Microfiction: Viral advantage

The big brains down at the DNA lab seemed to have finally come up with a winner. When the research that obesity was sometimes connected to a common cold virus, they started planning how to re-engineer a virus that did exactly the opposite, making obese people melt off fat in no time at all.
The actual gene sequencing and splicing of the DNA into the new virus only took a few months, and in the process they cut out all the flu-like symptoms of the original. Medical testing started at once with lab animals, and progressed to human trials in Africa, where a few hundred grand could buy just about any number of officials to let them test freely without irritating government interference. The hardest part was finding people obese enough to test it on.
The jump from vaccine to airborne infection of the new virus happened so fast that they never even got a chance to contain it for profit, let alone for human health.
Within a few months the cat had not only been let out of the bag, but had literally taken flight to every corner of the world. Within a few years, nearly everybody on the planet save for about 12 percent had shed so much excess weight that the Kate Moss heroin waif look was most common. No matter how much people ate, there was no way they could gain weight enough to look more than scrawny. Even bodybuilders and morbidly obese gourmands became stick figures, the virus was terribly efficient.
Of course, those tem percent of the fatties left found a new world, one where that extra hundred or so pounds meant fame, money and a sure ticket to a supermodel career.


Based on a real article, and human nature.
OBESITY DUE TO VIRUS?
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Could being overweight be due to a virus? Recent findings of a American Physiological Society study, as reported by the World Science staff, say that hypothesis might be true.
The study found that a human-infecting virus called AD-37 causes obesity in chickens, which corroborated with previous studies linking other viruses with obesity in animals or humans. Its conclusions appear in the January issue of the American Journal of Physiology – Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology.
AD-37 is an adenovirus, which commonly cause upper respiratory tract infections including the common cold. Leah Whigham of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, lead researcher in the study, reportedly cautioned that more research is needed to determine whether it actually causes obesity in humans since the study showed only a handful of people being infected with the virus. The question of whether curing this will lead to a vaccine or other methodologies is still to be determined.

No Straight lines

Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines. -- R. Buckminster Fuller

The Border

The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marksthe last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to astandstill. -- Robert Anton Wilson

Buy the damn Motor Primitives new EP

Go to their website. Buy their cds. Obey me!

Squeeze that fat bag

Fresh Batteries

Why I hate Dentists

It's not the pain, it's not even those crunching, tearing and grinding noises with the high piercing whine of drills, or even the smell of burnt bone wafting up to my nostrils, or that fucked up numb with no fuckin' coke high feeling you get for hours afterwards, or the wired smells and ugly lights and repbulican values reflected in the way out of line costs for somebody who is not even a real doctor.
It's the way they think my time is worth nothing when they over book and leave you sitting for too long as they work on seven friggin' patients at once, the way the force you these days to get a cleaning when you know god damn well that the last time you were there you had cavities you still have, the way they force you to watch not only your gums on TV monitors as they flay, floss and bleed you, splattering your DNA everywhere without a care, the way they make you watch some stupid fucking damn ad with HAPPY NEW IMPROVED WHITE TEETH LIKE A MODEL!AND PERFECT DENTAL CROWNS AND CAPS AND WHILE YOU'RE AT IT WHY DON'T YOU.......... with all those perfect young white people with Stepford Wife smiles and how they morph rotting and blackened teeth into shining white walls of clenched teeth, never having a clue that it looks like a bad acid trip when they do the cheap special effects, the way they say you need a crown here and here and here and here and your teeth aren't quite straight as they do a walletectomy on you when they should be saying this tooth pays for my new nine iron, this one pay little dimwit timmy's day school lunch fees for the year and this one will buy me that nice hotel room in Cabo San Lucas.
May the dental marketing people rot in hell, next to all the bastards who buy their stuff.
What really yanks my fuckin' crank is that this in not one of the teeth they said needed a crown.
Do you need all your molars at 48? Don't get me started on root canals.

Sick, sick sick.

Sick As A Dog All Week.
Bleech. More later. Must go drip drip hack cough

strech limo head

photoshop meets thumbs plus

Lettuce be poetic now

I like radicchio, don't ya know
shovel it in till my juices flow
and red leaf lettuce does not suck
unless it's hauled too far on a truck
iceberg heads are worthless to me
unless they're sticking up out of the sea
ramming my ship in front of me
some like bibb, green leaf and cabbage
but they are often just a vegetarian savage
ripping the heads from the ground
chewing them down by the pound
I prefer romaine from my garden
with a steak that makes my arteries harden
with a fine ceasar dressing white as old snow
anchovies mixed in, don't ya know?

Tired and Rich

He was tired, old and felt worn thin. The long years had worn him down, even though he had looked young for a very long time now. Tired of being cold, always, of seeing his loved ones die off one by one, of watching everything he loved fade into nostalgia. Tired of seeing the world turn, year after year, knowing there were so few challenges left, so few things unseen or unwanted.
He'd been young when his choice had been made, when he begged his way into the Organization, exicted at the power and wealth connected to it, the promise of being something bigger and stronger than anything he'd seen before, knowing his entrance had a seriously high price attached.
He hadn't cared or thought about it much, given how worthless and weak he'd felt. Anything seems better than being of no value or consequence when you're young and impatient enough to feel needed.
He'd risen up the ranks, made good long term investments and setup his people in positions of power and comfort, investing in pharmacuticals and biomedical research. He lacked for nothing he wanted. He'd been head of a powerful house for some time now.
He'd found that none of it mattered any more. He wanted to feel alive, to feel the warm sun on his face, to be back among his long dead family and friends.
So he took a long walk along the beach in front of his mansion, found a fine rock and waited for the sun to come up, letting go at last of all he was and could be.
It was the next night when the younger ones found his ashes, out on a lark to suck on some fresh teenage blood on the beach, even though they had plenty of good blood on tap back at the mansion from the new plasma/blood replacement biolab.

Play it in the closet

It was supposed to be something holy, for God's sake, when old Ernie sat down at the piano . . . I swear to God, If I were a piano player, or an actor or something, and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I'd hate it. I wouldn't even want them to clap for me. People always clap at the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddamn closet.

-- Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye

Burning one at the bar

Pubic Militia

Cowboy eyeball woman

Mortality

I never, ever take my used stuff to the local thrift store. Few things are more freaky than walking back into it a week later and seeing your stuff on a rack, waiting to be bought by somebody else who thinks it's cool to own stuff dead people don't need anymore.
Once I had a bad Hawaiian shirt collection. I stuffed it into the donation bin. The next day one of my bandmates, smiling at how happy it would make me, handed me a whole pile of ugly shirts he'd filched from the bin.
They were the ones I put there the day before.
Having cleaned up after dead people, emptied Rug Doctors filled with diluted blood, cut away the carpet where the decaying remains dripped into rorsharc test blotches, and tossed lifetimes of junk into dumpsters, I think I'll take my junk to distant thrift stores.

Dark eyed beauty

Your photograhper, outside her Trailerhome

I saw those aliens, they was hangin' out down by the quickie mart!

another alien!