Mer, rhymes with bear (merriehaskell) wrote,
Mer, rhymes with bear
merriehaskell

Spring? Not yet. / RANT

There is serious, spring-like birdsong going on outside, and the sun is up and bright, and I can almost FEEL the upness and the brightness of said sun, but it's only 13 degrees (F).

*flops back onto bed with the disappointment of a thwarted walk*

I was seriously considering going to the park until I checked the temperature. It's really gotta be at least 30 for that.




This next bit is grim.

Apparently, Sarah Connor is not John Connor's mother. Because her blood type is O (negative, not that this matters) and John's is AB (negative, I think).

ARGH. *tears hair* It's not that hard to get these things checked in a script (or book or story) people. HIRE ME if you don't have any geeky and/or pedant friends. I know enough things, and the things I don't know, I check. If you're gonna go ahead and say that the mom is O and the son is AB, this HAS to be a set-up for "she's not really my mom." And if that's the set-up for The Sarah Connor Chronicles, I'll eat my left shoe, because the whole series is predicated on "she's my mom." (Or rather, "I'm her son.") The necessity of biological motherhood (and fatherhood) to the plot of the whole Terminator series is RATHER SIGNIFICANT.

I was a biology geek in school, and I'd have known this stunk badly--maybe not since I did my first punett square in 6th grade, but certainly by 10th grade, and probably somewhere in 8th. Maybe it's not that obvious to everyone who has ever done a modicum of the biological study of humans. Maybe I am totally over-reacting on how obvious I think this is--I did major in biological anthropology, and I sometimes overestimate just how much other people know (or even care) about things like this, and I also sometimes underestimate how much I actually learned in college. But I work in a library and haven't done anything at all with my degree (beyond the paces I put it through towards writing science fiction), so I tend to think of myself as an uneducated layman--which would be fair, but is also a little bit not fair, because I do also spend time mentally calculating possible genotypes of friends and family whenever I notice certain traits. ALL THE SAME, THEY COULD HAVE CALLED ME, AND I WOULD HAVE TOLD THEM THAT THEY DIDN'T NEED TO BUILD FAKE TENSION WITH THE RARITY OF THE AB BLOOD-TYPE when the tension was really about something else anyway, and a B or an A blood type would have worked just as well and would not have introduced the impossibility of Sarah being John's biological mother*.

REALLY.



*A and B are co-dominant. If you're AB, you got an A gene from one parent and a B gene from another parent. O is recessive. If you're O, you have no B or A anywhere in ya, because you only express O if your genotype is OO. You can't then give a B or an A gene--you don't have one to give. No O can give birth to or father an AB kid. The other parent can supply an A or a B, but can't supply both to one kid, so an OO (expressed as an O, like Sarah), depending on the genotype of the other parent, can produce and O, A or B kids, but never ever ever ever an AB. EVER.

Knowing all of this (and a few other things) is how they used to do paternity tests, in the days before DNA testing. It couldn't give conclusive results, but it did rule out impossible fathers. Such as O fathers and AB kids.
Tags: something vaguely like a rant
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