Stressed animals with excess sodium

Let’s start our discussion with a story that exercises the obvious and gives liberals a reason to hug their yappy little mutts and foo foo cats. Seems the Israelis moved their zoo animals inside, i.e., out of the debris field, and now those animals are stressed.

What’s the point of reporting this? Don’t you think Pookie the Dancing Bear was shedding a little extra hair when his cage in Dresden, Germany, got rattled by the Allied forces? How about the facial tics that Tiny the Amazing Peanut Shooting Elephant (a bulls-eye from 50 feet everytime!) suffered until her death following the carnage she witnessed in her otherwise bucolic setting outside Nagasaki, Japan?

A war zone stresses animals. Go figure.

When you find yourself in a hole, quit digging. This guy sold a 1,000-tree arboretum. Not bad, but, alas, it was not his to sell. OK, bad move. Problem is it belonged to the school for which he worked – and the school was owned by the Chinese government. Ut oh. Don’t they, like, re-indoctrinate you by making you drink Communist Party urine for a week or something?

Well, our hero doesn’t want to get busted. Natural enough. So he bribes his co-workers by rounding up a few stray dogs and announces a BBQ! How cross-cultural of him. But, oh my, another problem. Seems he can’t cook too well. He torched the place – ten classrooms down. Puppy flambé.

The article claims he was simply fined. Yeah, right. I bet his sodium intake is screamingly high. Bummer.

For some transitory reason, MSN is my homepage at the moment. They had a headline – “Which is healthier?” – with a picture of a Big Mac and Whopper. I choked, actually gagged. I clicked the link but had to dig for the relevant information.

On page 1 - Whopper - 700 calories, 42 g fat (13 g saturated), 1020 mg sodium.
On page 3 - Big Mac - 560 calories, 30 g fat (10 g saturated), 1010 mg sodium.

Add fries at BK, just a medium – 360 calories, 18 g fat (5 g saturated), 640 mg sodium.

Recommended daily intakes are easy to find – 2,000 calories, 50 grams of fat, 2,400 mg sodium.

No discussion is necessary. Those places are the reason elasto-pants are a billion dollar industry and defibrillators are becoming common household items.

I have heard said that there is a fine line between genius and insanity. People who say that aren’t either. There is no line. It is actually an area of grey that is quite broad: the whiteness of one overlaps the blackness of the other. I think, as well, that people need to reassess which color should be assigned to which state.

Reading sites like this one make me feel smart. It’s not like everybody tells me – I can think, sometimes. Seems some old docs with lots of scientific information got recycled a long time ago. Some ancient Algore type. Brrrrr. But now with x-ray fluorescence they are revealing previously unseen images on the pages.

The work is being done at the Department of Energy’s Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. I presume it is the same one as is on Page Mill Road in Menlo Park or Palo Alto, CA. I remember dropping off my resume and a completed application to them about twenty years ago. I think I got a letter that read, “Yeah, right” in response, with little smiley faces drawn all over the page.

So fat people really are stupid. There is a perverse comfort in that thought.

How about stupid on a few levels? That Mary Winkler that wasted her preacher husband made bail. Now the discussion is beginning about emotional abuse by him. I mentioned that in my first post following the murder. A mercy killing.

But check this out in the article. First, the copyright: “© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.” Yeah, whatever. So, sue me.

This text is verbatim from the article: The couple had gotten tangled up along in a swindle known as an advance-fee fraud, or the “Nigerian scam,” in which victims are told that a sweepstakes prize or some other riches are waiting for them if they send in money to cover the processing expenses, her lawyers have said.

So, if you are a journalism major and work for a big outfit like AP, you get to write nonsensical strings of words like, “had gotten tangled up along in a swindle.” Methinks the writer got tangled up himself.

I suggest it reflects the incredibly low unemployment rate in our present economy. With the threshold of structural unemployment breached, we have complete idiots writing copy. Oh well.

Speaking of complete idiots … a knucklehead becomes a knuckleballer.

Jose Canseco should be in the Guinness Book for the human that consumed the most steroids without exploding. This is the same guy that went to catch a fly ball and it bounced off his head and over the fence for a home run. Now, he is pitching the minor leagues: he hit four batters and walked five others in 4 1/3 innings. I wonder if the animals around him are stressed.

Another mercy killing in the offing?