cynical

I just started reading a book called “Do they hear you when you cry” by Fauziya Kassindja and Layli Miller Bashir.This is a passage from it about Female Genital Mutilation.

“……during the procedure, four women spread your legs wide apart and hold you down so that you can’t move. And then, the eldest woman takes a knife that is used to cut hair and scrapes your woman parts off. There are no painkillers, no anesthesia. The knife isn’t sterilized. Afterward, the women wrap your legs from your hips to your knees and you have to stay in bed for forty days so the wound can close. After the forty days, you are ‘reborn’ for your husband, and delivered to his house to begin your new life as his wife.”

Being the dog lover I am, i felt like sharing the story of Snuppy with everyone. Let me rephrase that. By everyone I mean the people who have been living in Mars because how can you not know about this doggy doodles who is likely to transform medical research around the world??!!??

Snuppy (the acronym for Seoul National University puppy)has been named the invention of year 2005 by the Time magazine. This is because he’s no ordinary pup. First of all, he’s a clone. He’s also the first dog to have been created through cloning because up until now though other mammals have been cloned (Dolly the sheep, CC the cat and Ralph the Rat) dogs have remained elusive.

Given that my scientific knowledge is limited, I have taken the liberty of copying down the steps of the creation of Snuppy from a magazine article.

1.Donor-dog (in this case a cross breed bitch) eggs are extracted as they are released into the oviduct.

2.The nucleus of the egg is squeezed out through a slit made in the cell’s outer membrane.

3.A biopsy of skin is taken from the ear of a 3-year-old adult male Afghan Hound and skin cells are processed and grown in culture.

4.An entire skin cell is carefully injected into the empty donor egg, using the opening created earlier.

5.An electric charge fuses the egg and its new cargo. The resulting cell is then immersed in a chemical bath and starts to divide and grow.

6.After several days, 10 or more embryos at a time are transferred into a surrogate dog (in this case, a Labrador Retriever),improving the chances that one of them will grow to term.

7.After a normal 61-day pregnancy, Snuppy was born by caesarea section in April 2005

Hwang Woo Suk and his team of researchers at the Seoul National University in South Korea have called this just one of the major steps they are planning to take regarding stem cell research this year. As always, there are heated discussions about the pro’s and cons of such an invention because in dog cloning no improvements can be made to the dog. Only an exact copy can be produced. There is speculation as to whether cloned dogs would end up being used in the laboratories,etc.

Therefore although the experiment has proven to be a success (despite the fact that the other puppy born with Snuppy died at birth) it still will continue to crate controversy as stem cell research always has.

According to the latest news reports, the lead researcher Hwang Woo Suk has resigned from his post after admitting that he used eggs from two female scientists working under him, to be used for one of their human cloning experiments. Due to this unethical action, he has resigned but will continue his work as a researcher.

Female Genital Mutilation is an issue that has interested me ever since I read an article on the Reader’s Digest about the supermodel Waris Dirie and her battle with FGM. I think it’s an issue that every single human being should be aware of. Please click here to find out more about it.

Just for the record, this is something I found on Waris Dirie’s web site. I believe it’s something she said and couldn’t have been more true.

“If genital mutilation were a problem affecting men, the matter would be long settled”

This is one of my absolute favourite actors and I found this article on “Msn Entertainment’ which explains just how unique an actor he really is.

We celebrate a movie star
who runs his career on his own terms

By Sean Axmaker
Special to MSN Movies

Is Johnny Depp a star because of his idiosyncratic choices or despite them? He doesn’t play by movie star rules, and he has consistently steered clear of big-budget, high-profile productions, focusing rather on a wide array of challenging roles and eccentric characters. Depp plays in the kinds of films that garner great reviews but small audiences. That is until the acclaimed actor starred in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” his first bona fide hit, which he made after taking a yearlong sabbatical to be with his romantic partner, French pop star Vanessa Paradis, and their newborn child.

Although Depp had small roles in a pair of iconic 1980s hits — as the doomed boyfriend in Wes Craven’s genre-reviving “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” and as a young grunt in Oliver Stone’s landmark “Platoon” — it was TV that first put Depp on the map. “21 Jump Street” made Depp a pop icon, but it was the succession of vividly realized, often wildly eccentric screen characters that made him an actor to be reckoned with.

His Willy Wonka in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” is now on DVD, and he is preparing to bring his unforgettable punch-drunk pirate con-man Jack Sparrow back to the screen in “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.” Obviously, Depp still plays the Hollywood game by his own rules, and by the looks of it, he’s having as much fun as his characters.

The boy became a man
It took but a second
A second that buried her life
A second otherwise insignificant
A flash. A blink.
A lifetime rolled into one second
And it was in that second that
The son became a father.

Dedicated to a friend who lost his father 10 years ago when he was only nine and lost his mother last night.

For the last hour ‘ve done some productive work but it is so bloody frustrating. I have digested the French Revolution and badly needed a break because I’m numbed. My head has temporarily (i hope) stopped processing information.So i decided to vent a little on my beloved blog.Everytime I do an assignment I promise myself that I won’t wait till the very end to start doing it but here I am, once again, hundreds of assignments later, still stuck in an assignment 2 days before the deadline. I suppose it is true that “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history” because I’m feeling a weird sense of deja vu right now. This has just become one of the many sleepless nights I have spent over some assignment due the next day. And you’d thing there would be a difference in your attitude when you go through the same trial for the umpteenth time but no, nothing has changed. And right now i’ve stopped all my other work so from the time i give in this assignment I’ll be running around like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to catch up with my other work. *sigh* I hope the pessimism can be felt everywhere.

Can someone enlighten me as to why Afghanistan has been invited as the 8th SAARC country?In my opinion this is what you call borrowing unnecessasary trouble.I still haven’t been able to find out on what basis it was taken in. Maybe there’s some brilliant reasoning which the common man cannot comprehend. If anyone has any insight to this please explain it to me.

Christiane Amanpour is a woman I greatly admire and today I read that she was given the award for “The News Source” at the recent “Women of the Year” awarding ceremony organized by the Glamour magazine. Click on the link above to read more about her.

Does anyone know how annoying it is to have naturally straight hair in a world where every other girl seems to have artificially straightened hair???!!! It is so bloody frustrating because one minute people are admiring your hair and the next, they are asking you from where you got it done.I consider my hair to be one of my few assets and believe me it is annoying when it is considered artificial. Of course it gives me the chance to haughtily and rudely proclaim my hair to be my own but at the same time it pisses me off. All you see these days is straight hair.So straight that it seems to stand on its own. I’m not being spiteful but some are so badly done that it is quite obvious that it’s artificial. And anyway the only reason I’m all worked up about such a trivial matter is because straight hair is taken for granted now a days.It almost makes you want to go do your hair poodle style.

Ok then I’ve vented that out and it feels good

I did this Personality Disorder Test that I found on the net.Though such tests are not accurate most of the time, the results I got with this test were quite accurate.(I’m not sure if it was a coincidence or not)I’m still trying to figure out what some of the diagnoses mean.These were my results.

Paranoid : Very High
Schizoid : Low
Schizotypal : Moderate
Antisocial : High
Borderline : Very High
Histrionic : High
Narcissistic : High
Avoidant : Moderate
Dependent : High
Obsessive-Compulsive: Moderate