DIY operations. We take the blame.

Self medication is seeping through the weak fabric of society quicker than a budgie in a gas mine as an ever increasing number of imbecilic, senseless, witless – or just plain insane - medical junkies get tired of waiting and take matters into their own hands, bring out the chopping boards and get fruity with their own body parts. And you know what? Time after cringing, pain inducing, hide behind your hands, DIY operational, time, these botched medical procedures don’t work out in exactly the same way they were conceived. Ineptitude is a boundless quarry of gratuitous donations. Pain in your chest? Bring out the butter knife.

Ah yes, California, home of the bedroom doctor and our port of call today as a 67-year old man tries to take out his own hernia with a butter knife. Good start, he obviously paid attention in medical school; use a blunt knife to cut out your own insides. Butter knife? what, you don’t have a pencil sharpener? Hey, use a spoon. Scoop it out.

Paramedics were called to the house of a, as yet unnamed, Californian man by his wife after she walked in on him trying to eradicate his body of a hernia which had been causing high levels of discomfort and annoyance for some time. On arriving at the scene the paramedics were met with a failed operation and a possible candidate for the crazy house. In defence of the patient, he had “removed the butter knife himself“, according to sergeant Tom Lorenz of Glendale police. That, one guesses, is quite a feet in itself; you try taking a 6-inch butter knife out of your own chest midway through a failed hernia operation when you are the doctor, surgeon and nurse in your own your little hospital.

Take The Blame™ is no doctor – hell, it doesn’t even subscribe painkillers for botulism – but it has a sense of severity that justifies the insurance fee alone. What is a hernia? Just so you know what this cootie was up to. Drawing a blank on medical terminology, it is essentially when the inside of an organ has had enough of its immediate surroundings and tries to head west, chase the American Dream, quit, drop out and get a new job in the cushy, moist netherspace between the stomach and the highly oxygenated outside world.*

* or something.

Hey you. Yeah you. How much food did you throw away yesterday? last week? How about last year? What about just at lunch time today? Well we can tell you how much food you throw away. Not in literal terms. We can’t tell you what you jettison, be it corn fakes or bacon, marmalade or Nutella (breakfast items are perhaps the most throw-able) but according to new figures published by The Local Government Association (http://www.thegrocer.co.uk/articles.aspx?page=articles&ID=217324) every household in Britain throws away the equivalent of £520 per year; a combined bin-toppling total of £14 billion for all of us. A food mountain of gargantuan proportions is propping up the tips of middle England.

So who is to blame? The retailers or the shoppers? It is a difficult one to get to the bottom of. According to Clyde Loaks, environment chief for the association, “Way too much food is being brought into homes [and] retailers need to take a large slice of responsibility“. So there is a big pointing finger aimed pretty unequivocally at the retailers. In addition, the cause of the problem is the BOGOF; the Buy One Get One Free culture. Simply put, the customers are being brainwashed into buying food in a quantity they simply cannot consume and the supermarkets should stop peddling their wares in such fashion and return to single-item offers.

It is true that BOGOF offers are seductive. There is a warped sense of victory in buying 26 yogurts for the price of 13. That the best-before-date is in 3 days and equates to a yogurt to day ratio of over 8-1 is not the point. 4 packs of coffee, 48 bags of walkers crisps, 10 pineapples, 4 packs of fresh pasta, 6 avocados, 6 sachets of rice and 28 oranges. For half price? You would be foolish not to buy it.

In reality the supermarkets do not force people to buy the offers; they are voluntarily gobbled up. They merely put the offers out. 40% of shopping passing under the infa-red price guns at your local store is part of a deal; a  two for one, a multi-pack, a buy 6 get the 7th free.  You can’t blame an airline for people choosing to go on holiday and you can’t blame a supermarket for people buying food. Even if they buy too much.

What is clear, whoever is to blame, is that £14 billion is a lot of carrots. Carrots that could be put to use somewhere other than the local tip. Worldhunger.org estimates that there are 927 million hungry people on Earth; 578 million in Asia and the Pacific and 239 million in Sub-Saharan Africa and the rest scattered around The Caribbean, Latin America and some unfortunate developed countries. Obviously this number is vague and extremely open to counter-numbers and argument, it can’t be totally accurate as no-one really knows. Even the definition of hunger itself is wide. The Oxford dictionary cites 3 definitions:

• the uneasy or painful sensation caused by want of food; craving appetite. Also the exhausted condition caused by want of food
• the want or scarcity of food in a country
• a strong desire or craving

WorldHunger.org uses the second definition.

What needs to be done is a re-distribution of food. If the UK is throwing away £14 billion of food every year, then what about the rest of the world? What about America? The mind recoils at the very idea of it. Would there be enough to feed the world in a Band-Aid style? Citing WorldHunger.org, the global food production is substantial enough to supply 2720 kilocalories (kcal) per day to every man, woman and child on the planet. For all of the food that is thrown away as people go hungry, we take the blame. Lets start a revolution. Don’t throw food away. Eat it. Or don’t buy it in the first place.

The supermarkets are not to blame, we are all to blame.

Ineptitude comes to the restaurants of America as a Michigan chain restaurant Applebee’s gives a 15-month old child who requested apple juice a margarita instead. If only such things would happen to the adults of this world.

A Friday afternoon stop at the Applebee’s restaurant turned into a drunken, terrifying ordeal for Taylor Dill-Reese when an innocent request for a kids meal resulted in the apple juice she chose being accidentally replaced with margarita. Dominic, her 15-month old son, was soon talking to the walls.

“He was saying “hi” and “bye” to the walls and he eventually lay his head down on the table.” said Mrs Dill-Reese.

http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/27486476/detail.html

Soon after the talking stopped  Dominic refused to eat. Something was a-foot and not knowing where the strange behaviour stemmed from, Miss Dill-Reese tried her sons drink and was shocked to discover alcohol lurking within. Incensed, worried and angry she rushed her son off to hospital where his alcohol levels were recorded at .10. Enough to fail an adult breathalyser test. Doctors went on to add that if little Dominic had drank the whole drink, he could have died. Thankfully he made a complete and full recovery.

Ineptitude is rife. Do not let it enter your life. Be on guard; even when you think you are safe people will accidentally give your baby alcohol. We highlight this case because margaritas are not for children.

The outbreak is coming....

There is what appears to be green, congealed spam oozing from your nose. Your lungs are trying to escape from your ribcage in a last ditch attempt to escape the imminent prison fire, only they are trying to abdicate through your throat, causing contractions and convulsions through your entire chest cavity. It hurts. And it burns. Your eyes are bruised from the inflamed sinus infection, exchanging your iris’s for small, neatly sharpened needles that make changing the direction you look a study in pain evasion. An army of army ants pound the inside of your head; rippling pain cascades outwards at every available moment. Your muscles ache, which is strange because the last time you went to the gym it was still cool to actually think going to the gym was trendy. And trendy was a word. Your core temperature is searing yet cold sweat glistens from every pore. You have the flu and nobody believes you. We would like to take the blame for it.

When it became acceptable to complain about the slightest discomfort, the merest inkling of a minute change in the operational system of your core, the way winter illness was viewed changed. Such is the propensity of people to moan, whinge, whimper and complain about ‘the flu’ they have, when all they really are suffering from is a lack of sleep and, at best, a mid-winter cold, has diluted the real flu virus to the boy who cried wolf. Nobody believes you when you have it, nobody cares when you have it and nobody really even knows what it is anymore.

A killer is what it is. The cold you are most probably suffering from, and the continued whining about it that we are suffering from, is a discomfort. The flu kills between 20 and 40 thousand people annually in the US alone and half a million world wide. Are you sure you have it? Its side effects are monstrous in their debilitation – bacterial pneumonia, dehydration, and worsening of chronic medical conditions, such as congestive heart failure, asthma, or diabetes – are all just the tip of the death dredging ice-berg. You have a cough.

So who is at fault? The real flu, not the cold often referred to as man flu which is just the softening of the male psyche, is a respiratory illness instigated by the evil influenza virus – not by chickens, pigs, cows, birds – which, having infiltrated your respiratory tract, goes on a self-replicating rampage, exponentially quadrupling itself. The virus rapes and murders your cells, one by one, each time it does so, releasing the angry hordes in more numerous battalions. Your body reacts by trying to turn itself inside out. See above.

We are here to take the blame on two fronts. For the times when you have the Flu and the times when you have to put up with the continued moaning of your friends, work colleagues and family members who insist they are dying from it when all they have is a cold.

There are some things that the world could quite easily live without; certain things that, were they to vanish, nobody would blink. Places, people and objects that really have no place in this world or the next. Switzerland for example. Bono. Big Brother. Ships in bottles. Cucumbers. Rollerblades. Traffic wardens. Touching your nose with your tongue. Justin Bieber and now, breast milk flavoured ice-cream named after Lady Gaga.

A London restaurant, based in Covent Garden, has started selling ice-cream made from breast milk after mother Victoria Hiley responded to an advert placed in a local newspaper asking for volunteers to come forward and donate their milk. Ice-creamist founder, and presumed brains behind the operation, Matt O’Connor has great faith in his new invention, claiming that,

“noone’s done anything interesting with ice-cream in the last hundred years.” – www.bbc.co.uk/news

Really? Nobody has done anything interesting to eggs in the last hundred years but it doesn’t mean we have to fill them with breast milk. Come to think of it, nobody has done anything ‘interesting’ to a great many things in the last hundred years for the simple reason that nothing needs to be done. Bacon is perfect, it comes from a pig. Chocolate is perfect. Wine is perfect, it’s made from grapes, not pineapples; and ice- made with 4-legged animal milk – cream is perfect.

As reported by the BBC, the restaurant is proving pretty lac-ticious with the London hip crowd. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12569011

We take the blame for this most pointless of culinary desert inventions.