The Thin Yellow Line

As the football season comes to a close (finally), it seems fitting to draw attention to something that most of us barely even notice anymore. I don't watch football that much, but it's even hard for me to imagine life before The Yellow Line. Granted, we are only talking about ten years ago, but it's easy to forget hard times.

For those of you who live in holes (or Detroit), The Yellow Line shows us how far the team has to go to get a first down. Sometimes, there will also be a blue line to show the line of scrimmage, or if it's a fourth down, The Yellow Line will turn red (Danger!). The kicker is that it only shows up on TV. Even though it looks like it's actually there! This is the real reason people use to justify spending hundreds of dollars on high definition televisions as opposed to spending sixty-two dollars (I'm told) on football tickets. It's all because of the yellow line.

The computer system that makes it happen is actually called "1st & Ten" (those graphics nerds are so clever), and was developed by a company called Sportvision. It requires seven computers, five cameras, four people, and a whole bunch of technology that I don't feel like explaining. These people do though, so ask them. Here's a picture just to take up some space. See how The Yellow Line disappears behind the dude with the ball? It's' magical.


The Yellow Line may not make football any more bearable for non-football fans, but that's okay. There's plenty of other stuff to watch on big flat screen tvs. Like Super Bowl commercials.

The Revolution!

It's the biggest holiday since, well, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. January is already Black History Month, so why not make it official that January 20th is Barack Obama Day? It will just save us all time in the long run; this way, we won't have to remind all of the future presidents that they have a lot to live up to. Obama's transition to the White House has already been more favorably portrayed by the media than Bush's entire eight years in office. Not that that's really saying much. In an attempt to keep the past where it belongs, I will keep my mouth shut about the last eight years. Let's just say I no longer feel simultaneously embarrassed and compelled to leave the country.

There isn't really much that needs to be said here. Tomorrow, we will have a president who is not a crusty old white dude. Yay! This is clearly historical in and of itself. Our plantation-owning forefathers are probably turning in their crusty old white graves (dug tirelessly by slaves, most likely), but who cares. We are moving on and moving up.

Barack Obama has done what so many of us thought was impossible. He single-handedly (almost) dragged our country out of its cynical, unpatriotic stupor and got the young people to vote! And not only that; he got them to canvass, fundraise, organize, and most importantly, wear t-shirts with his face on them. Once you've got your own clothing line, that's at least a six month guarantee that your fans will stick by you. By then, all the crusty old white dudes will have realized that, indeed, the kids were all right.

So anyway - possible activities for future Barack Obama Days include: perusing the local humane society for hypo-allergenic orphaned puppies, riding in the front of a bus, visiting Hawaii, speaking in proper English, not throwing shoes, and attending a public reading of that superawesome victory speech that made us all cry somewhere around paragraph three.

We all have our own thoughts and feelings about our first African-American president, but we can all agree that January 20, 2009 is one of the most momentous days in American political history. I'm not much for patriotism, but tomorrow, I might just be proud to be an American (who knew?). Barack Obama doesn't have his own official holiday yet, but if he lives up to his promises, he'll deserve one. In the mean time, can we ride the Obama high all the way to 2013?

Yes we can!

Happy Barack Obama Day everyone!

Because we didn't have enough sheep already...

On July 5, 1996, I was eating a flaming watermelon. Well...not really. It was my brother's eighth birthday, and since he "doesn't like cake" for unknown reasons, we settled on a treat that required minimal effort as far as preparations go (the wax from the candles comes right off). In the height of our sibling rivalry, I wish I had been culturally aware enough to tell him that I was not celebrating his birthday with my enthusiastic watermelon consumption. It was, in fact, a much more important day (and certainly deserving of a slightly richer dessert).

Halfway across the world, in Edinburgh, other people were celebrating a birthday (dancing around in kilts and playing bagpipes, surely). The first cloned mammal, Dolly, had been born! Dolly was a sheep, cloned from a somatic cell of another sheep (quite predictably, also Dolly). It was a cell from a mammary gland, actually, which is why the Scottish people named her Dolly (as in "Dolly Parton sure has giant mammary gland cells!"). Apparently Pamela Anderson hadn't made it into Scottish pop culture yet and they were still listening to music from the late 60s. But you sure can see the resemblance - check it out:



Just kidding. I think.

Anyway, they cloned Dolly by taking the nucleus from the donor cell and implanting it into an unfertilized egg cell (sans its original nucleus). Then they stimulated that cell to divide with an electric shock, and eventually implanted it into a surrogate sheep uterus. Apparently this is a tough process to get right: Dolly was the only survivor of 227 cloning attempts. Oops. The guy whose brainchild (brainlamb?) this was has said that the process will probably never be efficient enough for use in humans. So sad; I was desperately hoping this was an actual possibility.

Dolly lived for six fulfilling years, during which she made six more baby sheep. Her breed is supposed to live for 12 years, but since she was living an extra life, six years of deja vu was probably plenty for her.

After Dolly, a dog named Snuppy (really...?) was successfully cloned in Korea. If dogs and sheep ever become endangered, we'll be able to bring them back, no problem. It's too bad that no one decided to put any serious effort towards cloning a more exciting animal, like a spider monkey or a tasmanian devil. Taxpayers would probably be a little more into the whole cloning thing if we all got to keep genetically identical (and possibly buxom) baby monkeys named Lindsay Lohan or Tara Reid.

And in case you were wondering, that sheep picture is actually Dolly. Her remains are on display at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, where she spent her whole second life. At least that's where her exterior remains are. Her insides? Probably haggis.