18 February 2006

On the Salt Lake City confusion - setting the record straight

It appears that there is a frightful row in Salt Lake City these days, all because of some stupid DNA issue.

A few years ago, Loayza said, his faith was shaken and his identity stripped away by DNA evidence showing that the ancestors of American natives came from Asia, not the Middle East.

For Mormons, the lack of discernible Hebrew blood in Native Americans is no minor collision between faith and science. It burrows into the historical foundations of the Book of Mormon, a 175-year-old transcription that the church regards as literal and without error.

The truth is neither here nor there, and it is up to us, the Elders, to straighten the record. The story started about 2 thousand years ago, when we have decided to look at the commercial feasibility of opening a buffalo burgers franchise in North America. We have set up a preliminary hunting and tasting committee of the Elders (see here):












And the conclusions were quite encouraging, so the Elders have decided to have a go at it.
The idea fired up the imagination of the youngsters, who have pictured the working conditions like this:












Well, anyhow, the exploratory party got there and set up several hunting and processing locations. There were no issues with supply of meat - you couldn't throw a stone these days without hitting a buffalo, so this side of the business was pretty well fixed.

The first real problem appeared to be the weather. Being used to a much hotter climate, the members of the hunting teams started grumbling, this appeared to be no fun at all:











"We didn't come here to freeze our yarmulkas off", was the regular whine these days.

The second issue came from a completely unexpected direction. The chief Rabbi of the expedition started doubting whether the buffalo meat is kosher. Since buffalo did not appear in the Book, it took us a lot of time for correspondence with the mainland and unending theological discussions, which was not a good start for any business venture, as you might imagine.

But the last, and mortal, blow came from the consumers. These days the market research was not what you might call scientific. So it came as a total surprise when it became apparent that the locals do not take at all to the idea of grilled meat. No matter how much we have invested in PR, free sampling, campaigning and all that marketing shit, the locals still stuck to their raw meat munching habits (this is why stake Tartar is a big no-no in our menu till these days, by the way).

So the team has packed their belongings, moved to Central and South America for milder climate and mingled with the local population. Just for the sheer fun of it, the Hebes started building there all kinds of incomprehensible and useless stone structures of all forms and styles that confound archaeologists and other eggheads of today.

As to the issue of DNA: these days we didn't know from no DNA. The "procreate and multiply" command, on the other hand, was crystal clear and attractive: if it stands on two feet and doesn't wave a tomahawk at you - go ahead and procreate. As for the DNA - we didn't split no DNA then, it was all done in the old-fashioned way, so just disregard all that mumbo-jumbo and take it easy. Here is how:




















With me so far? Good, that's it. Oh, and don't forget to have a few brewskies with that burger!

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