2
Saw a friend’s band play, alone. I wish someone else would have come with me. People don’t always want to talk to the guy with nine hundred pounds of space steel strapped to his body.

Broke the arm of the lead singer when I gave him a high-five.

3
Laid around with my dog and read while it was raining. Flipped through an H.P. Lovecraft collection. He really isn’t so scary, but his characters have a certain lovable horror that makes them endearing. I like that.

Crushed dog with SRMP.

4
Jenny’s pool party was almost fun. Massive robotic prostheses scare most women and children. Accidentally pulled power lines into pool. Three dead.

5
Dropped my coffee mug at the coffee shop. Spilt coffee on SRMP, and short circuited it, starting a small twenty-four hour rampage. Destroyed a city block and beat up old ladies. Also, I set the local orphanage on fire.

6
Finally passed out at the bar watching VH1 around three in the afternoon. Woke-up with half of a burrito lodged between my robotic tendons, and a face full of dry beer. People were around. It was dark outside.

I reached over and put a quarter in the jukebox, forty-five feet away.

(Note that a semblance of this piece was first concieved by Gene over at Utterwonder)

Beer brewing is as much an art as a science. Finding the right blend of delicate grains, hops, malt, adding just the right flavoring agents, boiling for exactly enough time to release the tannins, starches, humic acids from you wort, these are all skills that take a lifetime to master. Perfect beer is meticulously planned and carefully crafted.

Screw that.

You’re six days into a 2 month expedition, and if you were lucky enough to not be on a dry ship, it’s de facto dry by now anyway. You’re eying the ethanol stores, the crew is eying each other, and all hell will break loose if y’all don’t get some sweet water soon. This is no time for artistry.

This is not, as a rule, a terribly good beer (though, with a good brewmaster on board, it can be). This is a beer to pass the time. I can guarantee that if you are careful, it will be at least as good as the cheapest commercial alternative.

The tools you need are simple: an electric drip coffee maker with hot plate, a coffee filter, 2 1-liter sample jars, 2 handkerchiefs, 2 rubber bands, and a source of clean (preferably R/O) water.

You’ll have to be more creative with your ingredients. What you need are some sort of grain, some malt, and, if possible, something that can act as a clarifying and hopping agent. You need a simple grain to release the tannins, starches, and enzymes. The best bet is common cereals – Raisin Bran, Cracked Wheat, Kashi, whatever you can find. The fruit and nuts will add flavor, but are not important.

Malt is tricky, and sometimes gross. In my experience, the best you can hope for is vegemite, marmite, or some other yeast extract. If you have chocolate malt balls or some other malt based candy, those can be ground up and used as well.

The hops are the hardest, and you may have to forgo their goodness. Alfalfa or some other green roughage may work, but a clever biologist will bring their own hops on board.

Finally, you’ll need to find some yeast. Most ships will have bakers’ yeast. If you’re very lucky they might have brewers’ yeast.

Sanitation is key. If you have an autoclave, sterilize your tools ahead of time. Otherwise, wash everything with an iodine solution or, if there are no other options, ethanol. Contamination is your enemy. Everything must be clean.

1. Grind up your ‘grains’ (but not so much that it becomes powder).

2. Place your ‘grains’ in coffee pot (not the filter basket, the carafe).

3. Run 2 cups of clean water through coffee maker and let it sit on the hot plate for an hour. This releases all the good chemicals from you ‘grains’ and creates a fluid called wort.

4. Strain the wort through the coffee filter and place the filter full of ‘grain’ into the filter basket. Add the ‘malt’ to the filter basket. Pour the strained liquid back into coffee maker and add 1 cup of water.

5. Run the wort through the coffee maker 5 times, each time adding 1 cup of water.

6. Pour the wort into the saucepan and boil for 45 minutes. Two minutes before boiling is done, add the hops.

7. Carefully pour the wort into the canning jars.

8. Let the wort cool to between 60 and 70 F. Once it is cool enough to touch the outside of the jars without burning, pitched the Bakers’ Yeast into the mixture.

9. Seal jar with a handkerchief and rubber band over the mouth.

10. Store in a cool, dark place where it will not be disturbed for a week.

A cool, smooth brew, flavored with whatever you found. It may be very bad, it may be good. It will be beer.

You are now the most popular person on the boat. Enjoy.

Please note – these methods can be adapted to any lab or field work that demands it. The modestly sized oceanographic research vessel is not mandatory.

I, in no way, endorse the consumption or manufacture of alcoholic beverages on dry or alchohol free research vessels, nor do we condone the manufacture of beer by the underage. Drink responsibly or don’t drink at all.

Update: Several people have complained about my casually switching between metric and standard units (liters to cups). Mark my words, there is nothing casual about it. If you’re on a research vessel, chances are all your sample containers will be metric, but your coffee maker (at least if you’re an American) will use cups as the units. I have saved you the odious task of converting between the two. You’re welcome.

What’s the first thing that happens to you every day? You’re jolted awake by the alarm on your clock radio, right? The digital display, the jarring _buzz_…that’s science. Even if you’ve set the controls so that you’re woken up by a soothing song on the radio, how do you think that song reaches you? Through radio waves (discovered by scientists) transmitted from broadcast towers (designed by scientists). Even the DJs at the radio station are hitting all kinds of colorful buttons and knobs and levers, just like scientists are known to.

Anyway, now that you’re up, what’s for breakfast? Toast, of course. And just what do you think transforms that bland slice of bread into your delicious morning toast? Science again, this time in the guise of your harmless looking toaster.

Is it beginning to dawn on you yet? Science is everywhere. It’s inescapable.

It’s with you as you iron your pants for work, as you run the electric razor over your face, as you slip in your contacts. It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s even some complicated scientific term to describe the way water comes out of your shower head — The Cascade Effect or osmosis or something.

Now that your morning routine is over, it’s time to head off to work…but don’t assume you’re leaving science behind. No, it’s right there with you during your commute, in the form of the internal combustion engine and intermittent wipers and traffic lights that direct your every move because you, me, all of us, we’re just lowly animals compared to this omnipotent god science. And a lot of these traffic lights nowadays come equipped with spy cameras, letting them see the expression on your face as you pass by, so you’d better put on a fake smile and pretend nothing is wrong, even though everything you see around you says otherwise.

And then there’s the office itself: computers and faxes and copiers, and even the clunky old vending machine in the break room surely works on one form of mechanical principle or another. Also, hasn’t it short-changed you on occasion?

But wait. Maybe everything isn’t as bad as it seems. Your co-workers have gotten you a birthday card. Maybe for just a few minutes you can put all these disturbing thoughts out of your head. But what’s this? When you open the card, it spits a silly little tune right in your face. Even here, in the kindest and most basic of gestures…science. What can you do except put on that fake smile again and pretend nothing is wrong even as you run out of the office screaming?

But is there any relief when you get home? Don’t count on it. You have to microwave your dinner and put clothes in the washer, and even if you successfully avoid the TV and cell phone and Electronic Battleship and retreat to the safety of a simple book, a western, set back in the good old days before science was everywhere, even here the bad guys are shooting at the good guys with bullets fired from a six-shooter through the science of centrifugal force or something.

So, now that I’ve opened your eyes, you can finally understand how hopeless the situation is. What’s that, you say? You can always flee to the mountains and build a log cabin? No working technology, not even running water? You’ve done it? You’ve escaped?

Not a chance.

While you’re out chopping wood, a jet flies high overhead. It’s science, smugly looking down at you and laughing because it knows it’s smarter than you, more powerful, better looking, superior in every conceivable way. And all you can do is put on that fake smile of yours one last time and pretend that nothing is wrong and calmly throw yourself off the nearest cliff in what scientists would call Einstein’s First Law of Thermodynamics, or something.

Let’s go let’s go let’s go. IDBC is finally on its legs. We’re trained, we’re hyped, we’ve got that sharp-eyed Focus on the Family Approved ID curriculum. We’re big time primed to speak for and as God. So let’s make it happen, show those soon Left Behind what education is all about. God up people, let’s go, God up.

As you know, we’ve got work stations for everyone. God-stations, more or less. So we better all of us get acquainted with the guys we brought on board for this venture. From the front, then, a quick review of the acolytes at the top. If you will. And so on and so forth.

Mark will be up front, persuasively deep in analysis. He’s already one of our finest biochemists, a high level amino-proselytizer. Master of the grant proposal. He’s isolating a therapeutic from tissue obtained from our most devout. It’s blasphemously technical, true, but we believe in results people. Results. We’re gonna be using an Acts 2:17 protocol, and if it’s slow going, we’ve got like 6 kegs of Holy Water in the back. You never know with these things, is our point.

Behind Mark is John. He’s new too, but just as amped up and highly touted. He’s organizing our human cloning project. Not for the faint of heart. Or public release. Keep a lid on it for now, ‘kay? John was telling me before, this thing about how human cloning is somatic cell something nuclear transfer, which, I don’t know what it means, but he was real confident when he said it. It’s like, it’s when what the heathens call “DNA”–secular speak for the watermark of God–is taken from human tissue–secular speak for the Kleenex of God–injected into an empty egg cell, and then into a host mother’s uterus. Jeepers, right? I mean, and it only gets more complicated after that. All I’m saying is if you want to know more, just open your pocket King James to that long boring part in the middle. It’s basically all there.

I know, you’re thinking maybe it’s a bit too resurrection-like. But in the face of God, lo, and we are fearless, or something like that. It’s in Revelation, no? You gotta know that any human clones we get out of this won’t technically be the same individual, even if genetically identical. They still grow and age; still have their own experiences and memories, their own Church Camp hook-ups. I mean, Cain and Abel were different? You feel me? So let’s us rest assured–and we have to make this point clear to the biblico-investors–making a clone of the deceased is, in our faith-based opinion, not at all like resurrection. (Though, we were riffing in the break room, me and Damian–it might make a pretty good practical joke. You know, “SURPRISE! I bet you thought I was dead!” That would be funny. Jesus loved jokes. On a more serious note, though, this is why we’ll have a Pastor on staff 24/7.)

Okay. Luke is our creative one. Curly hair, has those denim shorts, still drives a Chevy. He’ll be leading our third start-up project. Yep, he’s the microscope guy you prayed for. We all read about that “Face of Jesus” he found on a mammary tissue slide. It’s hands down miraculous! For us, it means the product line opportunities coming from Luke’s station are endless. Beaucoup evangi-customers. I just made that up, you like that? Evangel-customers, evangi-cust, evangelimers. I’ll work on it. Anywho. We’re not talking Virgin Mary potato chips or grilled cheese Messiahs or shower door stains looking like Moses parting the Red Sea. We’ve got high quality techno-theistic stuff, the kind you’re not gonna get from those Fortune 500 secular humanist labs. Oh, and we’ve got that shipment of myrrh stain arriving from the Kansas office to help clarify these images.

At the back here is Matthew. His workbench’s kind of set away–say what up Matthew!–but he is probably our best shot for some buzz from the PTL Weekly Business Report. Matthew’s working on our B.M.L.G. gene therapy initiative. This one changes a guy’s genetic code, so that he or she–”he” mostly, let’s be real here–can actually “Be More Like God.” Marketing guys coined that. Pretty sweet, eh? In truth, our Numbers guys are saying this’ll be our most popular service. Lord knows the fourth-quarter projections put it at 37% of gross revenue. We’re giving our clients the option to be all knowing, to be all powerful, to alter reality, create essences, and all that crap. Cha-ching.

It’s true, yes, in the beta testing we only put out some minor God-like emulations. By playing with testosterone levels, more or less, fidgeting with the patriarchy, if you will. Made real progress with anger-creation, deeper booming voices, all that lush facial hair. So yeah we’re not starting floods or locust swarms or winning playoff games or that jazz, but our clients can at least look and sound good trying.

Anyway, that oughta bring y’all up to speed. I’m serious, and this isn’t just me saying, this is the entire Board and all the investors and Gideon’s, Inc. and on, we have a golden opportunity here. A cash cow. Me, and we, just wanna say how very excited we are about the entire lab and all our potential. Dogma will pay the bills, God willing.

Now let’s be safe out there. And an Amen to that.

In what experts claim is the first ever Proof by Accident, Eldersby laid down the basic Mathematical principles of what appears to be a successful unified field theory while attempting to medicate her cat and bake biscuits simultaneously.

“I had just started to bake some biscuits to take to the Friendship Group that night when I remembered that I hadn’t given Mr Fluffy his worm medicine,” said Mrs Eldersby in an official statement to the press. “We were celebrating Magerie’s 80th Birthday so I had lots of biscuits to bake urgently.”

The statement then detailed the exact nature of the proposed gathering, the finer details of those attending and some attached notes on Mrs Christy’s on-going hip trouble and officially classified her as a “poor dear.”

Professor Blaire of the Imperial College London’s Physics department claims that during the struggle to measure a dosage based on Mr Fluffy’s body weight and simultaneously bake a one-and-three-quarters batch of her famous blueberry biscuit recipe, Mrs Eldersby inadvertently stumbled across a flawless analogy for unifying the electroweak force with quantum chromodynamics.

And as a fellow member of the Friendship Group, he was also qualified to claim that the biscuits were “most scrumptious.” [F.G. Minutes, Prof. Blaire et al.]

The Eldersby Model solves a problem that modern Physicists have only been able to suggest possible, incomplete solutions to. But now that the proof has been found, Physicists around the world are experiencing the mixed feelings of relief that it has been solved and frustration over having not seen for themselves what is now obvious.

“Why I never worked out the mechanics of how cosmic strings can be carefully folded into the 29th dimension until light and creamy is beyond me,” lamented emanate physicist and mathematician Professor Hawking. “And holding the X boson by the scruff of the neck for Dimension 6 proton decay now seems painfully obvious.”

Mrs Eldersby put current scientists’ inability to complete a GUT down to the education system and how “they make exams too easy these days.” She then went on to mutter something about “not being surprised” young people couldn’t think because of excessive loud music, “they’re not even singing, it’s just lots of shouting.”

Despite much interest from several renowned Universities, Mrs Eldersby has declared she will not be pursuing a academic career. Although rumour has it that her work on folding fitted sheets has made some new inroads into the Reimann Hypothesis. “It’s all about examining how the folding lines the elastic up perfectly” she claims.

Message from the President

Hello, fellow death ray enthusiast.

You’ve made the right choice with the D-99, the modern standard in small arms particle beam weaponry. The D-99 is ideal for hunting, home defense, sport shooting, and even frontline combat. Indeed, the D-99 has seen service in every major military action of the past 25 years, from Gulf War IV to Gulf War XIV, and has never let our men, women, and ungendered protoclones in uniform down. Built to last, your D-99 is sure to become a treasured family heirloom, suitable for any mantle.

Now that you’ve felt the rush that comes from nestling a positron accelerator snugly against your shoulder, you’ll never want to let it go. To make sure you don’t have to, consider joining the National Rifle, Ray Gun, and Assassin Droid Association, the nation’s foremost voice for people like you and me who believe that the freedom to buy space-age weaponry at yard sales is what makes America great. The NRRGADA is out there every day fighting to protect our 87th Amendment right to bear death rays and our 89th Amendment right to fire them wildly into the air at weddings and funerals. They need, and deserve, your support.

Take it from me, a death ray is more that just a fancy gun. A death ray is a friend, the kind of friend that can save your life, a friend to the bitter end. With a friend like that, you need never fear the unmarked helicopters again.

Good luck and good hunting.

Ted Zap, President and CEO, ZapCo Industries Inc.

Safety First

The D-99 is a powerful weapon, so it is important to operate it in a responsible manner.

• When not in use, store your death ray securely.
• Never point a death ray at your face or crotch.
• Do not load your death ray until you are ready to use it.
• To repeat, never—NEVER—point a death ray at your face or crotch.
• Do not disengage the safety on your death ray until you are ready to fire.
• We really can’t emphasize this strongly enough: never, never, never point a death ray at your face or crotch.
• If you want to point a death ray at someone else’s face or crotch, hey, it’s a free country.

Special precautions are necessary around minors. Children are naturally curious about firearms, but lack an adult’s maturity and may not respect a death ray’s awesome destructive power. Never allow minors to handle a death ray unsupervised, especially if they’re your stepkids and they’re mad at you.

Getting to Know Your Death Ray

Key features of the D-99:

1. Muzzle

The muzzle of the D-99 is designed to accept all standard muzzle accessories, including flash suppressor, sound suppressor, and guilt suppressor.

2. Safety Selector

The safety selector has two settings: (1) ‘Safe’, and (2) ‘Fire’. When the safety is engaged, the weapon will not fire, not even when pointed at a TV tuned to The View. For this reason, keep the safety selector well-oiled at all times.

3. Power Selector

The D-99 has three power settings:

(1) light kill: recommended for small game and sport shooting
(2) medium kill: recommended for large game and home defense in jurisdictions with fairly generous ‘no retreat’ laws
(2) heavy kill: recommended for genetically-engineered ‘mega-game’ and settling property disputes in the Ozarks

Select the power setting that is appropriate in each situation, taking into account both collateral damage and destruction of evidence.

4. Fire Selector

The fire selector has two settings: (1) ‘Semi-Auto’, and ‘Full-Auto’. The default setting is ‘Full-Auto’. If at any time you select ‘Semi-Auto’, the weapon will notify you in the stern voice of R. Lee Ermey that you have selected a less manly setting and will go on to speculate about the lifestyles of men from your part of the country.

5. Stock

The stock of the D-99 is equipped with a reinforced butt plate so that it can be used as a clubbing or bludgeoning weapon, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Ammunition

The D-99 fires exotic subatomic particles called positrons. Never attempt to load the D-99 with any other kind of ammunition, as this may result in a catastrophic fission event that affects your warranty. For best results, use only genuine ZapCo PosiShot positrons.

CAUTION: Avoid handling, inhaling, or ingesting positrons. Direct contact with positrons has been shown to cause cancer, birth defects, Alzheimer’s Disease, Cushing’s Disease, Lou Gehrig’s Disease, Courtney Love’s Disease, a wide array of autoimmune disorders, hair loss, and diarrhea. If you come into direct contact with positrons, immediately flush the affected area with water and consult an embalmer.

Cleaning Your Death Ray

The D-99′s straightforward design ensures easy cleaning. For routine maintenance, first disassemble the weapon. Then degauss the injector assembly, alternate the magnetic resonators (every 5,000,000 kilojoules or as often as necessary), and recalibrate the electrostatic lens using a #5 Faraday wrench. Finally, reassemble the weapon. Alternately, just wipe it down with a Confederate flag bandana and get on with your life, ’cause a little dirt never hurt anyone.

2
Saw a friend’s band play, alone. I wish someone else would have come with me. People don’t always want to talk to the guy with nine hundred pounds of space steel strapped to his body.

Broke the arm of the lead singer when I gave him a high-five.

3
Laid around with my dog and read while it was raining. Flipped through an H.P. Lovecraft collection. He really isn’t so scary, but his characters have a certain lovable horror that makes them endearing. I like that.

Crushed dog with SRMP.

4
Jenny’s pool party was almost fun. Massive robotic prostheses scare most women and children. Accidentally pulled power lines into pool. Three dead.

5
Dropped my coffee mug at the coffee shop. Spilt coffee on SRMP, and short circuited it, starting a small twenty-four hour rampage. Destroyed a city block and beat up old ladies. Also, I set the local orphanage on fire.

6
Finally passed out at the bar watching VH1 around three in the afternoon. Woke-up with half of a burrito lodged between my robotic tendons, and a face full of dry beer. People were around. It was dark outside.

I reached over and put a quarter in the jukebox, forty-five feet away.

(Note that a semblance of this piece was first concieved by Gene over at Utterwonder)

Date: August 25th
We repeated the experiment with the 2C adjustment, but obtained similarily non-optimal data as before. This led to recalibrating of our temperture sensor at 0C and monitoring to see if the temperture cycles waiver at the latter cycles (i.e after the first 10 cycles), which was not the case.

At that point, we decided to calibrate our temperature sensor in real time with the eppendorf cycler to see what actual tempertures were for the reaction. In other words, despite the program being (which represents the block temperature):

STEP 1: 95C 3min
STEP 2: 95C 30sec
STEP 3: 58C 60sec
STEP 4: 72C 90sec
STEP 5: repeat 2 to 4 (x40)

we would actually probe a tube in the Eppendorf machine to see what the real “reaction” temperatures were. In this case, we noted that in reality, our tube was subjected to the following:

STEP 2: 92C 12sec (due to attempted ramp up to the 95C)
STEP 3: 58C 40sec (due to ramp down to 58C)
STEP 4: 72C 70sec (due to ramp up to 72C)

This means, there is the possibility that although the DIY thermal cycler is performing perfectly, the conditions are in fact not congruent with our control samples under the eppendorf machine experiment.

So… current hypotheses to test out:

1. Since we are using el cheapo pTaq, the difference between denaturing at 92C for 12sec versus 95C for 30sec is significant (i.e. higher tempertures is rougher on already poor quality enzyme and is killing it sooner).

2. The difference between the 2C/sec and 1C/sec ramp is significant. We can’t from a kinetic point of view concur with this, but this is testable by redoing experiment using tubes with thinner walls etc.

3. Because the DIY thermal cycler requires oil to prevent evaporation (and our Eppendorf machine doesn’t because it has a heated lid at 105C), somehow the addition of oil is having an effect. Again, unlikely but really easy to test.

4. Trace amounts of the thermal paste in reactions carried out in the DIY thermal cycler is messing things up?

Back to the drawing board…

Date: August 21st, 2006

Current Status:
Presently, we’re still working on optimizing conditions so that visualization via Carolina Blue staining is possible. We’re at a point where data is observable when using standard Ethidium Bromide stains – although the bands are significantly less intense, when compared with data from optimal experimental conditions (i.e. use of a commercially bought PCR machine). We think that due to the almost perfect nature of the temperature profile exhibited by the thermal cycler (see below), there may be an accuracy problem with regards to temperature calibration. i.e. the entire cycle is off by a net amount of degrees centigrade, leading to less efficient amplification (i.e. temperature is most likely a few degrees hotter) (Ed. note: just determined that this is the case, where accuracy was off (temps are hotter) by about 2 to 3^oC)

Gel Data

Lane 1: 100bp ladder molecular weight standard, Lane 2: Alu insertion PCR experiment with MAKE DIY thermal cycler, Lane 3: Alu insertion PCR experiment done on an Eppendorf brand thermal cycler. You’ll note one band at 100bp indicative of an -/- genotype.
Anyway, you can see that overall the machine works, but not quite up to par with the Eppendorf control, which we’ll need to meet for a band to be picked up by the less senstive Carolina Blue Stain.

PCR Program
Currently, we’re using the following:

i. 95C 300 sec (this is the hot start – we have an extended one so that we have lots of time to add our reaction at this step – “manual hot start”)
ii. 95C 30sec (denaturation step)
iii. 58C 60sec (annealing of primers step)
iv. 70C 90sec (elongation step – longer to ensure coverage to second primer binding site)
v. repeat step ii to iv (x 40)

Temperature Profile

You can see that this is really nice looking, and comparable to commerically bought machine with the main exception of a slower ramping time (time to change from one temperature to the next). Our ramping temperature change rate was at about 0.5C/sec, as compared to the Eppendorf which ramps at about 1C/sec. Note that, as described in the Ed. Notes above, the temperatures on this profile are off by about 3C across the board.

This is a figure of an earlier temperature profile, where you can see a greater wavering of temperatures during the steps within the cycles. This, we were able to correct, by first immersing the heat block/peltier set-up in a tupperware container filled with water that was prewarmed to approximately 60C. As well, although initially, we monitored temperature with a tube filled with about 50ul volume worth of thermal paste, we noted that it’s important for the temperature monitor to be reading from a scenario similar to the reaction (i.e. about 50ul of fluid, plus a few drops of mineral oil).

Heat Stable Polymerase
We’re still using a pTaq polymerase, which actually would be significantly less efficient than the Invitrogen enzyme suggested in the text. However, because we’re still in troubleshooting mode, we thought it best to play with an enzyme that we have a large supply of. Regardless, pTaq is working well with our control (Eppendorf brand machine).

Earlier this week, we had the chance to sit down with a member of a growing army of naked bubble mice. In thousands of biology labs around the globe, these lab mice quietly do their part in the pursuit of science and medicine. Called Nude Mice, these striking creatures are a result of spontaneous inbreeding, natural genetic freak shows if you will. More importantly, they are bereft of both hair and immunity – things that would normally protect them from the elements of the sky and the cooties of the world. And lucky for us, traits that not only afford some big advantages in the research arena but make for a great interview. The nude mouse we interviewed was just finished with a talk biopsy, so we met in his lab while he worked through his lunch.

I want to shoot straight from the hip here: On having no hair. How is it?
It can get cold sometimes, but generally it doesn’t bother me. Besides, most females prefer it that way.

Okay, okay. Then I’ll stay on this pattern: On having no immune system. Your thoughts?
Well, I have to say that as bad as it sounds, I love it. I mean – it’s who I am. If anything, the part I hate is having to explain what having no immune system actually means. If you go into B cells, T cells, antibodies and the like, people just glaze over. It can really kill a conversation.

I’m with you on that.
In the past, I’d talk about being like the bubble boy. Nowadays, I usually just say rent the movie Fantastic Voyage – yes, that Fantastic Voyage, with Raquel Welch in the tight suit – and watch out for those bad ass white cells eating the spaceship. I tell them that not having an immune system means stuff like not having any of those bad ass white cells.

Sort of After-School Special-ish, no?
Don’t judge me, ‘kay?

Of course not. How about, Give us your reflections on the media.
You’re asking me?

Yep.
The media I can live without. We’re fairly private creatures, so the whole publicity thing is not cool. Besides, they almost never get it right. One time, my uncle had a human ear prosthetic grow on his back, and well, Christ, with all the press that ensued, you’d think he was sleeping with Jennifer Anniston. Not only that, but if you picked up a newspaper, you’d see this picture of poor naked Uncle Orv with a huge human ear on his back, and you’d be totally thinking that he could hear out of this thing. Which, of course, is not at all true. A shame really – that experiment was pretty elegant in my view.

You’re kidding me, right?
Not at all. Engraft a hollow polymer scaffold (shaped like an ear) on Uncle Orv’s back, infiltrate it with tissue cells from a burn victim needing an ear prosthetic, and wait for growth. Unky Orv ends up doing good because he has no hair, and he also doesn’t have the biology to reject the foreign ear tissue. How brilliant is that?

Point taken. Let’s move on. On stem cell research. React.
Basically, and to quote a GREAT movie, “bring it on!” Although to be honest, my opinion is pretty biased. They do a lot of bone marrow research on types like me, since having no immune system means I’m great as a clean slate. Just put some stem cells in my spleen and hey, you just might reconstitute my immune system. That’s awesome when it happens, because then I can actually leave my bubble for a while. I hate living in a fucking bubble.

On scientists playing God, creationism and intelligent design.
Seriously, do I look like something that is a result of intelligent design? And I don’t care much for those creationism types either. Did you know that only humans get to enter the gates of heaven? What’s up with that?

I have no problem with that, if you’re asking. But let’s keep this one-way. On the ethical treatment of animals. Everyone’s always bitching about that.
Look, it’s really not so bad. I get nice living quarters, and plenty of food. And every once in a while, they bring in a wheel or a bunch of females, sometimes both. Plus, I know I doing some good in this world – the experiments they carry out can actually help people. Really, what more could you ask for?

2
Saw a friend’s band play, alone. I wish someone else would have come with me. People don’t always want to talk to the guy with nine hundred pounds of space steel strapped to his body.

Broke the arm of the lead singer when I gave him a high-five.

3
Laid around with my dog and read while it was raining. Flipped through an H.P. Lovecraft collection. He really isn’t so scary, but his characters have a certain lovable horror that makes them endearing. I like that.

Crushed dog with SRMP.

4
Jenny’s pool party was almost fun. Massive robotic prostheses scare most women and children. Accidentally pulled power lines into pool. Three dead.

5
Dropped my coffee mug at the coffee shop. Spilt coffee on SRMP, and short circuited it, starting a small twenty-four hour rampage. Destroyed a city block and beat up old ladies. Also, I set the local orphanage on fire.

6
Finally passed out at the bar watching VH1 around three in the afternoon. Woke-up with half of a burrito lodged between my robotic tendons, and a face full of dry beer. People were around. It was dark outside.

I reached over and put a quarter in the jukebox, forty-five feet away.

(Note that a semblance of this piece was first concieved by Gene over at Utterwonder)