Cool? Cool.

For better or worse, our modern politics.

Hello. Today, as the so-far uninspiring Democratic Convention gets into full swing, we are going to talk politics. Engagingly. Inspiringly.

The subdued hagiography of Joe Biden last night — a largely lackluster night of formulaic speeches — may have seemed like a guilt-ridden apology from an assembled cabal of Brutuses. And it may well have been, but a hagiography is warranted, as I noted a few weeks ago. Biden will turn out to be a borderline-great historical figure, for the simple, signal, magnificent accomplishment of ridding us of a tumor.

With the exception of the lump-in-throat speeches by Biden (“I gave my best to you…”) and by the bomb-throwing UAW leader Sinn Fein, or whatever his name is, I was mostly bored. It gave me time to disengage, and hone a theory I have about a particularly intriguing, mostly unstated aspect of this presidential campaign. It is kind of funny and kind of scary and, I think, it might even be kind of true. It’s about the meaning of cool.

We’ll get to it soon. But for now, a startlingly early-in-the-newsletter Gene Pool Gene Poll. Why I am asking this will become evident later:

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Imagine that you are on a jury pool, along with 50 other people. The judge asks anyone to raise his or her hand for a series of questions, one of which was “Can you be impartial in a case like this?” The case, he explains, involves a man accused of brandishing a knife at a strip club during a dispute with someone else. Apparently, there was no injury. The charge is “assault with a deadly weapon.” You answer, honestly, that you could. You also answer, honestly, that you have no truly important reason that serving on a jury would be a personal or professional hardship.

The judge tells you all that the case is going to trial, and that trials of this nature typically take 2-5 days, days you will have to show up. After the questions, you are one of 35 remaining possible candidates. Twelve will be chosen.

—

Okay. Politics. We’ll get back to the jury thing later.

Watching things spill out since Biden dropped out and Kamala Harris was chosen to head the ticket, I believe I have noticed a tectonic shift in the practice of politics. And like so many other things, Donald Trump is responsible … in this case, for good or evil. The jury is out, as it were.

For the first time in my memory, and probably going back to 1884, all pretense of comity and civility in campaigning has been abandoned. Biden was the last avatar of genteel political behavior, and he paid dearly for it, and this did not go unnoticed.

In modern times, Politics at the national level was practiced as an ostensibly dignified process. Dirty play, when it happened, were not ad hominem assaults, and tended to be passed under the table to surrogates. George H.W. Bush only exploited the racist “Willie Horton” trope after it was delegated to others, in a TV commercial. And, as revolting as it was, it was not personal, used directly against Michael Dukakis. It was about his policy. In short, filth was practiced at a genteel remove. Dog whistles were subtle, deliberately deniable. The game was that this was a “gentleman’s game.”

Remember Michelle Obama’s oft-repeated “When they go low, we go high”? Barack tried to carried this through. He tried to run the presidency as though bipartisanship was possible among well-intentioned people. It was a long-standing political assumption. He learned his lesson harshly, and in the end simply rolled up his sleeves and crammed policy through via less strictly parliamentarian means.

And then came Trump, who defeated a far more capable opponent via the indiscriminate flinging of threats and other vitriol. She did not reciprocate. And then, Biden makes a last stab at polity. And now Trump, again! The modern public likes feisty! And now the motto seems to be, when they go low, we go lower. The race to comity seem seems to have supplanted by the race to seem cooler, niceties be damned. It’s on both sides. It’s tectonic. We have seen some amazing, unprecedented stuff.

Tim Walz may be a fine candidate and a good, likeable man — check out his kids giving him donkey ears while he is being interviewed at the convention — he seems to have skyrocketed to the VP spot solely on the basis of a one-word attack: “Weird.” Sure, the governor of Pennsylvania might have delivered Pennsylvania, but that’s old school, muttonchops-era presidential electoral thinking. This guy can deliver stinging memes. He’s the the meany of memes. “Weird” appears to have been his big audition.

I don’t think I am imagining this. And I don’t decry it. I just note it.

Just a week ago, newly ensconced as Veep2B, Walz said this amazing thing about his opponent, J.D. Vance: “I gotta tell you. I can’t wait to debate the guy!” Huge applause, and it seemed to excite and to embolden him. You can see he hadn’t prepared for this, but in the extended applause, he seemed to consider this and … pounce: “That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up…. you see what I did there….” This was buying into a certain bit of juvenilia, based on a joke viraled out on social media from a vulgar slur invented by a troll, about Vance’s supposed sexual proclivities for furniture. It worked. Deafening applause, again. Meme!

Harris herself has doffed the gloves, in as nasty a way as possible. She directly slimes her opponent: “I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters, who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”

And check this out, from the Harris-Walz campaign. It is amazing.

This stuff is gold. Tapping into the zeitgeist. It’s fun. It’s funny. It’s spirited. I like it. But it is pretty damn undignified.

What is this about? It is about, I think, a new application of something I noted many years ago, to a deafening silence: The transcendence in politics of the value of ‘cool’. It’s often been misdescribed as “who is the candidate you’d rather have a beer with?” but it’s actually about “cool.” Cool is an ancient term, dating back to the 12th century in Africa, appropriately enough, where a king adopted a mononym meaning “It is cool.” Essentially, celebrating grace and humor under pressure. (I would cite this example specifically, but couldn’t find it. It was contained in a story I edited in 2000. Today, I searched the Web for it — cool, king, etc. — and got no hits, but a suggestion, from Google, that I instead search for “What is the weather tonight?”)

Still The Cool Paradigm holds.

Truman, who’d slept in hobo camps, was cool. He cursed mightily, and people knew it. Dewey was stiff dork.

Stevenson was pretty smart and witty, but Ike coolly killed tens of thousands of his own men for the greater good of mankind.

Nixon was globally brilliant but Kennedy… you know, was Kennedy.

Ronald Reagan was something of a dope, but cool. He dated Jane Wyman and Doris Day. He once played opposite a monkey. Both his opponents, Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale were as cool and as baked cucumbers. Carter’s official advice to battle the energy crisis was to turn down the heat and wear sweaters. It was correct, but exponentially boring. He seemed 120 years old.

George H.W. Bush was uncool, but Michael Dukakis was waay more uncool.

SNL parodied Bush for being “prudent.” They parodied Bill Clinton for having a rascal dick. Way cooler.

Today’s election is a race for cool. Kamala-Walz are winning that race, hands-down, and drawing a crowd on social media — a White People Twitter commenter noted that “the only way Trump gets to 270 is if he loses 50 pounds.”  It’s cool, and cruel. There is a new billboard out there saying “Orange is the New Old.”

Trump’s minions are trying to meet the throw-down challenge. Their main problem is Trump, a fat cranky old man with fat, cranky old ideas. Still, his people are trying.

When Huffington Post reporter asked the Trump campaign what the heck the his nickname “Kamabla” meant, he got this smug, dismissive serial response from Steven Cheung, that omnipresent, vibrantly lying Trump spokesperson. Cheung is coolly toying with the legitimate question, and coolly ignoring it.

When the same reporter asked Cheung why Trump seemed to be lisping in his interview with Elon Musk — something everyone noticed — Cheung’s response was: “It must be your shitty hearing. Get your ears checked out.” In retweeting it, Cheung griped that the writer didn’t refer to him by name.  

This is an official spokesperson.

When Trump retweeted an idiotic photoshopped image of Harris apparently speaking to a communist audience, Trump spokesperson Jason Miller was asked to explain this altered image and why Trump shared it. Miller’s one-word response was, simply,
”Kamunism.” Cool.

Something is happening here, and I do know what it is, yes, I do, Mr. Alex Jones.

It is a whole new world of combat, on a cool playing field. The field could use a Zamboni. The combat seems to have swallowed the need to debate over issues. Trump was always like that; now he has been joined by his opponents. I am in favor of this: It may well be how to beat him, which is all that matters. It is infuriating him, taunting him on his own turf, prompting emotionally warped mistakes. But it’s a descent into freestyle over substance.

There is nothing really new about this. In the first half of our country’s life, dirty, contemptuous politics was the lifeblood of political debate. It was … spirited. There were fistfights. In 1856 there was a near fatal caning in Congress. The presidential election of 1884 turned into a loquacious debate over which candidate was a filthier scumbag: Grover Cleveland, who fathered (and then arguably abandoned) a child out of wedlock but was highly principled in his public actions, or his opponent, James G. Blaine, a fine family man who took hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from railroad companies. One of the official mottos of the Blaine campaign was “Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa?” After the election, the Cleveland camp repeated it, adding a vicious dig, with an added rhyming line: “Gone to The White House, ha ha ha!”

The election results might have been influenced by a deft, dry, devastating letter to a newspaper from some guy in Chicago. He famously wrote: "We are told that Mr. Blaine has been delinquent in office but blameless in private life, while Mr. Cleveland has been a model of official integrity but culpable in his personal relations. We should therefore elect Mr. Cleveland to the public office which he is so well qualified to fill, and remand Mr. Blaine to the private station which he is admirably fitted to adorn."

They were vicious times.

Are they back for good?

Probably not, but maybe into the foreseeable future. Trump has spawned next-generation Trumps. The couch fornicator, for example.

—

Okay, so. My poll about the jury selection. As you may have surmised, this happened to me, just last Wednesday. I was in the jury pool in exactly that case. And I got exactly those instructions from the judge. And, as matters moved on, I came to ask myself the same question I asked you: Did I kinda want to be chosen?

On the one hand, 2-5 days is a hell of a commitment; it would be quite inconvenient. On the other hand, it was an interesting opportunity. On the one toe, however, it was a crappy little case, not exactly a murder. On the second toe, it was an interesting opportunity. On a third toe, who wants to decide a person’s fate, and possibly be wrong and regret it for the rest of your life? On a fourth toe, it was an interesting opportunity.

I was undecided, until the very end, when the jury was actually being selected, one by one. I will now digress to repeat one of my favorite poems, by the Danish mathematician Piet Hein:

Whenever you're called on to make up your mind,
And you're hampered by not having any,
The best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find,
Is simply by spinning a penny.
No - not so that chance shall decide the affair
While you're passively standing there moping;
But the moment the penny is up in the air,
You suddenly know what you're hoping.

—

And I did. As the final juror numbers were being called, I realized I wanted to be chosen. I wanted it because I believe that the meaning of one’s life, in large part, is encompassed by the breadth of experiences and opportunities you have had, and what you have made of them, and what you have learned from them. It was an interesting opportunity.

I was not chosen. Obviously. Or I likely wouldn’t be here today.

—

You are in luck. There is a second Gene Pool Gene Pool today, suggested by a friend. Please take the appropriate one, and only the appropriate one. So you don’t have to cheat and double-dip, I will tell you, mid-chat, how both sides are voting.

We now enter the real-time portion of the Gene Pool, where you send me your questions and observations, and I respond to them in real time. Today’s questions, so far, center on my challenge in the Weekend Gene Pool: Tell us an anecdote about something funny — even if embarrassing — that may have happened to you during sex or romance. If you haven’t already, I urge you to read my example anecdote here.

As always, send your observations and questions here:

Also, you might wish to register your distaste for Donald Trump by punching this orange button, and following the directions therein. It will make you feel better about yourself:

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Q: Why I had the final minute of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture as my cell ringtone, I'm not sure. Maybe I was celebrating having survived the long-running war of a bad relationship. It was a time of frenzied fun-seeking that crossed time zones and state lines. Following weeks of long-distance flirting, New York Guy flew to Miami to visit me. After a day pretending that either of us cared about something besides the "conjugal'' part of "visit,'' we began to conjugate. Just as we approached the simultaneous grand finale, my phone rang with the heroic crescendo of chimes, orchestra and battlefield ordnance. Right on cue, the first cannon boomed. Then the next and the next. Boom! Boom! We laughed so hard we rolled off the bed onto the floor. Landed with a boom, actually.

A: Magnificent. Thank you. (Reader: I know who this is. Is it clear to you that she is an extraordinarily good journalist/writer? It should be. )

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Q: I was in a relationship with a woman who had immigrated to the US some years before. One of the first times we were building toward a climax, she exclaimed, "Dada! Dada!". I was rather put off at first, until I remembered her native language was Russian.

A: Excellent. I know someone with a similar experience, involving a foreign born lady. She kept murmuring “liquor.” Guy had no idea what to think about this. Turns out she was saying “lekker,” which is Dutch for “mm, tasty.”

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TIMELY TIP: If you’re reading this on an email: JUST CLICK ON THE HEADLINE IN THE EMAIL AND IT WILL DELIVER YOU TO THE FULL COLUMN ONLINE. Keep refreshing the screen to see the new questions and answers that appear as I regularly update the post.

Q:  My first year of college, I lived at home to save money.  My bedroom was the large finished attic above the second floor.  The inevitable happened and my girlfriend stayed over for a weekend.  My mother was supportive and happy I’d found somebody, but without giving an explanation insisted that my bed be moved somewhere in that attic other than above my parents’ room.  Immediately.

A: A mediocre story, given the competition.  But it allows me to prosecute a stupid pet peeve of mine:  Everyone except the homeless lives “at home.”  It’s a strange term and an oddly adolescent one to  mean “live with my parents.”

Q: Did the judge know who you were? If so, did it matter?

A: Yes, he did. And it might have mattered. I cannot know for sure. My juror number was 27. Among the jurors he and the lawyers chose were numbers 26 and 28.

Q: A woman once injured herself on my anatomy (she was on top).  Intimacy immediately switched over to pain and agony; I was frantically checking myself for a penile fracture, while she ended up needing stitches.  I am failing to find anything funny about this; maybe you can do better.

A: Okay, agreed.  Lemme try to improve it, improvising from an old Buddy Hackett routine: “I attempted to fix the situation by squirting lighter fluid on our wounds and lighting a match, to cauterize everything.  The fire got out of control and set our hair on fire, so I had to douse it with ketchup…”

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Q: As a young man, I lacked both self confidence and the ability to pick up on subtle social cues. However, at one point in college, I was doing pushups in my dorm room when an attractive young woman with whom I was enamored entered. She commented favorably on my athletic endeavors, then asked whether I thought I could do a pushup with her sitting on my back. I accepted the challenge and succeeded, after which she again complimented my physical prowess. It did finally dawn upon me that she was likely interested in more than pushups. Unfortunately, that realization occurred 10 years later. (I may be exaggerating; it might have been only 8 years.)

A: This is an episode in Men are Clueless, vol. CMXIV.   I have an entry in vol. CXVI:  It is from a story I wrote about The Great Zucchini, a 35-year-old talented child’s entertainer with the emotional component of a child.  We were gambling in Atlantic City.  It was late at night at a casino: 

​​It's now just after midnight. We'd arrived at 7, and Eric shows no sign of tiring. He's lost some money at blackjack but is making it back on a craps table, again. Beside him is a sweet, funny, attractive woman named Mollie, in a low-cut black blouse and white pants with a big belt. Mollie's maybe 30, a businesswoman from Texas. She'd arrived with friends whom she seems to have jettisoned.

Eric is hot.

"You want to see a five?" He teases the table, which has bet heavily on five. "Is five what you want, a five?" He rolls a five. The table erupts in cheers.

"I'm a magician," he says to Mollie. "I don't know if you knew that."

"It's showing," she says. She is leaning against the table, hipshot, dangling a sandal, watching his every move.

Eric is generous with his winnings, every once in a while tossing a few chips to the croupier, tipping waitresses magnanimously. He has switched from rum-and-Cokes to coffee, to keep alert, but he still tips $5 or more. That's a signature of his: At coffee shops, Eric will sometimes leave $20 on a $5 tab. He says he does it to make the day of someone who is not accustomed to generosity.

By 1:30 a.m., he's up more than $600, and still rolling strong. "I'm going to call it a night," Mollie says. She shakes Eric's hand and leaves for her room, his business card in her pocket. Then she comes back, looks at the table and Eric. She thought she might have forgotten something, but she guessed not. She leaves again, for good.

"This is the hottest roll I've been on all night," Eric tells me. "When it's over, they are definitely going to give me an ovation."

A few minutes later he finally craps out. There is some polite applause, and someone else grabs the dice.

I tell him: "You could have hooked up with Mollie."

"What? No way," he says.

"Eric, at one point there, she was giving you a back rub."

"Well, yeah."

"You had her."

"You think, really?"

"Yeah."

He smiles sheepishly, goes back to the table.

I went to bed. I found Eric again at 7 a.m. at another casino. He hadn't slept. He was up $1,100 but wasn't ready to leave.

—

Q: Like you, I'm a baseball fan, though not particularly concerned with statistics.  But this story is so wild that I wanted to share it with you and the fine Gene Pool folks. Here's the lede:

"Everyone knows you can’t be in two places at the same time. Those are the rules — the immutable rules of physics.

Ah, but who knew you can play for two teams in the same baseball game? Those are also the rules — the wacky suspended-game rules of baseball.

So next Monday, if all the forces in the universe line up right, Boston Red Sox catcher Danny Jansen will go where no baseball-playing human has ever gone before. Not in the big leagues anyway."

– Steve Honley, Washington, D.C.

A: The thing I love best was how long the NYT allowed this story to run, and it was worth it!

—

Q: The setup: College days just after my graduation when I was having trouble finding work and I was non-exclusively dating a woman still attending. 

I was talking to another female student in whom I was interested when she asked, “How are things going?”  

I answered, “No offers yet. I just think I don’t interview well.”

“And the girlfriend?  You know word got out about how she left her room in the middle of the night and a mutual friend saw her in the hall and asked how her date went. She said it was still going on.”

“So everyone knows.”

“Basically… Hey, if you ever need to practice, I can help you out.”

Things got a bit blurry at this point. Did she just make a “no strings attached” offer?

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, people say I’m really good at it.”

More blur until I asked, “What are we talking about?”

“Interviewing. I do it all the time. What did you think… Omigod!”

Yeah, we did end up laughing about it.  That’s all we did, laugh.

A: Nice. And told well.  

—

Q: True story with a moral; I prefer the moral to be that philanderers get their comeuppance, but perhaps it is not to try to be too cute.  In my younger years I was taller, 6'2" and fairly fit. Not exactly a terribly imposing figure, but when I was standing and the target of my conversation was a little man sitting at his office desk, I likely looked something like a threat perhaps. Context: My wife had been assigned to assist his team on a short-term engineering project. He and I had never met and did not know each other at all, so when I was in his area on another task, I stopped by to say hello. Thinking I was clever, I said "I understand we are interested in the same woman", meaning a playful intro to my wife's work. I might have chosen other words if I had known he was something of a philanderer. He immediately turned ash white and then red red red, pushed back from his desk and sputtered unintelligible sounds. My wife knew his reputation and thought this was both hysterical and just. –

A: Nice.    

Q:  I will be 65 in a few years. Does this mean that if I receive a melodramatic confession of love or lust from a young man, it has likely been misdelivered?

A: This in in reference to a story I told on the weekend Gen Pool about a 35 year old man who slipped a love letter into the wrong office mail slot, and it went to a 65 year old woman with a similar name to the intended recipient.  I can only answer thus:  Yes, if it was from a coworker you barely knew, and if your name was, say, Clytemnestra Culbertson, and there was a younger woman you work with named Clytemnestra Cullington, you might have grounds for suspicion. .  

Q: Back in the day, visiting my Mother in CA, my dear husband and I loved to skinny dip in her fenced in pool as soon  as she left to do errands. We were pretty sure that her barky doggie would alert us to anyone arriving. 

On this particular day we took a chance to have sex on the edge of the pool. Fido sat quietly nearby. As we were surprised by my nephew’s young wife stopping in for a visit.😳

(We rolled into the pool, with no dignity intact.)

She was scarred for life… I swear the dog was smiling.

A: I assure you, the dog was smiling. 

—

Q: The growing prevalence of the wide open mouth photo - I first noticed this in the 90s. Almost all photos of Tipper Gore showed her with her mouth wide open - full on laughing, having the time of her life. I felt bad for her. It seemed so undignified, yet that was the type of photo usually chosen when she was the subject of a news story. Now it seems the wide open laugh, having the time of my life photo is everywhere. Clothing models. Musicians. Entertainers. Athletes. (The Olympic photos were either wide open mouths or biting a medal). It appears this choice of photo is used regularly for Kamala Harris. Why her? I do not think she spends the majority of her day with her mouth wide open, full laugh. Why Kamala? Why not Biden, Trump, Vance, Obama, Mitch, Nancy, etc.? Is this something campaign approved? “Please use the wide open mouthed photos when you can!” Anyway, your thoughts? Mine: make it stop.

A: I am assuming it is because of the “Kamala laughing” distraction. No? I hope that’s it.

This is Gene. I just had a thought. If she is elected, she will instantly join the short list of the “handsomest” presidents. Up there with Kennedy and Obama and, er, Harding. He generally makes the list.

—

This is also Gene. As I promised, the male-female poll splits.

Not surprising. But startling nonetheless:

So far, eighteen percent of women say they’d imagine the person nekkid.

Sixty-one percent of men.

Q: I am flabbergasted that you were bored watching the DNC last night. Did you not watch AOC’s speech? Rev Warnock’s? Jasmine Crockett, sharing how Harris had shown empathy and kindness in a very human way, the first time they met? Hillary Clinton acknowledging the history of the moment? Jesus, some people are determined to be too above it all. I thought it was inspiring and flawlessly staged. Perhaps you’d prefer Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt?

A: AOC was terrible. Clinton was terrible. These were wooden speeches, written by wooden speechwriters. The emotion seemed forced. Sorry.

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Q: I avoided jury duty for many years, successfully, because it seemed to be the thing to do. Eventually I was called when working in a different town, couldn't get out of it (in this place, unlike my native Gotham, trying to get out of jury duty was just not recognized as a potentially legitimate gambit, and maybe no one ever tried, I don't know). And so I went in and sat through the voir dire process as a spectator, which made me realize I was sorry not to have been picked. Some years later, back in Gotham, I responded when called without trying to get out of it. Ended up on a jury, for a very trivial drug case which should never have gone to trial. And yet it was riveting to see the system in action, and especially to realize that it worked amazingly well, while at the same time being a huge expenditure of public resources. They let us have a day off in the middle of the week the trial lasted. I went in to work and almost everyone I told about my experience said some version of "oh I could never do that, never send someone to jail." I observed that the jury had nothing to do with sentencing, but that wasn't the point. The defendant seemed clearly guilty to me, and also in the end for everyone else on the jury. Nonetheless we deliberated for some hours, I think mainly in order to mark the seriousness of the responsibility. I concluded that jury duty was the bedrock of a just society and a burden we should all gladly shoulder. Also, I just sent in a letter explaining why I couldn't do it now, because it's really very inconvenient.

A: Nicely told, great end. I sat on a jury once, and wrote about it. It was …. dramatic.

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Q:  I was young and in love and dating my future wife, though we were not yet engaged. I was also training to run a marathon. However, my youthful estimation of my necessary training was woefully inadequate. (My longest run prior to the actual marathon was a mere 12 miles in length.) At the 16 mile point of the marathon (still 10 miles to go!), my future wife was waiting and cheering for me. She yelled out to me, “I love you, Rick!” My romantic reply? A feeble “I’m dying.” The fact that we later divorced is likely unrelated to this exchange. 

A: I like this.  Once, in a romantic getaway in Acapulco, my relatively new girlfriend and I got simultaneous dysentery.   We had to poop together, at the same time, in the hotel room’s one bathroom.  I gallantly ceded her the toilet, and I used the bathtub.  You get to know someone quite intimately that way.  We married shortly thereafter. There was nothing left to learn about each other.

—

Q:  I don’t know if other people will find this funny.  Early on in my relationship with my now-husband, after we got funky one night at my place, we fell asleep and he woke up in the middle of the night to use the adjacent bathroom. I woke up too. I heard no flush and thought that he might have urinated in the sink, sleepy. I did not get up at that time. It became obvious the next morning that he had, in his exhausted (and sated) state, urinated in my cat’s litter box. “[Name], you used the litterbox.” “Did I? Well. Close enough.” We laughed about this for at least a year. 

A: I bet the cat was pissed.  “And you let him stick around?  Really, Kathy, you can’t find one who uses a toilet?”

—

Q: Providing moderatorial accompaniment for the first hour after a Gene Pool post goes live turns out to have a significant adverse side effect: Losers have been conditioned into making comments ONLY when they are sure that at least one of the benevolent despots will be reading them. The resulting pavlovian reflex is that as soon as Gene declares “We are down”, all commenting stops (if not that very second, then very shortly thereafter). Perhaps chiming in on the following day with a czarist observation or two might reassure Losers that their comments are not in vain, and keep the discussion rolling beyond that “pull the plug” declaration.

A: Interesting.   I do asjm at the end, always, for people people to keep sending in questions and observations….. I will amend it to include comments.   Also interesting: Stats show that more people read The Gene Pool after it ends than before.  

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This is Gene. We are now down. PLEASE keep sending in more questions and observations, and, if you prefer, comments.

The Q’s and O’s go here:

And the comments go here:

See you on Thursday.