By Carol MacPherson
Let’s recklessly roast the headlines in the summery sun, like baby-oil sunbathers.
“Fat, impotent roosters are making chicken more expensive”: This all due, of course, to man’s meddling with the poultry, in an effort to breed some kind of super rooster able to sire untold number of chickens. But, as is so often the case when you mess with mother nature, the opposite happened.
Scientists found that “genetic engineering had made the roosters susceptible to overfeeding” and unable to fertilize as many eggs as previous, trimmer roosters.
Now, no doubt, the chicken producers will come up with an equally cockamamie “solution”, and consumers will have to check the label on chicken to see if it meets or exceeds their daily requirement for Viagra.
“BrusselKale could be the superfood we’ve been waiting for”: The perfect side dish to go with your SuperSteroidChicken.
“Science says an apple a day could improve women’s sex lives”: Unless, of course, they’re married to a doctor…
“Hundreds line up to buy marijuana in Washington”: In Bellingham, Cale Holdsworth, visiting from Abilene, Kansas, purchased two grams and told the media, “This is a great moment.” It also would have been a great moment to employ the overused, but in this case spot-on, “Wizard of Oz” line: “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.”
“Hundreds line up to buy marijuana in Washington”: Among those making a purchase was Seattle city attorney Pete Holmes, who wanted to be one of the first to demonstrate there are alternatives to the nation’s failed drug war.
He then, however, unwittingly demonstrated one of the factors contributing to that failed war, (which disproportionately sent more black Americans to prison, with harsher sentences, even though white Americans were just as likely, or more so, to use drugs but not be penalized) by referencing the last time he smoked marijuana, paraphrasing a cartoon: “Remember, children, there’s a time and place for everything. That place is college.”
(Just so Holmes understands the “drug war” was never waged against college students…)
“Farmer loses phone, returned 8 months later”: His iPhone fell out of his shirt pocket into a silo holding 290,000 bushels of grain. The phone eventually ended up at a feed mill in Japan, where it was found by a worker, who contacted Eric Slater with the Zen-Noh Grain Corporation’s terminal in Convent, Louisiana, who contacted the farmer and returned the phone.
Slater said it’s not uncommon for cellphones to accidentally fall into grain shipments. “Frankly, I field about a phone a month,” he said. How reassuring for our food supply. (“Siri, where are you?” “I’m in the (*&%^$@ grain silo.”)
We probably really don’t want to know, or ponder, where else phones kept in farmers’ front shirt pockets fall before finally making their way to a grain shipment…
Don’t farmers wear overalls with snaps anymore? (They could call them “SmartOveralls” if they keep the phone out of the grain…)
“Christian Siriano: Melissa McCarthy is a ‘difficult’ diva”: As opposed to an “easy” diva? Aren’t divas by definition difficult?
This week, say no to fat, impotent roosters, who can’t even strut, and yes to banty ones.
Carol MacPherson: 425-339-3472; cmacpherson@heraldnet.com.
