For a Timepiece Never Changes Pace

So True!

Listening to - Treasure - Cocteau Twins

Wrote a poem about sharks yesterday inspired in some way by the article about the surfer who drove to get help after a small shark attached itself to his leg and wouldn't let go. Apparently squirting fresh water into the gills gets them off. I will have to remember that for the next time I go surfing; there are Grey Nurse sharks all along the Merseyside coast you know.

The big news of course is the cloning. I have an intense moral dilemma over this because it seems that the idea for this is to produce stem cells for creating body tissue for medical use rather than to create copies of anyone. I can see that these are human beings in a lot of people's minds but do the possible benefits outweigh these moral arguments? My wife is adamant that we should not do this and sometimes, when I think that a syringe of salt-solution is all that is needed to cure some diseases that cause huge amounts of misery, I wonder if we have our priorities right. Food is all we need to remove a great deal of suffering and surely we should concentrate in this first rather than finding solutions which will only help a few people, mostly in the Western world.

We do of course need to progress or else nothing would ever get done. I may have mentioned about my wife's statement about spending the money we spend on space research and exploration on more pressing terrestrial matters I countered with the view that taking that to its logical extreme would have left us in a swamp of decay sometime about 3000 BC. She did not like this but had to agree, if only grudgingly.