Word: amoebae
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...harder to admit that most of what I'm watching is pretty dull stuff. Like Curtis, the straitlaced Asian-American attorney, scrubbing the toilet bowl. Or Jamie, the squeaky-clean beauty queen, grating cheese for nachos. Or those endless dissertations on the virtues of Dryel, the horrors of amoeba-induced diarrhea, the burning shame of bunions...
...occurrences. In perhaps one of the best passages, a Schulze narrator, Danny, is frozen by the singular event of looking into "crocodile eyes," the grainy veneer of a cheap old Stasi desk. "Every time it happens, I promise myself I'm going to talk to the others about this amoeba-like grain in the veneer," he says. "We all have to spend our time staring at these lines and squiggles, which at the far left look like a crocodile's eye. But nobody ever says anything, and I keep forgetting it, too, like some bad dream...
...that serves as the tour's home base, people are after him, begging for autographs (Baldwin obliges) and introducing their wannabe-actor friends (Baldwin is polite). It could be worse. He could be younger brother Billy, who is along for the tour and is the center of a permanent amoeba of giggling girls. But it could be better. He could be older sister Beth, who sits unnoticed amid her famous brothers. "They have sisters?" asks someone in the crowd. "We're known as Nothing and Nobody," jokes Beth about herself and sister Jane...
What guides an axon on its incredible voyage is a "growth cone," a creepy, crawly sprout that looks something like an amoeba. Scientists have known about growth cones since the turn of the century. What they didn't know until recently was that growth cones come equipped with the molecular equivalent of sonar and radar. Just as instruments in a submarine or airplane scan the environment for signals, so molecules arrayed on the surface of growth cones search their surroundings for the presence of certain proteins. Some of these proteins, it turns out, are attractants that pull the growth cones...
...worried about the possibility that because of the Amoeba Principle, all the companies that came into being after the breakup of AT&T in 1984 may remerge, coagulating into some gigantic snarl of cables and wires. If that happens, I assume, the television commercials that were designed to make those diverse companies distinctive will simply meld together for a while, so that Candice Bergen will discuss the Yellow Pages with James Earl Jones in the voice of Dick Cavett...