Failed Experiment Produces Hideous Miniature Clone

enetic science took a step backward last week when the creation of a bald, chubby failed clone was revealed by members of the Raelian sect.

"They have attempted to play god, and they have failed," said someone in our newsroom.

The cloning was carried out by Clonaid, a terribly on-the-nose named company founded by members of the Raelian sect, who believe human beings were created by alien scientists years ago. In case you're wondering, yes, they are being completely sincere when they say that. Members of the socially unapproved religion announced their disappointment when the experiment yielded a clone one-eighth the size of the original, hairless, fatty, and with inhibited intelligence and language skills.

"Imagine our dismay when our optimistic attempts resulted in a hideous, miniature version of the DNA donor," said Clonaid spokesperson Brigitte Boisselier. "Perhaps we have exceeded the limits of human capability, but our intentions were good. And we are not giving up yet. The next clones we are producing are due for next week, and we are waiting to see if they are successful."

Though Clonaid revealed little of its methodology, they did speculate the process of incubating the clone in the DNA donor's body for nine months may have been a misstep in the procedure. According to outside calculations, simple physics dictate an exact duplicate could not be produced within the original since the amount of space needed to house a duplicate of equal size would have to be bigger than the original.

Clonaid scientists considered the possibility of the clone outgrowing the host and bursting right through the body, like that scene in Alien or Pras in that "Ghetto Supastar" video, and the scientists considered it had begun to happen, but instead the failed experiment escaped through an existing orifice after hours of laborious effort. It was then they realized the experiment had failed, producing a smallish, demonesque humanoid of sub-human intelligence.

"We have not given up hope that the creature may offer us some insight as to what went wrong, and we have continued attempts to communicate with it," said Boisselier at a press conference. "So far the monstrosity only emits ear-piercing screaming and claws at any who approach it. Our scientists are working to decode its screams and construct a common language, but the sounds are animalistic and will likely be a dead avenue. It is probably just crying out in pain, begging to be put out of its misery."

When asked if there were a chance the creature was unrelated to the clone experiment, Boisselier said the possibility was considered and rejected.

"It is quite clearly a clone of some form, though definitely not what we intended. We brought in the DNA donor for identification, and the creature definitely has the donor's eyes, as well as her cute little nose and dimples. We were going to risk contact between the donor and the creature, but then the small one made a boom boom."

The experiment may have other results as well, pushing lawmakers to create legislation in response to the first human clone, besides possible Tom Cruise clone Peter Facinelli, and evoking edicts from the world's religious leaders.

"Life is sacred, and it is not man's place to play God," said the Pope, mumbling in Latin. "I'm not one to say I told you so, but…"

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History has not been kind to the Trojans, inventors of the condom and quite possibly the stupidest people ever. Though they had an advanced culture that thrived for many thousands of years, the Trojans will always and forever be remembered as the people who were suckered by a gang of mercenary nutjobs hiding in a giant wooden horse.

Scam artists and traveling salesmen the world over knew of Troy, a town full of people so gullible that the best conmen stopped going there, as there was really no sport in it. The people of Troy had purchased several bridges in the lands of Mesopotassia and Outer Bulganium, neither of which actually existed. They bought into every diet and exercise fad that blew in on the wind, and most of the town was involved in a mutli-level marketing scam that involved paying people to wipe their own asses. Cedric the Stooped had sold the entire town invisible trousers that were cooler in the summertime, and most of the women in the town had purchased fat-burning crystals from Amaldine the Untrustworthy. The place was like a Scam artists' Disneyland, and many of them planned yearly vacations to Troy.

But the people of Troy were content to live their gullible little lives, and all was well for them until they screwed the pooch by inviting the Gods to a wedding between the king of Pthia, Peleus and Thetis, this crazy chick he knocked up at his brother's wake. History has shown us time and time again that when you bring the Gods into a situation, it always gets royally screwed up faster than you can say "man-eating serpents."

Anyway, somebody dropped the ball mailing out the invitations, and the goddess of promotional discounts, Eris, didn't get invited. Eris was about as high-strung as goddesses came in those days, and she shit a brick. Nobody was surprised, and they all rolled their eyes when Eris said some ominous shit and threw a golden apple on the table.

Nobody knew what in the world that was supposed to be about, and most of them ignored it, but Athena was drunk as a skunk and she grabbed the apple, declaring that it meant she was the hottest skank at the banquet. Aphrodite didn't believe in any of that voodoo, but she hated to see Athena happy, so she declared that she had seen the apple first. Zeus told everybody he wasn't going to touch that debate with a ten-foot finger of God, so he told the Trojan prince Paris to straighten the whole thing out while he went off to purge out the monster stack of flapjacks he'd put away at the banquet.

Right away Athena and Aphrodite were all over Paris, offering up everything they could think of, including every kind of nasty goddess sexual favor in the book. In the end he chose Aphrodite, who offered him the most beautiful mortal woman in the world. Right away, Athena was wishing she had bid higher than "my cousin Showanda." Aphrodite then gave Paris the hook-up with Helen of Troy, who Aphrodite knew from beauty school.

Paris traveled to Sparta and wooed Helen away from her husband, the Spartan king Menopause. She returned with Paris to Troy, which pissed off all of the Trojan girls who had sketches of Paris pinned up on their walls. Naturally, Menopause was pissed as well, since Paris had made off with both his wife and his best set of flatware. He got a hold of his brother Agamemnon, who had the much more intimidating name between the two of them, and sent Agamemnon with 1,000 ships filled with all his cousins and whatnot to go get Helen back and to stomp the fear of Greece into that wiseass Paris.

Though he had a pretty badass name, Agamemnon was still an idiot, and the Greek army spent ten years trying to get through the walls surrounding Troy. When their amazingly prolonged effort proved fruitless, finally the Greek soldier Sinon, who was tired of trying to run up the walls of Troy for ten years, suggested that they use the Trojans' weakness against them by building a giant wooden horse, hiding soldiers inside of it, and then leaving. Nobody knew what he was talking about, but it sounded like a good excuse to get the hell out of there and they could always blame Sinon if anyone asked them why they deserted.

The horse was built, and Agamemnon's best men hid inside while the rest of the army left town, leaving only Sinon behind to put on his puppy dog eyes. When the Trojans came out to find Sinon and the horse, he claimed to have been deserted by the army, who built the horse as an offering to Hobby, the God of big wooden horses. The Trojans walked around the horse and whistled to show their appreciation, kicking the wheels and standing around for a few hours. When they decided to bring it inside the city, the Trojan prophet Laocoon warned that it was a Greek subterfuge and banged on the side of the horse with his cane to illustrate that it was hollow. Instantly, giant sea serpents shot up out of the sea and devoured Laocoon and his sons, no fooling.

Deciding the matter settled, the Trojans wheeled the giant wooden horse through the gates of Troy, despite the occasional sneezing noises heard coming from inside and the guy who hopped out of the horse's ass while they were inspecting it and ran off into the woods to take a leak.

Like idiots, the Trojans partied all night to celebrate their victory and their cherry new wooden horse, and when they fell asleep the Greek soldiers hopped out of the horse, opened the gates of Troy and let in the Greek army, which had been hiding in the bushes the whole time. The people of Troy were screwed, figuratively and literally, as the Greeks had sex with everybody and took the most desirable women as their concubines, kind of like when AT&T bought out TCI a few years back.

Troy was destroyed, but the Trojans got the last laugh as the Greeks had been there so long they forgot the way back to Greece, and ended up wandering around in their ships until they ran out of food and were eaten by sea serpents. That is, the Trojans would have had the last laughs if they hadn't all been either killed in battle or stuck as sex slaves in bondage on the Greek ships when the sea serpents showed up. But you get the feeling like they appreciated that there was at least some sort of payback at the end.

These were pretty rough-and-tumble times, remember. It didn't really pay to be anything but a God or a sea serpent back then.

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Sorry, pardon the bad attitude, but I'm fresh out of condoms. What really pisses me off is that it probably won't make a difference. Think about it for a minute, if running out of rubbers is going to change your day at all and you'll probably get pissed off, too. So let's both get pissed off and dig in.

I probably wouldn't be so dang incensed if I had actually used it in some fashion, even heroin smuggling, but no, I gave it away out of the goodness of my heart. Just some kid who gave me a hard-luck story about not having any money and needing a prophylactic, so I loaned him one—to be paid back with interest. I thought I was doing a good deed! No, turns out this kid just puts it on like a hat and runs off and I find out later he's some lunatic who's scammed sixty free rubbers off of suckers like me. The world's a sad place sometimes.

Oh, I just saw jackass: the movie, by the way. So what's the big deal? Seems like any normal weekend with your buddies and a trunk full of beer to me. Putting a taser to your nutsack and jumping out of a tree with a bungee cord attached to your underwear isn't even a memorable weekend on my block. Those jackass guys should bring me aboard as a consultant or something. I have a brilliant idea for a sequel, and I've tried it before so I know it works—it involves two hundred chocolate bars, a bag full of marmosets, and a high school bully who works in a hospital burn ward lately. That's all I'm saying until we ink a deal, this cow don't give away milk for free.

This just fresh in from the list of things that pisses me off: You're sitting there, trying to enjoy a Captain D's shrimp dinner with hush puppies and some pre-teen priss in a pink sweater materializes on the TV and asks, "Can we talk about something personal?" Not if you want this shrimp to stay down, Sabrina. There is no way, no matter how loud you yell, to cut this discussion off before it starts. I don't know why these nasty tarts are asking me if they can talk about it when they know I can't answer, like they just want to taunt me. Mark my words, if I ever see one of these stuck-up debutantes sitting in a restaurant enjoying snails and squid I'm going to pull up a chair and start talking loudly about that bout of crabs back in 1993.

I've been watching TV Land all this week and had a scary thought: If aliens were receiving our broadcast signals and watching only TV Land, they would assume Scott Baio held a very high position in our government, like a world leader or something, mayhap even a god. Between Charles in Charge and Happy Days there is a vast over-representation of Scott Baio in our TV history. It keeps me up some nights thinking about it. Our best hope, if this were the case, is that all those commercials for scrubbing bubbles would scare the aliens into thinking we had nano-technology that would destroy them.

I'm developing my own take-off on that Kevin Bacon game, and I'm planning on calling it "Stu Umbrage's Six Hyperlinks to Amazon.com." Your friends come over, they all write down various word strings and dump them into a bowler hat, and people draw the word strings and search Yahoo or Hotbot or something for them, then they have six hyperlinks to get to Amazon.com from any of those sites. First person wins it all! In case you're wondering, I plan on selling the bowler hats for the game and I will make a killing. I'll be like that Pet Rock guy nobody remembers.

I had planned on launching a political diatribe concerning the recent elections, but you can see where all that ranks in the Stu Umbrage animal kingdom. Frankly, I'm bored with voting and supporting candidates. They started generating politicians out of a machine a few years ago and none of them are interesting to watch or listen to anymore—which is how they get elected, I guess. I'm looking for a political firebrand to earn my vote. If anybody wants to take care of insane condom bums and the Scott Baio TV Land inundation, I personally promise you a write-in vote the next go-round.

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