evening, such as Koko: The Gorilla Who Talks to People (BBC One, Wednesday).