via King of Zambia, great letter to the Ed if S.F chronicle today:

Our native tongues

Editor -- Hearing the news that the Senate has voted 63-34 to make English our official language, I can only reply, "Bravo!" This is no time to be blasé. Speaking English needs to become a cause celebre. English should become de rigueur in every U.S. school. The Senate deserves our kudos for going mano-a-mano with this bete noire. The best way to address the angst of non-assimilation is to deliver a legislative coup de grace that renders every foreign language absolutely verboten.

Now that singing our national anthem in a foreign tongue has become a criminal faux pas, shall we address that other great threat to American unity -- the Catholic Church, which persists in the use of Latin. I'm sure the senators would agree that, henceforth, Mass should be celebrated in English -- God's language -- and we should crack down on such linguistic fellow-travelers as pharmacists, doctors and scholars. If they don't like it, let them move to Latin America.

That level of snark is buffista worthy. Anyone in SF feel up to going for another toaster?

I think many people spend their time feeling incompetent and amazed that no one's caught on yet. There's even some kind of name for it, isn't there?

I have decided that one way to motivate myself to eat better and stuff is to be smug about it. Therefore, I am having a salad (romaine lettuce, carrots, jicama, corn, peas, broccoli, feta, pumpkin seeds, oil, and vinegar) and a Luna bar for lunch. And a Diet Dr. Pepper. You may now praise me.

Dana it is hard to type from a kneeling/bowed down position.

Allyson - if your time with us does not count as years of therapy then I don't know what does.

I think many people spend their time feeling incompetent and amazed that no one's caught on yet.

Internally, I always parsed it as being "found out". I bet there is a more official term for it.

"Impostor syndrome"? But I got that from like...Glamour magazine so there may be a better one.

Well, that's settled then:

It was the egg.

Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material does not change during an animal's life.

Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg.

Professor John Brookfield, a specialist in evolutionary genetics at the University of Nottingham, told the UK Press Association the pecking order was clear.

The living organism inside the eggshell would have had the same DNA as the chicken it would develop into, he said.

"Therefore, the first living thing which we could say unequivocally was a member of the species would be this first egg," he added. "So, I would conclude that the egg came first."

I can't believe they said pecking order.

Um, doesn't the egg come before the chicken because snakes and other reptiles lay eggs? And chickens are like the freak inbred grandchildren of reptiles.

Problem solved!

Of course the egg would have gotten its DNA from its parents...

Of course the egg would have gotten its DNA from its parents...

Yes, but the first chicken's parents were, by definition, not chickens.