Carl Zimmer wrote a book. Of course, that’s no reason to hate him, and I don’t hate him for that.
His book is all about Escherichia coli (“E.coli”). The friggin’ “Microsoft” of the biotech world. Accursed E. coli, hogging up all the print space and protocol development and sucking up electricity for -80°F freezers. I mean, come on people! You could be doing transformation of B. subtilis and related organisms instead, which form nice, sturdy endospores which you can dry out and keep in an any cool, dry place, no -80°F freezer needed! Or you could use something like Agrobacterium tumefaciens, and as a bonus be able to then transfer your nice transformed genes into plants, too! But NOOOOOooo….it’s always “E.coli, E.coli, E.coli.” DAMN YOU, E.COLI!
Of course, none of that is Carl Zimmer’s fault, either, so this is also no reason to hate him.
Now, if his book was lousy, that MIGHT be a reason to hate him, but as far as I can tell there’s no reason to think the book is lousy, so this is no reason to hate him either. In fact, that’s kind of the problem.
No, the reason I Hate Carl Zimmer is that he’s written a book about friggin’, stage-hogging E.coli…and I want it. (Well, a copy of it anyway.) It sounds like a very interesting book. I feel like a Republican who wants a copy of “The Audacity of Hope”. Or a Democrat who wants to plan a vacation to visit the George W. Bush Presidential Library. The cognitive dissonance torments me, and it’s all Carl Zimmer’s fault! CURSE YOU CARL ZIMMER!
Okay, got that out of my system. A review might follow eventually if I manage to get a copy of the book. Meanwhile, for a change of pace, anybody want to hear about my Asterisk setup? Or should I just get back to the fermentation stuff?
P.S. Here’s a bit of trivia for you: “Frig” is apparently an old-English word meaning “to wiggle”…
Asterisk? Why not? Do you just have it for your home phone, or what?
It’s actually my answering machine – which was harder to figure out than it sounds. (That is, it was hard to get it to act just like an off-the-shelf answering machine, not that it was hard to get it to answer the phone and take messages.) Well, it’s doing some other things too, and will be doing a lot more in the future as I have time to play with it, but at it’s core it’s my ridiculously-powerful answering machine.
With infinitely more votes for (thanks!) than against, I’ll go ahead and do a post on Asterisk later…