Living with Yourself

The nights are long here in Colorado, and I’ve been searching for television fare to gobble up some time. Not much appeals to me, but last night I decided just to give something a chance, and ended up watching two episodes of a Netflix show called Living With Yourself.

The premise is this: A guy (played by Paul Rudd), kind of a loser, is burned out on life, married but unable to have children, and is handed a business card suggesting that he visit a place called Top Happy Spa, a small storefront in a strip mall. The price for their service is $50,000, and he is so burned out that he is seriously considering it. But looking at the joint, he has second thoughts and is going to drive away.

Who should walk out but Tom Brady. He’s merely there for a cameo, but his presence, as I came to understand the plot of the show, shocked me. Rudd’s character goes in, and they take his money, put him under, and replicate him, making a clone (but with better qualities). They then try to kill the original, wrapping him in plastic and burying him. The opening scene has a hand coming out of the ground, breaking through the plastic and surviving. He then walks home only to confront himself, the clone, who has all his memories and has taken his place, stolen his life.

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So why is Tom Brady doing a cameo so remarkable? Brady is a Bokanovsky Brat, the Matt Damon clone. For those of you unfamiliar with this work, back in the face splitting days (which will return) we uncovered something unique and strange. In doing face splits, I would take the eye pupils of two people and set the distance between them at one inch on my computer screen, using Microsoft Paint. I would then split the face in half and place it over that of the other to see how all of the other features aligned. The results were sometimes remarkable, but I got carried away with it and made some faulty connections.

So it goes. The technology is solid however, as even as we age our pupils always remain in the same position, as our skulls dictate that matter. They are hard-wired. However, I was catching a lot of grief from skeptics, and so did something unusual – I had on hand a photo of me looking directly at a camera, age maybe 30, and another in my 60s, same pose. I did the trick, and here is what I got:

I did not monkey with this in any way. I merely performed the pupil-distance exercise, and lined the two photos up. Note how everything is in sync … eyes, nose, mouth, chin, dimples. My ear lobes are longer, as happens with most of us as we age. I’ve had dental work done, as I did not like my old teeth. But other than that, this is solid work, findings validated. The process works, but I must exercise great caution.

So anyway, here is Tom Brady along with Matt Damon.

Again, no monkey business. It either fits or it does not. In this case we have two men who are easily distinguishable, and yet who share the same facial plate. (Obviously I cannot be in the same room with them, so I cannot guess about relative skull size.) However, I found this same result by matching Damon with both Ben and Casey Affleck, Russell Crowe, George Clooney, Jack Nicholson, Jimmy Kimmel, Timothy Olyphant and others. On the other side of the aisle I found it worked with Hillary Swank and Jennifer Garner. (Ben Affleck, if you recall, was once married to Garner.) Going back in time I found it worked with Paul Newman, Rock Hudson, and James Dean. Nothing turned up before Dean, which suggested to me that this process, whatever it is, originated in the early 1930s, as Dean was born in 1931. That is as far back as I ever found it to work.

Perhaps James Dean was the prototype. Perhaps he was flawed in some manner, some glitch in the process. Perhaps that is why he faked his death at a young age. Or really died. We cannot know these things.

In the book Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, there is a process for cloning, described as follows:

The process is applied to fertilized human eggs in vitro, causing them to split into identical genetic copies of the original. The process can be repeated several times, though the maximum number of viable embryos possible is 96, with 72 being a “good average.”

It was named after the scientist who invented it, Bokanovsky. I therefore called all of those who fit in the Matt Damon batch “Bokanovsky Brats.” I speculated that they are the result of eggs split and implanted in different mothers, thereby allowing them to grow different features (hair color for one) due to dietary and blood differences. They are not clones, merely lookalikes who look different enough to fool us.

Some protested that the men merely exhibit the “golden ratio” where people of completely different origins are selected for stardom due to these features. That’s a possibility, but the alignments I got were so very precise that I ruled out the golden ratio as statistically highly unlikely. Others said it was merely family resemblance, but each of us who have brothers and sisters can easily see that even as we slid down the same birth canal, we are distinctly different people without the alignments seen above.

Most of the original work has disappeared, turning up as tiny boxes in the original posts, as if someone went in and deleted each photo. I can easily replicate it, and will, but have not had the inclination since the face chop days. I will do so in the near future.

So as I watched Living With Yourself, after I realized that the appearance of Tom Brady was significant. It is a show about cloning, and Tom Brady is a clone of sorts. He surely knows of our work here, as people talk, and not because this blog is famous or anything. But in the show I watched last night, as Brady left the Top Happy Spa, the son of a bitch had on one big shit-eating grin. He knows what he is.

By the way, the lead character played by Paul Rudd … I know they have technology to make one person into two or more in the same scene. But I had to wonder, as the two Rudd characters do not look exactly alike. Is Paul Rudd a set of twins? We’ve happened on that before. Is he a Bokanovsky Brat? That’s a project for down the road. For now, I have to assume technology split him in two, and not birth, and that he is not a Brat.

By the way, Rudd’s character’s name? Miles.