Thursday, July 27, 2006

A Mammoth Waste of Time

South Korean scientists admitted to trying to clone a woolly fucking mammoth yesterday! They acquired mammoth DNA from a glacier in Antarctica and tried to clone one in three attempts but failed each time. Now I'm all for stem cell research, but I'm not sure cloning extinct species is a good idea for anyone. Wasn't Jurassic Park featured in Korean movie theaters? Earth seems to have a very finicky ecosystem, and re-introducing an animal that didn't make it the first go around all that well is just asking for trouble. Then again, what more could we humans possibly do to screw up this lemon of a planet even more than we already have?

I could see a mammoth being cloned and hate life from day one. For starters, it's woolly. Our planet is warming. Why bring back an animal that sweats a lot, and wears a thick coat everywhere? It's like those homeless guys in the ghetto all wrapped up in an old puffy Charlotte Hornets parka in the middle of July. Who needs it? Then there's likely birth defects to deal with because lets face it, we mortals can't crank out good old nature like the Big Guy Upstairs Corporation can....yet. Pfizer and Merck have been negotiating purchasing some possible trade secrets with BGU Corp., but the bartering of souls have proven to be a tricky legal process. The mammoth would probably be blind and smell awful too. It would feel the need to spit all the time and the weird enzymes in it's saliva would cure any bird flu threat because it would immediately kill off every bird on the planet. Then the cloners would need to do dinosaurs again in hopes of a quick evolution into more birds. Rather counterproductive if you ask me.

They might clone mammoths and then realize they cant be killed. Tar pits would be developed throughout the US in hopes that the mammoths will happen into them, but gruesome reports of pet and child accidents will ruin that suggestion as well. They could potentially serve as useful mountain guides but remember they're blind and the tours would take upwards of months to finish.

Eventually, once the sheer usefulness of a mammoth became apparent, it would be subjected to being the worlds most popular gag gift and become a species of humiliation and low self esteem. They would be dropped off at bachelor parties and going-away events with messages actually pinned into the thick skin of the beast that read "Like marriage, this too is your problem now." Modern elephants would rally for the euthanization of all cloned mammoths for fear of being replaced at their jobs. "No dumbass mammoth can do what we do. I don't care how cheap you can get 'em. Go ahead there Woolly, balance your hairy ass on that ball there. I don't think so," said one angry elephant at a nearby rally. "I say put all of these test tube debacles out of their misery."

Surly their could be a cooler extinct animal we could clone. How about those little hobbit like people who lived on the island of Flora like 10,000 years ago? They weren't midgets per se, but they were close enough to them to remain funny, and if we cloned them then maybe it would be morally justifiable to hunt them. That would be good cable TV viewing.

MK- Clone me, and suffer the circumstances