QOTD: "A man has to be a political idiot to say that power comes from the barrel of a gun when the other side has the guns." - Saul Alinsky
Reading: Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Listening to: Antonio Carlos Jobim, Jazz 'Round Midnight
Decluttering accomplishments: threw out a few odds and ends of papers
The humouse was an attempt by people opposed to genetic engineering to make their point by patenting a man-mouse hybrid. It's an interesting legal issue. Just how much human genetic material does a creature have to have before the law declares it human? Think carefully, because you don't want to make it impossible to produce a valuable drug like human insulin. Does it matter if you insert the human genes into a bacterium or into a chimpanzee? How much human DNA would you need before your creation is sentient? And are these decisions we really want the United States patent office to be making?
Not that I have any great answers to these questions. I do, however, suspect that some people I have to deal with are not entirely human, so it is entirely possible that the thought experiment behind the patent applications has been performed some time in the past. In fact, I suspect a lot of crossbreeding between people and donkeys along the way. How else to explain the idiots at my storage place who once again screwed up their automatic charges, failing to pay the insurance premium and notifying me only after they cancelled the insurance? I suspect this is related to their last billing screw-up, despite my six or seven phone calls to try to make sure they had really waived the late fee. On top of which, they are raising the rent on the space. I am determined to have all my stuff out of storage before the end of this year. Which means moving, which is awful, but enough is enough. I just don't know whether I'm moving cross-country or within Los Angeles.
Speaking of human-donkey hybrids, someone at our contractor insisted we had to deal with a document by reviewing a set of change pages published separately from the actual document. Almost nobody figured out which of the three things posted on the document management system was the one we were supposed to look at. This was a typical example of people making life easier for themselves without considering the impact on anybody else.
In other news, my boss sent me a haiku in binary today. It only works if you pronounce the zeroes as "oh," but most people do. I have yet to come up with a suitable response.
And apropos of nothing, have I mentioned my idea for a microbrewery with a comedy club? I plan to call it brew-ha-ha.
I'm not sure whether I am hu-man or hu-mouse, but I think I've just proved that I am far from hu-morous.
Copyright 2002 Miriam H. Nadel