Today’s Daily Post prompt asks:

Often, our blogs have taglines. But what if humans did, too? What would your tagline be?

Oh, that’s not easy. My first reaction is something like, “Rob Ross: Superhero in Training” or “Rob Ross: Stranger Than Fiction”. My wife might say something like “Rob Ross: Cheaper Than Air”, and my daughter might say “Daddy: More Hilarious than Kitty… But Only Slightly”, if she were able to speak.

But we could lose the superlative aspect – I tend to be a little competitive about things sometimes. How about “Rob Ross: Running Like the Wind”? Or “Rob Ross: Living Like a Landlocked Surfer”?

http://soundcloud.com/user575160/scar-tissue-lyrics

“Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue. Realize the strength, move on.” – Henry Rollins

There are a great many ways for one to be scarred: there’s physical scars, emotional scars, other psychological scars that can be built up over a lifetime. Cuts and burns, that’s what they are. And we can let them heal, or we can pick at the scabs so that they never heal. I know people who are just messes of scabs and they are victims of those wounds, self-chained to the pain. But even when we heal it can be hard to move on.

What qualifies as “strength” in that quote, rather than an inability to move on? When a general mistrust of others, having developed over time, becomes a social impediment… that’s not strength because we thrive on community as a species. Detaching from the community is supposed to be a huge disadvantage, right?

I think the real strength lies in being able to face down the person one has become, to accept the things about themselves that they don’t like, to change what doesn’t work if they can and to work on becoming a more complete and healthy person by leaving those scars alone and letting them heal over. But can we ever truly “move on”? I don’t know. We certainly can’t forget what makes us who we are; we have to take that baggage with us wherever we go, don’t we?

http://soundcloud.com/esmix/van-halen-jump-special
Today’s Daily Post prompt asks:

What’s the biggest risk you’d like to take — but haven’t been able to? What would have to happen to make you comfortable taking it?

I’d love to pack up the family and move out of the country. Somewhere far wouldn’t be too far from the government I loathe but much too far from the country I love; still, it would be great to live in a different place in the world. Maybe we would go live in Nova Scotia, on the eastern edge of Canada. Maybe somewhere in the U.K. – London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Dublin – I’d take Germany or France, Switzerland, Russia… Just about anywhere new and relatively peaceful would do.

What holds us back is the prospect of leaving our family and friends behind. That may never change, and that’s alright by me. I like my life the way that it is, and as long as I have my wife and daughter I have no problem staying put.

So what would you like to do? Feel free to let us know in the comments!

This is an interesting article on the question of whether companies can patent individual genes. My response went like this, and was submitted to the comments section:

I’m inclined toward the opinion that parts of the human genome aren’t patentable, because it’s like cutting a leaf off of a plant and trying to patent that – albeit on a smaller scale. If I were to create an entirely new leaf through some non-natural process, however, that would be patentable, and I probably would patent the process rather than the leaf itself, because then you can’t copy the leaf without the process, and then if one were to find a substantially different process to produce the same results, they should have patent protection for their process.

So maybe instead of trying to patent single genes, which is a trick that corporate pharmacological companies want to master for the sake of big-big profit, they should be more concerned with the honest pursuit of patents for isolation and diagnostic techniques. I’m not sure if that would make a difference in affordability and accessibility, but at least that would stop bringing up this absurd question of whether human genes can be patented.