Another notch in the single-tasker’s belt

(I realized this morning that many of my own words, on this blog at least, are reactions to the words and thoughts of others. No man is an island.)

From “Ear Plugs to Lasers: The Science of Concentration” was in the NYT today. This was a very interesting article to me, for a few reasons.

1. This is more support for a lifestyle of single-tasking.

2. The problem is clearly defined, and requires little external evidence; everyone feels unproductive in this fast-paced world of progress and production. Everyone. Problem defined: we can’t pay attenti… hmm. I’m hungry. I need to pay some bills too. And get gas. No not that kind of gas, got plenty of that. I need to finish my Lewis lecture, and get immunizations, and… oh, blog.

3. The article comes so close to suggesting what I think is the only solution: clear your life; change your attitude toward things; reevaluate; reset; develop the virtue of contemplation (thinking long and lovingly about X); have a disposition of focus; today’s troubles are enough; the moment’s troubles are enough.

4. But it doesn’t suggest that. It shouts out to “meditation” but other than that, expects that technology (externalities) are able to fix us, without a meaningful change from within. Put in ear plugs; attach “a frikkin’ laserbeam to your head” to neurologically change your brain to pay attention. I wish I was kidding, but this is how twacked we’ve gotten. That’s transhumanism – this device would take us one step closer to merging into an unholy chimera of man and machine. Just wait for the suggestion of an implant.

5. Cool shout outs to William James and Milton, but I’m not sure if the context works to apply their thoughts. (I’ve never read either of those quotes though…)

6. I am (regardless of my blogbashings) supremely guilty of multi-tasking. But when I can sit and focus for a large block of time (the book/article suggests 90 minutes, but I’m thinking more like 2-4 hours) on the top priorities of my professional, vocational life… Oh! The happy state! I feel whole. I feel united.

Theoretical notch or not, this doesn’t change the fact that we are a culture of divided individuals. Say what you will about “connection” or “unity” with others… we need wholeness and unity within ourselves. (And something tells me that the two are more intimately related than I already think.)

Alas! Modernity! Part 1 of 2 (The Prose)

Oh, blessed and damned Machine Age! Hearken! You’ve heard of your futility before. I merely – pray not vainly – repeat:

‘There must be a good side somewhere to this revolution,’ said Vertue. ‘It is too solid – it looks to lasting – to be a mere evil…”

The Guide laughed. ‘You are falling into their own error,’ he said. ‘The change is not radical, nor will it be permanent. That idea depends on a curious disease which they have all caught – an inability to disbelieve advertisements. To be sure, if the machines did what they promised, the change would be very deep indeed. There next war, for example, would change the state of their country from disease to death. They are afraid of this themselves – though most of them are old enough to know by experience that a gun is no more likely than a toothpaste or a cosmetic to do the things its makers say it will do.

‘It is the same with all their machines. Their labor-saving devices multiply drudgery; their aphrodisiacs make them impotent: their amusements bore them: their rapid production of food leaves half of them starving, and their devices for saving them have banished leisure from their country. There will be no radical change.

‘And as for permanence – consider how quickly all machines are broken and obliterated. The black solitudes will some day be green again, and of all cities that I have seen these iron cities will break most suddenly.’

C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress, Book X, Chapter vi; On the futile shift from classical to scientific education

Tasty, iddn’t it? Part 2 coming soon.

Stem Cells: A Month Later, An Update

So, to update. More of my thoughts have been published by the CBC via their weekly e-newsletter. Check out part 1 and part 2 via the CBC.

But there’s more already! The NIH (National Institutes of Health – the organization behind the regulation and funding of U.S. federal scientific research) has published draft guidelines for ongoing stem cell research. This is their response to Obama’s commission back in March. These are only draft guidelines, so we’ve yet to see how the final draft will look, but…

Here they are.

I’m happy. All things considered, there appear to be significantly strong guides and boundaries for exactly what sort of stem cells may be used in therapeutic experiments.

Big Idea #1

Most importantly: Embryos created solely for the purpose of being destroyed in research is still out-of-bounds (this is the work of the “Dickey Wicker” if any of you are familiar with the unfortunate name, but not the actual work of the amendment).

Now, there will be backlash on this. There already is. Stanford researchers, Colorado representatives and Hollywood actors all hate this. This is a major disappointment for them. Simply proof that they are not willing to reach across divides and find ethically defensible means of doing therapeutic research with stem cells (adult, cord blood, induced pluripotent stem cells).

And we can expect the complaining to continue. Jennifer Lahl, national director of the CBC, mentioned to me yesterday at lunch that the pool made available by these guidelines still leaves researchers vying and competing for precious raw material to experiment on. That’s why they want to create them on their own (through human cloning – also known as somatic cell nuclear transfer – SCNT).

All the complaining, in the midst of getting a bunch more government money, just heightens my disgust that they want to take life into their own hands.

Big Idea #2
And that’s the not-surprising bad news. There is now more federal funding available for embryo-destructive research, and more lines of stem cells available to destroy. But! the silver lining: In order for researchers to obtain these embryos they need permission based on informed consent from the parents of the embryo.

I remember, these embryos are the leftovers from fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization (IVF). So, think of the 2nd through 8th octuplets. In a normal (whatever that means) IVF treatment, only one embryo is implanted and brought to pregnancy. The other embryos (created just to “make sure” that the customer gets the goods she’s purchasing) are not ever implanted. They just get frozen, and some are thawed for research. Others die in the thawing process.

(This should highlight some serious problems with IVF. It’s not as easy as, “they help infertile couples have babies” – there are very small members of the human community involved here, and their existence demands our respect.)

But now, the parents (the patrons of the fertility treatment) will have a say as to how their non-implanted embryos – their CHILDREN – will spend the rest of their lives.

The positive side of silver lining: Instead of the doctors and researchers and their wallets and budgets deciding the fate of the child, the choice is in the hands of parents.
The negative side of silver lining: The fate of the child – the choice for their life or death – the vocation of their existence! – is in the hands of the parents!

And so now, this should be worrisome to you, dear reader. We’re hardly even talking about the NIH guidelines anymore, but I’ll end with this. The stem cell debate may have more to do with issues of the family than we previously ever thought. Scientific and moral and political and cultural things may be more connected and interdependent than we thought.

But remember, these are just draft guidelines – we’ll see what’s in the final. Will Marty McFly get his way? (Oprah’s Doc says no.)

Stem Cells: And So It Begins

I’ve been eager to see what actually came of Obama’s executive order and memo. I’d like to round off my previous three posts about this stuff with some more general comments.

(BTW – this guy’s actually talking about nature of the embryo, which is way cool! He also gets into IVF issues – which is too much to chew for now.)

I shall start thusly: I do not like false dichotomies. I believe they are dangerous to humanity. (E.g. faith vs. reason, public vs. private, sacred vs. secular, etc.)

“It has often been said, and certainly not without justification, that the man of science is a poor philosopher.” – Albert Einstein, “Physics and Reality” (1936) [Okay, it's slightly out of context... look it up.]

Summaries of Today’s Executive Action
Order: “Yay stem cell research; we need more of it; remove limits [i.e. restrictions of federal funds and limited number of researchable embryonic stem cell lines] on “scientific inquiry” for the “benefit of humankind; human embryonic stem cell research (hESCR) is AOK within the law; guidance left to National Institutes of Health (NIH) to figure out – due in 120 days; Bush’s restrictions/limits officially revoked.”

Memo: “America relies on science and its progress to help form policy; the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy has 120 days to figure out how to “guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch” and share that with the Prez.”

Thoughts About the Order
I’ve said my piece before, but I want to reiterate the need for understanding what an embryo is. Greg Koukl wittingly points out that the answer to the question “Can I kill it?” depends on another bit of information… “WHAT is it?”

This order will change some things. Granted, it’s not entirely clear what the NIH will come out with in four months, but it seems safe to predict that:

Federal funds (lots more than the hundreds of millions already provided) will be doled out to researchers working on human embryos. Think about this figure: a piece of $10 billion over two years… granted to the NIH as part of the stimulus package.

Frozen embryo lines (that were created at fertility clinics or elsewhere after August 9, 2001) will now be available to scientists to “study” (when EVER did “studying” imply destruction? Only evil circumstances.)

Now, for the cloning comment today.
Obama brought up cloning (proving that stem cell issues at least beg the cloning question), admitting his belief that in it’s reproductive form, it is dangerous and wrong. But please note that cloning already exists. It’s called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). If “new lines of embryos are created” it will be by this process, which takes a bodily cell from an adult human, and injects it into the nucleus of a human egg, tricking the egg to think the somatic cell is sperm. At that point the egg is fertilized – you’ve got a clone. It’s an embryonic clone, but it’s still a clone.

Now, it’s good to know the Prez doesn’t like reproductive cloning, but he didn’t mention therapeutic cloning (SCNT for the purposes of making more embryos to study and break to pieces for their pluripotent cells). And he doesn’t seem to have a problem with that.

But what would the difference be? It brings us back to THE NATURE OF THE EMBRYO… again. If human life starts at fertilization (nod to the National Academy of Sciences), you’ve got a human clone whether it’s for therapeutic research (the clone is born to die) or for reproduction (the clone is born to live). Now, I am entirely against cloning, but certainly a live clone is better than a dead clone, right? And either way – whether therapeutic or reproductive, there is an issue with commodifying human life. The reproductive clone is a commodity: it is a synthesized, purchased human life. The therapeutic clone is also a commodity as well: it is also a synthesized, purchased human life. The difference lay only in the use. One’s purpose for living is satisfying an infertile couple with a child, the other’s fate is disassembly and then injection into the spine or heart or brain of an afflicted consumer.

So, Prez, do you hate therapeutic cloning just as much. Please say yes.

All in all, this is just the beginning of a four-month to four-year to God-knows-how-long drama over the lives and fate of the youngest and most vulnerable of our human community: the embryo.

Thoughts About the Memo
Now this is quite possibly more far-reaching than the Order today, simply because it’s about a reformulation of “scientific integrity” in politics. I’m a little iffy about this, and will obviously need to know more, and of course it depends on what shape the executive recommendations end up taking. Suffice it for now to say, there was NO MENTION of ethics in the Memo (though plllenty of musings in the press and the Prez’s comments about today’s actions).

I’m all for restoring integrity to science. But matters of integrity are ethical matters. I hope some of the guidelines help to foster more open dialogue and better communication and connecting and integrating of ethics with science. But the Barack himself railed against a “false choice” between science and morality… as his REASON for lifting the restrictions. No, it’s not one or the other, but the Bush restrictions came much closer to “neutral” than Obama’s “emancipation” – he’s already chosen a side: science.

I’m reeeeeeally hoping that the President’s Council on Bioethics remains in tact. They should be working intimately with the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the NIH. Lord have mercy.

Issues I’m Still Researching and Still Thinking About
There are are few unknowns for me still (I am, after all – GASP! – cognitively limited, which I am joyfully struggling to accept). Some you, my dear reader, might be able to correct, which I invite, and some I think require closer philosophical consideration:

Will new lines of embryos now be created (i.e., for the sole purpose of being destroyed in research/therapy)? Did the lift allow for that?

How authoritative and far-reaching will the NIH guidelines be? What is their potential to enact ethical restrictions/limits?

There’s a lot of “the embryos will be destroyed anyway” talk; is this really a legitimate justification for then destroying them?

When Obama and his cabinet (and the media and bloggers and such) refer to “political influence” do they also mean “ethical influence”? This is a nagging question about the nature and efficacy of politics to allow different disciplines to engage (e.g., ethics and science).

A litany of other questions and issues about integrating ethics and science and policy and philosophy and theology and blogging and neck-beards (my latest craze).

Ultimately, my position on how to conduct stem cell public policy will depend on (in a sort of supplementary way) the answers to these questions, as well as my grounding belief on the matter: that “caring for each other and easing human suffering” (Obama’s words) demands that no human should ever be abused as a means to such care or ease of suffering. If embryos count as human life, then we need to care for them and ease their suffering.

The Wonderful Paradox of It All
And paradoxically, I’ve dedicated my life to One who did just such a thing. He certainly was abused as a means to great ends. And was so voluntarily, by His own design.

Stem Cells: The Masters Are Finally Free!

Shameful Emancipation

“Hallelujah, this marks the end of a long and repressive chapter in scientific history,” said stem cell researcher Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass. “It’s the stem-cell Emancipation Proclamation.”

It’s here.

So much for “restoring scientific integrity.” That’s right, the scientists – the masters – are finally free. Emancipated to more effectively and rampantly confine, shackle, and strip for parts the weakest and most vulnerable of the human community – human organisms at the earliest stage of life – the slaves.

That’s classy: hail Obama’s move tomorrow as a virtuous and courageous exclamation of freedom. Lanza, your parallel is folly. And worse, I fear your analogy is purposefully backwards: the slavemaster is declared free. Free from that dastardly, cursed concept of ethics; free from that burdensome and annoying responsibility for the weakest of our human family.

Finally right and wrong, the metaphysics of the person and the nature of humanity are no longer burdens to the scientist. Observe carefully:

“Public policy must be guided by sound scientific advice,” said Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, discussing the order and memorandum Sunday.

Melody Barnes of Obama’s Domestic Policy Council added that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will set standards for federal science advisers, insulating them from political interference.

Noble Harold, and what shall guide your scientific advice? Will your Council also be insulated from ethical interference?

Needed: A Different Conversation
As long as the conversation continues to be about “science” – the usefulness of these “clumps of cells” – such critiques of embryonic stem cell research will continue to be ridiculed as anti-science, misinformed, and even evil. “How could you stand in the way of CURES!?! Precious CURES! Health! Wellness! Better-than-wellness! Limitlessness! Nay – immortality!”

To which, I wonder, “How could you stand aside at the pillaging of the weak and defenseless?”

I’ve railed for the last three posts on this: The conversation needs to be about the moral status and nature of humanity. Interestingly enough, the National Academy of Sciences has something to contribute.

“In medical terms, embryo usually refers to the developing human from fertilization (the zygote stage) until the end of the eighth week of gestation when the beginnings of the major organ systems have been established.”

Fertilization is conception, the only sensible point (scientifically, medically, philosophically, theologically, sociologically, ethically and politically) at which full-fledged membership to the human community should be granted. (That membership should grant the appropriate rights to humans 80 years after birth, 18 years after birth, 18 days prior to birth and 18 seconds after conception.)

I’m looking forward to this conversation. In the face of widespread disagreement, will we prudently give the benefit of the doubt (what little there is) to the entity in question: the embryo?

If you guys ever come to question my personhood, I hope you’d give that benefit to me, and not use a destructive percentage of my cells to inject into someone else. At least give me the choice my humanity secures, a choice that we currently do not respect among 21 (and soon to be hundreds more) lines of microscopic humanity.

Stem Cells: This is Happening Friends

Apparently, on Monday, Obama will undo a legitimate good deed done by Bush. Read all about it.

Bush made some big mistakes. The stem cell funding/research restriction was not one of them. Note: The restrictions weren’t even a ban (as pointed out by Jennifer Lahl at this link); federal and private funds were still doled out; it essentially amounted to a moratorium on created further lines – more human lives, who would be alive for the sole purpose of serving other ends. Sounds a lot like the abolition of man to me.

The word is “Embryonic stem cells offer promising results.” But so far, even with years of research, that’s it: a promise. I am tired of promises. Science sure is investing a lot of faith in these small humans. They’re even better politicians and PR people than they are scientists.

I wonder if the cure for Parkinson’s was known to be available simply by dismembering infants for their magical cells, if that would garner as much support as embryonic stem cell research. Of course, we’ve never gotten to clinical trials for that, so that’d be ridiculous to assume. Pardon me.

Again, the issue is not consequences. Whatever spinal injury, Parkinsons, diabetes, etc. patients who might benefit from embryonic stem cells will live, but not without blood on their hands.

The issue is the nature of the embryo – that thing you’re dicing up in a Petri dish.

Oh, and, please excuse me, I simply forgot that we’ve got federal dollars to spare.

Lord help us.

An Update: The BarackBerry [not my pun, thankfully]

UPDATE to my previous post: “The BlackBerry Prez.“: Saw this today. Bummer for Barack. No doubt, there’s more to rant on, but I’ll let a little out with this… our President is forced (by nature of his occupation, of course) to multi-task like crazy. Should he also be checking email, texting and poking his 1,092,595 friends (a mixed metaphor I realize poking is for facebook) during boring cabinet meetings?

I also find it discouraging that, for all the reasons it’d be bad for #44 to have a “BarackBerry,” this NYT article doesn’t even consider the problems associated with any old schmoe having an iPhone or other PDA, hand-held, etc. We are more and more a culture of puny attention-span… our knowledge goes no further than Google’s top hits and Wikipedia’s wisdom, and our virtue no deeper than Tyra Banks’ True Beauty (a new TV shoe that I haven’t watched, I’m embarrassed to know about, and is effing flawed because it is searching for the most “inner-beautiful” beautiful person – there are no uglies, my friends…). So effed.

Here’s to single-tasking, my new and only life-pursuit… among others. Doh.

I’m sure I didn’t coin the phrase itself, but I’m considering a disciplined, full conversion to the cult of single-task. Might be a lonely cult. We’d wear dockers with big, white sneakers and watch the sky! Anybody so crazy as to suggest doing one thing at a time is positively a weirdo cult member.

Barack, it’s not so bad. We can be friends, and actually talk face(book) to face(book)! Aye.

If Love is a Brain-state, then Who the Hell Are You?

Update (January 13, 2009): Now the NYT has to give their two cents. Same problem though…

Today, the BBC ran an article about love! But really, the research they highlight isn’t all that new (nor, for that matter, is MOST “news” very new in our speedy modern world).

For quite a while now (several decades at least, and for the past 100 years at most), biological naturalists, scientific materialists and physicalists, in an effort to explain the more mysterious things of life, have sought to reduce love to mere chemical causal chains. In a world that consists entirely of physical matter, that’s the best way they’ve come up with to deal with love, morality, thoughts and consciousness (or “intentionality”): reducing it to physical processes.

Ahhh... love. Isn't that sweet?

This of course is more manageable from a scientific perspective. If love is a brain-state, it will appear on on MRIs and CAT scans, which make it observable in a way that doesn’t actually require human moral sense. If you can identify a particular hormone or chemical, say oxytosin, you might even start thinking about ways to manipulate or control that substance in real organisms to play cupid. This already exists in many perfumes, meant to be an aphrodisiac.

The fundamental issue in all of this is control. Modern man is in search of rational-technical control – over every aspect of his life. And of course love is top of mind. For all the scientific control he exerts, I fear that many a scientist or biological naturalist has had some difficulty in controlling their life in such a way as to get a girl.

Which makes this statement, well, a little creepy…

Professor [Nick] Bostrom [a prominent Oxford professor, and supporter of transhumanism] believes it will become increasingly possible to manipulate the neurological mechanisms that play a role in romantic attachment. “Used wisely, such pharmacology could enhance human experience and mitigate unnecessary suffering. However, this kind of manipulation would raise a thicket of ethical and cultural issues, which would need to be carefully explored.”

At least he sees the thicket, but his optimism betrays his bias. If “such pharmacology could ENHANCE human experience and MITIGATE unnecessary suffering,” it could no less DEGRADE and DESTROY the human experience of love, and DIRECTLY CAUSE suffering. I trust he’s not intending or advocating further honing of the date-rape pill, but I don’t think the correlation isn’t all that far off.

The problem, again, is the lust for control. Not only over ourselves, but over others. Our loved ones will someday have been a carefully manipulated family of well-trained and overly-drugged physical organisms. But that’s life in a physical world. If every emotion or sentiment or virtue or value is just a causal chemical chain, so would be the personhood and identity of the human holding those (apparently, but not really) non-physical thoughts or emotions.

C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, cogently and sharply contends:

“We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may “conquer” them. We are always conquering nature, because “Nature” is the name for what we have , to some extent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature. Every conquests over Nature increases her domain. The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyse her. [And I'd add here, that LOVE does not become Nature till we can chemically recognize and manipulate and direct it.] The wrestling of powers from Nature is also the surrendering of things to Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same.”

Evaluating this process of man conquering Nature, “It is the magician’s bargain,” writes Lewis. “Give up your soul, get power in return.”

“But once our souls [and maybe, as Wendell Berry might identify, our living souls], that is, ourselves have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man’s power to treat himself as a mere “natural object” and his own judgments of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will…”

I once wrote a short article on raw material, influenced in part by Lewis’ quote here.

“…The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners.”

Sometimes I get the feeling that many many people aren’t worried about these sort of things. This is an insecurity of mine. Maybe I’m alone on this (not that the company of people like my wife and C.S. Lewis, among other few, but good friends, isn’t uplifting). Or maybe those many people – some laughing and some scorning, some Christian and some not, some cool and some not – simply lack careful imagination.

Yours with brain-state XYZ,
Evan

The BlackBerry Prez.

Well, I’m just not sure what to make of this.

“[Obama], like President Bush before him, is being advised for security reasons and his own legal protection to refrain from sending e-mail during his presidency.”

What do you all think? I’ll listen first on this one, then comment.

Brains, Machines and Humanity

I like bioethics. Especially when I get to talk about brains-machine hybrids and Shatners and most excellent evil brains.

Jennifer Lahl pointed out this post on The Scientist (an online life sciences mag).

The post read:

We’re writing a feature to check in on scientists working on bridging the gap between brain and machine. We’re planning on asking them, “What’s taking so long?”

When I think of brain-machine interfaces, a couple of things come to mind: The Borg from Star Trek, whose neural implants give it the ability to communicate telepathically as well as control implanted tazers and pincers. Then there’s The Matrix, where a plug in the back of the brain connects the user to an elaborate virtual world.

While scientists work out the kinks of making the brain connection, we want to hear your thoughts on what kinds of problems this technology should tackle first. Some readers suggested “body piercings that have a legitimate use,” such as, say gaming or text messaging. Others want to see the technology help amputees and paralyzed individuals regain motor control.

What’s on your wish-list?

My Response
I admit, I was feeling quite saucy. Curious what you think.

Rather than asking, “What’s taking so long?” – you might consider asking a different sort of question. Maybe something like:

Where does the human element fit into the “brain-machine” hybrid?

How much of your brain are you willing to “lift” or “soop-up” before enough becomes too much?

What about the mind? What non-physical consequences will this have on your human test subjects?

And finally, the non-so-but-should-be obvious: Is this okay? Is this good? Is this helpful? Is this right? Is this human?

For all the “unbiased” science that purports to approach biotechnology and other research and experimentation, I don’t hear these questions asked by the researcher or supporter very often.

Nevermind telepathy and virtual reality. I’m actually quite surprised that this passes as “science.” I mean, you did reference Star Trek and The Matrix. Remember, that’s William Shatner and Keanu Reeves you’re talking about. What fine representatives for the cause! That’s Hollywood-celebrity-pseudoscience on its very best day, imagined by a scriptwriter – not a qualified, well-thought-out, informed scientist.

Now, I can appreciate prosthetic limbs for those in need, but augmenting our bodies for “super-human” strength and our memory and other naturally human limitations gets very sketchy, and I’m a little confused at the unfettered acceptance of many “scientific” communities. There is an air of “helping people” – but will this really help? Will it solve all their present problems, and create many more? With all the hunger and death, maybe science could come up with a better, more humane response to help people.

I’m also quite surprised at the thought of “gaming and text messaging” being considered a “legitimate use” for brains teaming up with machines. You have made many 14-year-olds very excited. Now they may literally never have to lift a finger.

And, in general, I’m disappointed in the “rational, unbiased, progressive” science community for conflating some really basic terms. My scientist friends, “can” does not equal “should.” And we’d all do well to spend more time thinking about the “should” at least as much as the “can.” This, I fearfully predict, will appear preposterous to most biotech scientists; and that would simply prove my point.

But you did, after all, ask me “What’s on your wish-list?”

And that is a very simple answer, friends. I want to become Krang, the Evil Brain from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, that lived inside the big Devo-esque, alien wrestler-man’s stomach.