If this blog doesn’t go viral I hope it will go bacterial … like E coli … E coli is a bacteria …. Escherichia coli …..   there are a lot of them around …. I think it is the most common family of bacteria …. Like most families  ….  most of the strains of E coli are good …. or at least harmless …. It’s just the bad ones you read about in the news …

I think bacteria reproduce a lot faster than viruses … all they do is divide and the population doubles   … I think E coli can reproduce in about 20 minutes …. It is a good thing E coli are polite …. Otherwise   ….

those bad E coli could eat the whole earth in a few days

Viruses have a lot more work to do to reproduce …. They must first commandeer a cell …. Then they must turn the cell into a virus factory … that would take a lot longer than 20 minutes …. I have never been able to build a factory in 20 minutes

I have been building factories since I was a wee lad …. I remember a marble factory I built in fourth grade …. Not glass marbles like the rich kids had ….. I wasn’t making stuff out of glass till I was almost 30 … I used a much more economical material … mud …

I have it on good authority that the ancients made marbles from mud …. They called them dobies …. The word comes from adobe …. Ask anyone that is over a hundred and they will tell you all about it.

My mud was mostly clay ….. my best source was from gopher mounds …. When I found a good mound I would bring some water and mix a small batch of dough …. I would knead it well … I would then roll out a nice rope of clay then pinch of pieces that were exactly the same size …. Ok …. Almost the same size …. Except for the ones that were intentionally big or little …. I had to experiment a little and see which size worked the best.

When I had a batch done … I would make a nest in the remaining gopher dirt and cover it with the driest dirt … this was to disguise the product so marauders would not plunder the factory …. A few days later I would come back and retrieve the marbles ….. there are probably better ways to manufacture mud marbles …. If I did it now, I’m sure the process would be much more sophisticated.

My fourth grade mud marble factory was soon shut down and shuttered ….. bankruptcy …. The problem was in the marketing …. When I took them to school the other boys were less than receptive to playing for keeps … putting their glass marbles against my mud ones … I think it was fear ….

Any way after a less than brilliant marketing strategy I found another use for the surplus …. If you threw a mud marble against the school building brick wall they shattered quite nicely ….. the mud marbles shattered …. not the bricks   …. Thus we see that bricks are harder than mud

In hind sight …. You need a good marketing strategy before you invest in building the factory ….

So tell that to the viruses

 

E coli and Mud marbles

I put the title at the end …. I didn’t want anybody jumping to conclusions