World Cow: A Bloody Shame

Bloody Shame

It has come to my attention that Japan, Australia, Canada and perhaps
even the democratic United States intends to refuse blood from British
donors who might have eaten British beef during the Mad Cow Scare.
The impeccable logic goes something like this: since the British
continued to chow down on beef during the mad cow fuss, God only knows
what's in their blood. So why take the chance.

  I can understand these host countries taking a hard line on blood from
people who are cousins to cows.  More than one columnist has noted that
in the last few years the British, who continued to stoically eat cannibal
cows during the Mad Cow Siege, have begun to look very sheepish, so to
speak. It is not at all surprising that the British look like their dogs.
They love these hairy creatures to distraction. In fact, the recent census
counts more dogs than people in the UK, by a ratio of three to one. That
is, if you don't count the recent influx of Iraqi Kurds, gypsies,
shell-shocked Albanians.

But doctors have been hard put to explain why people, especially those
from Yorkshire, are looking more and more like local cows.   Some
believe a genetic link, originally found in a mix of cow and human bones
from Waterloo, used as fertilizer, was the trigger.  It was as if an
aberrant gene showed up one morning and bit Yorkshire in the ass.

My theory is not as elegant. I think the human /cow convergence was
actually a sympathetic response, much as one might sympathize with a
wife who is having a child.  In this instance the whole nation was having a
cow, farmers were going bankrupt, and a million cows where
slaughtered because some petty bureaucrat in Brussels declared the
whole bloody British herd guilty.

I can only admire the British for standing up for the cows and wearing
T-shirts that read: "I Eat British Beef."    In truth, the stubborn refusal
of the Brits to abandon beef  represented an act of courage unrivaled
since Dunkirk.  Is it surprising that the British, so in love with their
cows,would risk developing brains that looked like Swiss cheese.  So
deep was this cow worship that many from this brave nation began to look
like the cows they ate in order to save.  Psychologists call this the
phenomenon "abattoir transference" where the living literally take on
the face of the slaughtered. In colloquial language this is called the
"hang dog" look.

I find it somewhat discriminatory that nations would ban British blood
without any scientific proof that the blood carries the Mad Cow tick.
More to the point this practice will deprive thousands of British
travelers who regularly pay their way to Disney World with proceed
from blood banks. That is the reasons the British in Florida look so
wane and unhealthy.  This is a severe blow to the middle class in a nation
of shopkeepers.

But, if this is to be the policy of these forward-looking countries, at least
they should be consistent.  It has come to my attention that sewage from
slaughterhouses in France has been used in animal feed, particularly for
poultry and pigs.  If this is true, the people who eat French meat should
likewise be banned from giving blood.

If I had a choice, I'd rather have a bit of madness in my blood than have a
sewer run through it.

Price Charlie, International Correspondent

       The French Beef

Have you noticed that foie gras and roquefort cheese, two staples in the
American diet, are getting more expensive. Don't blame the French.
Blame the Mad Cow.

The Cow is an easy target because it weighs two tons and moves with all
the grace of a rhino. Plus, the commodity cow has been cheapened more
than pork rinds on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Poor buggers.
Slaughtered by the millions, they still are blamed for everyone from toe
jam to spinal bifida.  Still, the cow bangers have a point.

The world would have been a better and more beautiful place if certain
unnamed cows in Kent, England  hadn't eaten one of their sleeping
brethren while they were on a binge of curds and whey. The rest is
history. When man eats his brother he gets a bad case of pimples or the
runs but cows go mad. Or, as the British say, wobbly. It's not pretty and
it's certainly not fair.  Cows have a long history of meek behavior. One
drunken night and you're dead meat.

So the term mad cow is a euphemism for everything from passing gas to
passing out. Sharp as pencils, the environmental Nazis have found a
certain mad cowness in genetically manufactured food. The same foot
soldiers equate hormone-fed beef with the cow scare and with American
imperialism. Makes sense. Some cows have design patterns on their
flanks that look like a map of Texas. One can certainly see the
association. By the way my favorite cow looks like Alaska.

Now French beefers are protesting McDonald's, the original cow burger,
because it too has an American odor. Also sharp as pencils the Mac
people substituted duck breast and foie gras for beef in the Big Mac. Or,
"Big Magret au Foie Gras", which has all the sex appeal of exploding
goose livers. In the Agen region Burghers are serving burgers topped
with roquefort cheese and Agen plums. It's called "Roquefort-burger
aux pruneaux d'Agen."

Almost makes you pine for sheep brains.