Punday Night & Stuff
n ancient Babylonian general was once involved in a plot to overthrow the king. His plot included a number of followers in the upper ranks of the army. However, his plot was uncovered, and the king threw him in jail. The king sentenced him to death without a trial.
From the jail, he was able to secretly contact his followers to arrange to escape, meet his followers, and attack the king’s palace at night. So the night before his scheduled execution, the general managed to escape from prison. He fled to a ziggurat several kilometers away, where his followers would meet him. However, the ziggurat was one of several in the area, and he wasn’t sure if his cohorts would find the right ziggurat. By this time it was twilight, so he lit a small fire and sent smoke signals to indicate in which structure he was hiding.
However, the king’s loyal soldiers saw the smoke coming from the ziggurat, and came to arrest him before he could meet his followers. He was executed later that day. The moral of the story? WARNING: The searching general has determined that smoking ziggurats can be extremely hazardous to your stealth.
Oh, dear. I apologize, but I couldn’t resist that one.
Filed under “That Can’t Be Good” (which is what the doctor said), comes this story about trace amounts of pharmaceutical drugs in our drinking water:
There are traces of sedatives in New York City’s water. Ibuprofen and naproxen in Washington, D.C. Anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety drugs in southern California.
A 2,550 word article from The Associated Press is drawing attention to the widespread problem of trace amounts of pharmaceutical chemicals turning up in the drinking water supply of millions of Americans, but no one seems to know how to react. The report itself culminated with a doctor offering a tried-and-true deduction for the Ages: “That can’t be good.”
But how bad is it, exactly? The answers range in degrees of confidence and alarm, though no one was ready to predict imminent doom.
Could they maybe dump something in the water that counteracts the arsenic we keep hearing about? Just a thought. But how are these drugs getting into the water, you ask? Well, and I can’t help but giggle as I type this, apparently you don’t metabolize every last grain of a given drug that you take. So, when you take a leak and flush it away, your urine contains trace amounts of drugs, which don’t get filtered out at the water plants when they turn our sewer water back into drinking water.
Yes. Proof that you are, in fact, drinking urine. I mean, I expect we all sort of knew that anyways, but there’s nothing like having it spelled right out for you. Oh, and if you think bottled water is safe, think again. Most of it is just filtered tap water, and various bottling companies have said they aren’t filtering for drugs, so it’s likely in there, too.
Hey, I’m drinking a nice cold bottle of piss, drugs, and arsenic right now. Ain’t life grand?
And on that note . . . I’m out of here.
(Pun Perpetrator: Pun of the Day.)
