August 2006 »

Author: David Plotz
Publisher: Random House
Rating:
Buy The Genius Factory on Amazon.com

Every parent’s dream is to have a child that is healthy, bright, and good-looking. Robert Graham’s dream was to have a planet of children that were healthy, bright, and good-looking. What if, he wondered, I could, using the magic of masturbation and liquid nitrogen, mate the best men and women from all over the country, and thus produce a generation of perfect children?

The Genius Factory began as a series of articles on Slate.com, collectively known as “Seed”, and tells the tale of the Repository for Germinal Choice, more popularly known as the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. The bank was started by a man on a mission to improve the quality of human stock (thank god he was a benevolent sort) and, according to Plotz, revolutionized sperm banking as we know it.

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Despite my best efforts to cook and feed myself well, I still wind up eating “effort-free food”—frozen pizza, microwave dinners, you name it—every so often. Usually because I don’t have the time and energy to prepare a nice meal, but sometimes because they look so darn tasty. These Hot Pockets® and the Digiorno® pizza caught my eye on my last trip to the supermarket.

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I was making my morning blog rounds and came upon this post on Dan Drezner. He quotes the New York Times quoting Joe Biden saying,

“My problem with Wal-Mart is that I don’t see any indication that they care about the fate of middle-class people,” Mr. Biden said, standing on the sweltering rooftop of the State Historical Society building here. “They talk about paying them $10 an hour. That’s true. How can you live a middle-class life on that?”

As a commenter on Dan Drezner noted, this strikes me as “extremely odd”. No, forget odd. I’m going to go with “ridiculous”.

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