Mutton to Sneeze At

It was 10 years ago today that scientists sang "Hello, Dolly" and announced that they had cloned a sheep. A little known fact is they chose to clone a sheep out of all the barnyard animals because they liked the fact that the word "sheep" is both singular and plural so no matter how many they had they only had one word to worry about. That's elegance of design for ewe. If Dolly were a boy sheep, her name would have been Bob Hope, since she was cloned from another sheep's breast (you know young lambs--they often turn into nice racks), and the lab repeatedly sang "Thanks for the Mammaries." Instead, she got named after Dolly Parton, which means someday there will be a very interesting sheep Dollywood theme park that people will flock to but it will cost too much and park-goers might feel fleeced. Then no one would go, for you know how people titter. Alas, poor Dolly died at the age of 6, which might be old if you're an ovine in the vicinity of mint jelly, but is actually young for a sheep not shorn of its life for a kebab's sake. Scientists speculate she might have been "born" at age 6, since that was the age of the genetic material used to clone her. She aged before her time, and sad to say, there is no plastic surgery for wool. Maybe scientists should work on that, if they could just get past fixing the erectile dysfunction problem, but now I've stuck a penis joke into my sheep tale and never even got around to referencing Gene Wilder, Woody Allen, and Woollite.