Drunken tree torture.

• Author: Durst, Will
• Position: Humor - current events - Off The Map - Column

A University of Massachusetts anesthesiologist has figured out how to grow a human ear on the back of a mouse. Well, it's about time. I can't tell you how many times I've been talking to my wife and bemoaned the fact that human ears just weren't appearing on the backs of mice like I imagined they would when I was growing up. The process is known as tissue engineering. I suppose cats are going to want thumbs and pockets now. Since reality is catching up with science fiction, we're going to have to change some things around here. Marc Antony will have to implore his listeners, "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your mice." The children's song "Three Blind Mice" will be altered to "Three Genetically Engineered Heightened Hearing Mice." And knowing capitalism as I do, I predict it is only a matter of time before the porn industry comes up with fully functioning penis mice.

San Francisco, California, where activists climbed to the top of the Bank of America building to protest Mitsubishi's ravaging of the rainforest, totally ignoring what Demi Moore did to `The Scarlet Letter.' The Museum of Radio and Television held apanel discussion about the importance of talk radio in the political arena. One of the complaints was there was no one on the left to balance Rush Limbaugh. And there won't be until Shamu gets a talk show. Limbaugh, 340 pounds of wrong, has the grace of an oil rig and the subtlety of a grenade. The only way to figure his popularity is there's an undiscovered element of physics where people's opinions are being sucked into his gravitational field. I don't know which twisted path this country tripped down, but it must have taken a header into a sharp stone wall to take Rush seriously and start thinking the poor and helpless are the enemy. Maybe it's time we collectively sit down, take a couple of deep breaths, and start targeting smug, bloated, rightwing, hood-wearing freaks preaching intolerance. Why isn't there a leftwing Rush? Because leftwingers think for themselves. Which, for Limbaugh's listeners, is strictly verboten.

New York City, where the movie Seven' is considered a documentary. It makes as much sense as an underwater drum kit, but every six months or so, sex scandals, celebrity murders, and even Newt Gingrich's feeble attempts at ego-reduction surgery get bumped off the front page because Hillary Rodham Clinton is undergoing another makeover. Already the Hillmeister's had more makeovers than a Mary Kay face chart...