Mute

I heard today about some sort of online game ... just looked it up, CityVille, by Zynga. You build a virtual city, or a farm, and no doubt other things as well. Like Simcity I should think, although I've never played or even seen any of them. Last video game I played was Super Mario Bros, in the mid 90s. I understand things have evolved since then. What struck me was that while the game is free, you can buy, with real money, at drugstores or somewhere, credits with which you can purchase things ... yachts or tractors or the ability to do things faster ... to augment your virtual environment.

On the one hand, you're buying nothing at all. On the other hand, what is a crossword puzzle book, or a paint by numbers set, or music, or any passtime? That it's virtual doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile. It's a sort of art. I build things. I'm building something right now. For my foolish mother. So I understand creating. And anyone who's read as much as I have shall have no reason to complain about how people spend their leisure time, or their entertainment dollars. It's not a new thing after all. But, um, Zynga is now a billion dollar company. They sell imaginary merchandise for imaginary places. That's a new thing.

Brilliant.

Yesterday I heard on the radio about what they're doing with genes nowadays. There's a machine about the size of a microwave oven that takes jars of powdered nucleotides and combines them into genes with measurable attributes. You want your E. coli strain to smell like bananas? Can do.

Then they talked about a woman who gave birth to two children, but when she needed a donated kidney the kids were not a match because they didn't have any of her DNA.

Not a typo.

It seems when the woman was a 4 day old pre-blastocyte, she was actual twins, which incorporated each other and segregated various functions to one or the other. Blood was one sister, kidneys another. One person, two sets of unique DNA. She is a chimera. How odd.

Then they talked about a college student who wanted to do the experiment: inseminate her own egg with chimp sperm, implant it in her womb and chart its development. What would she do with the, uh, child? "Oh, abort it of course ... it's just for the experiment."

Would it be human? What would its attributes be? Its rights? None, of course, since it would be aborted. Half-chimp fetuses are beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they have no rights which the white man is bound to respect. So says the Supreme Court, and there is no higher authority, whether moral or civil. I might be getting my centuries wrong, but whatever.

Then some guy was talking about how he envisioned a day when kids and housewives had at-home DNA splicing kits, where you could cut and paste together your own unique species ... part fish, part bat. Cool. Part octopus, part koala bear. Neato. Man, this could be fun.

Given the microwave gizmo, this may not be too far away.

There's a late night radio show, usually utter crap, but one guest said that UFO implants were not tracking devices but a prototype of the mark of the beast, function of which would be to alter DNA. Very interesting. As in the days of Noah. Nephalim were a hybrid mix of angelic and human DNA slash spirit -- angels have biological bodies when they materialize in this dimension. There's an idea that DNA is a sort of conduit between the quantum and the chemical worlds, through which spirit manifests. Mutate DNA and you mutate spirit? In any case, doors are closed, or opened.

We are very near the end, my friend. These are strange and interesting times.

J