Happy Rebirthday??

I neglected to give any comment about my selection of Genetic Savings and Clone for this week's link. It's amazing to think that we've gone from some jiminy-cricket sideshow sheep cloning to the actual banking of human and pet DNA for legitimate rebirth. And this company is boasting the birth of its cloned kittens.

My cat Oggy turns 17 next week. Weird that I could send some of her DNA off to Sausalito and have her born again to some assembly line momma cat in a lab cage who just squeezes out kittens that aren't hers over and over.

I wonder... what if I cloned Oggy's clone, then cloned that clone, doing this over and over? Would I eventually have a kitten that recognized me at birth and automatically knew where the litterbox was? Or what if I had her fetal clone inserted back inside her -- allowing Oggy to give birth to herself?

Uh-huh, you stoners out there work on that one for a while...

Cloning a cat for science is one thing, but there's something kind of sick about cloning your own pet. My cloning Oggy would be a HUGE projection of my abandonment issues, not to mention a total disregard for her memory.

But the real reason I'd never do this is my deepest fear: that her clone will grow into a gargantuan evil mutant that shoots laser beams from her eyes and ravages Tokyo.

If that sounds far fetched, look again at the picture of the guy with the puppy on the Savings and Clone homepage. At first glance it looks like the dog is licking the guy's face as if saying "Thanks for bringing me back, I wuv wu all over again!" Actually the cloned mutant puppy is sucking the guys brains from his temple. That guy's not smiling, he's wincing in agony at the utter horror of his worst nightmares come true.

"What have you done?!" the puppy is saying.

"What have you DONE?!?!"