Weekly Features. Weekly Features.

Some weeks I have what I consider to be great ideas for the weekly features and I look forward to writing them.  Other weeks, I feel nothing more but obligation regarding their creation.  That's more how I've been feeling about them the last few weeks, and perhaps the quality of them has reflected my frustration.  I have been grinding out material like a glassy-eyed, hypnotized assembly line worker.  I have written them with the same fervor George Jetson used to push that button at the Spacely Space Sprockets factory over and over and over and over and...well, you get the picture.


It was with that level of compulsive repetition in mind that I decided to make this week's top five list my top five favorite clones:



5. Roy Batty - Okay, so Rutger Hauer's role in Blade Runner was a robotic humanoid, not technically a clone.  That's the only reason why the psychopathic, platinum haired, pectorally plentiful killer replicant was not ranked higher, but he sure proved that the c in clone (while I'm on this alliteration kick) stood for crazy.  By the way, anyone else creeped out by the passing mention of the "pleasure models"?


4. The Jurassic Park dinosaurs - Few can top all the heart warming, cold blooded, lawyer devouring fun that the reptilian genetic mistakes of Jurassic Park provided.


3. Mini Me - When the tiny version of Dr. Evil was first introduced, he reminded us all that the timeless comedy technique of violence toward midgets had not been lost to political correctness and that it was still funny.  Sorry, that was insensitive.  I should have said violence toward little people is still funny.


2. Boba Fett - One of the few redeeming qualities of the prequel trilogy was finding out more about this mysterious baddy's dark origins.  Of course, such enlightenment was hardly worth suffering through even the first episode, but now that we know he was a clone, he is definitely the most bad ass one in my book.


1. Dolly the sheep - Dolly is real and that's why she ranks number one.  Hooray for scientific progress that we may one day regret!  As an added bonus, in parts of Scotland Dolly is considered a "pleasure model."


This week's cool-ass thing you will never own in an Open PCR Thermal Cycler.  How often have you thought to yourself, if I could only replicate enough of this DNA sample, I could figure out exactly which of my roommates ate the last pickle out of my jar?  Yeah, me neither, which is why you will probably never plunk down the $600 bucks necessary to purchase the device that would allow you to turn that glob of saliva into a usable DNA sample size and crack the case.


This week's sign you are a nerd is that you shut down your website along with Wikipedia in order to protest the SOPA piracy bill.  I doubt that the inability of the world at large to read your musings about your cats carried much weight with the online community, but at least you tried to do your part in keeping copyrighted material in crappy, grainy, silhouettes walking in front of the screen form free, just the way it ought to be.  Keep fighting the good fight.


This week's nemesis is sleep.  I hate it, often avoid it, yet I need it.  There is so much to do like work, watch television, build Lego sets and work out, but not enough time to do it all and still get enough rest, so I usually skip the things I shouldn't like working out and building Lego sets.  When I try to burn the proverbial candle at both ends, I end up staggering through my day, having random conversations in half delirium that I barely remember like the time I spoke to my father-in-law on the phone about blueberry muffins when all the poor guy was trying to do was get a hold of my wife.  Curse you, vile slumber and your ability to turn my mind into mush when I done have lack of many enough you of.


This week's lesson learned is that dog poop freezes solid to concrete with a matter of minutes.  This could also have been written as, "Get it while it's hot!" but I figured it was gross enough as it was.


This week's equation helps one decide how manly the scarf they are considering wearing outside this winter should be:

M is the scale of manliness, which is completely arbitrary because we hate being locked into commitments.  You can determine it by taking the product of the number of people who will see you in public (p) times the percentage of said people who are likely to be in possession of a camera (c) and adding the amount of time in minutes you will be outside (T) then subtracting the distance in miles you are from the nearest sporting event (d) then multiply that entire result by your gender (g; female=0, male=5).  The higher the number, the more you need to stick with earth tones or just plain black in color and as itchy and rough looking a wool as possible for the material.  If the number is high enough, you may want to consider forgetting the scarf all together.


Finally, this week's Star Wars quote is dedicated to my wife who will be celebrating a special day this week: "The princess.  You have to take care of her."


Thank you for reading.  Come back soon.