I’m not sure how I missed this back in April, but Amanda sent me a reminder of the time that Anthony Coffman went nuts in a grocery store and destroyed a bunch of meat, some of it with a hunting knife, which has a weird poetry to it. Damages to the store: $200. Damages to everyone in the area’s perception of vegetarianism: priceless.
It’s funny, when someone kills someone with a crossbow, the bow and arrow people try to distance themselves, while to the rest of us they’re pretty much the same group. When vegetarians do something weird, vegans don’t tend to call them out as much. No idea why that is, but that’s veganism for you: we’re more loyal than Green Arrow.
Anyway, Amanda suggested a proper punishment for Coffman would be to get shot “in the nads with a tofu cannon,” and that reminds me of some feedback I got this week about Spawn Better, our vegan parenting site, where someone said that they imagined the Council of Vegan Parents to be like that tribunal at the beginning of Superman 2 where Zod and his gang got sent to the phantom zone (yes, two superhero references in one post, but isn’t Coffman like a crazy super villain here?)
This totally has to happen: forget the vegan police, I want Vegan Court. Defendants will stand in one of those spinny ring things like this:
But instead of Marlon Brando, it’ll be some vegan dude with a tofu cannon. Aimed at your nads. And after the shot is fired he’ll shout KNEEL because it’s what one does when one mentions Zod.
The Book of Vegan Law hasn’t been written yet, but it won’t get in the way of the pettiness of the vegan police. Stuff like making vegans look bad by being a vegetarian who messes up a grocery store is pretty universally recognized as a tofu-nadding offence, I reckon.
This is a quickie for today, because I’m tired. And The Simpsons already did the joke, which I’ll repeat in a moment: Former Rep. William Jefferson was busted a while back for bribery or conspiracy or something else that cops and lawyers would be able to tell you about, but it doesn’t matter really; the point of the tale is that he hid the avails of his crimes in veggie burger packages in his freezer.
Does anyone else remember the Lisa the Vegetarian episode of The Simpsons, where at the end Apu had his hidden staircase behind a fake display of non-alcoholic beer, and Lisa asks what he does when someone wants a non-alcoholic beer, and Apu says it’s never come up? Well, William Jefferson, welcome to 2010, where people actually want veggie burgers.
Seriously, if you have a fast food chain near you that serves veggie burgers, at least ones that are any good, sit near the counter and listen in on orders. There simply aren’t enough vegetarians and vegans out there to make up the demand I’m hearing around here, which means the things are going pretty mainstream. I just wish I knew why – not that I think they suck, I’m just too lazy to survey some customers and understand what’s driving them away from meat, if just for one meal…
You’re right, they’re probably hoping to receive a bag containing thousands of dollars that was poorly hidden by someone not up on current market trends. Damn, I need to go shopping.
Café owners, current and future: be sure your offerings are vegan, or you’ll run the risk of using contaminated tuna in your sandwiches. Which you’ll run the risk of selling in an order of about a hundred. Which you’ll run the risk of delivering to police officers. Of whom you’ll run the risk of making 47 ill.
Police officers don’t like to be poisoned, as it turns out, and Muriel Morris has been given a four month suspended sentence, a curfew, and an electronic monitoring device so police will know if she gets within 5 feet of a loaf of bread. OK, probably just so they’ll know if she breaks curfew – it’s not fair to tag all the loaves of bread because of one person’s mistake. Incidentally, I need one of those electronic monitoring devices for my keys, but I don’t want to poison 47 cops to get one – er, I don’t want my keys to poison 47 cops.
The solution is obvious to me, but so are many things and nobody’s elected me world ruler yet: if you’re going to run a café, make it a vegan one, and it’ll be 100% free of contaminated tuna. You might think that cops will never order 100 vegan sandwiches, but that just means you haven’t been listening: all the sandwiches will be vegan because every café owner will follow my advice. It’s the least they can do, really.
Today’s stories don’t have a whole lot to do with veganism, other than some connections to plants and animals, and I’m sure I could string something together, but folks, honestly, I’m just amazed at these articles and felt like sharing.
A British Columbia man has been charged with feeding bears. Feeding bears is a no-no, because they’ll get all domesticamicated or something, so Allan Wayne Piche is looking at potential fines of up to $100,000 or a year in prison. There’s no word on what charges he’ll be facing for the one thousand marijuana plants found on his property, which was why the cops raided his property in the first place, but hey, you go get ‘em, Ministry of the Environment!
In all, well, most, seriousness, the Ministry was able to “wean” the bears back to nature by gradually reducing the feed levels, which means they didn’t have to euthanize any of them, and kudos to them for properly cleaning up after a drug bust, but I just love how the story’s all about the bears and the drugs are an afterthought.
In other news, British Columbia has gained a new plant species: the world’s deadliest mushroom has been spotted and is likely to stay. Wanna know how deadly the mushroom is? It’s called the death cap mushroom. It’s so deadly it can kill you. It’s, like, lethally deadly.
Oh, and THEY CAN LEVITATE.
I don’t have anything to add, I just liked the picture.
OK, one more, from the same website, because I think they’re speaking to me, and this one isn’t terribly funny but it’s good news just the same: a diet rich in nutrient-dense foods might lead to stronger bones. Nutrient-dense foods are ones with high ratios of nutrients to calories, as opposed to calorie-dense foods, which have high ratios of calories to doughnuts. Plant-based foods are packed with nutrients and don’t usually have a lot of calories, so they win, and people who eat a lot of them tend to have fewer fractures.
Fish also gets mentioned, but let’s just ignore that because there’s lots of plants in the article and fish have more heavy metals which means you’ll trigger the airport detectors even more often if you eat them, or so says my science, so just stick with the plants and you’ll have a better chance of being an 80 year old pro-wrestler, body slamming and top-rope diving like the strong boned person you are.
Both Colleen and PonderingWillow sent links to the latest McNonsense, which involves a woman trying to order Chicken McNuggets, but in the morning, when apparently you can’t get Chicken McNuggets, but don’t try to tell this lady that, or she’ll, well, she’ll go nuts, is what she’ll do, as captured on ye olde security footage.
After almost standing up for a McDonald’s campaign earlier this week (I maintain I was standing up for the Fantastic Four, and McD’s just got lucky,) I’m almost afraid to say this: I feel a little badly for the workers.
The workers, mind you, and not the corporation that sets things up in a way that this continues to happen (see our earlier survey of violence at McDonald’s.) Fast food workers are overall having a better go of it than slaughterhouse workers are, but cheap meat ain’t cheap, if you get my meaning. And before someone else says it, no, fruits and vegetables don’t have the best labour record either, but I’ll maintain that it’s a less violent form of oppression overall, which isn’t to say it’s OK, but, but, hey! I’m talking about McDonald’s here.
But besides the workers, you know who else I feel a little badly for? America. The links I received are from the BBC and a major Canadian newspaper, and unlike stuff that actually affects our lives, this is the kind of thing that gets sent around the office, and sadly, this is how other countries think everyone in the USA acts. I’m not even kidding – take the weirdest set of stereotypes about veganism you’ve heard from non-vegans, and then think about how people can categorize other large groups of people. Yeah.
Update Aug 12: Matty sent me the YouTube version so we can embed it. Mostly I just like saying embed:
Anyway, I still worry that I’m getting soft on McDonald’s, so here’s something else in my “use this image someday” folder that seems like a good way to show my colours:
I think we’re getting to the point where we need a category for “non-vegan anal insertions.” It’s not the milestone that I’d hoped and dreamed of reaching when I was a young boy, but we’ve all got to take what victories we can from life. This is one of them, and it’s mine.
The category milestone, that is. The anal insertion was someone else’s, and it involved a live eel. A 59 year old man was admitted to hospital with complaints of the type one would expect from an anal eel insertion, but apparently nobody ever expects an anal eel insertion, so there’s a pesky troubleshooting phase, followed by speculation on just how the eel got there (“I must have eaten it” never gets old,) and unfortunately in this case, the man died.
And it was a murder.
It turns out he passed out drunk at a bar and his so-called buddies thought an anal eel insertion would be just the thing to liven up the evening. Police are getting involved, but I don’t know if animal cruelty is on the list of things to push for. This is one of those cases where animal rights people can look like douches by going on about animal cruelty when someone’s been anally raped and killed, but it’s kind of the job, and frankly, it’s an important one: if this kind of thing could be recognized as an act of cruelty and if such acts of cruelty could be made into a social taboo instead of “great fun at parties,” then nobody would have had to die from anal eel insertion.
Anyway, since there seems to be a lot of confusion in the medical community, I want it put in my will that if my death involved abdominal pain, dehydration, and severe anal bleeding, could someone please look into that eel thing and avenge both me and the eel?
A Cleveland man was arrested in Athens, Tennessee for selling meat door to door without a permit.
Well, almost.
Rather than risk discovery of his real mission, Robert Sherk swallowed a half-burnt marijuana joint in front of the police officers who were talking to him about the permit. Marijuana, as we know, has incredible mind-altering properties that cause law enforcement officials to forget all other issues and focus on the damned reefer they learned about in basic training. Oh, and then Sherk resisted arrest.
So what was “Robert Sherk of Cleveland,” if that is his real name, trying to hide? What’s going on with Cleveland meat that they need to take it to Tennessee to sell it, door to door, without so much as a permit? It’s got to be something big for Them (yes, capital ‘T’ Them) to equip Sherk with the modern equivalent of a cyanide capsule?
Soon to be a major motion picture, no doubt – if Cleveland doesn’t get to me first.
There is a segment of you whose instant response to this piece will be something about my having too much time on my hands. Let me assure you, I have nowhere near enough to wreak that which I would have wrought (yes, I somehow found time to use the dictionary there. Spiffy, no?)
Symantec, makers of fine computer security products, I assume, has come out with a list of the top ten riskiest US cities for Cybercrime. Cybercrime is a form of terrorism to some (as are unpaid parking tickets if it serves the right agenda to say to, but I digress,) so I immediately sprang to action, for I am spry, and set out to ensure that nobody would be able to link cybercrime to veganism. After all, if you’re vegan and reading this, then you use computers, therefore you too could be a cybercriminal. Such damage to the movement cannot be tolerated! To action!
Using data from HappyCow, I opted to see if there was a relationship between the number of vegetarian restaurants and cybercrime rankings. It’s hard to hide a vegan diner, after all, though I fantasize about one day being invited to a soyeasy for some illicit mung beans.
Without further ado (and as you can tell, I’m in an ado-ing mood,) here are the results. The less-than-helpful headings in columns 3 through 5 refer to the types of restaurants that can be found:
Isn’t that a relief? I have no idea where NYC is in the crime list; that’s just for comparison.
But wait! Could it be that vegan cybercriminals have infiltrated HappyCow to hide their presence? Hmmmm…
Also of note: the FBI’s ten most wanted list of fugitives, as of this writing, doesn’t contain anyone with obvious ties to veganism OR cybercrime. Of course, this too is on the internet.
Still, for now I’m going to go with what I hope would be the obvious conclusion: veganism and cybercrime are unrelated. And while you may think this is tongue in cheek at best, that’s just because you haven’t spent 9 years reading the stuff that spews out of animal agriculture PR agencies. Some day I fear this post will be more relevant than it appears today.
The internet grows faster than I can read it. There’s a new site where people can build lists, and their community manager just sent me a link to one he thought you’d all like. Was it the list of top 10 reasons to go vegan?
No. It was the 13 most violent things that’ve happened at a McDonald’s. I’ve never been happier to process a “hey, here’s a link on our site you might like” email. OK, I wasn’t happy about the violence, but for someone to pick a relevant link? Gold.
The list is pretty epic, but what blows me away is that there’s video of every incident. Allow me to hike my pants up to my armpits for a moment and discuss the old days of vegan newsgathering, where one could easily spend 3 hours in the search for one good story to talk about. In the year 2010, it appears you could run a VP-like site entirely off of what’s on YouTube.
Now, please note that one item of violence is missing from the list, and that’s the bazillion animals that have become McNuggets or Big Macs. Oddly, it’s hard to find video of that still (though that too might be changing…)
I can’t quite figure out if the level of violence inside the McDonald’s chain is a factor of the sheer number of outlets they have (which could also mean that they’ve got an increased chance of being the site of the Second Coming, which would be something, all right!), or if it’s the kind of place that simply draws this kind of thing, in which case I think we’re moving beyond the “it’s a sucky place to work, but what’cha gonna do” phase to “oh wow, all of your workers need to be placed in a protection program while we close things down” kind of space.
And let’s assume this is the progression we’re seeing. Eric Schlosser made a good case in Fast Food Nation that slaughterhouse workers are stuck in perhaps the worst job in the food industry, second only to the animals themselves, and neither group can escape. Perhaps this chain of misery is extending to the front line service workers now, and I fear that it’s going to continue, virus-like, through the remainder of the food delivery chain.
I mean, really, when you’re in the business of marketing murder at low low everyday prices, is this kind of thing that unexpected?
But instead of Marlon Brando, it’ll be some vegan dude with a tofu cannon. Aimed at your nads. And after the shot is fired he’ll shout KNEEL because it’s what one does when one mentions Zod.
I don’t have anything to add, I just liked the picture.
Isn’t that a relief? I have no idea where NYC is in the crime list; that’s just for comparison.
