This is old news! In 1994, scientologists at Kalvos & Damian's New Music Research Junta discovered -- under admittedly suspect laboratory conditions which were the best money could at the time rent -- that young children playing with mice built up a startling increase in the ability to distinguish mice from their parents. In a test group with placebo mice, the children fared poorly, often confusing the mice -- which were constructed of kapok and barbed wire -- with their parents. The implications may not have been staggering, but the parents often were, probably because the latter were part of another study group that was served Jack Daniels disguised as Clamato juice during their children's debriefing sessions. A remarkably convoluted stimulus-response investigation followed. Researchers -- some with backgrounds, albeit shadowy, in science-related fields -- determined that the Clamato juice was indisputably linked to the chromosome theory of genetics as originally propounded in 144 AD by Emperor Caracalla, whose fashionable dance clubs had all of Rome doing the Caracalla, a forerunner of Karaoke. The chromosome theory was immediately employed in heated hands of whiskers six-draw, sometimes with startling results, such as the discovery that certain combinations of discarded fours and queens led to a noticeable shift in the orbital apogee of the outer planets of the solar system, including but not limited to Neptune and Pluto. And when, on this date in 1869 -- coincident with the birth of Albert Roussel, father of the School of Romantic Atonality -- Neptune, of its own free will as well as a discard pile of fours and fives of ergonomically impossible proportions during the All-Brussels City Championship, aligned itself with Mercury's shadow on Chloe, a since-misplaced satellite of Mars, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, formerly a backwaters plankton research outpost, received an invitation from President Howard Taft to become the 39th state. With regrets and without a binding constitution, the foundation passed up the honor, opting instead to try to corner the domestic market on home stroboscopes. And the rest, you can guess, is history, though perhaps not the history on which you have been raised, but rather a history rich in tales of mice brains and their bovinical counterpoint, calves livers, or le flambeau oriange.

This likewise has important implications for radiophonic broadcasting, which itself is scheduled to go digital by the year 2056, concurrent with, we hope, the renewal of a contract featuring a hefty salary increase for Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, now in its 98th episode, an episode, I might add, totally uninfluenced by busy mice brains, at least in my case. Another matter entirely, and one which I feel compelled to avoid unless gently prodded, is the effect of mousic cerebral research on, no surprise here, Kalvos.