A New Menace

A pair of seemingly unrelated news stories went largely unnoticed in the hue and cry around the Garden State's burgeoning educational crisis. If the two developments reach their logical synthesis, the implications are daunting. Or totally awesome, depending on your point of view.

Stanford researcher Ingmar Riedel-Kruse has successfully developed biotic videogames, allowing players to control the actions of living microorganisms to perform simple gaming tasks. Note that Riedel-Kruse is a real name, despite how close it sounds to Balki Bartokomous' pronounciation of ridiculous.

While Stanford pioneers the use of living creatures in gladatorial combat, raising the specter of mini-colosseums (colossi?) in every family room, our friends across the pond offer a humorous take on the ancient practice of fox hunting.


Iden, England's hounds are prohibited by law from hunting real foxes, so in the best tradition of Richard Dawson and Arnold Schwarzeneggar, the Coakham Hunt sends man's best friend over hill and dale in pursuit of man himself. Coakham's specially-trained bloodhounds hunt a pack of
humans, chasing the bleeding and panting homo sapiens for miles before tearing them limb from limb. (I assume this last part to be true - I stopped reading when I had enough material for this post.)

In this edition of G:TB's long-running series highlighting things that should make us all really, really paranoid, we offer a thought experiment about the potential conflation of these two modern-age curiousities. Three words: Human Pac-Man. Two words, depending upon how you feel about hyphens. Think about it, as you chuckle about the gene researchers playing God with the cute little paramecia in their laboratories in Palo Alto, and picture yourself being chased by a Hummer-sized amoeba while you have that gawdawful Pac-Man blaring in your head.

I think you all know what must be done. Riedel-Kruse can't be allowed to procreate. I've sent the Teej back to 1979 to stop him from being born. And to pick up some of those awesome Pittsburgh Pirates caps. Godspeed, my friend.