Welcome back, Dear Reader! Today our topic changes direction– literally. What is the meaning of this conundrum? It’s alimentary, Watson (or whatever your name is). Today we examine the intake side of the alimentary tract.

We all recall with delight our childhood joys in the Consumables Department. My particular favorite was the Tootsie Pop, a great big sucker on a stick with a Tootsie Roll core. The fictional New York police detective of TV fame, Kojak  (“who loves ya, baby”), was incessantly mouthing one as he subdued the doers of evil. Even  today, shlurping a Tootsie Pop fills me with warm recollections of my youth.

But they can’t leave well enough alone, can they? As part of the infantilization of the body politic, led  by the corrupt politicos who reduce the most complex issues to nine-second sound bites, the teachers who refuse to demand that students actually learn something, the inventors of quiz shows and reality TV, the confectionary industry has now plunged to new lows. The Tootsie Pop? How about the Titsie Pop! Yes, Dear Reader, a Mr. Jason Darling of Austin, Texas (otherwise a wonderful town in which I have spent many happy hours over the years) has introduced into the halls of commerce his new product: a breast-milk-flavored lollipop.

Now, it doesn’t contain any actual breast milk. Mr. Darling is a vegan. (N.B. This does not necessarily mean that he comes from the star Vega, although his ideas do suggest that explanation.) But he claims that using his product brings back fond memories of the part of your life during which you could grab an attractive woman’s left knocker, shove it into your mouth, and not have to worry about a sexual harassment suit or getting knocked upside the head by her, her brother, or her father. Halcyon days, indeed!

But this is great!

Mr. Darling has raised the concept of comfort food to a whole new level. Or has he?

We can already buy chewing gum that tastes like cigarettes (Nicorette). We can buy cakes that taste like marijuana (Alice B. Toklas brownies). We can stimulate our little taste buds with concoctions that recall any sinful experience we want.

There must be something we can do to raise the ante. I know! We need some treats that bring back bad experiences! How about a lollipop with the flavor of Fels Naptha soap, used to wash out our mouths when we used naughty words? How about a carbonated beverage that tastes like beer barf, to remind us of the occasions on which we overindulged during college?

I don’t know about you, but I’d just as soon leave the dead past, well, dead.

Welcome again, Dear Reader, to the fields of excrement. No, I am not fixated at the anal compulsive developmental stage identified by those two great medical philosophers and savants, Dr. Sigmund (“Vy you don’t like your mommy?”) Freud and Dr. Benjamin (“Let the little monsters do anything they want or you will damage their fragile self-esteem”) Spock. No, no, no. I am a mature and sophisticated adult. But the cannonade of insanity inundating us forces me to speak.

A scholarly scientific article was published just last week indicating that recent results indicate that fecal enemas are not as effective as previously claimed. Fair enough. However, my own experience, both on a personal level and in terms of my interaction with my young children, was that enemas were used to cause fecal material to leave the body. I was surprised (an inadequate word) to discover that the enemas they were discussing were reverse enemas, id est, they involved putting alien  poop into the victim, excuse me, patient.

The study indicates that one of the reasons that the efficacy of this treatment  was overstated was that it was based on a small number of cases. How surprising. I would have expected throngs to be hammering on the clinic door begging to have somebody else’s poo squirted up their rear end. BLECCCHH!

Now, in all fairness to the medical profession, this revolting treatment was developed to treat extremely difficult cases of infections by clostridium dificile which, as its name indicates, is dificile to cure. It is amusing to speculate on how anyone came up with this concept. I see two white coated physicians standing around in the hospital, outside the room of a particularly difficult case, when one says to the other “Hey! Why don’t we try shoving somebody else’s poo up her butt!”

But this is great!

The ingenuity of the medical profession knows no bounds! This conceptual breakthrough heralds oodles of new and interesting treatments.

But oh no!! It’s too late! All the really revolting approaches from the Dark Ages have been resurrected already. The Three Weird Sisters from Macbeth have nothing on our contemporary medicos! Eye of newt and wing of bat, hah! We once again use leeches to drain black eyes. We use maggots (sterilized, of course) to eat the dead flesh off of  victims of chemical burns and fires. We use creepy molds to make antibiotics.

Where is a witch doctor when you need him? I’d prefer the old mask and rattle any day.

Ah, Dear Reader, you think you have seen the worst.  You think that the heights of folly have already been scaled by our masters. Think again! To quote Al Jolson, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

We have all become accustomed to having our fannies patted by lascivious TSA personnel. (Some of us even like it, I fear.) Those of us who wish to help our fellow man by marrying in order to reproduce, or to earn a meager pittance to purchase Sterno (drink of the gutter-inhabiting multitude), are accustomed to providing blood to the public health authorities. Those of us who work in industries where there is some reason for the public to demand we be in at least partial control of our senses have become accustomed to providing urine samples to the drug-sniffing guardians of the public weal. But as we follow Greece into the valley of the shadow of insolvency, we can expect to follow them too into the shadow of  regulation of on-line businesses.

Starting a business in the swamp of Greek regulations is almost impossible. But in addition to the usual “fill out these 276 forms in triplicate, using a pink crayon,” the Greeks have added a charming new biological hurdle to jump. In addition to the gigantic pile of papers you must submit, you now must submit a stool sample!

You are tempted, no doubt, to respond to my assertion with a shocked “No shit!”  YES, SHIT! This is not an urban legend! The Greekies are actually doing this! Why, I cannot imagine. The only possible argument your Interlocutor can conceive of is a desire to keep the quality of the stuff circulating on the Web from becoming too high. “You want to disseminate stuff on the Web? Well it better be shit! In fact, we are checking up to make sure it’s shit!”

I suppose I should apologize for interjecting scatology into what has heretofore been a G-rated blog. But I won’t. Some topics demand scatological treatment. (For those of you who are interested, the term “scatological” is derived from the Greek “scat,” meaning poop. So scatology is particularly appropriate when discussing Greek poop collecting.)

But this is great!

Think of the possibilities that this approach opens up! Blood, pee, poop – what’s next? Want to go skiing? Before we will rent you ski boots, we want 17 toenail samples to check for fungus. Want to ride on the roller coaster? First throw up in this bag so we can test the effluvium to ensure that you will not spew pathogens on the folks in front of you after the 720 degree loop the loop the loop!

At the end of the day, we will find ourselves strapped to gurneys with scalpel-wielding bureaucrats hovering over us, each anxious to slice off the most informative morsel.

I just hope it doesn’t happen on a trip to the sperm bank.

You remember Babar, don’t you? He was the little elephant who went to Paris and lived in an apartment with The Old Lady, who was fond of little elephants. Cut that out! The Babar books were written in a more innocent age. We are not talking about a cougar who is into bestiality, and is particularly attracted to elephants because of their long, firm trunks. No! The Old Lady is a sweet little grandmotherly type. And Babar trots through book after book, living a peaceful life except for one incident when he finds himself in a war with the rhinoceroses. How nice!

But let us return for a moment to the first page of the first Babar book. What happens? Babar’s daddy is blown away by a hunter! How do you think that made Babar feel? Lousy, to be sure, but he never takes revenge on the human species.

Until now.

Fox News has reliably reported that a Mr. Solomon Manjoro was smeared uniformly over the grass in Zimbabwe during a poaching expedition. The culprit? Babar, or a reasonable facsimile thereof!

It is unclear why Babar forsook his erstwhile tolerant attitude toward people trying to kill him and remove his tusks. It may be that he saw the video posted on YouTube showing a South African safari guide charging an elephant to the cheers of his drunken comrades. But a more likely explanation is that Babar has joined the animal mainstream. The domesticated and semi-domesticated animals are in revolt!

Roy of Siegfried and Roy was attacked by his tiger. Grizzly Adams was eaten by (surprise!) a grizzly bear. Everywhere we turn, another former friend of man has become a consumer of man.

This is great!

We now have the opportunity to rewrite all those puerile children’s stories with cute cuddly little beasties to more accurately reflect contemporary reality.  For example, “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” can be rewritten to conclude with a bear feast at which Goldilocks is served to the assembled guests with an apple in her mouth. Winnie the Pooh will rend Christopher Robin limb from limb.

We can finish off the PETA people, too. We will present them with pets – carnivorous pets! Poisonous pets! The ferocious pets will probably form their own PETA organization: Pets for the Eating of Thickheaded Asses.

We can revive the circus – not the Barnum and Bailey type – the Roman type! We will not throw the Christians to the lions. We will throw the politicians to the lions!

Good idea, no?

There is danger everywhere! First we had pipe bombs, turning every plumber and tobacconist into a potential mass murderer! (OK, so the tobacconist doesn’t sell the same kind of pipe, but you must allow me a little poetic license.) Then we had handguns! Then we had assault rifles! But now? Danger lurks in the housewares department of every department store! I’m talking about pressure cookers!

Don’t get me wrong, Dear Reader. I was as nauseated as most by the atrocity at the Boston Marathon. Maybe more nauseated. I spent the lockdown in Boston sitting at the top of my staircase with a 12 gauge shotgun loaded with double-ought buckshot across my knees and a 357 revolver tucked in a belly band, while my baby grandchildren huddled in a bedroom. Paranoia? Absolutely not! I was five minutes, as the carjacked Mercedes drives, from the area being searched for one of the homicidal maniacs who bombed the Marathon finish line and murdered a harmless campus cop.

But back to more serious business. Pressure cookers have now replaced assault rifles as the most fearsome inanimate objects running amok in the world today. Personally, I have always detested pressure cookers. I was always convinced that they would explode violently even when used according to the instructions in the manual. (Of course, the instructions are written in Mandarin, so following them can be an issue.  Also, everything pressure-cooked in one of those contraptions tastes like waterlogged Brussels sprouts.) But our paranoid society has now developed an anti-pressure cooker reflex.

The Detroit News reports that “Federal agents have arrested a Saudi Arabian traveler who arrived at Detroit Metropolitan Airport with a pressure cooker.” Now, they do go on to point out that a pressure cooker was a key component of the Boston Marathon bombs, suggesting that busting Mr. Hussain Al Khawahir was not unreasonable. Maybe not. On the other hand, there were a lot of other components in the bomb. One was the remote control unit from a radio controlled toy. While I admit that I do feel a kind of terror when one of my grandchildren aims a radio controlled tractor at my ankles, I do not consider that a terrorist act.

And we are in for even more trouble. Remember when an irate journalist chucked a shoe at President Bush II? Perhaps shoes are terrorist weapons, and the next thing you know, the authorities will be making us take off our shoes at airports! Ridiculous! What? You say we already are forced to take our shoes off at airports? Ah ha!

But this is all great!

There are so many more small kitchen appliances to add to the infernal machine list! How about electric meat slicers, those digit-hungry refugees from an Edgar Alan Poe novella? How about food processors, those potential mixing devices for who knows what explosive stews? Try to fly to Dubuque with a Mixmaster for Granny’s birthday and you will find yourself face down on the floor with a shootin’ iron pressed against your neck.

However, on the plus side, as the infernal machine list grows, the amount of baggage you will need to bring with you when you travel will decline precipitously. In the not too distant future, we will all adopt the following policy, leading to merriment, titillation, revulsion, and many other rewarding emotions:

FLY NAKED!