The Washington Post yesterday carried this report on recent discoveries about what really makes our bodies tick:

In fact, it's time to stop thinking of yourself as a single living thing at all, say the scientists behind the new work. Better to see yourself as a "super-organism," they say: a hybrid creature consisting of about 10 percent human cells and 90 percent bacterial cells.

Sure, sure. Nature comes up with hundreds of different kinds of bacteria to do "noble" things like help you digest food and manufacture vitamins, but not a single one to do something useful like trickle ethanol into the bloodstream on demand. Priorties people! Ya gotta work on those priorities!