10 things you should learn

In lieu of writing anything with substance, I give on to you another list. I know I have promised some more videos of some of my stand up, and they are coming, I am just waiting until I nail a performance and have good footage of it.

This list came about when I was lying in bed coughing my guts up last night. I am sick. I don't get sick very often but I am sick. SA has a public holiday on Monday, the Fringe Festival is in town (the second biggest arts festival in the world), I have new jokes to prepare for a gig coming up, and my body has decided on being sick. If I didn't know better I would think my body is being a jerk.

1. Changing your name to Bob will not make you more buoyant. Palindromic, but not buoyant. 
2. Only make friends with people who are shorter than you, you will forever be their King. Plus you get to show off by getting things off shelves.
3. Exercising willpower is harder than exercise. I would rather eat a packet of Tim-Tams and run 8ks than do neither.
4. When life gives you lemons, open a market store and flog them for 50c each.
5. Economies come and go but jeans are forever, and sometimes that long between washes.
6. Pillow fights are only fun when your winning or you're all in underwear. In which case you're winning.
7. It's not the heat or the humidity that kills you, its constant need to tell me the weather on Facebook.
8. Bottled water is bad for you, because paying for it just proves you're an idiot.
9. Fitted sheets are only impossible to fold when you care.
10. I let someone walk a mile in my shoes. They got a new perspective, I got athletes foot.

Bee-n there, pollinated that

Science interests me. It is a human trait to want to know how shit works, and an engineering trait to find ways to exploit it so capitalists can make money from you. I came across an interesting article on the Discovery website about scientists at the University of Illinois looking into the risk taking behaviour of bees – I imagine because they have no beach to study the effects of bikinis and fun – and how it relates to risk taking behaviour in humans. (I’m sure there would be grants for the bikini study somewhere. Do Playboy offer a scholarship?)

At any point in every hive, 5-25% of bees are food scouts. These food scouts do not do the normal honey run like other bees. They are the hipsters of the hive; they will find a new source of food, tell all their friends, but never go back because all of their friends are now there and popular is uncool. I imagine using something similar to Facebook, maybe BeeBook, or checking in on OcelliBook if the bees knew the Latin name beach-lacking-scientists give for their face. (That is a case of trademark infringement Mark Zuckerberg’s lawyers would not want to touch… The Defence would like to release its opening statement your Honour. Attack my pretties!)

“You look at animals and they look really different and they act really different, but when you drill down deeper and look at the genomics, you find these deep commonalities” said Gene Robinson who is an entomologist, geneticist, and neuroscientist in charge of the study. The first thing I noticed when reading that quote is not the implications this find makes on what we believe makes humans human or that this man is obviously knee deep in bitches, is that he is a geneticist called Gene. That is like a Backhoe driver changing his name to Doug, or Footballer legally changing his name to “Sexual Assault”, or Chris Brown’s few remaining friends calling him “Punchy”.

Gene continues by saying “when you see this kind of result, you can say that personality is not a human invention”, I thought that would be obvious if you studied genes and was called Gene.

What the boffins did is find similarities between scouting bees, and other risk taking behaviour in mammals, including humans. People who are prone to alcoholism, gambling addictions, promiscuity, skydiving, Wall Street trading, or strip lawn bowls have a link to thrill seeking genes similar to those of the scouting bee. To translate, if scouting bees had a credit card, they would put it all on black while sculling vodka upside down after a bungee jump. Then they would post photos of their genitals on OcelliBook.

The interesting thing is that the scientists were able to tweak the genes patterns implicated in risk taking through experimentation, and increase the likelihood that the bees would become food scouts, and therefore increase the likeliness of them becoming risk takers. This is an amazing break through and good news for Gold diggers who are thinking about buying base jumping equipment for reluctant husbands.

 Now I don’t know what they mean by “tweaking genes”, but I believe it to be similar to “tweaking nipples”, and that’s the kind of science I can get behind, and probably more likely to get Playboy funding.

Check out what Hipster bees would look like at Pish Posh