Harry was already on his way into the house to look for Sondra.  "What will we do?"  He paused for a moment in the doorway, blinking in at the dark.  "More of the same, I suppose."
                         -- Rudy Rucker, Master Of Space And Time.

BRIAN:  So here we are, on the scene, reporting form some farm.
BOB:  It's a lovely day, Brian.
BRIAN:  That it is, Bob.Ý That it is.
BOB:  Why is it that we're here, you might ask, on this lovely sunny day, standing at this old man's farm?
BRIAN:  Well, you see, there's some sad news to report.  A little while ago--
BOB:  Tuesday, May 20th in fact--
BRIAN:  There was a cow discovered in Canada with Mad Cow Disease.
BOB:  Horrible, horrible.
BRIAN:  Yeah.  Actually, it does kind of suck.
BOB:  Y'know, I remember when I first heard of Mad Cow Disease.
BRIAN:  Me too.
BOB:  I thought it was funny.  Like, crazed, rabid cows and stuff.
BRIAN:  Yeah, I thought that too.
BOB:  And then, y'know, I saw the footage from Britain with the cow collapsing and then I thought maybe it wasn't all that funny.
BRIAN:  Yeah.  It's not that funny.
BOB:  Primarily it's not that funny because humans can catch it and I for one don't want to feel my mind slipping away while I die of dementia.
BRIAN:  Yeah, I'm doing a good job of that on my own, without Mad Cow Disease.  I don't really need any extra help.
BOB:  Exactly.
BRIAN:  So, the cow was found at some farm-- not this farm, by the way.
BOB:  Yeah, they wouldn't let us near that other farm.
BRIAN:  We kept being chased away by black helicopters.
BOB:  Hate those things.
BRIAN:  And we had to set up something to cash in.  I mean, if Singapore can have a SARS channel nothing but SARS reports and SARS-themed dramas and sitcoms, we at *30* can start the Mad Cow Disease station-- MCtv.  Picture it, the sheer potential.  Daily updates on the spread of MCD, MCD sitcoms with average working families and young professionals who catch Mad Cow Disease, behave randomly in a silly fashion and the hilarity ensues.  Shows featuring conspiracy theories surrounding the rise and spread of Mad Cow Disease.  Maybe disaster dramas-- post apocalyptic things set in futures where Mad Cow Disease-- or rather its human variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease-- has wiped out 99.99999% of the global population and the survivors have to struggle against the odds to set up utopian enclaves against hoards of hallucinating mutants.
BOB:  It could work.
BRIAN:  And there could be specialty shows on Kuru, yet another Mad Cow-like thing that effects humans.  Oh, and we could also have The Scrapie Show, all about sheep that get scrapie.  That could be more like kids' programing.  After all, kids like sheep,.  Sheep're cute.
BOB:  Oh, and in case you've been living in a log somewhere with no access to human culture, the media, or the real world, and so don't even know don't know what we're talking about here, Mad Cow Disease is a brain condition that's brought on, essentially, by cannibalism.  Its real name is Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE.  Basically, if you eat the brain tissue of your own species, these little proteins called prions build up.  Prions burn holes in the brain tissue of the living animal turning the brain into a spongy, swiss-cheese-like thing, and that causes insanity, loss of motor control, and then a coma, and then the body just shuts down.  Humans can catch Mad Cow Disease and there are also variants of it which are actually native to human beings.  Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and Kuru being versions of this thing.  That's my factoid, blah blah blah.
BRIAN:  So, yeah, basically, Mad Cow Disease is caused by grinding dead cattle up into cattle feed and feeding them back to other cows.  This was initially thought to be a good way of recycling dead things, lowering the cost of feed, and quickly bulking up cows.  The living cows get all the steroids in the dead cows, plus all this protein and stuff, on top of what's in their feed.
BOB:  And prions aren't really that easy to destroy because they're not viruses or bacteria.  They're protein chains which means they're really, really, really, really tough and no antibiotics or anything effects them.  They're like DNA-- which is one of the hardest, strongest substances out there.
BRIAN:  And, yeah, so this one cow was found at some farm in Canada somewhere in Alberta and then BANG!  The Americans stopped buying Canadian beef.  Just, like, instantly.  The won't import it any more.
BOB:  That is pretty severe.
BRIAN:  Frankly, though, I don't blame them.  After all, like I said, I don't want to die of dementia because of the food I eat, so I'm pretty sure the American people also don't want to.
BOB:  True enough,  But it does, when viewed from a certain light, look like a punishment for not entering into the Iraq war.
BRIAN:  Kind of yeah.  And of course-- glad you brought it up-- within a few days of the Americans stopping the beef trade, the conspiracy theories started flying.  The farmer whose cow had Mad Cow Disease turned out to be transplanted American and people started saying that maybe the USA paid the guy to infect the cow-- because it looks like there's probably no other cows with Mad Cow Disease in Canada right now-- although it is a little early to be saying that for sure.
BOB:  But, yeah.  Either the US military did it, or the CIA did it.  Spooooooky.
BRIAN:  The CIA's always a good scapegoat.
BOB:  Especially when the 'conspiracy' is as vague as this cow.  They're trying to trace it, but this is a cow that's bopped around a lot, so they're having trouble finding its source.  Where it was born, what farms it lived at before it ended up in Alberta.
BRIAN:  And, of course the government is saying that it can't be the feed the cow was fed because the type of feed that produces Mad Cow Disease has been outlawed for years.  So they're saying no farmers would be using that feed.  And instead I heard someone the other day saying that the MCD just 'spontaneously' happened.  So it's not the feed.  Uh-uh, nope.  Nope nope nope nope nope.  Could never be the feed, never.  It just magically happened on its own, wasn't caused by anything, certainly not contaminated feed.
BOB:  Even though the cow was supposedly born right around the time that feed was outlawed.
BRIAN:  Right after, I think.
BOB:  Yeah.
BRIAN:  So we're being told that farmers wouldn't use that feed-- even though farmers are, if nothing else-- notoriously cheap and tend to have a "waste not want not" kind of recycling attitude.  Sometimes to the point of absurdity.
BOB:  Yeah, but when the government outlawed the contaminated feed they compensated all the farmers with money for the trouble and the loss of feed.  So they'd have no reason to still use the feed.
BRIAN:  So you're saying that some people wouldn't just take the government money, and then just use up the remainder of the infected feed because then they'd have extra money and besides, "what harm could it do?"  Just going: "Hey, look I've got all this feed, and this money to replace this feed-- so why don't I just keep the cash and use up the feed and I'll be ahead financially because I won't have to spend this money on new feed-- and then I'll get new feed later."  And the government never really keeps track of this stuff very well, so both keeping the feed and taking the money would probably be easy.  I mean, nobody takes Mad Cow Disease seriously on the Prairies-- or rather they didn't till now, and this sudden wave of concern is only because trade with the USA has stopped.  I've even heard farm people saying they believe Mad Cow Disease doesn't exist, that it's some sort of conspiracy by the government-- or better yet the French-- or even better yet, "The Indians"-- to keep rural Canada down.  Which is, quite frankly, retarded, paranoid, uneducated, and lame-- but then again so's the world.
BOB:  And, of course the health department on top of all this is also trying to "educate" people about Mad Cow Disease.
BRIAN:  Yeah, well. That's why they need MCtv.
BOB:  They're saying that you can only get a prion infection if you eat the spinal cord or the brain of the infected animal.
BRIAN:  Yeah, well....
BOB:  And they're saying that the people who died of Mad Cow Disease in Britain had been exposed to the brains and spines of infected animals.  That eating a steak from in infected animal won't give you Mad Cow Disease.
BRIAN:  Yeah, well....  It's true that you will get a prion infection quicker if you eat a brain or a spine because prions cluster there-- but they neglect to tell you that prions are also free-floating-- like DNA.  We have DNA in all our cells, but we also have DNA in our bloodstream as well, just drifting around doing God knows what.  And prions also drift through bodies.  They cluster where there's neural tissue, but they also wander around randomly, too.
BOB:  Yup.  And, while it's true that prions have to build up in your system to a certain level before they start doing serious damage, you could, in theory eat enough prion infected beef to reach these levels-- even if you avoid brains and spines.  Infection only happens quicker if you eat brains and spines.
BRIAN:  So, despite what the health people say, you can get Mad Cow Disease from eating prion-infected steaks.  You just have to eat lots and lots of them.  Compared to only a brain or two.  The health people are just downplaying things in order to save the beef industry.
BOB:  And how did those Brits get exposed to brain tissue anyway?
BRIAN:  They could have eaten beef wieners.  Everything goes into wieners.  Brains, spines, eyeballs, intestines, erasers, cigarette butts.
BOB:  And oh yeah cooking does not kill prions.  They can withstand a hell of a lot of heat.
BRIAN:  I even heard a rumor that tin cured with prion-infected fat could also contain trace levels of infection.  But that's just a rumour and I haven't been able to verify it for or against, to my satisfaction.
BOB:  So, basically, we're doomed.
BRIAN:  I don't know about doomed, but I'm sure eating a lot more chicken.
BOB:  But I like burgers.
BRIAN:  Well, I wouldn't sweat it.  There'll probably only be one infected cow.  But for now I'm playing it safe.
BOB:  Hey, I got an idea.  Maybe it'll become trendy to eat Mad Cow beef, maybe getting Mad Cow Disease will be the new cool thing.  I mean, it'll be like taking lots of drugs-- and it'll be permanent.  Kind of like combining body piercing and tattoos-- which are old and stale now-- with drugs-- which are getting passé.  It'll be like "brain modification," or "neural scarification."  I'll be like punching holes in the only thing left to punch holes in.  It can be the next big thing.
BRIAN:  You first.

Next:  Ghost voices....
 

Epilogue 47.
Epilogue 45.
INDEX.
HOME.