“Bacon will kill you,” my friend said.  “No way,” I answered. “Way,” he insisted.

And that’s how I learned that I could be on death’s door because the WHO, who I thought lived in Whoville in Dr. Seuss books, has declared that bacon is a confirmed carcinogen.

This WHO turns out to be the World Health Organization … a global organization that sets health standards so those of us who insist on continuing along a suicidal health path, can plot exactly where we are on the road to self-destruction.

In the meantime, my wife, a disciplined bacon eater … you know the type – one piece maybe three times a year – just sits and smiles as I squirm and rant about the Cured Meat Police.

Aargh … Am I cut-off before I ever get to our local Waffle House for a bacon topped waffle slathered in maple syrup?  What a bummer.

But, the pigs, swine, and Porkys are not going down without an oink aimed at the WHO Police.

One day after the WHO’s declaration, the Porkys lobbed PR mortars at the research labs of the WHO.  They’ve been challenged to show a causal link between the 15 slices of bacon I dream about eating each week, and the threat of colon cancer.

Maybe the Porkys need to attend the Tobacco Military Tactics Academy located somewhere in tobacco country … North Carolina or Virginia.  They’ve been in this fight for a generation or two … one of the longest health wars on record.

How long will it be before the tobacco-like warning label appears on bacon packages?

So who, other than the pigs and religious groups who don’t eat pork, are the happy ones in this announcement?

That answer is, “Almost no one.”

The WHO is under attack for putting all ham, hotdogs, cold cuts, cured sausages, jerky and bacon on the endangered list.  Oscar Meyer immediately started looking for a buyout. The Chinese, who recently bought that American icon Smithfield Hams, are now crying “Fowl.”

Will the Hormel Black Label Bacon Fest, held annually in San Diego, become as extinct as Entelodont Terminator Pig ribs at Hooters?

Bacon has replaced Apple Pie as the All-American dish and Bacon Eaters from coast-to-coast are not going to take this “loin-ing” down.

It won’t be a picnic for WHO.  The Bacon Eaters have put their porky shoulders, hammy butts, and pickled feet to the task of pushing back this assault on their freedom to do themselves in.

Just sayin’.

Road rage may soon exist only in our rear view mirrors … a behavior we had to leave behind not because we’ve become a kinder gentler nation, but because we’ve been kicked out of the driver’s seat.

The future is here and it’s the auto-drive auto … and damned if we know what to do about it.

How will we maintain our addiction to vengeful and rewarding highway yell-fests?  Where will all our misplaced road rage go?

New Release!  Coming to Theaters Soon!  “Not Quite so Fast and Furious XXXVIII – Auto-Drive!”

Yep … auto-drive cars are coming soon to roads near you and the implications are giganto!

Job impact?  Upstart Uber who just got a foothold in the taxi industry may be kaput? What about all the useless chauffeurs and bus drivers?  BTW … with no Driver’s Ed, what course will high school football coaches teach?

We’ll have to reduce police forces by at least 10% … no more speed trap towns like Starke, Waldo and Yulee … Oops, up go the real estate taxes!

And what happens to all the liability lawyers?  Will Morgan and Morgan (and junior Morgans) be reduced to just “Morgan … for the People?”  Hey … If two driverless cars have an “accident,” did an “accident” actually occur?

For couples, the impact will be humongous!  Backseat driving will go the way of “how to squeeze the metal toothpaste tube” as a source of endless gender squabbles.

Who wants to nag a computer?  “Did you use your turn indicator?” will become a phrase that’s as dead as Latin.

The ramifications are endless.

But, as with all great innovations, there will be speed bumps along the way.  Rumor has it that the auto-car drives like your “grandmother.”  Oh, no not her!

Some of the test drivers got so bored with going the speed limit and slowing down before the last possible second that they actually went into “Driver Withdrawal.”

They reportedly missed tailgating and jumping the green light.  Without psychological support groups could they fall victim to hallucinating hellish highway scenes from Mel Gibson’s “Mad Max” movies?

Never fear … we can count on the youth of America.  It won’t be long before some tech-savvy teenager hacks the cars’ computers and creates a “rogue auto muscle car” on steroids.

Just sayin’.

Washington D.C.’s full of you-know-what.  I bet you already knew that.

But, do you know what they’re doing with all that s**t?

D.C. now runs a major utility off this s**t, plus provides electricity for over 10,000 homes.  Wow … That’s a lot of s**t!

Here’s an abridged version of the way it works.  Take the s**t and remove the solids.  A huge, I mean really fricking big centrifuge, spin dries the leftover s**ty water, which now resembles the Potomac River on bad days.  The remaining sludge is pumped into containers that act like mega-pressure cookers – You’d better hope the lids are on super tight because it’s cooked at 338 degrees of steam and pressure.

The s**t is now sent to “digesters” which are 8-story concrete buildings filled with mega-bazillions of microbial bugs … Bugs you don’t want in or around your house.  And, if there’s beauty in s**t, here it is … The by-product is major league quantities of clean burning methane gas which is used to produce electricity.

Wait a minute!  Did I hear “methane?”  Methane gas?

Aren’t cows the largest producers of methane gas?  Cows carry their own microbial boogers in their stomachs and wander around eating all day, belching and farting methane gas by the cubic whatever.

No s**t, Sherlock!

Bing – bang – boom … an idea lights up the nether regions of my brain.  (Surprise, surprise … I have one of those and it functions on alternate Tuesdays.)

Cows produce methane.  Cows eat almost any plant fodder.  Where do we have room for huge herds of cows in Washington D.C.?

Until now, I haven’t found a direct link between all this s**t and either the House of Representatives or the Senate.  But Holy S**t, it seems to me that since we’re talking s**t here, we’d look at Congress as the source for our raw material.

Duh … the capitol building and the surrounding parks and grounds.  What good is Congress at solving any of our problems?  I CAN’T HEAR YOU …

What?  You think we could put Congress on a permanent recess and load the hallowed halls of government with herds of belching farting cows all producing methane gas? Methane that produces electricity, which is a lot more than Congress has ever produced.

As the French would say, “Voila!”  We now have a use for Congress … at least the halls.

Screw the Congressmen … unless they want to shovel s**t.

Just sayin’.

Guns, guns and more guns … If I hear one more piece of insane rhetoric about guns, I think I’ll shoot myself!

My favorite justification for not controlling guns goes something like this, “Hammers kill people. Should we control hammers?”

So help me with this.

We already control cars, seat belts and child restraint seats.  We place warning labels on cigarettes, beer and liquor.  We blunted the tips of scissors when we realized it was impossible to stop kids from “running with scissors.”

The anti-gun control arguments about having to control hammers if we control guns got me thinking about all the other “objects that kill” that we’d have to control.

Cheese kills people.  It’s a fact.

Issue a cease and desist order to the Green Bay Packers.  Stop their fans from wearing those incredibly ugly “cheese heads.”  A block of cheese placed right next to people’s brains, including children, undoubtedly influences them to eat more cheese.  And we all know cheese is on the verboten list for health foods.

Ban the Cheese Heads.  Cheese = Cholesterol = Heart Attacks.

Ice picks kill people, especially in the hands of serial killers.

I’ve read several novels that featured death from ice picks wielded by calculating stone-cold killers.  Yet, I can walk into any Ace Hardware and pluck one right off the rack … made in China of course.

No one uses blocks of ice anymore.  When’s the last time you saw a crazy person repeatedly and furiously stabbing at the chemical cold-packs in an Igloo cooler?

Ice picks are clearly deadly weapons.  Ice Picks + Crazy People = Death.

Fruits, especially apples, kill people.

Apples should sport a skull and cross bones sticker, warning that the fruit of Eden should be eaten under close supervision, removed from the core, and cut into small pieces.  If not, the eater runs the risk of choking to death.

No more mouth watering bites from a fresh picked apple.  Better to cook it down into unrecognizable mush to minimize risk!

Danger, this Apple may kill you.  Apple Bites + Bobbing Uvula = Death.

Wow … No wonder we can’t come to grips with reasonable efforts to control guns.  If we tried to establish reasonable controls over every object that kills us, think of the legislative work our poor Congress would face … These are the same folks who’re making the election of a new Speaker akin to parting the Red Sea.

I say, focus on controlling objects, which with just a flick of the finger, can kill huge numbers of people in seconds.  I’ll run the risk of leaving hammers, cheese, ice picks, and apples to their own devices.

Just sayin’.

What better word is there in our capitalist system than, “free?”

It’s free.  It won’t cost you a damn dime!  What?  No charge? Nada?

Yep … F-R-E-E.  Free!

But since 1988, capitalists at Warner/Chappell Music held “Happy Birthday” hostage while collecting millions of dollars in royalties.  Their case was based on the seriously shaky claim that the original publisher, Clayton F. Summy Company, never published or allowed anyone to publish the lyrics to Happy Birthday.

Surprisingly, there is no evidence W/CM ever ordered police to use flash-bang grenades or battering rams to raid birthday parties where gleeful kids led by their slightly tipsy moms sang the iconic song.

Thank God for that.  I guess Mitt was right, “Corporations are people, too.”

But … digging into the corporate dirt of W/CM, it turns out that the case had a bit of TV court room drama in it.

Apparently W/CM, as a collection of “people-who-are-corporations” are wont to do, “forgot” to file some relevant documents until just before judgment day.  The most important info in one of the docs was also mysteriously blurred.

Guess what?  A little closer examination revealed a smoking gun.

The original title of the song was not just “Good Morning” as claimed by W/CM.  The blurred original title was clearly “Good Morning and Birthday Song” … and just below the title it also stated the “Clayton F. Summy Company gives permission” for the song to be published.

Oops!

My, my, my … does anyone still think “corporations are people?”  For sure I do … nasty, greedy, lying people living to cover-up their tracks.

Do I hear someone mumbling “Fahrvergnugen all over again?”

Karma’s a B**ch, as the saying goes.  The plaintiffs are also considering a nasty class action suit to reclaim the millions in ransom W/CM illegally collected.

The plaintiff’s attorney speculates that the suit could be for way more than the self-reported royalties.  Whatever gives him the idea that W/CM might try to fudge the total amount collected in royalties?

With “Happy Birthday” no longer held hostage maybe Warner-Chappell Music should set sights on “The Star Spangled Banner.”  Somebody better check to make sure Frances Scott Key maintained his rights or we could be shelling out big bucks again.

The SSB is sung at almost every U.S. athletic event, miniscule to giganto.  Wow… That’s a pot of gold!  Time to call W/CM and feather up the nest egg.

Just sayin’.