Why cloning anyone—even Jim Carrey—isn’t the best plan

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Doubling

If the internet is to be believed (it isn’t), more and more celebrities have been replaced by clones.

The latest to have their body allegedly stolen is actor Jim Carrey, star of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and other cinematic wonders. Carey attended the 51st César Awards in Paris on February 26, his first public appearance in a while, and he looked a little different than before. One might think that this would be attributed to some combination of aging and cosmetic procedures, but instead a conspiracy theory is forming that the man is not Carrie, but a clone.

Whoever’s doing all this celebrity body-snapping is busy: Carey’s replacement follows those of Paul McCartney (presumed dead since 1966 and replaced by a replacement) and Avril Lavigne (supposedly dead since 2003). One would think that by now they would have gotten better at covering up their criminal activities.

Feedback tried to think through the logistics of creating a usable clone of the star of Dumb and dumber. As far as we know, no one has ever successfully cloned a human, so there’s that. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume there’s an illegal cloning lab in Hollywood, maybe in a seedy apartment somewhere on Mulholland Drive, that can do it. There is still a big problem.

For a bit: if someone somehow clones Kerry, perhaps collecting his cells from the upcoming set Sonic the Hedgehog 4this clone will come out of the tub like a baby. It will then take 64 years for him to grow up to look like Kerry now, by which time he will be 128 years old and probably 6 feet shorter.

With the risk of increasing the trauma of Star Trek fans who just saw the recent cancellation of the latest TV series, once upon a time there was a terrible movie called Star Trek: Nemesis in which the bad guys had created a clone of Captain Picard and planned to replace him. For this to work, they had to genetically engineer the clone to undergo accelerated aging. And even with 24th century technology, it doesn’t work right.

The feedback suggests that a modern cloning conspiracy might encounter technical barriers.

Steel for lunch

Feedback is not for fancy restaurants. We think their main benefit is the pleasure we get from reading a really scathing review from a restaurant critic who’s sick of still being hungry after 18 perfectly arranged small portions.

Therefore, we were unaware of sound tampering, which is the emerging practice of using carefully selected sounds to enhance the dining experience. This is based on the science of sensory cross-modality: the fact that our senses cross-wire in the brain, creating specific correspondences between, say, sound and smell. For some people this leads to synaesthesia where colors can evoke tastes etc. But even if you’re not synesthetic, the sounds a restaurant plays can affect your dining experience.

Screenwriter Chris Sims warns us to the latest proposal in the field by Charles Spence and Tiani Zhang of the University of Oxford. They set out to identify a “musical match for the metal taste” that had not previously been identified, “nor sought.”

With graceful inevitability, the sound “strongly associated with a metallic flavor” was, of course, “the sound of a theremin associated with old sci-fi movies.” For those unfamiliar with a theremin, it is an electronic instrument that the musician does not touch. Instead, there are two antennae and the musician moves his hands in the space near them. Thanks to electromagnetism, this generates an unearthly howl, perfectly suited to the more sinister kind of sci-fi.

Feedback would say that this explains why we taste lead when we hear the original theme from Star Trekbut we checked again and there’s no theremin in this recording, so it’s obviously just our unstable brains. We then fell down a rabbit hole of records that purported to contain terremixes but actually didn’t, which included the soundtrack of The Forbidden Planet and the Beach Boys Good vibes.

All this investigation has made Feedback hungry, so we head out in search of lunch. What is the best sound match for leftover pizza?

Pass the bear

Just when we think there is no more nominative determinism, reader Richard Black comes up with a really complicated example.

It started when he read a recent column by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein to the question “What is a galaxy?” Chanda mentioned a paper by astronomer Simon Smith reporting the discovery of a star cluster called Ursa Major III. It gets its name because, as seen from Earth, it is in the constellation Ursa Major, or the Great Bear.

Richard writes: “My mind (being elderly) immediately jumped to a song (performed) by Alan Price called ‘Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear’ which is instantly stuck in my head now.” We’re not sure if this is really nominative determinism or just a giant game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but either way the connection is in our head, and now it’s in yours.

However, to prevent any e-mails complaining that this doesn’t really count, we’ve been informed by reader Richard Bartlett that the head coach of Leicester City Women’s Football Team is Rick Passmoore.

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