Sbarro Filed for Bankruptcy Protection, and Scientists Think We Can Clone Woolly Mammoths

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Scott Hendo

Malls hold a special place in my heart. Growing up in the suburbs as a teenager without booze connections, I didn't have many other places to hang out at with my dorky friends other than the mall, where we wasted hours upon hours trying to meet girls. (This goal was quickly abandoned once my friends and I realized meeting girls meant we had to actually work up the nerve to talk to girls. Knowing we wouldn't get laid anytime soon, we settled for looking at Crown Books' adult magazine section.) When I was locked in these concrete islands of commerce, I had to eat whatever the tribespeople had to offer at the food court. I thought about my food-court memories last week when I read that the pizza chain Sbarro had filed for bankruptcy protection (again). I was hit equally hard by the news that Quiznos, Sbarro's food-court cousin, had followed the pizzeria down the same bankruptcy rabbit hole—at least I felt depressed until I remembered that nobody gives a shit, because Sbarro and Quiznos are both disgusting.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user MadLab Manchester

When I first read that Tokyo-based engineers and Squarepusher, a British recording artist, had made a band made out of Japanese robots, my first instinct was to put on my grumpy old-man hat and whine about how this news encapsulates the decline of modern music. Instead of worrying about Skynet taking over our weapons and enslaving us, we should have focused on the machines attacking our souls by co-opting our species's monopoly on art. But then I remembered that humans used auto-tune to create “Buy U A Drank (Shawty Snappin'),” so, you know, maybe it's the machines' turn to create art. We had our chance, and we blew it.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Leandro Algro

Here's a good rule to live by: If you think you're getting a good deal, you should assume someone on the other end is getting screwed. Like, you know how easy it is to get Amazon items shipped to your doorstep by the next day? Well, on the other side of your rushed delivery of Veronica Mars DVDs are terrible working conditions in Amazon's warehouses. Here's another good rule: If you think you're getting a good deal, you're probably not.  According to two lawsuits, Amazon Prime users weren't receiving free shipping. Amazon was allegedly encouraging third-party vendors to inflate their prices by the shipping cost, pretty much taking away any benefit of paying $79 for the membership. (Soon Amazon will raise the membership fee to $99.) If you ever felt bad about sharing your Amazon Prime streaming password, you should probably start sharing the password with your friends now.

Many people will greet the news that scientists have a “high chance” of cloning a woolly mammoth with alarm bells. They'll claim that this is the first step to creating a real-life Jurassic Park andvelociraptor soldiers are going to hunt us down. As an admitted wimp, I understand their mentality. But I also understand that wehave the chance to live in a world where woolly mammoths exist! Sure, they'll be confined to zoos—a whole different moral conundrum, which I don't have time to get into here—and it's a slippery slope before we start cloning other species, our dead cherished pets, our relatives, and ultimately the Founding Fathers, so we can finally put an end to partisan bickering about the Constitution by going straight to the racist source. But luckily most of those issues won't be dealt with until after I'm dead. Carry on, scientists! Clone the mammoth!

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