Vlog the Inhaler, or The Occasional Video Blog Musings of Jim Thornton

Did you ever wonder what else you could have been had you taken other paths in life, made different choices here and there, pursued other career avenues, taken more or less or different risks, found refuge in a different set of arms, become a runner instead of a swimmer, etc.?

As an identical twin, I have the ability to glimpse answers to such wonderings via the miracle of nature that is human cloning.

To be sure, researchers now know that a variety of transcription factors can turn various genes on and off in complex ways mediated by the environment, so that identical twins slowly become less alike over the decades. Still, we started off with identical DNA, and even though it is likely that we are not currently expressing exactly the same complement of genes, we do represent something of a living laboratory for the study of a single organism taking two different paths in life.

Those who know John and me also know that it is John who has blundered onto the better road, the high road, if you will, while I have meandered along the potholed low road, stumble-bumbling my way along, havoc and disharmony in my wake, like a comet's polluted tail, or, less grandiosely, the flatulent clouds that follow a nervous steer down the chutes of the abattoir.

In tonight's vlog, I present my twin brother John's recent film wherein he reimagines a myriad of even more alternative routes he himself (and by extension, me, his trollish clone!) might have taken had we been born at different points in the history of art.

John, as I think I may have posted somewhere earlier in the vloggish memoir, was a swimmer at one point in his life, a member of the Junior Varsity at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where his greatest athetic achievement was not so much as a swimmer but as the inventor of the game John Ball.

Mitch Kupchack was one of many members of the Tarheels bball team to play John Ball, which involved a hand ball, the elevator banks at Granville Towers which housed the basketball team, and horrified co-eds, before the game was permanently banned from campus.

Still, John's swimming accomplishments are no small matter. He still holds Thornton family records in the 100 freestyle, backstroke, and butterfly.

That's neither here nor there, I suppose, at this stage of our lives. As indicated earlier, John's charming new film highlights many other scenarios that, as fate would have it, are also neither here nor there but quite possible could have been both here and there had we been here or there...

We (and by we, I mean he) herewith presents more Alternative Us's to give you fodder for rumination about your own Alternative You's, and in so doing, find a portion of contentment in your actual lot:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq2VWDd8CDM"]YouTube - John Thornton Takes You on a Wild Art History Tour![/ame]