My tweets

• Thu, 22:11: Almost Friday http://j.mp/qmMNjJ

Dear AT&T…

…about your dysfunctional marriage/parents playing favorites commercials? They’re not funny. They’re not edgy. They’re cruel. I don’t remember what you’re selling, but I do remember the sneer in that bitch of a wife’s voice when she tells her schlubby husband that she should have married someone else. I remember the look on his face, just as I remember the look on the little boy’s face when his parents announce that his older sister is their favorite.

For years, your cellphone commercials featured that batshit crazy mother who hoarded unused minutes and browbeat her husband and kids for wasting theirs. Now, we’re treated to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Mommy/Daddy Dearest. Who thinks up this stuff? Does every single person in your ad agency have a shitty marriage, or what?

I mute the damned things now as soon as they come on.

Mirrored from Kristine Smith.

Parasitic viruses, oh my!

I love Ed Yong’s blog, Not Exactly Rocket Science. He’s joined Alton Brown as a charter member of my Geeky Crush Club.

This one’s about parasites that influence the behavior of their hosts, including driving them to their deaths.

At the top of its plant, the caterpillar liquefies. Its body almost seems to melt. As it does, it releases millions of viruses, dripping them onto plants below and releasing them into the air. These viruses are the agents that compelled the caterpillar to climb, and eventually killed it. They are baculoviruses, and they cause a condition known aptly as Wipfelkrankheit – the German for “tree top disease”.

The baculoviruses are just some of the many parasites that change the behaviour of their hosts, and many of them trigger unusual tendencies to climb. The fungus Cordyceps unilateralis drives ants to bite into leaves around 25 centimetres above the forest floor. This zone has the perfect conditions for the fungus to develop its spore capsule, which erupts fatally through the ant’s head. Meanwhile, the Leucochloridium fluke cancels out a snail’s fear of bright lights, driving them to open spaces where they’re more readily eaten by birds – the fluke’s final host. Perhaps someday, scientists will decipher the genes that allow these parasites to take over minds as well as bodies.

Mirrored from Kristine Smith.