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Conversation Lesson

AC, what’s happening?

Well, there’s lots happening in the world, Dan.

Yep, yep.

Lots happening, yeah.

What would you like to talk about today? Let’s talk about you. Enough of these English lessons.

Just all about me, huh?

Let’s talk about you.

Yeah, but that’ll put everyone to sleep. No one wants to hear about me.

Yeah, that was a joke.

Come on, come on.

We don’t want to talk about that. What should we talk about?

I think we should talk about having second chances in life.

Second chances.

Yeah.

I’ve given you second, third, fourth chances.

Just today, alone.

Yeah.

I’m sure you’ve had plenty of second chances in your life.

I’ve had a few second chances.

Yeah.

I almost drowned. I probably told you this story a million times.

I think we’ve heard this story before.

Yeah.

You almost drowned and then someone saved your life, right?

No, nobody saved. That’s the whole story. This is how much you pay attention. I’m gonna give you a second chance to hear this story.

Give me a second chance, please.

I almost drowned and my friend, who was a really good swimmer, yelled at me, “Hey, are you okay?” I thought, “Oh my God, my friend’s gonna save my life.” I yelled, “No!” That’s what I said, but what he heard was, “Yeah!” Then he said, “I’m going back to the hotel.”

Oh man.

I managed to survive and got a second chance at life.

Wow, that’s a great story.

You’ve already forgotten it. You didn’t pay attention.

What was that story again?

Somebody saved your life. It’s a great story.

Someone saved your life, that’s right.

What about you? You have any second chances? You given anybody a second chance?

Yeah, I give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I give second chances all the time. I think that it’s a good thing to do.

Well, the benefit of the doubt and a second chance are not always the same thing.

That’s true, but one could be based on the other. If you want to give someone the benefit of the doubt, you give them a second chance. Not always, though, you’re right.

Right, right. We’ve had three stories that are somewhat tangentially related to second chances.

Yeah, and they’re different types of second chances.

Yeah, completely different. It’s a bit of a stretch.

Yeah, but that’s good.

Yeah. The first one was about cloning. It’s not the first time that we’ve done a Deep English lesson about cloning.

True. One was about the bull, right?

The bull who …

The owner loved the bull so much that when the bull died, he had the bull cloned at a local university, right?

Right.

Then the second bull looked just like the first one, it had many of the same attributes.

The personality was the same.

The personality was the same, it did the same kind of things.

It hung out underneath the same tree and it ate in the same strange way.

Then one day, just out of nowhere, out of the blue, it attacked him.

Yeah. I think maybe it attacked him twice and almost killed him.

But that’s something that the first chance had never done.

Yeah.

So there was a behavioral difference.

Yeah.

Yeah, this one was with dogs.

Right. They’ve cloned cats, dogs, pigs, bulls.

You think they’ve cloned humans and we just don’t know about it?

Probably in secret somewhere.

Yeah.

The first clone was a sheep, Dolly. That was in the 90s.

Yeah, that was the famous-

It’s hard to believe that the cloning technology has been around since the 90s.

Right, right, right.

Now it’s something that you can just go to a lab and pay for. There used to be a company in the US that did it for much cheaper.

You’re talking about animals, not humans.

Yeah, animals. I think dogs and cats for rich people who are really attached to their pets.

Right.

Anyhow, these people in the story, they seem to get a two-for-one deal. I wonder how that happened.

When you call it a deal, it still sounds like they’re getting a really good discount but they’re still paying $100,000 right?

It’s better than $200,000.

That’s true. 100 grand is better than 200 grand.

Obviously, this couple had a lot of money to burn.

Yeah, yeah.

Apparently, they had just spent $100,000 on a Humvee and they kind of justified it. “We paid that much for a car and it’s worth more than our car.”

Yeah.

Now they’re thinking about getting a third clone.

Really? A third one?

Yeah, for their grandson.

Oh, that sounds ridiculous to me.

That was one strange part of the story. They talk about the original dog was Melvin, he was so wonderful, and they even let Melvin babysit their grandson in the backyard alone.

Really?

I assume Melvin was quite small if he needed to be babysat.

That’s an extraordinary dog, he can babysit.

Can you imagine if you brought your little kid to your parents’? Then you came back and the dog was watching them? “Oh yeah, Melvin’s taking care of it. Don’t worry.”

No problem.

“Where’s my kid?”

Good ol’ Melvin. Oh man.

So yeah, Melvin was a special dog and now there are two clones of him.

So that’s certainly one type of second chance, although it brings up so many existential questions of why someone would clone something when it’s not necessarily the exact same being? If you believe that it is even though it’s not, it just seems odd to me.

I suppose it’s just an extension. It’s possible that you could rationally understand it’s not the same being but still be comforted by it.

Yeah, like an extension of the physical nature of the being as before.

Yeah, it’s like maybe a living photo almost. It looks the same, it sounds the same, a lot of the behaviors are the same. It’s like watching a video but way better.

Yeah.

I remember when my father passed away, my mother would listen to the answering machine message that my father left for a long time. She would listen to it over and over again just to hear his voice. Yeah, I wonder if she would clone my father.

It does raise that question, especially if you lose a child. Would you want to-

No, I wouldn’t. I think that that would creep you out or make you more sad.

Yeah, I think it would make me more sad.

What would you do if a loved one, like somebody in your family wanted to clone their partner who had passed away?

Right.

Yeah, I don’t think I would like that.

No, I wouldn’t feel comfortable with that. I think there are different ways of dealing with grief. I don’t see cloning as being a very successful way to deal with it.

Especially if you didn’t like your clone. That would make things even worse.

That’s right, but the kind of second chance they’re giving these … Actually, they’re giving themselves the second chance. It’s not like they’re giving the animal a second chance.

Yeah, Melvin didn’t get a second chance.

No, he has one and only chance, right?

Yeah, but Paula and Paula’s husband, I’m blanking on his name, they got a second chance.

I think the second story about the woman-

Before we get on-

On Barbara.

On Barbara, I did read something interesting. I have vague memories of this from the news, how in 2015, this same laboratory was planning to clone a wooly mammoth.

Oh really?

They had found some wooly mammoth, amazingly-

Intact, right?

They’ve been extinct for thousands of years. I don’t know how many thousands of years, but thousands of years, and they found one intact that actually had blood.

Yeah, DNA.

They had a vial of blood and there was plans for some lab to try to clone it. Obviously, it didn’t happen, they weren’t successful.

It’s a matter of time.

Yeah. I think they have cloned some animal that went extinct recently, like some kind of sheep or goat that had gone extinct in the last 20 years and they cloned it.

That story by Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park, that’s what that whole story’s about, right?

Right. Did you see the new Jurassic Park?

No.

Me neither, but yeah, I’ve heard that there are other labs still planning on cloning a wooly mammoth. Their plan is to maybe try to mix the wooly mammoth DNA with the DNA of an Asian elephant.

Well, I think they’d have to. I don’t know if it’s possible to just grow it from a single cell.

Right.

You’d need an egg and all that stuff.

You know, in this situation, I didn’t know anything about cloning. When I was looking into the story, I didn’t understand that apparently, the breed of the dog where the eggs from is inconsequential to what the clone will be as well as the breed of the surrogate mother has no connection. I can kind of understand the surrogate mother, but I would think that there would be genetic material in the donor egg. I guess that’s the whole thing that they do. They remove all the genetic material from the egg.

Yeah, they remove it in vitro. They do that connection that connects the DNA, they ligate it, they do whatever, then insert it back into the egg, and then take that egg and plant it in the surrogate mother.

The fact that they kickstart it with electricity, that’s like Frankenstein stuff.

Yeah, pretty much. Frankenstein.

Anyhow, I was reading about this wooly mammoth that they’re going to try to create some sort of hybrid that will have traits from both the current modern elephant and the wooly mammoth.

Interesting. You think you have any wooly mammoth blood in you, Dan?

Some wooly mammoth genes?

Yeah, I think you do.

I feel it.

The fur on your face just gives it away.

I’ve gotta shave myself every once in a while. Yeah, Barbara Harris, that was the opposite of a second chance, of somebody who believes some people don’t deserve a second chance.

It’s kind of a pretty controversial issue, situation.

Yeah, very controversial.

On the one hand, she’s trying to do good – in her mind – by taking in babies that are abandoned, and orphaned, well, abandoned by the mother because the mother can’t take care of them ’cause she’s addicted to drugs. Somebody needs to take care of these children, but on the other hand, she’s paying these women money that she knows they’ll take ’cause they need the money to buy drugs. In exchange, they get sterilized. Some people could see that as taking advantage of their situation in order to inflict some kind of life-changing, life-altering condition that prevents them from procreating in the future. Some people might say, like we said in the lesson, this has remnants of some sort of social engineering, which is pretty dangerous in some peoples’ minds.

I think Barbara Harris would say her intention is purely to protect these unborn children from a life of suffering, but it’s very easy to see it from the other side, that she’s trying to punish people and say that they’re not worthy of fixing their lives and changing their lives.

Exactly, and I would assume there’s a racial element to the story as well. Is Barbara black or is she white?

She’s white and actually, she brings up the fact that people call her racist. She laughs at that because she’s white, but her husband’s black.

She’s raising these black children.

Destiny and all these other children she adopted were black, but that racial element aside, there’s still a cold way to look at this.

Sure, it’s a moral issue involved.

She’s saying that this class of people, she does compare them to dogs in one interview that she did on TV. She did a lot of talk shows in the 90s and she got a lot of negative press and some positive press. There were a lot of people that supported her as well and sent her lots of money that funded her.

Wow.

(coughs) Excuse me.

No problem.

Then a whole nother angle on it is the fact that she raised these four children that she loves very much and they wouldn’t exist if her NGO was around before. The adoption agency said Destiny is going to be physically and mentally challenged her whole life, forever, which turned out to not be the case. She’s in college. I heard an interview with her. She sounds like a normal happy young woman.

Yeah, great. It begs the question, what if her NGO had existed before and these children wouldn’t be there?

Yeah.

Wow, it brings up a lot of contradictions.

Yeah, but wow. Can you imagine just one after another, adopting? She’s already had six of her own children and just every year, another phone call. Well, there’s another baby that has got mental problems and physical problems. Will you adopt him also?

Wow.

She just kept saying yes.

Have you ever thought of adopting a child?

No.

No.

No, I haven’t.

I’ve thought about it before, entertained the idea, but we’ve got our hands full with our own children.

Yeah.

Yeah, I’ve thought about it.

She jokes about the fourth child that she agreed to, how her husband was like, “Hey, I’m not buying a school bus.”

Keep the four-door sedan.

She talks about how he had to move up from a car to a van, from a little apartment to a house.

Yeah, not going the bus route.

My mother-in-law, she adopts stray cats and she’s got 11 stray cats, which I think really bugs my father-in-law.

The neighbors. Oh, your father-in-law, sure.

I think he’s not a fan of cats at all, and she just keeps bringing ’em over, bring ’em home one by one.

Nonstop.

But those are just cats.

Can you imagine human children?

Bringing a new child every year.

Yeah, that’s pretty heavy stuff. Actually, the person in our third story also has adopted a couple of dozen children over the years.

Right. I think taking care of, I don’t know if adopted, but taking care of over 100, right?

Yeah, over the past 15 years or something. Yeah, he’s quite an individual who kind of gave himself a second chance.

Yeah, he saw an opening to really help people and he seized it.

Yeah, and he used his skill and experience that he gained through a pretty challenging and somewhat disturbing childhood and applied it toward doing good, which I thought was pretty cool. Most of these cases, of child soldiers that children end up with all kinds of trauma, and emotional scarring, and mental illnesses. Their lives are very, very difficult.

Yeah, what an amazing guy. Even though he’s probably one of the world experts on diffusing mines, he’s still putting himself in severe risk to do that job, and he’s been doing it for years.

Decades. To do that for decades and he’s never been hurt, it’s almost unreal. It’s surreal in a way, but yeah, pretty amazing guy.

Yeah, Cambodia’s not a place you can just go wander off for a hike in the woods.

Yeah, you gotta be careful.

There’re mines everywhere there.

Apparently, you actually do have to apply, they say, at least 10 kilograms of pressure on top of a mine in order to detonate it.

Oh really?

As long as you don’t step on it, you can poke the ground with a stick pretty hard, actually, until you strike metal. You think that’s a mine, you can dig around it. I was reading about this. I’m not an expert on diffusing mines, but apparently you have to apply a fair bit of pressure in order to actually cause them to detonate. That’s how he was able to do that with a stick. Of course, he’s put landmines together, he’s planted them for so many years. He knows how to diffuse them safely and get rid of them.

Yeah.

Yeah, he’s built this landmine museum where tourists can go and touch the landmines and hold them and what not. Yeah, pretty amazing, the courage it takes to devote your life to that and think of how many lives he’s saved over the years. He didn’t have to do any of that. He chose to do it. So yeah, pretty strong individual.

I didn’t really get the bit about his name. I understand there’s a Japanese company called AKIRA and then he took that or he was given that nickname, but did it have something to do with diffusing mines?

Actually, I can’t remember if the Vietnamese Army gave him that name or if it was the UN that gave him that name. Some commanding officer saw how efficient he worked. He worked so efficiently that it was almost like he was a machine, like an AKIRA. I guess in those days or that time, there was a company that made all kinds of machinery that would do heavy work.

It was really efficient and just worked good.

Yeah, very efficient and got a lot done, more than a human would. He took that name. They started calling him that and it just stuck. Yeah, Aki Ra.

Yeah, amazing guy. That was really interesting to learn about him. After hearing that heavy story with Barbara Harris, I mean he had a heavy story too, but there’s this clear unequivocally positive ending to all the stuff that he went through in his life.

Yeah, right.

Barbara Harris, it’s really hard to say. What’s she doing, helping or hurting? So yeah, it was nice to hear that story. Well, until next month.

Alrighty.

Alrighty, over and out.

All right, take care.