Leave the Freaks Alone: or, ridiculous political correctness overkill

I'm not sure how NBC New York decided that this was a story worth reporting on, but check out the one about the "5-Legged Puppy Rescued from Coney Island Freak Show."

Looks like a puppy mill operator decided to sell his five-legged chihuaha-terrier mix, Precious. Some "kind Southerner" outbid the Coney Island freak show operator and is being lauded as a hero for saving the admittedly adorable puppy from a life of freakdom.

It seems the fifth leg hasn't hindered Precious from many of life's joys, but since it hangs between her back legs and trips her, it has made walking difficult. According to the breeder, the dog "wasn't a freak, she was just ... born with five legs." Nevertheless, he was set to sell her to a freak show until Allyson Siegel from North Carolina outbid the Coney Island operator and basically stole the puppy out from under him. And, just to be sure she won't end up as a freak in any way, she's renamed her Lilly and is going to have her fifth leg removed in two weeks.

Now, call me crazy, but it seems to me this Siegel character is a little overly concerned about the 'freak' label. I mean, sure, I can't imagine the freak show on Coney Island is a fabulous home for 'different' animals (I've never been), and as humans we shy away from the idea of being seen as different or freakish, and all that. But who's to say the dog isn't totally fine with being a freak? Who's to say that Siegel should have its extra leg removed? Can't the dog be different from other dogs, or will that make it less valued as a pet? Or is she just projecting her own insecurities and issues onto Precious/Lilly?

Maybe this "kind Southerner" is one of those people who was a hopeless dork in high school. A social outcast with glasses and headgear who got called names and made fun of mercilessly by the other "normal" kids at the "education mill." Growing up she felt like a freak for not making the cheerleading squad or getting many dates. But as soon as she graduated with a degree in business and got a good job at some nice company, she went and had herself surgically and chemically altered so that now she's tall, blonde, and sporting DD cups. And now she goes to high school reunions with incredibly handsome men, her giant boobs hanging out of her taylored dress, to show those bitches from school who the real losers are. And she's a total douche.

And now she's forcng her brand of 'normal' down the throat of this poor, helpless, mostly functional and totally adorable puppy?? That ain't right. I say let the dog go to the freak show and learn to be ok with its extra leg, then make the decision for itself. Don't take your securities for you!

Kicking ass and taking fewer pills...

This is not a blog post in the truest sense of the word, in that it will be of no interest to anyone who doesn't already follow the blog or know me (and that is the vast majority of the human population). But, oh well, screw you guys!

I went to the rheumatologist today and he said that my new medicine appears to be doing me a world of good. ALL the inflammation in my joints is gone, I have more energy, and I am generally doing really well on it. He took some blood and said if all the tests come back looking good I can start cutting back on my other medicine, too, which is a godsend. I've been taking one of these anti-inflammatory pills once a day since I was like... I don't know, maybe ten years old. And they make me sleepy and they hurt my stomach and I think they're maybe giving me a stomach ulcer. And now I get to stop taking them, fingers crossed, knock on wood, etc etc etc.

Today rocks. And so do I, because I'm like UBER healthy. I feel like the dude pictured above.

The Wednesday lazies...

Wanna see something that's really just wrong in every way but is still completely safe for work? You know you do! Check it:



And you wonder why your parents and grandparents are so weird about sex? There's your answer. Who wants to bump uglies with a lemony-fresh antiseptic wipe?

Summer morning rain in the big city...

This morning it rained. Really hard, for a long time, without letting up. I don't really mind rain, but it does a number on the city and the people in it, who all seem to freak out and assume the end is nigh, even though it rains here pretty frequently. Also, it does make my commute to and from work much more diffficult than usual for several reasons:

1) Everyone in this city with an umbrella seems to think that he or she is Hot Stuff and can weild his or her umbrella like a deadly weapon. Apparently umbrellas exempt them from any moral culpability for poking people in the eye with their weapon's spokes, running into people because they 'didn't see them,' dumping huge amounts of water onto others, and any number of other inconceivably rude things that would NOT be ok to do if umbrellas weren't present.

2) There are about 500 of these ubmrella-toting bastards on every block.

3) It's very easy to become one of these bastards.

4) When I suppress the urge to be a bastard, I tend to get very grumpy.

5) No matter what the umbrella situation, I always end up wet from the knee down at least, because cars go by and splash me, umbrellas, bags, and awnings drip on me, and the sidewalks are never, EVER, even, leading to unexpected puddles.

So, when I got to the train this morning, I was already cheesed because my sandals were filled with water, my hems were soaked, and I had been poked and annoyed by at least 2,500 umbrellas already. But I was willing to try out a good mood. I was giving it the old college try.

And then, at 125th Street, this lady got into my car, which was not particularly crowded. I was standing in the little nook and leaning on the door, minding my business and listening to my iPod. This lady, I must admit, looked a little old and a little white to be getting on the train at 125th and Lex, and I assumed at first that she was just frazzled by the rain and all the people and the fact that she wasn't in her comfortable upper west side 3 bedroom rent controlled apartment. So I tried to give her a little slack when she walked directly up to me, then pivoted to stand facing away with her back literally less than 6 inches from me.

I let it slide for a few seconds, thinking maybe she'd assumed the car was way more crowded than it was and overcompensated, but would soon move out of my personal space when she realized her mistake. But she didn't. She just stood there, her hair practically in my mouth, not seeming to notice that the other people in the car all had a good foot of personal bubble surrounding them while I had virtually none. Even though I could have breathed on the back of her weird neck.

As the train continued hurtling through the tunnels, this woman swayed back and forth with its motion, her upper body in general getting closer and closer to me. I was getting extremely uncomfortable, and she seemed oblivious to my discomfort--to my presence entirely. I cleared my throat loudly. Nothing. I moved around, shuffling and moving my arms sufficiently to be certain she could see me in her peripheral vision. No response. I allowed my dripping umbrella, which was dangling from my hand and thus will tell you how close she was to me, to touch the back of her leg so that it dripped down into her pink galosh. No movement whatsoever. When we went around a turn and her hair literally touched my face as she swayed backward, I let a "Jesus CHRIST!" slip from my mouth. I didn't yell it, but I sure said it loud enough for her to hear me and move away. But she didn't. Just stood right there, being in my way, being way too close to me, and being oblivious or willfully ignorant.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I don't like my personal space being invaded by strangers, much less in situations where it's completely unecessary. I wanted to take my drippy umbrella and smack her, hard, in the back of the knees with it. Or scream "Get away from me you creepy bitch!" But I kept it under control. Almost. I noticed a lot of people nearby watching me intently and realized I was giving her the Level 10 Death Look. Let me tell you - this is not a look you ever want to see coming from me. It means doom is coming for YOU.

Anyway, she moved away from me - far away - at the next stop, so maybe she got the vibes of pure unadulterated hatred I was sending her way from ~4 inches behind her head.

I made it to work on time and with little more in the way of incidents, still kind of wet and annoyed, but figuring I had a pretty good "Rainy-Day-Weirdo" story to share with the coworkers.

...until two of those coworkers got of the elevator and said they'd just been in there with a woman who was wearing a WWII style, two-oxygen filters, full-on gas mask.

Ah well, you can't win them all.

Slime Molds: or coming to terms with oblivion...

Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygoooooood you guys. Woah. Holy crap. I feel kind of bad about having to tell you guys this, because I take the responsibility upon myself to warn you of impending doom and this seems to have almost slipped by me unnoticed. I mean, I try to be pretty thorough in my coverage of overlooked phenomena that might have doom-bringing potential: I've brought you news about ant invasions, robot intelligence, our existence inside the Matrix, and countless other important revelations about our imminent demise.

But I didn't realize this one was even out there until a few days ago. And every thing I've learned since has been more ominous than the last. This is serious trouble.

Slime Molds. Dude, I can hear you laughing, but trust me, this is no joke. Sure they sound gross and creepy, and trust me they are, but there is something much more sinister going on with these creepy gooey... things. That's what they are, just things. They're not molds. They're not actually fungi of any kind. They ARE slimy. But beyond that nobody knows what the hell they are. They don't seem to fit into any kind of classification of animal, plant, bacterium, or anything else for that matter. There are several different kinds of things called slime molds, and scientists don't even really know if they're related to each other closely enough to be in the same category. Nobody knows what they are.

I guess I can go ahead and admit it to all you hippies out there with sky-high ideals: I like labels. Ok? As far as other life forms go, I like to have a clear label on a weird life form so that if I'm ever confronted by it in a life or death situation, I'll have some basic mooring to which to attach myself as per how it might behave. For instance, if I know I'm being faced with some type of bear as opposed to a dog, then I know that climbing a tree might not help me because some bears can climb trees quite well, but dogs cannot. Likewise, if I know that the terrifying sound coming from the other room is coming from a llama as opposed to a wildcat, I can proceed with less caution because being spat upon is a hell of a lot less scary than being eviscerated. Labels are good.

I would therefore feel a little better about the following facts if I knew what the hell a slime mold was in the first place:

Slime molds (I'm referring to Mycetozoan types here, but Bikont types are probably just as bad in one way or another) start life as amoeba-like single-celled doo-dads (which are in fact NOT amoeba, but it's helpful in picturing the situation. see? labels are good) that go around eating bacteria and pretty much minding their own business, until food runs out. That's when things get weird. When food is running low, the Mycetozoan slime mold amoeba-like doo-dads release a chemical signal that brings all the others near it running (or oozing, I guess) out from their respective woodwork. They join together to, quote, "join up into a tiny multicellular slug-like coordinated creature, which crawls to an open lit place and grows into a fruiting body" according to Wikipedia. The fruiting body grows up into a stalk formed by dead cells which actually sacrifice themselves in order to let the other cells make it to the top (confounding evolutionary theorists along with the rest of us, since why would any living thing sacrifice itself and give up its chance to reproduce?), where they finish their life cycles by sending out spores into the air (hence the stalk - the higher the spores are released from, the farther they'll go), which in turn grow into more amoeba-like doo-dads.

Pretty cool, huh? Except. Wait a second. Here we have a life form that can adopt not only four different forms (I mean, butterflies have been metamorphizing for ages and I'm ok with them - they're purdy), but which also behave in ways similar to that of FOUR DIFFERENT CLASSES OF LIVING THING. I'm probably using the wrong terminology here, but to be honest, after a certain amount of research I got too freaked out to check up on my bio vocab. But think about it: they start out as amoeba-like doo-dads that are NOT actually amoebas. Then they get together to form a SLUG-LIKE conglomeration that behaves like an amimal. THEN, they form into a "fruiting body" very much like a PLANT. And then they release SPORES, very much like a plant or fungus.

What the hell IS this thing? I don't like it at all. I don't trust this shape-shifting doom-monger. Seems to me it could just turn itself into a bat anytime and fly away, or, hell, just turn into a rock if it felt like it and make it through the next ice age intact, only to become a goddamn lion or something and kill the few of us that survive. But, hey, maybe I'm being paranoid. I mean, really, all it does is shuffle around like a slug and then turn into a flower, right? Not much to worry about on the intelligence level, right?

Wrong.

1) Allow me to just quote. This needs no editorializing:

"Japanese scientists claim that amoeba-like organisms have a primitive form of intelligence, following an experiment where a slime mould found its way through a maze."

Yup. My buddy Physarum polycephalum (pictured above - ain't he cute?) is smart enough - somehow, despite the lack of a brain - to find the shortest way through a maze when food is placed at either end.


2) Oh, and also this:

"Single-celled slime molds demonstrate the ability to memorize and anticipate repeated events, a team of Japanese researchers reported in January. The study [pdf] clearly shows “a primitive version of brain function” in an organism with no brain at all." Good old Physarum polycephalum again. "As the cells crawled across an agar plate, the researchers subjected them to cold, dry conditions for the first 10 minutes of every hour. During these cool spells, the cells slowed down their motion. After three cold snaps the scientists stopped changing the temperature and humidity and watched to see whether the amoebas had learned the pattern. Sure enough, many of the cells throttled back right on the hour in anticipation of another bout of cold weather. When conditions stayed stable for a while, the slime-mold amoebas gave up on their hourly braking, but when another single jolt of cold was applied, they resumed the behavior and correctly recalled the 60-minute interval."

Smart little... er, big... amoebas... er, plants... er, slugs... er... WTF!

Well, I might be ok falling asleep tonight knowing that somehwere out there in the woods on a rotting log is a weirdly intelligent but brainless blob of gooey unidentifiable life matter that at least isn't aspiring to any high leve of doom-mongering at the moment.



3) But then. This:

"A bright yellow slime mould that can grow to several metres in diameter has been put in charge of a scrabbling, six-legged robot. ... The Physarum polycephalum slime, which naturally shies away from light, controls the robot's movement so that it too keeps out of light and seeks out dark places in which to hide itself."

Yup. Slime robots. As if this world couldn't get any more insane or terrifying with android battle drones and slime molds operating separately. Oh, no. Not bad enough. We need, and I quote, "autonomous components" to provide energy and biological bases for "autonomous robots." Cause, heck, who doesn't need a robot that can power and move itself even independent of a human-made source of electricity? Who wouldn't want a robot that can feed and power itself and cause unending and unendable destruction by using a slime mold to move and possibly power it?

Holy amoeba-like doo-dads, Batman, am I the only sane person left on this crazy rock? Why the hell are we giving these frenzied, label-bending, unclassifiable monsters access to our technology? Can't we leave them in the woods, quietly plotting our demise where they'd at least take a long time to get to us? Or shall we just go ahead and bring them into our labs, hook them up to advanced robotics, and let them mow us all down? Why delay the inevitable? If there really was a Dr. Evil out there, he'd be right on top of this one.

Dammit.

I'm going straight home tonight and pulling up the covers and... I dunno. Just trying not have nightmares. Seems like the only thing to do.