Toren Atkinson’s Absolute Blog

I can’t decide whether or not this more disturbing than traditional animal-killing:

SCIENTISTS FORECAST MEAT GROWN ON KITCHEN COUNTER

Here are some choice tidbits:

Scientists are trying to develop an industrial process that grows meat tissue from a few cells in a lab – or even at home, in a device like a bread maker.

Instead of being cut from a farm animal, the beef, pork or chicken would be grown in incubators from a few starter cells, a growth medium and some hormones to get the cells to divide.

“It has the taste and texture resembling the ground meat products that are already available,” such as hamburger or chicken nuggets, he said.

Researchers in the Netherlands have grown mouse meat and are now working on pork. Australian scientists served grown frog muscle tissue with apple brandy sauce at an exhibition in France in 2003. They said the meat tasted like jelly on cloth.

Mike’s blog link to a statement on the traditional definition of life in the bible (basically - life is in red blood, that’s why good Christians should eat flesh but let the blood “spill into the dust” (paraphrasing), and octopus and squid don’t have red blood so therefor they aren’t alive) led to me posting the link to The Octopus News Magazine Online TONMO.com which led to a careful discussion of religion vs science. I wasn’t going to just say “you religious people are delusional” so I skirted the whole religious issues to say:

Do whatever works for you to be a decent human being. If you have to wear a yellow t-shirt to avoid going on a stabbing spree, then far be it from me to tell you that yellow is a yucky colour. But don’t expect me to wear a yellow shirt. Conversely, if your belief in the Spaghetti Monster leads you to go on a bloody crusade, I’m against that.

Then there was some discussion about how much religion was responsible for violence in history. Clearly: lots. However, to think that getting rid of religion would end war and conflict in the world is specious. People are jerks and will fight over anything - land, skin colour, oil, sexual preference, women, etc etc etc.

And THEN somebody brought up this: “What lends the Bible credibility over the holy Koran, the Torah, the Egyption Book of the Dead, or the Greek pantheon of mythos? Holy texts depend on themselves as the base of their credibility.”

What’s interesting is that science textbooks are also bibles of a sort. Which is not to say that I believe they are sacred scriptures. My point is unless you are going to recreate every science experiment for yourself, you do have to take certain ‘tenets’ of science ‘on faith.’ Do I know for sure that quarks exist? No, but I put faith in science (generally speaking), and the reason for that is science’s foundation is one of logic, perception and constant analysis and revision. Christianity, on the other hand, is about wacky stretches of logic, unquestionable doctrine and outdated tradition.

On another note, who remembers MAOAM candies?

Jordan called me on being Mr Complain-o after he read the post I did on the Thickets, and he’s right, so I wanted to post a self-rebuttal to set the record straight. Obviously, if I’ve been in a band for 14 years and made next to no money on it, I’m not staying in the band to get rich and famous. I do it for the creative process which I love, performing, which I love (as long as it’s not unrequited love), and the satisfaction of a job well done (where applicable). My bandmates are all talented musicians - more so than me - and obviously it is a team effort to make the band work. So while I’m always striving to be better, and to diversify, I’m very pleased with and proud of being a member of The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. I guess the main point of my post was that, like everything, it has its frustrations and challenges. I didn’t mean to single anyone out, we are all stupid human beings, except for Mario who is a cyborg, with our own very special shortcomings. Being in a band is like being on a sports team with no coach, which means we’ve got to identify where we’re going ourselves and work together to get there.