Only in the Pacific Northwest…

Seattle is experiencing a surge of homicides (which are probably not statistically significant in number.) Seattle is also experiencing a surge of squid. Some irresponsible journalists are suggesting these two observations might or might not be linked.

These scurrilous allegations should be addressed by a trustworthy source, like The Typing Octopus. I mean, seriously, the murders are on dry land, with guns. I’d suspect the Sasquatch before I would some disgruntled cephalopod…and even there, the fact that the victims weren’t slammed with hurled tree trunks should let Bigfoot off the hook.

Department of obviousness

Well. I don’t see the point of this study, but I suppose there are people who need to be clubbed about the head with the obvious who would be well-served by reading it. It’s a study to determine whether clones would have separate identities.

Umm, yeah?

They determined this by interviewing twins, who are clones of one another.

OK, yes?

From these findings the scientists said they could assume a clone would probably not feel their individuality was compromised by sharing genes with someone else; that their relationship with their co-clone was a blessing; and their uniqueness was not a negative thing.

That’s a relief. We can stop worrying about the clone armies full of self-loathing bodies with a single mind between them, I guess. I wonder if they also pursued the question of why, in any pair of twins, one individual gets all the good qualities, and the other is always pure evil?


Never mind. Try googling “soul” and “clone”—there are way too many people in the world who take that worry seriously. Maybe this was a necessary study after all.

Link dump

I’ve made it to St Paul and am sucking down some caffeine before strolling over to the venue for my talk this afternoon, and I’ve got a few minutes for a quickie link dump from the mailbag. Digest these for a while…

Can I trade the cat in for one of these?

i-f253e0593ce41801f29014b99a5d3e03-california.jpg

John Bentley sent me an issue of Seven Days with this interesting illustration on the cover: it’s titled “California”, by Chris Varricchione. Excuse the smudginess, but I just scanned it in from newsprint, so it isn’t exactly the cleanest image to start with. Still, I had to make it my desktop image—who can resist a flying mollusc/bird chimera? Now if only someone would point me to a sharper original source…

Thanks, John!