100514- A joke

.....When I was a kid, prescription medications were never advertised on television. They were created to treat debilitating conditions and often produced mildly annoying side effects. Now that the invisible hand of market forces have set things right, prescription drugs are created to treat mildly annoying conditions and often produce debilitating side effects.

.....Seriously, as I'm typing this I'm listening to a television commercial for a prescription drug to treat symptoms as vague as "confusion" and lists potential side effects such as "an increased risk of death" or "impaired motor skills". If the drug is meant to treat confusion, maybe the real purpose of the ad is to expand the market.

100503- A joke

.....Back in the eighties the Reagan administration did everything they could to prevent the FDA from protecting the American public. The argument was that market forces would tell us what was safe to eat, that experimentation and testing was just a waste of tax dollars. To prove their point, they forced the FDA to sit on their hands while a chemical additive called Olestra, on which they had placed restrictions for fifteen years, was used to make fat-free potato chips. After thousands of people spent far more money going to their doctors than the FDA would have spent in taxes, makers of the chips still didn't pull Olestra products from the market but instead announced that they "forgot" to add a warning which, they felt, would absolve them of any legal responsibility.

.....Now here's the kicker: the disclaimer/warning became a news item when it conceded that products cooked in Olestra "may cause spontaneous rectal bleeding". It should be pointed out that the chemical causes diarrhea in nearly everyone, which only leads to hemorrhaging if you're stupid enough to keep eating a product guaranteed to give you diarrhea until you bleed. Still, it's a phrase that turns heads at parties, I'll give you that. More than that, it's a neat condensation of a personality test. In any sufficiently large sampling of people, if you were to ask each one which word in that phrase they find most alarming, I would wager that most would say "bleeding", as though other forms of spontaneous rectal activity were... uh, negotiable? For others, "rectal" would concern them most; I'll leave the Freudian interpretations of that to yourselves. There would even be others for whom "spontaneous" would cause more anxiety, that a negative side effect would seem more manageable if it were more predictable. Me? The one word in that sentence that I home in on has to be "may". It "may cause spontaneous rectal bleeding". It says, "We had some indication that it might cause spontaneous rectal bleeding but we didn't see any pressing need to nail that down before we made food for you out of it."

100401- Menu Options

.....Thank you for calling You're Welcome. If you're receiving this message it means that you have called on April Fool's Day, our only recognized holiday, and have been forwarded to voice mail. We would be happy to fulfill your low-rent humor needs during regular business hours, which are every day. As a service to our valued bipolar and emotionally stunted customers we offer the following menu in lieu of today's joke:

• For English, press one.
• For Spanish, press dos.
• For Danish, press three.
• For coffee with that Danish, press four.
• For the hell of it, press five. I always wanted to see what happens.
• If you're just waiting for a chance to give strangers personal information, press six.
• If you wanted to know why Paul McCartney stopped smoking pot, "Press To Play".
• If the first thing that comes to mind when you want to reassure someone that you don't look like Carl from "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" is that "my head is a completely different shape from his", press seven.
• If you forgot to take your medication, press eight.
• If you le-ee-eave me now, press nine.
• If you wish to hear this menu again, take two aspirin and press zero.
• If you wish to speak to a human operator, hang up and call the same number again. It will save you the time spent on hold until we did it to you anyway.

100316- A joke

.....I knew a guy who tried to give up smoking. I told him that it's always tough but it would be worth it. The one thing he should remember though, is that sometimes when people fail it's for the same reason that dieters fail: they often get advised to use a "one-method-fits-all" treatment. It would work better if the treatment was tailored to the condition you want to change. I recommended he try the nicotine patch first. "If you crave a cigarette," I told him, "you use the patch instead. If the cravings are stronger than that, you use two, and so on. You see? You make the treatment match the need." That made sense to him. I got caught up in work for a while and it was months before I saw him again. When I did see him, I noticed he wasn't holding a cigarette. His face and hair seemed cleaner and he had a little more energy overall. I started up some small talk, but I was dying to ask him if he had really quit. When I did, he said, "Oh, yeah, it's been a while now. You were right about those patches." "Really?" I asked, "they worked that well?" "They sure did," he said, "they tasted horrible. And lighting them is nearly impossible."

100313- A joke

.....With baseball season starting up, the professional leagues have finally decided to do a little preventative maintenance regarding steroid abuse. From the perspective of management, the problems don't stem from the abuse but from getting caught when it becomes so comically obvious that even congressmen notice. So, to prevent things getting that far out of hand the owners have opted for the 'theme park' approach. From now on at the doors to each of the locker rooms there will be a die-cut plywood cartoon character with an outstretched hand and a word balloon reading, "You must be this tall and able to scratch your ass with both hands to play this game!"

100307- A joke

.....The thing that distinguishes 'sports radio' from other radio formats is that 'sports radio' is where people with tiny walnuts in their skulls scream about people with tiny walnuts in their pants.

100105- A joke

.....Something that was overlooked in the coverage of the Nigerian Christmas bomber was that this was not the first time someone flew in from Amsterdam with exploding underwear. It's just the first time it was done with malicious intent.