Friday, February 28, 2003
Introducing a new little irregularly-recurring farkleberries feature, WebWurst! It's a little place to find some of the worst, weirdest and wildest stories I've gleaned from my surfage. Are you ready?
- PETA launches new public relations campaign: "Holocaust on Your Plate", or "A Nazi in Every Frankfurter"
- Playboy magazine looking for the "Girls of Starbucks" ("You want some foam with that latte?")
- DNA co-discoverer James Watson says "stupidity should be cured"
From NewScientist.com: "If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease," says Watson, now president of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, New York. "The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what's the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, 'Well, poverty, things like that.' It probably isn't. So I'd like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 per cent." Watson, no stranger to controversy, also suggests that genes influencing beauty could also be engineered. "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."
Oh, go sit on a test tube and centrifuge, you old coot. Now you know what some Nobel laureates fantasize about: an army of beautiful giant blonde Science Fair winners. Hm. Where have we heard this before? See the PETA flap above.
Lest we forget, human nature is to stratify no matter what the range of norms: in a neighborhood where everyone can afford a Cadillac, the family with a Lexus beats the Joneses.
If everybody were tall, beautiful, smart and blonde, then some would still be smarter, taller, blonder and more beautiful than the others, creating a pecking order once again. To paraphrase what George Orwell once said, "we're all equals around here...just some of us are equaller than others."
Or: no matter how high you raise the bar, there's always going to be a "lower 10 percent."
