Daily Briefs: Peanut Butter and Stem Cells

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Choosy Moms Choose the Hype Machine: While I was listening to tracks from Just-1’s very, very serious hip-hop album Blinded by the Truth on the Hype Machine, I swear to god this ad was in the sidebar:

Peter Pan? On the Hype Machine? Reassuring salmonella-scared moms? Massive over-representation of dance music on the internet brought to you by Lunchables, you guys. Is it a weird period of dissonant advertising because of the economy? The only answer I’ve got is to snarl into the mirrors, clean and jerk 220 kg of pig iron, drop it, give a throaty scream, and then recalculate my weight class based on the Sinclair coefficient. And that just ain’t no answer at all. But I do know this: Yesterday, David Martin used the word “econocalypse,” an obvious neologism I came up with one morning last year while I was brushing my teeth, so I have now directly influenced the best hard journalist in Kansas City. Sorry, Yael T. Abouhalkah, recalculate your Sinclair coefficient, because you are not in the same weight class as David.

Science whatever: Pres. Barack Obama declared war on stem cells yesterday by overturning former Pres. George Hussein Bush’s ban on embryonic stem cell research, which means that the average consumer can now purchase Peter Pan brand spreadable stem cells from the grocery store. Right? I’ve always loved the idea of having my own evil Belial-like twin growing out of my abdomen, but I didn’t absorb my identical twin in utero when I had the chance. Now I can grow one using stem cells. This will work, right? By using science? SHUT UP. It will work.

All this happens against a broader backdrop of the alleged marginalization of science by Bush administration ideologues over the last eight years, according to a committee you’ve never heard of called the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Man, they’ve got committees for anything you can think of, including the Senate Select Committee on Quack Quack Seat Back Enforcement Appropriations and the Joint Committee on Disproportionately Itty Bitty Mammary Oversight. This article, which appeared this morning in the only newspaper that matters, the New York Bee Picayune Intelligencer, has a cutline that says, “President Obama’s directive to ‘guarantee scientific integrity’ in policy making will not completely divorce science from politics.” Then, the only quotes they could get backing up this vague assertion came from a Fox News marshmallow goblin named Karl Rove. Why not ask a scientist? Answer: Because their minds are being manipulated by their no-longer-illegal evil conjoined stem cell twins.