25 May 2001 
 
So here's the Maakies transcript on fruit-hating: 
 
Drinkycrow: I hate fruit! (he's chomping on a pear, btw) 
 
Uncle Gabby: I like to hate!  Will you teach me to hate fruit? 
 
Drinkycrow: You never know where you stand with a piece of fruit!  Treacherous 
villains! 
 
Once I bought an apple!  It looked so beautiful, shiny and red... but when I bit 
into it, it was like stuffing a handful of sawdust in my mouth... Fruit! It's 
nothing like the reliable vegetable! A vegetable is relatively safe, as it is 
best eaten cooked!  A fruit, however, could be bruised on the inside, too ripe, 
not ripe enough, there might even be some disgusting insect in there! When I bite 
a worm in half, who has been devouring a pear, I feel sorry for the worm, BUT NOT 
THE PEAR! 
 
DEATH TO ALL FRUIT! 
 
It's suicidal anyway!! What other food is specifically designed to be eaten, in a 
kamikaze effort to spread its seed? At least a cow has developed legs, with which 
it can escape destruction! 
 
Uncle Gabby: Ah, now THERE is a noble food! 
 
Drinkycrow: String em up! (this while a banana and pear are being hanged from a 
tree branch...) 
 
Uncle Gabby: Scoundrels! 
 
 
Maakies is by Tony Millionaire, and it is on www.maakies.com.  I read it every 
week in NYPress. 
 
I still chuckle to myself in the comparison made between fruit and cows, esp. as 
cows didn't develop legs as far as I know (though it =would= make for interesting 
evolutionary history... perhaps cows descended from dugongs, then leg-development 
wouldn't seem so silly) and, secondly, they don't seem to use their legs for much 
of anything.  As Stuart nails it "they're the only animals one can hunt with a 
hammer," though there are some cats one can do that to, as well.  I'll let his 
generalization hold though. 
 
 
In other thoughts, I was reading from the June issue of =Natural History= on the 
ride home on the subway.  There were a couple of interesting articles, a few of 
which I will mention here: 
 
--> one on the transfer of cells between fetus and mother.  You may not realize 
this, though if one thinks about it it's unsurprising, but some of the cells from 
the mother are incorporated into the baby's body during development, and 
vice-versa.  The reason I say this is unsurprising is that there's an exchange of 
materials all the time through the umbilicus.  What =is= odd is that these cells 
(or their genetic descendents) can remain in the mother and child's body for the 
rest of their lives.... (they were talking about these things in relation to 
auto-immune diseases, but that's not really my interest) 
 
So this is what I've been thinking -- so I've got cells in my bloodstream from my 
mother, and she has my cells in hers.  And she had those cells in hers when she 
was pregnant with Amy and Carey.  So my younger sisters may have my cells in 
them!  When my Ma complains that I haven't been a good role model to my sisters, 
I can say that at least my cells have been living in them. 
 
Let me tell you, Natural History tells me more about truly bizarre things than 
Scientific American does.  There are indeed odd things going on on the molecular 
level, but gross behavior of species can be outlandish as well. 
 
--> microbes in general, and the ones that live in us in particular: they talk 
about some particular species of microbes, and their useful or detrimental 
behaviors - there are microbes which can basically "harvest" heavy metals - they 
incorporate heavy metals in the environment into carbonates, which cling to their 
shells.  Recently the genome of this particular species was sequenced, and they 
have something of an idea as to which genes are related to this carbonate 
formation.  So some ideas: linking a bioluminescence gene to the carbonate-gene, 
so that one can tell when heavy metals are being picked up.  This might be a 
really neat, cheap way to clean up toxic sites, and by adding bioluminescence, 
one might be able to determine which areas have higher concetrations of toxic 
metals... 
 
So, more things you might not want to think about - you've got bacteria, viruses, 
and odder microscopic life simply teeming in your body, on your skin, probably 
even living on your eyes.  We walk through a miasma of microbes.  Many of the 
organelles in our cells might be archaic bacteria which got fused into cells and 
used for their oxygen-consuming abilities (mitochondria), and viruses may have 
even injected their own DNA into our germ line, and we carry genetic detritus, 
some of which has been circumvented by our own cellular machinery (introns vs. 
exons) but some of which are perhaps expressed - if they came in handy. 
 
Now this makes me wonder where our immune system came from.  Perhaps some 
symbiotic microbes?  What if we can be considered an amalgam of beings from 
separate origins... aaaaah my brain hurts... 
 
I told y'all about the time I couldn't tell myself from the air surrounding, 
right?  When I saw the entire world as being overlapping quantum wave functions 
and I was interlaced with everything around me.  Now I have to think of myself as 
this roiling community of cells, some of which are in conflict with each other 
(achoo... thanks allergies).... 
 
 
ahahaahhahahahahahahahahahaha AAAAA