Fox News

I wonder if Hannity's "liberal translation treatment" is good for your pores.

THE END OF THE CIVIL WAR

Barack’s final rally before election day was in Manassas, VA. The site of the first major battle of the Civil War. A battle which the residents of DC traveled out to Bull Run to watch while picnicking. The beginning of the Civil War and the end of the Civil War, all in one location.

Of course, during the Battle of Bull Run the picnickers ran off in fear when the cannon balls started flying. This time, when Obama finished speaking, the voters triumphantly, enthusiastically… slowly, trudged home in bumper to bumper traffic.

Fun Fact: Manassas, VA, is the same town where Lorena Bobbit, in honor of the Civil War surgeons who came before her, amputated her husband's penis and threw it out the window. The same surgeon who reattached Mr. Bobbit’s penis, by the way, was unable to reattach the riding-lawn-mower-severed fingers of my grandfather some years earlier.

And now, Barack Obama, this man from Illinois, the land of Lincoln, the Civil War president who freed the slaves, is about to become the first black President. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream will now be realized so close to where he said those words, on the opposite end of the mall from where he stood and gave the greatest speech ever given.

On the topic of iconic images. I’d like to point out how the 1988 movie “They Live”, starring Rowdy Roddy Piper, influenced Barack Obama’s election.

The artist who designed the wildly popular Barack Obama Hope poster is the same one who designed the Andre the Giant Obey stickers that you see everywhere, wonder what the fuck they are in the moment, and then promptly forget about.

An artist named Shepard Fairey took the word Obey from the film “They Live.” A film about aliens disguised as humans who take over the world through subliminal messages in our surroundings.

The Hope message was far from subliminal. They were quite in your face and you were very aware of them. But that is the market of today. We don’t want to be marketed to surreptitiously. We want to be aware of it.

So future Presidential candidates listen up – make sure you have a TRENDY poster. But don’t forget to have a sincere message to go with it.

Yes, the Civil War is over. Will the re-enactors please SURRENDER their iconic rebel flag?

The Brokeback Women

I made the The Brokeback Women Trailer when Brokeback Mountain was out but now that the original movie has been remade I think it's time that this trailer sees the light of day. Plus, people will actually know what movie I'm talking about: The Women (1939). Or at least they should

NEMESIS – THE HUMAN GENOME MAPPING RACE

While attending George Mason University I made a living as a lab tech at Genetics & IVF Institute (the McDonald’s of Genetics). It’s the place to go if you want to get artificially pregnant, check to see if your baby’s gonna be Downs or find out “who’s your daddy?” While I was there we lost a few techs to the Human Genome rivalry. The Celera lab paid more and you got your own Perkin-Elmer Applied Biosystems 3700. Science geek heaven. But I prefer to analyze the DNA of the promiscuous. So I stuck with Paternity testing.

At the center of the Human Genome mapping race are Francis Collins and Craig Venter. Both were working on the Human Genome project at NIH. But since NIH was taking so long to map out the genome, Craig Venter left NIH to form Celera and use his controversial “shotgun” technique in order to speed up the process and profit off of the Human Genome. The term “shotgun” may bring to mind southern accents and neon orange hunting vests but it’s just another example of scientists trying to make themselves sound sexy. Like Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism. I don’t have to tell you what Fragment Length is alluding to.

But seriously, folks, the shotgun technique allows you to skip “junk DNA” in order to get to the DNA that we know the function of. It is more profitable to supply the sequence of a location that we know to cause cancer than one we don’t know the use of. And in February 2001, when Venter announced that the Human Genome was complete, it was NOT complete. The “junk DNA” had not been mapped. But the papers carried the headline “Human Genome Complete.” If a scientist tells you it’s so, it must be true. It was not actually completed until over two years later in April of 2003. Francis Collins and his team at NIH finished the job and the headlines said the same thing and the general public still didn’t notice.

Prior to this James Watson left NIH. Yes, that’s the double helix Watson of Watson and Crick fame. I know we all remember where we were when we read “The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA.” It’s a landmark event in every child’s young life. But Watson’s reason for leaving was the opposite of Venter's. Watson objected to the director of NIH, Bernadine Healy, attempting to do the same thing as Venter – sell genes by granting patents and ownership rights on gene sequences.

Bernadine Healy was appointed to the position by George H.W. Bush “after a long search in which Bush insisted that the N.I.H. director be opposed to abortion.” Incidentally, she previously served under Reagan and now advises George W. Bush.

Bernadine Healy has a selective anti-science stance in opposition to stem cell research and evolution. From a recent article by Healy: “The United States is in the midst of a gold rush over human-embryo research.” But she and the Republicans supported the one scientific venture that they could really profit off of, selling genetic sequences to the researchers of cancer and other medical disorders. They would have thus delayed the finding of cures as the scientists would have had to do more fund raising in order to afford the sequences.

Gene patents stop innovation and quite frankly, they kill. It’s like having a monopoly. It’s like owning land because you drew a map of it first. You should own the map not the land. And therein lies the complication. Genes on paper are like maps. But if you use the same techniques, obviously techniques should be patented, you will come up with the same map. But the cost of a map should be negligible. Like the cost of the magazine it’s published in. And discovering heart disease shouldn’t allow you to have a patent on coronaries. If I have a heart attack do I have to pay residuals? You should just get credit for the work and a patent if you developed a technique. So here is the complication that logic brings us.

In March 2000, President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair announced that they were opposed to patenting genome sequences and that they should be swiftly published so that they would be available to all researchers. Celera's stock immediately took a dive as did the biotech reliant NASDAQ. An estimated $50 billion in biotech market capitalization was lost in two days.

This has happened in other areas of biotech. Such as the journey of Taq Polymerase or Thermus Aquaticus. You might remember it from its reign as Molecule of the year in 1989. It is the enzyme used in PCR which is a form of DNA analysis. This enzyme is necessary as it can survive in extremely high temperatures which allows for amplification. This basically means it allows us to get results from smaller amounts of blood or semen or whatever sample you’ve brought in to test. And, no, you can’t identify someone’s ashes. Please stop asking. The temperature that Taq Polymerase naturally resides in is so high that it was found in the geysers of Yellowstone National Park. The discoverer has profited off of it but it was found on public park land. So can someone own all of something because they found one of something? No. The courts decided that you cannot own all of something because you found one of something, thus making DNA extraction that much cheaper. The 818 is out – besides being the area code to Burbank it is the number of the Taq Patent. Either way Taq Polymerase is my favorite enzyme/porn name.

In conjunction with Healy’s “gold rush” quote and the NYTimes use of the term “bio-prospecting” I consider genetics labs across the country to be the Deadwood of our time. So let’s all set up camp and get us some whores. “If that’s what you fuckin’ do.” - Calamity Jane

P.S. Healy retired from the American Red Cross on December 31, 2001, amidst controversy over the handling of funds for victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

P.P.S. As of 2004 “Junk DNA” is no longer junk. "Ironically, what was damned as junk might turn out to be the secret of human complexity." Like you didn’t see that coming.

Low Gas Prices? Really?

On a walk the other day I passed a Santa Monica gas station which claims "Low Gas Prices" above a regular gas price of $4.35

McCain in New Orleans

McCain’s wanderings around the lower 9th ward of New Orleans during his campaign travels are just as clumsy as his wanderings around non-Green zone Baghdad during his campaign travels. Except he has more hope for Baghdad than he does for New Orleans. Let’s see if you can figure out which city he’s talking about in the quotes below:

1. "Things are better and there are encouraging signs."

2. “What we don't read about and what is new is a lot of the good news -- the drop in the murders.”

3. “What we need is to have a conversation about what to do – rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is.”

When you’re watching McCain tour “indigenous” neighborhoods with a trail of staff and press and National Guards, as if he were touring Baghdad without the flak jacket, it comes off as the most obvious pre-prepped photo-op imaginable.

Especially the people set out on their New Orleans porches to “visit” with him. At the end of this video he approaches a woman sitting on her porch and attempts to follow her into her home. You know, the one they should just “tear down” or “whatever.” She’s seen all the tours come through her neighborhood before so, as this presidential candidate confidently walks up to her front door with all the momentum of someone expecting to enter without interruption, she puts her hand up. And he stops abruptly, waiting on the porch like a door-to-door salesman. A door-to-door salesman who happens to be leading a mass of media and politicians into her front yard. She knew exactly what he was there for. What any good salesman needs: a prop.

So he stood out on the porch until she rolled out a woman in a wheelchair. And all you could hear was a PR lady off camera: “Okay, one shot and then let’s move. Let’s just get one shot.” You know that that is the PR lady job but you don’t need to hear it.

CNN has been doing this a lot lately. You go to look at a prepackaged link and you end up with B-roll with no audio or just continual footage with no newscaster commentary. Why do they give raw footage to the public? I mean, usually it’s a high speed chase or a six-legged cat frolicking about the yard. But when it’s McCain’s press secretary shuffling him along like he’s on an award show red carpet, it’s not humane.

Pay attention, McCain, you’re not giving Mary Hart from Entertainment Tonight “just one shot.”

Pay attention, McCain, New Orleans IS being rebuilt.

Pay attention, McCain.



Answers:

1. Baghdad

2. Baghdad

3. New Orleans – Yes, “tear it down” as he walks through areas being rebuilt by residents and volunteers.

Is St. Paul the Same as the Plagiarizing Travel Writer?

With so many examples of people lying in their books these days, sometimes purposefully for later book deals and all of the lying about everything: Do Morals Matter?

James Frey “A Million Little Pieces” wasn’t as addicted to drugs as he claimed. Thomas Kohnstamm “Lonely Planet: Colombia” never actually went to Colombia. Margaret B. Jones “Love and Consequences” was never a Native American gang member. Kaavya Viswanathan “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life” never got kissed, never got wild and never got a life. At least not in her own words. And Jayson Blair of the “New York Times” plagiarized and outright made things up.

A lying journalist, of course, is far worse than a lying novelist. You’re not getting your news from a novel but it is oh so very similar. Is the one lie of the department in which the novel should sit, as bad as the lies covering 600 newspaper articles? Certainly plagiarizing for one’s own profit we know is wrong but is an incorrect category a big deal? Just as big of a deal as “reality” TV. That’s a nice lie that we are all aware of. It took us less time to realize this than it did for us to figure out the prior to the fact choreography of professional wrestling, the lip syncing of Milli Vanilli and the Karl Roving of George Bush.

At least we can all pad our resumes with an “unauthorized” sex tape. Do we still believe the words “unauthorized”? It’s part of the craigslist job description of requirements for getting your own reality show.


REALITY SHOW STAR NEEDED:

No experience preferred.

Must have a famous relative.

An unauthorized sex tape is not absolutely necessary but it is helpful.

Please include a photo along with links to your most recent tabloid appearances.

Anyone with an actual reason for being famous need not apply.


And no one has a problem with it… outside of Rob Lowe who can’t catch a break for some reason. He did the underage sex tape before anyone else, causing him to take a few years to recover his career. And now he’s in trouble for sexual advances towards the nanny. If you’d just marry her or impregnate her you wouldn’t be in this situation. She’d have received her money through one of those two means and you’d be done with it.

Maybe it’s the lack of morals that matters. I don’t mean Puritanical religious “morals,” like you’ll go to heaven if you wear long sleeves and a bouffant hairstyle. But just the idea of: why not just say that a book is fiction? I know, there’s more cache to “based on a true story” but now this will be the way to sell books. Tell them that it’s non-fiction then tell them that it’s fiction. So really, people are mad for being lied to about the section within which a book should be housed. We’re angry that the book is less than based on a true story. What percentage of “based on” is okay?

So is St. Paul the same as the Plagiarizing Travel Writer?

                TRAVEL WRITER                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

    “They didn’t pay me enough [to go to

    Colombia.  So] I got the information

    from a chick I was dating -- an intern

    in the Colombian Consulate.” 

                ST. PAUL

           (to Oprah)

    Well, I wasn’t actually born by the

    time Christ was crucified.  This chick

    I was dating knew a dude whose Uncle

    was there.  So I just wrote down what 

    he said. 

Seems more like a time honored tradition than a modern ailment. So not having morals is really the most admirable or at least most entertaining way to live your life. The Bible is an all time best seller. Therefore, I say that St. Paul is the same as the Plagiarizing Travel Writer but on a much larger scale.

Were past writers who wrote down ancient tales like: "Well, when you go to press if you're gonna put down an author, then you may as well put my name since I did put the quill to paper."

No, morals don't matter. They get in the way of the pursuit of happiness. Have a Merry Girls Gone Wild Day. Did you get me anything?


My sacrilegious stop animation can be seen here: