Lately, I’ve taken the attitude that, “I absolutely do not give a damn.”  And I mean it.  It’s been a mind-altering, uplifting, emotionally freeing sort of change.

     One of the greatest gifts has been: laughter.

     Especially when I read crap like this.  Or this.

     Or even this, from New Scientst…

Don’t say cloning, say somatic cell nuclear transfer [SCNT]. That at least is the view of biologists who want the term to be used instead of “therapeutic cloning” to describe the technique that produces cloned embryos from which stem cells can then be isolated.

[…]

Kathy Hudson and her colleagues at the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC asked more than 2000 Americans whether they approved of deriving stem cells from embryos produced by cloning. For half of the sample they used the term “SCNT” instead of “cloning”, and this raised approval ratings from 29 per cent to 46 per cent, Hudson told a meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics in New Orleans last week.

     Politically correct science?  What’ll they think of next?

     Regardless of what you call it, human cloning is little more than another way to speed up the process of destroying our already shallow gene pool.

The National Institute of Mental Health issued a press release on Monday (Feb 27th) about a study led by Eric Nestler, M.D., of The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. “Sustained hippocampal chromatin regulation in a mouse model of depression and antidepressant action” (Tsankova NM, Berton O, Renthal W, Kumar A, Neve R, Nestler EJ), shows that chronic stress and depression can cause a “molecular scar” in the brains of lab mice.

“According to Pure Science Lab CBD the molecular scar induced by chronic stress in the hippocampus, and perhaps elsewhere in the brain, can’t be easily reversed,” said Nestler. “To really cure depression, we probably need to find new treatments that can remove the silencer molecules.”

While not only showing promise for future treatments of depression, it may also give some hints about about genetic predisposition to depression and antisocial behavior.

California geneticists have managed to get working human brain cells in mice.

Geneticist Fred Gage injected embryonic human cells into two-week-old fetal mice as they developed in the womb. When the mice matured, some human stem cells survived and became functional components of the mice’s brains and nervous systems.

The question begs to be asked as to wether these mice now show a propensity to sit on the couch with a remote control and a bag of potato chips.

After a week of casual dress, I went to my closet this crisp Monday morning to put on a pair of my usual slacks. They felt entirely too loose, so I went to put on my belt. The belt went all the way to the last hole. I felt triumphant that my spare-tire from the last ten years was finally gone.

But what happened after that is making me wonder if I wasn’t abducted by Aliens who singled me out to perform a useless medical experiment with no value except to make me question my own sanity.

The loose belt was one thing. But as I continued to get dressed, I realized that my slacks were about three inches too short. “Okay, weird.” I thought.

I put on a second pair, similar, a similar style, and they were too short. “That’s just freaking bizarre!” These are from the same set of slacks I purchased three years ago.

“Third time’s the charm,” only, in this case, it wasn’t. “Dammit!”

Five pairs of slacks later, going through all the usual suspects, I finally found a pair that fit — a pair that were at the top of the closet waiting to be altered for my short legs.

Now, I’ve been five-foot-eight for twenty years. I had completely resigned myself to the fact that I would forever be one of those feisty, vertically challenged men who people quietly snicker, making comments like, “Short man’s complex,” whenever the Starbuck’s cashier just won’t get it right.

I pulled out the tape measure and a book — held it vertically so there’s no mistaking it — and what did I find? That I’m suddenly 5’11! Sure enough, I can reach the coffee filters on the top shelf in the kitchen without the step stool!

I Googled and Googled, and came up short (no pun intended). I couldn’t find anything on mid-life growth spurts. Pretty much everyone stops getting taller by the age of twenty-seven, most many years before that.

In the immortal words of Sherlock Holmes, by way of Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle,

“That process,” said I, “starts upon the supposition that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

In finding no evidence of the scientific possibility that I could have grown three inches over night, my improbable conclusion must be true.
 

I figure it must have happened some time after the local news, and just before the Infomercials started. I was falling asleep on the couch, watching the news, and faded during the last fifteen minutes. I awoke with a fright, checked all the doors, looked out the windows, and went upstairs to bed.

Some time in that foggy fifteen minutes, the Aliens must have shown up, transferred my consciousness into a body of their own making, and left me in exactly the same spot on the couch where I would awaken to another annoying infomercial.

So maybe I’m off-my-rocker. Aliens are the only way that I can explain three inches of growth, all in the legs, when I’m pushing forty.

Damn Aliens. If they were gonna give me a new body, they should have given me some replacement hair to go with it. Or, perhaps they put me back just at the right moment, when the informercial that I so hastily switched off would have shown me a revolutionary hair-regrowth technology.

If they’ve been studying us for five thousand years, surely they know that nobody likes infomercials.

According to a December 9th article at World Science, your average honey bee can be taught to recognize a human face for up to two days. That’s better than some people I know!

The article is rather inspecific and quotes dates in the future (we assume they meant December 15th, 2004, but who can be sure?), so it’s still a little suspicious. However, if true, I can think of literally hundreds of applications for this particular discovery.

Imagine, the perfect home security system which causes anaphylaxis to anyone they don’t recognize.

What an incredible and inexpensive alternative this could be for the costly Biometric Analyzers used at large public events!

How about a new Where’s Waldo? lawn game, with a mail-in certificate for your child’s very first set of bees? Great for cookouts and Family Gatherings!

And maybe they could find Bin Laden.