It's A Bad, Bad World!

Recently eaten: sushi, sooo much sushi (no sea urchin)
Recent annoyance: is it a tropical storm or is it a hurricane? make up your minds!

I don't like to relive it, but JYo and I went to see the remake of the old horror flick, "The Hills have Eyes" a few months back. It was terrible. I wanted to scrub my eyeballs and my memory having seen it. Then I happened upon this article that reminded me of the movie. judge for yourself. But I take no responsibility for wanting to scrub your eyes clean after reading it.

Forbidden Fruit
"Nearly everyone in Colorado City, Arizona, and the adjacent town of Hildale, Utah, was a member of a fundamentalist Mormon sect that practices polygamy and had long encouraged multiple marriages between close relatives.

By the late 1990s, Tarby and his team had discovered fumarase deficiency was occurring in the greatest concentration in the world among the fundamentalist Mormon polygamists of northern Arizona and southern Utah.

Of even greater concern was the fact that the recessive gene that triggers the disease was rapidly spreading to thousands of individuals living in the community because of decades of inbreeding.

Fast-forward to the present: About half of the 8,000 people living in the towns are blood relatives of two of the founding families that settled in the 1930s on the desolate high desert plateau against the base of the Vermillion Cliffs.

Religious leaders control all marriages in the community, and many of these relatives have married or likely will marry in the future. Some of these marriages will include parents who both are carriers of the fumarase deficiency gene, making it certain that more children will be afflicted with the disease.

"We have and will have a continual output of children with this condition," Tarby says.

In this isolated religious society north of the Grand Canyon, few secrets have been more closely guarded than the presence of fumarase deficiency. Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints elders, who control the community, have labored to keep the public from finding out why the disorder is manifesting. Many members of the fundamentalist community don't even know it's occurring."

And in a similarly strange and disturbing story, hedgehogs get top billing over humans.

Hedgehogs humble McDonald's
"Hedgehogs have finally humbled burger giant McDonald's after years of campaigning, forcing the company to redesign its killer McFlurry ice-cream containers.

Up to now the opening in the container has been large enough for hedgehogs to get their heads into for a lick of the left-over dessert -- a trap they have then been unable to withdraw from, so dying of starvation in untold numbers.

But from September 1, the wide-mouthed opening in the lid of the McFlurry containers will be reduced in size, making them too small for the sugar-loving animals to get their heads into."

McDonald's should probably also look into making the openings to their other food products small enough so that humans cannot fall head first into a 20-piece chicken McNugget making them morbidly obese.

Inbreeding causes people to choke on filet-o-fish sandwiches