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COLD TURKEY
Headline writing, like brain surgery, should be done carefully. An imprecise headline, overlooked by an inattentive editor, although not as consequential as similar behavior by a surgeon, will embarrass those in charge of a newspaper or blog. Its readership, paralyzed by laughter, will not complain. Below is a recent headline followed by the story one might expect to be attached to it.
DACO Cracks Down on Underweight Turkeys
DACO, Puerto Rico’s fierce and committed consumer-protection agency, cannot abide skinny turkeys who fall short on the ideal-weight fowl charts. The problem, it contends, is as old as the pilgrims. Unapologetic about its aggressive intervention, DACO will be sending its foot soldiers into the field to forcibly grab the thin necks of these feathery birds and pour additional amounts of feed down their throats. And if results aren’t forthcoming quickly, DACO will add crushed McDonald’s supersized Happy Meals to the mix. Precautions, of course, will be taken to ensure that only non-GMO ingredients are used. At the same time, more senior, experienced DACO agents will work with underweight turkeys, impressing upon them that gobble gobble isn’t simply about calling for a mate, but is a term that must be applied to the way they eat.
DACO takes its consumer rights safeguarding responsibility seriously. It pledged to protect the rights of the extensive and growing number of obese consumers, estimated at 30 percent of the population in the most recent 2014 survey, by ensuring that they receive ample portions of chubby turkeys on their Thanksgiving plates. Twenty years ago, when obesity rates were much lower, lightweight turkeys were far less of an issue. Credit to DACO for recognizing this rapidly changing trend. Unwilling to stop at turkey remediation, the indefatigable agency has already announced its intentions to crack down next on stuffing.
Underweight turkeys aren’t taking this lying down. In fact, they rarely lie down because sedentary habits often lead to weight gain. They are defending their right to choose their individual lifestyle preferences. They cite the overwhelming influence of skinny Barbie-like turkey models on these choices and defend their right to choose by raising the emotionally charged preference of consumers for white meat over dark.
The feathered nibblers have become more vocal about pursuing a presidential pardon, but DACO appears unworried, since Puerto Rico is a commonwealth whose citizens do not have the right to vote for president. Rumors that the turkeys will be tampering with their own tryptophan levels was, however, alarming to DACO officials, who worried that this sleep-inducing hormone might render officials sluggish after Thanksgiving and jeopardize their future consumer-protection efforts.
As it turns out, when the DACO personnel did disperse into the field, they discovered that most of the turkeys were already dead and frozen, making their ability to crack down on the underweight ones that much more challenging.
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YALE BULLDOGS POODLES
Yale University’s endowment faces trouble, now that the school has added 5,453 facilitators to its payroll, one assigned to each undergraduate student. These babysitters facilitators will accompany each student 24/7. The only exception is bathroom and shower breaks provided there are no other human beings present.
The university has directed each facilitator to make college “a cocoon place of comfort” for the student to whom they have been assigned and to be particularly vigilant about warding off anything their student finds offensive. Students made it clear to the administration that they were psychologically incapable of ignoring Halloween costumes and had to be protected from any frightful observations of them. Yale University’s dean, pointing out that the students were exactly right, reminded the facilitators to check under the students’ beds before tucking them in at night. One of Yale’s professors foolishly suggested to students, “If you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.”
Student protesters, via their spokesperson, pointed out just how foolish that suggestion was. “We were told to meet the offensive parties head on, without suggesting any modes or means to facilitate these discussions to promote understanding.”
Enter the facilitators. No longer will two students lunching together with their facilitators have to directly ask the other one to pass the ketchup. In the classroom, each student facilitator will attend class along with an assigned student. Because seating space is limited, the facilitator will sit in the seat while the student will settle in on his or her lap.
Professors will be prohibited from speaking directly to students lest one of their utterances be deemed offensive by any student having a bad-hair day. Instead, the professors must address the lesson, a sentence at a time, to the facilitators while the students hold their hands to their ears. After each sentence, the facilitators vote on whether the professor’s sentence is allowable. Only after a unanimous vote “yes” are the students told to drop their hands and listen to the professor’s words.
Teaching the syllabus may take a little longer. This is just a small price to pay for hermetically sealing students from controversial sentences, thoughts, or concepts, lurking in the hallways of academe, waiting to pounce on the vulnerable psyches of unwitting undergraduates and leaving psychological anguish and scarring in their wake.
Imagine the emotional bruising caused by being forced to listen to Timothy 2:11-12 in Bible studies: “Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.” Or a statement by Booker T. Washington in Humanities class: “There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs and the hardships of the Negro race before the public.” Or a professor accidentally using emotionally charged words—chairman, management, manhole cover, gingerbread man—in one of their lectures. Or a teacher saying Christmas tree instead of Holiday tree. Or a professor so bereft of sensitivity that he might encourage a discussion of such topics as global warming or reverse discrimination. Thank God these kids are in college and no longer have to confront, with their newly acquired sense of outrage, the insensitivity, for example, of the author of Georgie Porgie—presumably Mother Goose—whose intolerant and condescending message is unmistakable when revealing that Georgie kissed girls and ran away from boys.
At Yale sporting events, where the cheers of opposing fans against the Yale team and its student supporters are downright debilitating, the facilitators, after distributing earplugs to the students in their care, will be expected to file criminal charges with the local police after the game. And all on-campus tailgating barbecues serving hamburgers and frankfurters will be permanently banned so as not to offend students of German descent, and, to be on the safe side, students descended from any of the neighboring countries.
Back to that insensitive professor and his perplexing and hurtful recommendations that students talk to each other. No, said many students. Until Halloween masks are banned from campus, Yale will not feel like home. Home was where these students presumably learned tolerance, civility, and respect for authority.
The professor got a glimpse of that upbringing when approached by a group of protesting students, one of whom tenderly told him: “You should not sleep at night. You are disgusting.” Now, it is clear why facilitators and perhaps some behavior modification experts are needed.
The administration, perceptively concluding that the students were unable to manage the Halloween-costume issue, banned specific costumes and masks from campus, including sombreros and Rastafarian wigs. Missing from the banned list were baseball hats, belts embroidered with sailboats, and pastel-colored pants, long and short, with little whales on them.
The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) community at the school marched to the president’s office to convey the torment they felt from other students dressing as preppies. They found the use of these costumes offens
ive and degrading to the American culture and people. They, like the students who criticized the professor, were worried “about the violence that grows out of wearing offensive costumes is not something we can ignore.” Inexplicably, the administration was not taking the WASP protesters seriously. The WASPs were soon being shouted down by a growing crowd of the original, bona fide, card-carrying student protestors—until one of the card carriers, a member of the Save a Whale Society, expressed the anguish she felt at the debasement of whales when people wore shorts and slacks with whales on them during Halloween. The administration capitulated and banned clothing with whale designs not only for Halloween but for the foreseeable future.
But we learned about the real crime from a well-reasoned editorial in a student campus publication. The professor’s suggestion, reads the editorial, “is tainted by her decision to email it directly to all Silliman [a college at Yale] students—an email list to which she has access through her administrative role in the college. She could have published these thoughts on a personal blog or in a publication. She chose not to.”
The Yale president, a quick study, learned from this editorial that it is the medium, not the message, that offends his students. He immediately changed the school’s communication policy. Henceforth, the school would communicate with its seniors (presumably mature enough to deal with the threatening nature of email) by email, juniors by Twitter, sophomores by Instagram, and with freshmen, the administration would communicate using large blocks with brightly colored letters.
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EU CAN’T BE SERIOUS
The wisdom of Yogi Berra—“You better cut the pizza into four pieces because I am not hungry enough to eat six”—now has competition from the officials of the European Union, or more precisely the Orwellian-sounding European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). The producers of bottled water in Europe applied to EFSA for approval to include the statement “Regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration” on the label of their bottles.
Not so fast, said the mandarins over at EFSA, mindful that they, like Yogi, don’t want to “make too many wrong mistakes.” So, they studied this esoteric topic for three years, (no, that is not a typo) and with a flourish, organized a meeting with twenty-one scientists, handpicked for their deep knowledge of thirst, in Parma, Italy (the Osso buco alla Milanese shouldn’t be missed). They concluded that “reduced water content in the body was a symptom of dehydration and not something that drinking water could subsequently control”—a dose of circular logic which makes Yogi’s “You wouldn’t have won if we’d beaten you” seem Aristotelian. Dressing up their conclusion into proper European Union bureaucratese, the EFSA apparatchiks declaimed that the proposed statement did not comply with Article 14 of Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006, and therefore producers of bottled water are forbidden, by law, from making that assertion. In light of this new scientific discovery, the EFSA group immediately began work on an EU directive banning water stations at all long-distance running races in Europe, mandating that potato chips be served instead. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time or Osso buco left to complete their work, so another conference will have to be scheduled.
A group of year six students from Cumberland Primary School in South England, replaced the EFSA explanation of hydration with the standard dictionary definition and were confused by the result: “Reduced water content in the body was a symptom of reduced water content in the body and not something that drinking water could subsequently control.”
All this work made the students thirsty, which they successfully addressed with a trip to the water fountain. One of the older students, Nigel, believed to be twelve years of age, sent a letter to the EFSA shamans asking if they felt the same way about air: reduced air in the lungs was a symptom of asphyxiation and not something that breathing could control. Nigel received a prompt and very cordial response from EFSA saying that to answer his question, they would need three years of study and another conference in Parma, Italy.
The industrious students at Cumberland did some additional research and learned that people who live at high altitudes face a greater risk of dehydration. They discovered that the mountain people of Tibet, who probably don’t have a lot of bottled water with labels encouraging them to drink water to prevent dehydration, drink thirty to fifty cups a day of their national drink called Po Cha, or buttered tea, a delightful mix of yak butter, tea, and salt. Nigel presented this information in another letter to the EFSA eggheads and asked if this would change their views on hydration in any way. No, came the answer in a second courteous letter from EFSA, but with immediate effect, the European Commission was removing bottled water from the on-premises refrigerators serving its 60,000 employees and replacing it with eight-ounce cartons of Po Cha.
Those 60,000 people have been very busy, issuing directives—50,000 of them at last count—to harmonize and regulate anything that makes eye contact. And no subject is too complex for this army of subject matter experts. The EU commissioners, proud of the team they have assembled, look forward to any challenge, knowing that “we have deep depth,” as Yogi would say. The European Commission has issued ten directives regulating duvets, thirty-nine for sheets, thirty-one for toothbrushes, 172 for mirrors, 118 for shampoos, 454 for towels, 1,246 for bread, fifty-two for toasters, 12,653 for milk, ninety-nine for bowls, 210 for spoons, five for pillowcases, 109 for pillows, and 225 for eyeglasses. And, for the privilege of allowing these productivity-sapping directives to smother their economy, Great Britain pays seventeen billion pounds to the EU and receives six billion pounds of benefits in return. The British almost seem like Bridiots for not Brexiting Brefore 2016.
What regulations could possibly come next—for prunes? Well, yes. Those pesky people in the private sector wishing to market and sell their prunes thought it might be a good idea to remind consumers that prunes help maintain and/or improve normal bowel function. But, before something as controversial as this could be included on a label, the EFSA scatologists would have to conduct a study. They defined improved bowel function as “reduced transit time, increased frequency of bowel movements or increased stool bulk.” Right away some clarification was needed. Did “reduced transit time” mean that the consumer of prunes would take less time getting to the bathroom, or did it mean that the bulked-up stool would take less time to travel through the intestines? Either way, the EFSA scatologists had a complex measurement task before them.
Undaunted, they hired several dozen human subjects, men and women and then cleared a large area where they set up a sufficient number of EU-approved toilet bowls. They fed the subjects large quantities of prunes, and with EU-approved stopwatches began timing the stools’ journeys, taking extra precautions not to tell the subjects to push, otherwise the results might be tainted.
Further details on research methodology and results remain murky, but EFSA concluded that “the evidence is insufficient to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between the consumption of prunes and maintenance of normal bowel function” [EFSA Journal 2010; 8(2): 1486]. Copies of the opinion will be sent to the Cumberland Primary School, where the young students who did such fine work on bottled water, will read this new pronouncement from EFSA and understand what Yogi meant when he said, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”
• • •
EPILOGUE
Mandatory retirement encroached on my rapid journey from Queens into the fast lane. For goodness sake, I was already on the service road of life’s highway; just a few more lanes to go before I would be cruising along, opening up the throttle with society’s elite. If I just had a little more time.
However, the retirement party in the back room of the Kiwanis Club beckoned, with laminated folding tables decoratively covered with paper tablecloths, and the peeling, red cloth wallpaper almost unnoticeably re-adhered to the wall behind it. The party was well attended by easily more than a dozen people, all enjoying their drinks in plastic cups from the
first-drink-free bar. Heck, even the assistant vice president of operations showed up to present me with a Casio watch for my thirty years of service.
That seemed liked years ago. Celebrations over, I have downshifted, returning to the slower moving traffic in life’s right lane, more accurately, the side streets. These days, a major accomplishment for me is remaining awake for an entire full-length movie. The experts recommend engaging in a sport or a hobby. I never had an interest in golf, and have reluctantly concluded that I am too old to take up bobsledding or pole vaulting. I thought about resuming my stamp collecting, but I can’t remember where I put my album.
With all the extra free time, I am making a lot of new friends and am seeing many old friends more often: my dentist, internist, cardiologist, urologist, optometrist, ophthalmologist, gastroenterologist, and of course my psychologist and psychiatrist. Whoever called these the golden years hadn’t reached them yet.
I lamented to my psychiatrist that I have been seeing him for forty-six years and have still not been cured. He says I am making great progress, but that therapy takes time and cannot be rushed. I heard him mumble something about my being more than halfway through the treatment program, which would put me in tiptop mental health at age 110. I guess he has mouths at home to feed, or based on the exorbitant fees he charges me, heirs to provide for.
Adding a Little Levity Page 13