Somebody Doesn’t Have Enough to Do 

    Under my heading of “They Don’t Have Enough To Do” is this situation. The owner of a zoo in New York was live-streaming a giraffe on YouTube. This Giraffe is soon to give birth to, hopefully, a small giraffe. YouTube removed the feed because somebody reported it as explicit and containing nudity. 
    Evidently someone at the zoo had forgotten to dress the giraffe that morning. WOW! In all the nature shows I’ve watched, and that includes a number showing the birth process of various animals, I’ve yet to see one animal that was wearing clothes. Somebody doesn’t have enough to do. 
    The zoo owner blamed it on "a handful of extremists and animal rights activists." Whether he knows that for a fact or not, is anybody’s guess. What would these people have done if the feed had actually shown the new giraffe being born. Holy Moly. Probably have had a collective stroke. This giraffe hasn’t yet had the baby, but will soon. From what I gather the live-streaming is back up, the nudity and explicitness notwithstanding. 

 A New Day Has Dawned, Well, Sort Of 

     The town fathers and mothers, (the mayor is a woman), of Henryetta, Oklahoma, have taken a big step. They have rescinded the ban against dancing within 500 feet of a church or school. In Henryetta they have been having dances inside schools and churches as long as anyone can remember. Evidently it was just that once you got outside one of these establishments, you couldn’t dance until you were five-hundred feet away. Nobody tried to make sense of it, so just sort ignored it. Now the ban has been lifted so everybody can feel at ease and dance up a storm.

Elephant Traps - The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly! 

    There are many things we do in life with the expectancy that our actions will somehow improve our lives. But do they really, and if so, how can we be sure. I call it the elephant trap conundrum. 
     A theoretical scenario: We put elephant traps in our back yard to protect our homes from elephants. And son of a gun, we’re not bothered by elephants. Now, the question is this: Did we not get any elephants in the back yard because they saw the traps and stayed away, or did we not get any elephants in the back yard because there are no elephants close enough to bother us anyway?
    Take pain medication for instance. We take pain meds to lessen pain. Right? Right. So, the pain meds seem to work. Is it because the pills worked, or because the pain was less anyway? 
    Another similar example: The dentist sends you home with some pills and says, “Now don’t wait until it hurts to take these. Just take one every two hours until the bottle’s empty. You experience very little pain. Again, was there really no pain or did the pills mask the pain like we’re told they’re supposed to? 
    Another example: We were going to drive over the Pass to visit the kids. The weather up there was terrible, traffic was being held up, and accidents were happing all over the place. As we got ready to go Lorraine says, “Make sure we have the tire chains along.” So I made sure the chains were in the trunk. We got over the Pass without a problem. The roads were dry, and the drive was not a problem. The big question is this: “Were the roads okay because the chains were in the trunk, or was there not going to be any snow on the roads anyway.” 
    Another recent example: We’ve been getting a lot of snow lately. By a couple days ago it had nearly all melted away except for the big piles I made when cleaning off the driveway and sidewalks. I thought, well, winter’s got that out of its system and wouldn’t try that again, so the snow shovel went back into the shed. A clear example of not putting out the elephant traps. Sure enough we got another five inches of snow the next day. Now would it have snowed if I had left the shovel in the garage where it was handy? We’ll never know. 
   See what I mean? Another conundrum.

These People Live to Be One-hundred Forty-Seven Years Old 

    We keep getting these magazines, small newspapers, or whatever you want to call them, each touting some cure for something that ails if not us, somebody else. One thing they all have in common is that they are selling something. For this article, let’s call them advertising booklets. 
    Usually they will start out by telling you that what they are selling, be it a book, some concoction made from 47 plants previously unknown to man, is something that the medical community doesn’t have, has never heard of but is still trying to keep secret, besides trying to shut down this advertising newspaper because they, the medical community, are afraid of being put out of business. 
    Most times if you try to follow the advertising booklets logic too closely you might just fall off your chair. 
    Some of these advertising booklets will darkly hint that they are about to be shut down by forces so sinister that they can’t even stand to write about them. And of course, the reason is because the medical industry (oops, they did mention it anyway), would then lose all their revenue. One of their primary targets within the medical community are drug companies. 
    I have no strong feelings for nor against drug companies. They’ve been caught running enough elicit money making schemes not to be a target for someone who is ready to bend the truth a little, and take a molehill and make it into a mountain. But I myself take several drugs, and am told that they are helping me to keep fit and well. At least somewhat well. The ‘fit’ ship sailed some time ago, at least compared to what I remember being in my youth. And I’m glad the drug companies are there. 
    It seems that two of the most common ailments these advertising newspaper people flog cures for are diabetes and arthritis. Good choices for them, because between these two you have multiple millions of sufferers who are desperate for any kind of help with their symptoms, or maybe even a cure. Besides these two ailments are ones that medical science has not gotten a complete handle on yet. 
    Diabetes – The latest advertising newspaper I’ve seen is trying to sell some formula discovered being used by a Tibetan, by the name of Monk, who is 147 years old and can run down mountain sheep at 17,000 feet in the Himalayas. Of course they can’t divulge the ingredients’, because then everybody could mix it up and sell it, unless they had a conscience. 
    Or another was some mystery plant, (possibly the gualagaba berry, but they never really say for sure), from the Brazilian rain forest. It seems that, according to the people giving testimonials in this advertising newspaper, they had to take it for only two weeks before all traces of diabetes were gone from their bodies. Of course they’re trying to sell you a six-months supply which they never explain, hoping you won’t notice. 
    In addition to that, the leg that at least one of these testimonial givers had to have amputated because of said diabetes, grew back in nine months, and they show this lady, who swears this actually happened, jogging round a park in Outer Kapakastan, with two good legs, and a big smile on her face. This second leg looks a little out of focus, like maybe it had been photoshopped by not a kid, but some elderly person. 
    One of the positive side effects, “Space will not allow us to list them all” claims the advertising newspaper, from this mystery plant, (possibly the gualagaba berry), is that when eaten by the Kinky Monkeys of Brazil, makes the males have erections that last for two days. 
    What they don’t tell you about this mystery plant, is that it makes the Kinky Monkeys bodies supply so much blood to these erections that the monkeys have a distinct lack of blood supply to their brains. This results is their falling out of the trees where they get eaten by jaguars. 
    And then there is arthritis - This malady plagues nearly all old people. It is painful, deforming, and has no cure as such, as least that’s what I understand. The symptoms can be moderated to a certain extent. There are a zillion creams, potions, and pills put out by the drug industry to help people cope with this ailment. 
   But wait, along comes an advertising newspaper, and they have a simple cure for every kind of arthritis. It seems that there is one tribe living on the Mongolian Steppes who don’t even have a word for arthritis. Of course they don’t have a word for lots of things, but that problem is beyond the scope of this article. 
    They live on a diet of yak’s milk which is high in fat, yak meat, which is pretty lean, and rancid yak butter made from this fatty yak’s milk. (Poor man’s yogurt.) This tribe laughed when somebody first suggested that they should be eating plants like their yaks, or eating things that grew in the ground. We’d call them tubers. The first time these people heard this, several of them got sick for the first time in the history of the tribe, and had to vomited. 
    The missionaries who came to save these people from such a dastardly diet, (remember they live to be 147 years old), gave up on the idea of converting these people to a raw vegetable, bean curd, and tree bark diet. 
    But then, along came the pseudo scientists, hucksters, and con men, thinking they might be able to use these Steppe people and their long-life spans to peddle some concoction through the medium of the advertising newspaper. After casting around they discovered that these Steppe people, because of living in such close proximity to their yaks, always seemed to have yak manure on their bare feet. So now they have a lotion made up of one part per two million of sanitized yak manure. This was their secret ingredient, responsible, according to them, for the longevity of these people. The rest of the concoction is some low-grade petroleum-based gunk. And guess what? People bought it up so fast that their demand outran the supply. So now the producers of this Longevity Lotion, have a huge herd of cows named Yak 1, Yak 2, etc. So, they can truthfully say that secret ingredient still comes from Yaks. Why they should suddenly feel the need to be honest about something is beyond me. 
    But these advertising booklets are a wellspring of pseudo- medical information, all presented in the breathless anticipation of the readers been cured--once their credit card has cleared.