Instead we’re meant to be excited by a pair of thing-a-zoids which, placed side-by-side in the photographs, look less like the dawn of a new scientific era and more like a pair of giant googly eyeballs, as though Nookie Bear is staring at you from inside a burqa. The underwhelming bio-glob in question is, we’re told, ‘based on a bacterium that causes mastitis in goats’, which might make an amusingly wry on-screen sub-heading at the start of the next Transformers movie, but doesn’t do much to make the breakthrough any more thrilling.
That’s possibly because the breakthrough itself is impossible to understand unless you’re a geneticist. Here’s what happened: the scientists created a computer simulation of the goat bug thingy, then fed the code into a genetic synthesiser. You know, a genetic synthesiser. It looks like a George Foreman grill, but in white, and with twice as many winking lights on the top. They fed it into that. Probably using a USB stick. Anyway, the DNA grill heated up and went beep and ‘produced short strands of the bug’s DNA’, which I imagine were an absolute bugger to pick up with tweezers. Said strands were then ‘stitched together’ by some bits of yeast and E. coli, which eventually knitted the strand into a complete million-letter-long DNA sequence, which you’re probably incorrectly picturing right now.
So far, so baffling. Then it gets weirder. To ‘watermark’ their artificial bug, the geneticists spliced a James Joyce quotation into the DNA sequence. The unsuspecting genome now has the phrase ‘to live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life’ written through it like letters in a stick of rock. In other words, it’s the world’s most pretentious bacterium. After Quentin Letts.
This raises the question of whether it’s possible to shove an entire book into the genetic synthesiser and create a new life form. I’d be quite interested in seeing what would pop out if you fed it one of Jordan’s novels. It might result in a lifeform more sophisticated than Jordan herself, even if it was just a burping elbow with eyelashes.
Incidentally, the DNA sequence also includes an email address, presumably so you know who to contact if you discover a bacterium wandering about in the street without its owner present.
Anyway, leaving aside the immense philosophical and spiritual considerations, the most pressing concern about artificial life is the prospect of sinister man-made lifeforms being used for nefarious means. Even Craig Venter himself, who oversaw the experiments, describes it as a ‘dual-use technology’, which is a brilliantly non-specific way of saying ‘good or evil’.
On the one hand, energy companies could create an organism that converts CO2 into power, thereby solving climate change and the energy crisis. And on the other, North Korea could unleash an army of sabre-toothed jackdaws. Or we could accidentally create a kind of whispering, intelligent mud that rises up and smothers us to death in our sleep. Literally all of the above can but won’t happen.
If we survive long enough to perfect the life-creation process, we’ll have zany new animals to look forward to. Entire zoos will be dedicated to ridiculous remixed animals: 100-legged cat centipedes, crocodiles with breasts, ladybirds the size of a church. Ever wondered what happens when you cross a cow with a shark? Wonder no more at the charkinarium.
Disney could breed a real Mickey Mouse, a real Donald Duck, and a real whatever-Goofy-is to greet kids in their amusement parks – genuine walking, breathing mascots, with their own lungs and digestive systems and everything. Your kids won’t know whether to laugh or cry. Although ultimately ‘cry’ is probably the likeliest option, since given the size of Mickey’s head he’ll probably break his own neck when he bends down to shake their hand.
I’d create an animal that excretes meat, just to give vegetarians pause for thought. Ethically, what’s the problem with eating a sausage, if it’s been harmlessly pooed out by an animal? To sweeten the pill yet further, what if you put pleasure receptors in the animal’s colon, so it actively enjoys the sausage-creation process – enjoys it to such a degree that it chases you down the street, yelping in orgasmic delight while shitting a string of pan-ready chipolatas?
If you think that’s disgusting, I’d just like to point out that it’s far less revolting than killing a pig with a bolt gun then mashing it up into sausagemeat.
And we could remix humankind too, removing all the rubbish bits we’re cursed with, like the appendix, or empathy. It’d be fun to create a race of people without memories, pain receptors, or shame cells, then populate a pleasure-island with them: a hyper-decadent, consequence-free paradise where you can spend a fortnight’s holiday having sex with everyone you see, or deliberately ramming your car into them, or both – like a real-life 3D Grand Theft Auto. It’d be just like being an oligarch.
All in all, a brave new world full of sweating, belching horror lies just over our collective horizon. But don’t be scared. Consider yourself lucky to be alive just as we’ve worked out precisely how special that’s not.
Going ‘woo’ on a rock in the sea
28/05/2010
I gave up on Lost some time during the first season, having decided it was just a bunch of irritating people going ‘woo’ on a rock in the sea. An episode detailing Charlie the rock star’s backstory, replete with hammy flashbacks to a wildly implausible version of Manchester, was the final straw. But since then I’d heard from devoted fans, who insisted that despite a few major wobbles somewhere round the halfway point, it was actually well worth watching.
I never acted on their advice. I could’ve bought the box set, I suppose, but that’d be a lot of investment in a show which had annoyed me so much in the past. Best just to tune in to the final two episodes ever instead, then. I can probably just pick up the story, right?
Wrong. Thumpingly, obviously wrong.
Far from clearing up the mystery of what the island was and why they were there, from my uninformed point of view, the finale consisted of random sequences in which irritating people went ‘woo’ on a rock in the sea and in a city, apparently simultaneously. The city was purgatory and the island was real. Or was it the other way round? Characters I recognised rubbed shoulders with strangers, all of whom were imbuing each line of dialogue with such sombre, knowing significance, you could be forgiven for assuming we were witnessing the end of history itself.
The plot made less sense than a milk hammock. Jack was apparently no longer Jack, but a man who looked like Jack. He was certainly just as punchably earnest as I remember. There was much kerfuffle over a kind of magic reset button located down a well in the middle of the island.
The story ended with alternative-universe-Jack having an existential chat with his dead dad. I remembered Jack’s boring daddy issues from the first season; back then they struck me as a spectacularly tedious attempt to give our clean-cut hero some depth. Has any viewer, in the history of film and television, ever actually cared about a lead character’s parents? Faced with a character as blankly dull as Jack, I’d be more interested in learning about the tortured background of a piece of office furniture.
Anyway, having healed his life, Jack was free to stand around in an imaginary church backslapping other Lost characters while the room was filled with heavenly light: the end. Intense and moving, no doubt, for loyal fans of the show. Might as well have been a pretentious building society advert for anyone else.
But Lost isn’t the only series coming to an end. Ashes To Ashes, Law & Order, 24, Heroes: it’s almost as though populist TV drama itself is shutting down. Some shows, like Heroes, don’t have an opportunity to plan for their own deaths, leaving the characters stuck in limbo. Others, like Lost and Ashes To Ashes, turn out to have been in limbo all along. Limbo’s very much in vogue at the moment. In fact there’s roughly a 50 per cent chance that any serial you’re following will turn out to be set there. All this publicity must be doing wonders for the limbo tourist industry.
Of course saying ‘aha, it was limbo all along’ is just a marginally more profound way of saying ‘aha, it was a dream all along’, a trope which became a cliché through
overuse. There’s no room for any more limbo-based programming, so anything currently on air is going to have to find a different way of ending, which sadly means 24 – which finishes for good in a fortnight – won’t conclude with Jack Bauer kicking his way through Hell and kneeing Satan in the bollocks. Another twist is necessary. Here’s hoping it transpires the whole thing took place in a paperback novel being read by Shaz from Ashes To Ashes, who was herself being daydreamt by Sawyer from Lost – while he was trying to think up a satisfying conclusion for Heroes. That or it pulls out to reveal it all took place in a cat’s bum.
A cat’s bum doing a poo.
I am thirty-nine years old.
Twenty-two millionaires fucking up a lawn
04/06/2010
I wish I enjoyed the World Cup, if only for some fleeting sense of common unity with the rest of humankind. But I simply don’t get it. A huge number of my fellow citizens tune in and witness a glorious contest of ecstatic highs and heartbreaking lows. I see twenty-two millionaires fucking up a lawn.
If the fans want to enjoy their sport, fair enough. Judging by their rapt faces, I’m the one losing out. What puts me off isn’t the game itself, but the accompanying patriotism; or, more specifically, the hollow simulation of patriotism used to hawk products throughout the contest.
Take the current Carlsberg campaign featuring an insanely jingoistic dressing room ‘pep talk’ which blathers on and mindlessly on about national pride. ‘Know this,’ the voiceover whispers portentously, ‘that shirt you’re wearing? Your countrymen would give anything to put it on.’ Really, Carlsberg? I wouldn’t put down a sandwich to lift the World Cup, let alone pull a sweat-sodden sports jersey over my head. And would even the most committed fans really do ‘anything’ to wear it? Would they saw their own feet off with a bread knife dipped in cat piss? No. They wouldn’t. So stop lying.
Having grossly overestimated the cachet of said hallowed shirt, the ad treats us to a cameo from virtually every notable English sporting hero of the past fifty years, pausing briefly for a patronising moment of silence for Sir Bobby Robson, before depicting an ethereal Bobby Moore, bathed in heavenly light at the top of the tunnel, standing proudly beside a lion. The whole thing plays like a masturbatory dream sequence for Al Murray’s Pub Landlord character, the punchline being that the whole thing is a sales pitch for a Danish brewing company. The tagline should be: ‘Carlsberg: as English as Æbleskiver’.
The American confectionery company Mars is also keen to pat our patriotic behinds. It’s paid John Barnes to jokily recreate his notoriously poor rap from the 1990 New Order single ‘World In Motion’. And – ha, ha! – it’s hopeless. But if you’re not familiar with the original, it just looks as though we, the English, have absymal taste in music. Tourists watching this advert in their hotel rooms will spread tales of our cultural ineptitude on their return home. Thanks for that, Mars. Incidentally, Barnes’s lyric has been altered, so he’s now rapping about ‘three lions on a Mars’, which rather implies that the sacred England shirt that Carlsberg was getting religiously excited about is, in practice, interchangeable with a calorific chocolate-and-nougat slab.
Japanese technology giant Sony is also capitalising on the World Cup. It’s got an advert starring Brazilian star Kaka which aims to convince viewers to trade in their old TV sets for shiny new 3D ones. It’s an exciting prospect, only slightly undermined by the fact that the World Cup is being transmitted in the UK by the BBC and ITV, neither of whom will be broadcasting any of the matches in 3D. In fact, if you want to watch the World Cup in three dimensions, you’ll have to go to the cinema, where Sony plans to show it, in 3D, on around fifty screens. That’ll mean leaving your brand-new 3D telly at home, of course. But never mind. You can watch Avatar when you come back. In 2D. Because the 3D version won’t be out until months after the World Cup. So you might as well not bother getting a 3D TV till then. And come to think of it, it’s probably best not to bother anyway, because Avatar is rubbish. (I couldn’t stand that tribe of pious, humourless, surly blue luddites. Fuck their stupid tree. I was cheering on the bulldozers.)
There are other adverts of course: Coca-Cola, Nike, Pepsi-Cola, BP, Blackwater Security, the Tyrell Corporation, Damien Thorn Enterprises and so on. All hitting the same phoney note of concord, all somehow cheapening the fun that millions will extract from the tournament itself. Not me, though. I’ll be out of the country for the whole thing. When I think of all the adverts I’ll miss, I’ll try not to sob too loudly.
150 per cent more British
14/06/2010
Flippantly putting the grave environmental tragedy of it all to one side for a moment, the Deepwater Horizon oil leak isn’t just causing extensive damage to the Louisiana coastline. What about our accents? Our lovely British accents? Thanks to the BP link, they’ve been destroyed too. Don’t know about you, but whenever I’m around Americans, I tend to exaggerate my Britishness in a pathetic bid to win their approval. Those days are gone.
The first time I visited the US, I ran into trouble at immigration. Half the group I was travelling with decided to get drunk on the plane, which probably would’ve been fine with all the other passengers if it hadn’t been for the unrelenting cackling and yelping and removal of trousers. I was fairly drunk too, incidentally, but only because I was so terrified of flying I’d decided to blot out the whole of reality by glugging myself into an inflight coma. From my slumbering perspective the flight was a warm fifteen-minute snooze. To the other passengers it must’ve felt like a thirty-year sentence in baboon prison.
Upon arrival, we were identified as troublemakers and hauled off one-by-one for a comprehensive bothering. Instantly I realised my only hope of avoiding immediate deportation was to behave like a minor royal – not an aloof, chilly posho, but a genial gosh-what-a-wonderful-country-you-have Hugh Grant-type, one who smiles a lot while using slightly formal language.
I apologised profusely by saying, ‘I apologise profusely.’
The officer started out prickly – one of his opening gambits was, ‘You could be spending the night in jail, wiseguy,’ which simultaneously impressed and scared me – but several minutes of profuse apologies and crikey-I’m-sorry delivered in an embellished British accent appeared to disarm him, and I was released without being subjected to gunfire.
That’s my recollection, anyway. Perhaps he just got bored with watching me grovel. But from that point on, my dial was set to 150 per cent British for the duration. I said ‘Good day’ to receptionists and ‘I beg your pardon’ to waiters. At one point I think I even said ‘Toodle pip’ to a cabbie.
Incredibly, rather than calling me a dick, they said they loved my accent. The US was a magic country where strangers liked me on the strength of my voice alone, unlike cold anonymous London where, rather than break their stride, pedestrians would blankly step on your face if you were dying on the pavement, quietly tutting at the blood on their shoes.
On a subsequent trip I discovered mockney was just as useful, and deliberately roughed my accent down in gas stations or bars, saying ‘blimey’ and ‘bloke’ and ‘bleedin’ ’ell’, even if I was only asking the way to the toilet (sorry, ‘bog’). This was even more popular than my Little Lord Fauntleroy act. Thank God I can’t do a Liverpudlian accent. I’d probably have adopted a Beatles persona in music stores.
But now, as a company with the word ‘British’ in its name pisses apocalyptic quantities of oil into the ocean, and CEO Tony Hayward pops up on the news to make tactless statements in a British accent, anglophilia is shrivelling. Things must be bad when gimpy Cameron has to reassure us that BP wiping its arse on the Gulf of Mexico won’t disturb the ‘special relationship’ between the US and the UK. Of course it will.
Never mind that BP is an international company. Never mind that 39 per cent of its shares are held in the US, that half its directors are American. It’s got the word British in the title, and that’ll do. It genuinely feels like our fault. Like you, I’ve never supervised the offsho
re drilling policy of a major oil company, but I can’t help feeling responsible. It’s like watching a news report in which someone with your surname has been caught having sex with a hollowed-out yam. The disgrace is shared, however irrationally.
And to be honest, the Americans are thus far admirably restrained about the whole thing. If a company called Texan Gloop belched a carpet of black gunk over Norfolk, we’d be surrounding the US embassy and burning sarcastic effigies of Boss Hogg within minutes. And that’s just Norfolk: flat earth and windmills. Having vandalised Louisiana and laminated thousands of pelicans, the BP spill now threatens to disfigure the Miami coastline, corrupting its relentlessly cheery blue-and-yellow colour scheme with a sea of rainbow black. Congratulations, people of Britain. Even though, strictly speaking, it isn’t your fault.
Clearly a rebrand is in order if we’re to maintain any national pride whatsoever. Trouble is, BP’s already had one: ten years ago it changed its name from British Petroleum to BP following a merger with a US oil company. Since that’s not enough to dissociate it from Britain, Britain itself will have to change its name. It’ll still need to feel quintessentially British, mind. For the tourists, like. How about London Kingdom? Great Crikey? Yeoman Island? Hobbiton? Churchill-on-Sea?
Let’s face it: to recoup our cultural value, it’s either that or we all head over there and start cleaning the mess up ourselves, while muttering ‘blimey’ and ‘gosh’ and doing our best to be charming. If you’ve got a fly-drive holiday booked, start practising that Hugh Grant act now. Chances are you’ll need it.
I can make you hate Page 14
