#215 Ark Angles

The long rain streak in the Great Northwest is over. More than a month without a completely clear day. Wags had it that the reason the boat show closed early was not that the Seahawks had to play a playoff game but because the boatmakers all went back to the factories to retool so they could start turning out arks. Personally, always being a god-fearing man, and wishing to keep one step ahead of any post-prophecies doled out by Pat “after the fact” Robertson, AKA the Lord’s personal armchair quarterback, I set about collecting all sorts of animals two by two. But there are a lot of angles about this Ark thing that have to be considered. I’m in just a touch of a quandary about some of them. I’m not sure what to do with mushrooms. The last time I heard, fungi had been re-classified into a sort of gray zone between plant and animal. I’m also not completely sure what to do with animals that reproduce asexually. Is it still important to have both sexes because the Lord is interested in preserving genetic diversity, or is he just looking to preserve the species per se? And assuming his intelligent design is to dismiss the whole evolution thing is he completely comfortable with the Darwinian notion of species at all? In any event, since I don’t actually have an ark yet, I’ll have storage issues. And since my homeowner’s covenants don’t allow for the corralling of domestic animals in my yard and the mini-storage places frown on livestock as well, I’ve been pretty much restricted to collecting our smaller friends two by two. Although I have do have a pair of possums trained to come round for my own personal version of Fear Factor bug stew every night. An unintentionally happy result of bad planning. Let’s just say I collected two flies a little too early. Mostly I’ve been collecting smaller animals, like your amoebae and your paramecia. And I’ve got a petri dish of E coli going, but as with the flies, keeping the population down to just two individual bacterium has been difficult. I’m guessing on day 39 or so I’ll join the cull the culture club. Meantime I got my eyes peeled for a good flatworm couple. Or, if I can only manage to find one, I can cut it in half and use the growbacks for a perfectly matched pair. Even better than E-Harmony. How about E Flat Harmony. But my most difficult question is whether I should attempt to find animals that are already in gestation. Horns of a dilemma to be sure. There won’t be a lot of extra room on the ark for elaborate mating displays. And those animals that have to wipe out an adversary in order to be able to go into full rut will be no be happy campers. But on the other horn, a pregnant animal would be eating for two as it were, so logistically, that makes three animals of the same species, hmm... Maybe I had better give Pat Robertson a call on this one.
America, ya gotta love it.