Tales of the Incredible Hoke Robertson

Some of you may know that I dabble in genetic splicing in the underground lab complex I built under my house. It all started back in the 1950's when Drs. James Watson, Francis Crick and I were working on our theses in molecular biology. The work eventually led to us receiving the Nobel Prize in Physiology/ Medicine. Unfortunately, my ongoing association with the government precluded my name from being publicly mentioned, but I do still have my gold medal, somewhere. Anyway, after we had finished our joint work, I only dabbled in genetics periodically thereafter until the neighbor's rooster became an intolerable nuisance. I began trying to locate and isolate some of the genes of a sloth with the intent of making roosters less eager to wake up in the morning and therefore less likely to start crowing at 4:30 am.

Getting sloth DNA proved to be a difficult endeavor, but I eventually got the customs paperwork approved and soon had a whole slouch of sloths in my backyard (slouch of sloths like pod of whales or squint of moles). Anyway, in the early days, cross fertilization was not easy and mistakes were made. Along the way I ended up with chickens with claws on their wings trying to climb trees and sloths that leapt out of trees waving their arms trying to fly. Thank God for safety nets. Anyway, I eventually found the right gene and got the proper splicing done and lo and behold had a lazy male chicken with a floppy comb which I named "Droopy." Unfortunately, Droopy was not so lazy as to completely ignore the females and soon we had a large but lethargic flock of chickens that just sat around doing almost nothing. As might be expected, when they roosted at night they hung upside down. When my kids began to refuse to go to school and started sleeping all day, I realized there were unintended consequences to my experiment. I made sure nobody ate any more of the eggs of that shiftless flock and kept them isolated until they all passed (of natural causes) to that great coop in the sky. Interestingly, the feathers of that flock went into our pillows and everyone who uses them states they get the best night’s sleep they've ever had! HOKE ROBERTSON