Douchebag Snowflakes

Earlier this evening I took a break from letter writing and Internet pornography to read an excellent article about evolutionary biology in the May/June 2006 Yale Alumni Magazine. No, I'm not a Yale alum, but Donna went there and they still have this as her address. I'm disinclined to give them her new address because I like getting things for free.

I went to UMass Boston and majored in physical anthropology. Had I not gone mentally ugly and put on the straight-jacket, perhaps I would have gone to graduate school and studied evolutionary biology. Because I'm fond of romanticizing my failures and framing them as tragic instead of pathetic, I embrace this interpretation. And is there anything more lamentable than regret? In truth, I can't imagine what I'd be like without depression, bipolar disorder, oppressive anxiety and social phobia that borders on paranoia. Well, I just wouldn't be me, the unique snowflake...the fat, poor, idiosyncratic snowflake that is unique from all the other douchebag snowflakes out there. So I have that going for me.

But I digress. The article, Evolution in a Petri Dish by Mark Ostow, is in part about the relatively new field of experimental evolution. A fellow out at UCAL-Irvine, Richard Lenski, took 12 colonies of Escherichia coli and monitored them in a specific way as they evolved in response to environmental change. He started this years ago, and 40,000 generations later he has watched these colonies of bacteria evolve again and again and again. Experimental evolution! I got all excited about the research that I read about, and felt compelled to call someone and talk about it. That didn't pan out. That's why I'm on here talking about it. If you'd like to get a copy of the article, just email me and I'll happily send it to you.

The picture above is of an exposed biological film in a Petri dish. The E. coli bacteria produced dark pigment when exposed to light through a negative, similar to how photo paper is processed. It's referred to as a "living photograph." And it mocks intelligent design nicely with the drawing of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Scientists are a hoot.

Another matter on my mind right now is the Tangerine Sour Altoid that I'm sucking on. Fucking thing is outstanding. And finally, I want to make it clear to Anne that the term is banana "peel" NOT banana "skin." We got into an argument about that the other day that got pretty heated. If they still had duels, we would have dueled over that. I was just reading about Alexandr Pushkin and I learned that he died shortly after a duel went bad. Duels. I wonder if it was kosher to challenge someone to a duel over something really stupid. It probably was, so long as both parties took it seriously. Just imagine a friend laughing at you because your marshmallow caught fire whilst trying to make S'mores. "I challenge you to a duel!" There would be countless duels over stolen bandwith and Star Wars movies and whatnot. Maybe we should bring it back.