Thoughtless Thursday (updated)

I'm too giddy about the way Buckner Verrilli has handled the barrycare arguments to think straight.  Which means I have not thoughts of my own and the only thing I can do is poach ideas from other blogs.  Dunno why nobody has thought of doing that before... 

Amongst my little circle of blog buddies, there has been a lot of talk about fishing.  Maybe it is the spring in the air that calls us to the great outdoors.  Maybe it is the fear that the trout I pull out of the creek will be all I have to live on after I pay my 'lectric bill and put gas in the car.  Either way, this discussion of fishing hearkens to mind the very first fish I ever caught...

mature adults, like me, may actually remember this ad when it aired on one of our 13 available

cable channels, and most of those 13 were useless and they all went off-air around midnight

and we had no remote except "get up and change the channel!" and get off my lawn uphill both

ways in the snow.

The title says "1973" which puts me right at the same vintage as this junior baloney broker.  In fact, that could be me, except it is well documented that I can't sing and I had the mom-approved V05 greasy slicked-back hairdo (to tame the cowlicks) at that age.  I say "could have been me" because my first fish was caught off a similar dock using a nearly identical toy fishin' pole.  It was a perch ("perch" is an Native American word meaning "useless fish that likes to swallow your hook so you have to rip its innards out to get it off the line") not much bigger than my child-sized hand.  I have photographic evidence to back this claim - but trust me, it isn't terribly impressive.  This modest beginning has led to a lifelong love affair with fishing.  I love it so much I actually go fishing once every five years or so.  Then I just get pissed and go to Skippers.

---------------------------------

Science! is still preoccupied with global warming and what to do about it.  They put forward a series of suggestions, intended as examples of the sorts of human engineering measures that people could voluntarily adopt. These include:

-Induce intolerance to red meat (think lactose intolerance), since livestock farming accounts for a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions.

OK, you've lost me already. Wait... that would mean more burgers and steaks and bacon for ME. Maybe this plan has merit after all.

-Make humans smaller to reduce the amount of energy we each need to consume. This could be done by selecting smaller embryos through preimplantation genetic diagnosis, a technique already in use to screen for genetic diseases. “Human engineering could therefore give people the choice between having a greater number of smaller children or a smaller number of larger children,” they write.

You go ahead and have a bunch of little kids.  I'll have the big kids that beat your little kids up and take their lunch money.  Then they'll grow up and be in the NFL.  I'll never have to work again.  Besides, if I were shrunk to a more energy efficient size, I'd need an elevator to get into my big gas hoggy SUV.  And I wouldn't be able to see over the dashboard, so I might accidentally run over a bunch of miniature Critical Mass cyclists.  Hold on a sec, that "problem" has a certain appeal to it.

-Reduce birthrates by making people smarter, since higher cognitive ability appears linked to lower birthrates. This could be achieved through a variety of means, including better schooling, electrical stimulation of the brain and drugs designed to improve cognitive ability, they propose.

"Take the pill and enter The Matrix" is what they're trying to say.

-Treat people with hormones, such as oxytocin, to make us more altruistic and empathetic.

Aw geez. Their idea of "improving" humanity is to reduce us to a bunch of miniature vegan drug-addled empaths with wires coming out of our heads.  Dear Science, if you are going to piddle away grant money on "improving" humanity, why doncha actually, you know, improve humanity?  How 'bout you splice some chlorophyll genes into us, so when I get hungry I can just lay down in the sun for a while?  What's the matter with that idea?  Then Cameron can use union-member green people in his sequel to Avatar instead of those ludicrously expensive CGI smurfs he used in the first one.

Better still, why not graft some electric eel genes into us?  Think of the money we could save by not having to give each cop a tazer!  We could feed all the homeless and house all the hungry with all that extra dough!  And when people get in a fight it would make cool zappy noises like those black/white guys who hated each other in the original Star Trek. (Which I used to watch, as a child, on one of those 13 available cable channels).

Oooh... Another idea!  What about bio-luminescent genes from fireflies?  We could glow and no longer need those [bleep]ing CFL light bulbs.  Much energy savings!  We could huddle all the #occutards around a solar panel, and they'd become useful for the first time in their lives!

As Instapundit might say, faster please!

---------------------------

Oh, almost forgot:  The highest exemplar of poetry ever penned in the Queen's English.

---------------------------

UPDATE: Oh, almost forgot this gem from the local paper:

VAMPIRE ON THE GREYHOUND?: 5:45 p.m. 508 S.W. Monroe Ave. A 14-year-old girl called Corvallis police to say that while traveling from Eugene to Portland, she stopped in Eugene and had a strange interaction with a man. The man reportedly approached her, told her it was her birthday, hugged her and bit her neck. She told police she had a small bite mark on her neck but was otherwise uninjured. She then rode the bus with the man to Portland and did not report it until she got to Portland and told her sister about the incident. The girl described the man as a black male in his 20s, wearing a blue “I Carly” shirt.

Read more: http://www.gazettetimes.com/news/local/crime-watch-march/article_737bb4da-78b2-11e1-bd34-0019bb2963f4.html#ixzz1qYUD2xLj

A black vampire in a blue "I Carly" shirt.  Dude.