# 303, December 30, 2003

COLUMBUS: Television news is saying today that beef from that old milk cow in Washington state, which couldn’t amount to more than about 800 pounds of hamburger, has been spread over 8 western states. Never in history has anyone distributed such a small amount of meat among so many people, except for our Lord Savior himself, and he only did it with fish. Closest anybody has ever come to it with hamburger is McDonalds.

You know, if 3M were to drop an ounce of arsenic in the Mississippi River at St. Paul (not that they would ever do that) our news folks would advise us to stop drinking the water all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

Now everyone is for safe food, and it’s hard for anyone to argue ours isn’t safe, as much as we eat of it. We eat more than we should and live longer, so it can’t all be poison to us.

But the whole American beef industry is about to be downed by one old milk cow of Canadian heritage. Can you believe it, on account of one sick Holstein, Japan stopped shipment on millions of pounds of Angus T-bone steaks and Hereford prime rib. There’s boatloads of beef heading across the Pacific that may be dumped overboard.

Just imagine if you can, if Japan discovered that one new Toyota Camry (or even an old one) was infected with some terrible disease, like Injector Influenza. (This disease has been known to cause wheezing and coughing, and can even lead to an engine dying.) Do you suppose we would immediately halt the import of Camrys? And not only Camrys but all Toyota models, plus Nissans and Hondas? Well, if we did we would be just as foolish as they are in refusing our rump roasts.

The terror threat is up for the holidays and we’re spending Billions on extra police and security. I wouldn’t be surprised that since bin Ladin and his al Quada followers seem to hate capitalism, he is happy just to see us spending so much of our “excess” profits on our own protection. But I wonder if old Osama has been watching us and how we react to all this mad cow news. He’s liable to come up with a new plan. He’ll have his men hijack a cargo plane at London’s airport, load it with British cows that all have that disease, fly ’em over here and scatter the meat across our eastern states.

Happy New Year. 2004 should be a good one. Enjoy the football games, and eat more beef.

Historic quotes from Will Rogers:

“Now I say, and have always claimed, that things would pick up in ’32. Why ’32? Well, because ’32 is an election year, see, and the Republicans always see that everything looks good on election year, see? They give us three good years and one bad one…. no, three bad ones and one good one. I like to got it wrong. That’s the Democrats does the other. They give us three bad years and one good one, but the good one always comes on the year that the voting is, see? Everything will pick up next year and be fine.” Radio broadcast, Oct. 18, 1931

“Well, the old year will be passing out in a few hours, and I don’t know personally of a thing that I can do about it. I guess there will be a lot of people will take it up with the government, as they look to them to do everything else.” DT #2622, Dec. 31, 1934