The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Like so many of us South End men in this post-chauvinistic era, I was in the kitchen chopping up vegetables for a tasty dinner for when the mizzus got home from the mine. Every store-bought pepper had this itty bitty sticker with a scanner bar glued on semi-permanent so I had to dig at it to get it off. And it got me to wondering — what kind of glue sticks like this and does washing my pepper really get that stuff off and does it add anything savory to the tastebuds and is it known to the state of California to be carcinogenic???

Now let’s understand here, I’m not talking about the government getting involved. I’m not advocating the FDA look into whether my level of glue toxicity is above some approved threshold. No sir! We’re living in the day of Get-Government-Off-My-Back and the last thing us South Enders want to see is paying some federal employee to investigate this when we can just run some studies on our own, find out exactly WHAT that sticky substance is and set up a double blind experiment to find out, for ourselves, what kind of effects this glue has. All I know it might be good for us. Might grow hair back. Might cure erectile dysfunction. Might prevent cancer.

I mean, why can’t we just think positive? Why do we assume GMO foods are necessarily so bad we got to have labeling? Or irradiated foods? Milk that last months instead of weeks? Take that fracking we got going on. The oil companies don’t have to tell the damn government what they’re dumping in those wells. They got government off THEIR backs, but do we celebrate that? Do we declare victory over burdensome regulations? Hell no, we don’t!! We whine and we cry and we scare everybody with horror stories of funny tasting well water and water that catches fire. Here’s a tip: don’t drink flaming water. Duh.

You’re worried, get a test kit and have a go at it. Government can’t do everything for ya. And when you find out those chemicals kill 99% of the bacteria down your well, maybe consider a little thank you card to the oil companies. It IS called Better Living Through Chemistry.