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February 11, 2006
The Love Lives of the Prokaryotes
If your morning has not started off well; if your coffee was cold or if your tea was flat or if your eggs ended up running all over your plate and colliding with your cereal because today you thought that you’d 'go without that whole bowl thing', just stop for a second and think to yourself “Boy, I’m lucky that I don’t spend all of my time obsessing over the lives of bacteria.”
I say this to myself at least once a day. There are limits to human capacity for caring and bacteria fall somewhere into the murky depths below this level of care. First of all, there are millions and kajillions of bacteria. And they are dying all of the time, wiped from the face of the earth by the sole of your shoe or the random swipe of a Lysol-soaked cloth.
Also, it would be impossible to learn all of their names. An enterprising scientist could invent nametags for the larger bacteria but I don’t think that we will ever get lapel pins small enough to make the smaller Prokaryotes comfortable. Notice that I’m ignoring the problem of sewing shirts for each Streptococci or Leucothrix. I’d dwell on it but I have no idea what constitutes bacteria fashion.
Bacteria fashion can be important. How do other bacteria respond when a given bacteria achieves fame and fortune? Namibiensis, for example, and S. pneumoniae are both pretty famous. Do Bacteria watch Star Search? I'll bet they do. Actually, I think they watch Cribs and gasp when taken through the palatial renovations— new veranda, the bathroom with a Jacuzzi— inside Bill Murray's sinuses.
Someday, Topps will publish bacteria themed baseball cards. This will be the biggest card collection in the universe. There are, after all, over 9,000 types of bacteria and there are, according to one researcher, 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bacteria on the planet which means that we would need at least a trillion playing cards just to cover the bacterial film and sports stars and the bacteria that show up on the lifetime channel romance shows (bacteria find the term “Soap Opera” to be offensive).
We could sell the baseball cards in old-school bubblegum packs. Each pack could cost a dollar and would weigh thirty pounds and it is still unlikely that anyone could collect them all. Kids would wade through hundreds of cards just to find the ones that caused disease. Maybe each card could come with a scratch-off bacterial sample in order to promote immersive learning.
Jibber Jabberin | By jb | 07:51 AM
Comments
The cards could also double as bacterial cruise liners and make a fortune sending the leisured set of E. coli around the world. Maybe enterprising administrators could hire a strep band to play classic numbers such as "Fever" so the infectuous guests had something to do when they grew tired of shuffleboard.
Posted by: funke at February 11, 2006 09:03 AM
Why would have cereal on a plate? I can't understand the rest because my brain hurts from the cereal plate.What about bowls...you don't like them?
Posted by: I had Neko Case's Baby at February 11, 2006 09:20 AM
JB, I found this poetry site (www.everypoet.com/pffa) that has a JohnBoddie on it, critiquing away. Is it you? He doesn't write like you, but you never know...
Posted by: spangle dwarf at February 20, 2006 03:41 PM
Nope, no poetry criticism from me. I've googled myself, though, and I'm apparently not alone in cyberspace
Posted by: jb at February 20, 2006 07:37 PM
Apparently not! You shouldn't feel bad though; the other JB seems like a smart guy, although maybe a bit of a jerk. He's from PA.
Posted by: et phonehome at February 21, 2006 08:05 AM