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Sunday, June 15, 2008

Virginian Pilot Brings Fecal Matter Into Your Home

Pravda was a beacon of journalistic truth and technical prowess compared to the Virginian Pilot.
No, No, no, not the written content which most people agree deserves the appellation of mental compost for midgets. I’m talking about the actual physical paper product you touch with your hands.

Now, I’m no more squeamish than the next guy, but I was reminded of the the deadly hazards that can be found in paper when I picked this morning’s paper up in my gloved hands and noticed this headline:

“Researchers: AP’s Sludge Story Sloppy, Unfair”


As is typically the case with stories found in the Virginian Pilot, this one was not written by one of the few writers left on their dwindling staff, but is a re-print of this story “Johns Hopkins criticizes AP story, says treated sludge in Baltimore lead experiment not risky” from the AP which I found in the Minneapolis Star Tribune site.
I was unable to locate the story in the PilotOnline.com so no link is provided. I was only able to locate it in the dead tree version.

The short version is this: researchers at Johns Hopkins wanted to reduce the level of lead that children were exposed to by adding compost to the high-lead dirt found in certain neighborhoods. The researchers used a commercial product you could buy at Home Depot to fertilize your lawn. The AP decided to make this appear to be a case of racists poisoning poor black people. The yards used in this experiment happened to be in a black neighborhood and the AP found one academic who questioned whether the product had been tested for every possible known as well as every unknown hazard.

Which brings me back to the fecal matter in the Virginian Pilot.
I have no doubt that there is some poop in the paper and that it may be poisoning you right now.
Do you know that the paper used by the Virginian Pilot comes from trees? And where do tress grow?
Why forests, of course.
And what else do we know about forests?
Animals live there.
And where do animals go potty?
Why right in the forest.
And what happens to their poop?
It gets dissolved into the earth, which in turn gets absorbed by the roots of the trees. The trees are killed by trained tree killers and ground up into the paper which then ends up in your hands which are now full of poop from bears (bears do poop in the woods) and snakes and birds and rabbits and other animals that use the woods as their open air toilet.

So let this be a lesson to you, kids. Not only are the writers and editors of the Virginian Pilot full of poop, (a physical certainty) and not only is what they write full of poop, but the very paper it’s printed on is full of poop.

And now you know how the Batten family became billionaires: selling poop.

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