CSotD: Somewhere between ‘The Jungle’ and the outback …
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Okay, this The City strip is actually from last week or last strip or however often Derf updates. GoComics doesn't seem to be updating its non-dailies very well and I've had to go poke around for some of the political cartoons.
Most of what I had missed was that apparently when Mike Wallace got to heaven, he had some tough questions for St. Peter and also you should know that an elephant doesn't really want to marry Mitt Romney but has no choice.
Maybe GoComics and Google have cooperated on some new technology so that it only updates the ones they figure you'll like.
Which, y'know, could happen. I priced airline tickets to Denver on Delta's site last month and I've been getting annoying little "Delta flies to Denver!" ads in the margins of my web pages ever since.
And for some reason, this morning one of my browsers is feeding me ads in Spanish, which I really don't understand. The language, un poquito. The reason for the ads, not at all, unless it's because I listened to the cast album from "West Side Story" on Rhapsody the other day. Quien sabe?
Anyway, this Derf cartoon isn't his most current but it cracked me up. (Click for a larger version if necessary.)
His combination of rage and fatalism strikes a chord with me. Yes, it's terrible. So what's your plan?
I realize that, to some people, this translates as "So you just give up?"
Not at all.
And there is certainly value in protest. You vote with your feet, you lobby with your wallet, and it can help: The local Wendy's has put a message on their sign noting that they never used the pink slime.
So get a burger at Wendy's, but do it knowing that the cattle they used may have consumed antibiotics and may have fallen in poop on their way into the abattoir.
While you're there, get one of their fish sandwiches, because they're promoting the fact that they use handcut cod. Get two, in fact — one to eat, one to freeze so your grandchildren can know what cod tasted like.
Here's the deal: You have a responsibility to yourself, to your progeny, to society as a whole, to make good choices with your money and with your body. But, as Derf points out, there are limits to how much purity you can find out there.
And one thing is that you have to decide how much of the "yuck" factor is scientific and how much is psychological.
We can analyze your store-bought veggies and detect pesticide residue. We can also find arsenic in your drinking water. And if the answer is to distill your own drinking water, what do you make the distilling tube out of? Because it will leach all sorts of toxic crap into the steam.
You have to draw a line somewhere, or, rather, draw a graph so you can see where the lines of "need to eat" and "require purity" cross, possibly with "cash on hand" factored in somewhere.
But, as in politics, you should get information from more than one source and, as the phrase goes, "Never ask the barber if he thinks you need a haircut."
To begin with, anything can sound disgusting if you want it to. They treat that "pink slime" (and renaming it that was a good start) with ammonia. Okay. But how do they make grits? Well, you treat corn with lye …
There's no doubt that Upton Sinclair was right about the horrific conditions in slaughterhouses. But when I say there was "no doubt," American soldiers in the Spanish-American War had died from eating the canned meat being produced by beef packers. The health risks in that system did not require longitudinal studies to confirm: You ate it and it made you vomit or die or whatever.
So draw your graph and take your stand.
But realize that the previous owner of your house may have used a lawn service that sprayed god-knows-what on the grass over the years, plus every time it rains, it's leaching toxins from your roof and heavy metals from your soil, and, anyway, those grubs are probably full of radon that comes through the ground from where they dug your foundation.
You need organic witchetty grubs. They're the next big thing. Of course, as soon as this catches on, we'll start building witchety grub farms to satisfy demand …
… though grub farms would have to be pretty large-scale before this problem emerged:
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