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Scientific progress seems to accelerate the very pace of time itself. The arrival of Dolly, the cloned sheep from Scotland, proves this beyond any doubt: two shakes of a lamb’s tail now requires half the time it used to. Dolly has entered the record books as the first mammal in history to be a perfect gene-for-gene copy of another animal.

Much is being made these days of the ethical dilemmas that await us once we begin to clone humans. Is your clone a child or a sibling? Should you get into Stanford just because your clone did? Is it okay to gorge on chocolate ice cream as long as your clone stays thin? Will the Elvis impersonators get along with the Elvis clones? That sort of thing.

Vexing as these questions are, consider that from a sheep’s point of view, the ethical dilemmas are already here. I confess that when I first heard about this cloning trick, like many others I thought to myself: Clever bastards, choosing sheep like that. Much simpler to pull off than cold fusion; who can tell the difference between two sheep? Talk about pulling the wool over our eyes. It made me wish I had scooped them last week by holding a press conference in which I presented two identical fruit bats to a stunned world. Both named Barney.

The passage of time, however, has revealed that these Scots are not charlatans. They have actually xeroxed a sheep. I began to puzzle on this. First of all, sheep have a pretty hard time of it anyway. Easily frightened and famously dim-witted, they contribute the word “sheepish” to the language. You’ve just got to figure that the clone of a sheep is going to have some serious self-image problems, perpetually living in the shadow of another sheep. I picture her in therapy with some expensive uptown shrink, nervously inspecting the sheepskin diplomas on the wall. Perhaps she might be soothed by news of her lasting fame. After all, we well remember what’s-her-name, the first test tube baby. It will be far tougher for the cloned sheep that follow Dolly. But then again, I guess that’s what sheep do best.

What’s really interesting is how similar, philosophically, the cloning process is to copying software. Dolly is a perfect copy of another sheep’s most intimate details. The next century will bring a head-on collision between computer science and biology. Intellectual property and livestock will come to be much the same thing. Let your neighbor walk your prize-winning dalmatian, and you might just find the neighborhood crawling with a hundred and one exact copies next week. Cattle-rustling becomes cattle-piracy. I envision animals shipping with license-managers and other copy protection measures (Question: “Waiter, what’s this keyboard doing in my soup?” Answer: “The backspace?”). When wool meets code, softwear becomes software (“In order to receive technical support for your new sweater, please return the enclosed registration tag immediately”). Paradoxically, as animals become more like software, software comes to resemble animals. Advances in genetic algorithms on computers may mean that you’ll pay a stud fee some day to let your copy of Excel 56.2b enjoy a blissful rut with the latest Lotus 1-2-3 down at Kip’s Happy Spreadsheet Kennel.

In the meantime, the future beckons. What other animals should we duplicate? If cats already have nine lives, it hardly seems fair to clone them. I’d say they’ve got an unfair advantage right out of the gate. I vote for cloning dogs instead. They’ve got that whole one-year-equals-seven-years thing to deal with. But we might just find the most intriguing possibility of all high in the Andes. What are the religious implications of cloning the Dolly Llama? Maybe the Tibetans prefer a Dolly Yak instead. As Saint John might have remarked in his Gospel text, “Behold the Lamb of God. Both of them!”

Still, I tire of the shrill voices of pundits who claim that science is eroding the foundations of our society, speeding us along too fast for our own good. No, I won’t lament that we are playing God. But it does make me want to graft a slightly more prosaic ending onto William Blake’s poem, “The Lamb.”

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed,
By the stream and o’er the mead?
Well, it was Dr. Ian Wilmut
And a team of researchers at the
Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland.
Full stop.

Aldus Manutius, a Venetian publisher from around the time of Christopher Columbus, chose as his motto the phrase “Festina lente,” or “Make haste slowly.” When the hectic pace of technological change starts to spin your head around, it’s comforting to recall these words. The centuries that separate Manutius from us have done nothing to improve the practice of sitting down with friends and sharing stories and drinks.

Aside from the invention of the martini, of course.

December is here again, and with it comes an orgy of activity that threatens to obscure or distort everything else in sight. The Japanese knew this when they launched their infamous 1941 attack a mere 18 distracted shopping days before Christmas. And any truly clever alien would know that Independence Day is a terrible time to attack the Earth. In America, at least, everyone is looking skyward on July 4th, whereas in mid-December about the only things we see are cars, crowds, and sadly abused credit cards.

A few facts have the power to cheer in this grim season. One is that the days will soon be getting longer (the Star Chamber sends its condolences to its readers in the southern hemisphere). In fact, owing to the elliptical nature of the Earth’s orbit, the sunsets will start getting later on December 12th. The sunrise doesn’t start getting earlier until sometime in January, but since the Star Chamber editorial offices don’t open until well after dawn, this is no concern of ours.

A second cheering fact is that official Star Chamber Martini Glasses are now on sale. Tired of crass over-commercialization this holiday season? Forget your cares with a cold martini in one of our high-quality, tasteful, logo-emblazoned glasses! See our Catalog for details.

Paracelsus reminds us this week of the joys of being a regular. Notwithstanding any cheery Cheersy references to a place where everybody knows your name, it IS nice to hang out with close friends in a place you know as well as your own backyard. Accordingly, in this week’s story we meet Fisher Pinckney, a regular at the Scarf and Bolt.

Also in this week’s edition The Star Chamber is pleased to present a cogent and conclusive
Treatise on the Natural Limits of Self Publishing in a Web-based Medium. We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all websites are most certainly not created equal. That they endow their creators with many sleepless nights. Yadda-yadda-yadda. Check it out.

Mr. Wilson, my eighth grade history teacher, was a compact and intense red-faced man. Charlie Birkner was a clownish classmate with enormous glasses and a mild pleasant grin; he sat just to the right of me. Mr. Wilson could swing quickly from a puzzling joke about the Jefferson administration to a furious rage at the antics of some classroom slacker. Charlie Birkner could make amazingly realistic Star Wars light-saber noises with his mouth and he enjoyed playing his pencil as though it were a saxophone.

One day Mr. Wilson, in an expansive mood, said to us “A Chinese wise man and his student were standing on a bridge over a mountain stream. Look how quickly the water moves, said the student. No, look how still the bridge is, replied the wise man. If you can understand that, you’ll have learned something about life.”

The room went completely silent. Mystified, each of us tried to penetrate the message of the story. Mr. Wilson just grinned wickedly. His head twitched slightly. The silence persisted. Finally, as though he had just caught hold of a knock-knock joke that had eluded him for years, Charlie Birkner called out:

“Oh, I get it!”

I always wondered what that story meant, but Charlie Birkner never told me.

Newt remained curled up in the chair. He held out his painty hands as though a cat’s cradle were strung between them. “No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X’s…” “And?”	Chiyono studied Zen for many years under Bukko of Engaku. Still, she could not attain the fruits of meditation. At last one moonlit night she was carrying water in an old wooden pail girded with bamboo. The bamboo broke, and the bottom fell out of the pail. At that moment, she was set free. Chiyono said:
“No damn cat, and no damn cradle.” Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle	“No more water in the pail, no more moon in the water.” Gyomay M. Kubose, Zen Koans

Quick: if a dog breaks a mirror, does that mean forty-nine years of bad luck or just one? As of the 16th of this month, the Star Chamber is six months old, which in the accelerated dog-years of web time, makes us a noble old property indeed. Or old, at least. Just as we promised on April 16, 1996, we continue to add new content to this site every Monday, without fail. If that’s not worth a bookmark, we don’t know what is. We’ve even been reviewed on the Pop channel of HotWired.

The new space that we staked out half a year ago is slowly being mapped. Terra Incognita all over the web is giving way to Rand McNally as fortune-grabbing web barons criss-cross the Great Plains in Shockwave-belching locomotives. Mercifully, there’s still plenty of territory for the small and the quirky among us to map out. In keeping with this cartographic theme, we introduce a new writer this week, Ortelius, who presents an apt tale on the topic.

Finally, you will also find two short pieces by Paracelsus: a meditation on cats and moons called Hey Diddle-diddle, and a short piece called Spider-Baiting whose subject you can no doubt guess.

The weather is fine in the middle of this September, but September always wears the gold-tooth smile of a thief.

Someone pulled the plug on August, and all that accumulated warmth is emptying sloppily into the southern hemisphere, may they thank us well for it! As above, so below. Speaking for himself, Paracelsus will miss the heat, and he ponders what liquid concoction is most likely to stanch, at least for the duration of Happy Hour, the ebbing tide of seasonal warmth.

Perhaps a fine Kentucky bourbon will do the trick, with its connotations of golden harvest and its unmistakable fire in the belly.

Old Dr. Paracelsus, the medieval alchemist and medicine man, thought of alcohol as the quintessence, the fifth element, next to those established worthies earth, air, fire, and water. Indeed, it was none other than Dr. Paracelsus who gave alcohol its name: al-kohl originally referred to black sulphide of antimony, and he arbitrarily transferred that name to wine spirits. Which is just as well, because who likes to drink black sulphide of antimony? Olive or twist, on the rocks or straight up, it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that zing.

Thoughts of chemistry and the ancient and estimable art upon which it was based set us puzzling about alchemy. What do you suppose they would have made of Goldschlager in the fourteenth century?

This week we pass another significant milestone for the year: August the second is a cross-quarter day, which is to say that it is halfway between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox. It used to be known as Lammas, and it marked the first harvests. Notice that it happens to be just across the calendar from Groundhog Day. What happened to the celebrations? A quick perusal of the month of August reveals a strange dearth of official holidays of any kind.

We at the Star Chamber propose a remedy to this situation: call it Grounding Day. Leave work early one day this week. Get the good gin out of the freezer and fix yourself a big martini. Sit outside in the hot air with both feet firmly on the ground and listen to the quickening pulse of summer. It’s damned important to stay grounded.

One cool spring evening recently, the Star Chamber editorial staff assembled at its favorite watering hole for cocktails. Some of these cocktails were fine, spirited martinis, and some of them were gallant if ignoble admixtures of vodka and dry vermouth. No matter. The point is that the gathering was followed by a comet-viewing party, as Comet Hyakutake was forming a particularly admirable display at that time. In elder days, comets were considered great and dangerous omens (they were also called hairy stars in honor of their plumage). The strange perceived relationship between matters celestial and terrestrial set Paracelsus a-puzzling.

Also new this week is a brief story about the web-wide bot revolution, called Sims.