The Wisdom Of The Ages; Duh.

I guess we file this item under, “Well, duh”. The Annals of Plastic Surgery, one of my favorite publications, says that women who get breasts implants are three times more likely to commit suicide. This opens up the whole field of bad humor, such as: I’ll bet they didn’t throw themselves in the river, because they would float. But the author suggested that many of the women who ordered bigger breasts had “psychological problems” before getting the implants. Really? Well I wonder who didn’t suspect that, other than the surgeons who got rich inflating those woman’s chests, I mean.
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And here’s a really stupid idea. Denmark held a ‘street soccer tournament’ last week for the homeless and homeless contestants from 48 poor countries were flown in for the week long contest and now… they can’t find 15 of them; 7 Burundians, 4 Liberians, 3 Cameroonians and one Afghan. The spokeswoman for the group sponsoring the event said, “We’re surprised because 15 players is quite a lot.” Duh, again.
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And consider this equation: parents dumb enough to shell out hundreds of dollars for those damn “Baby Einstein” tapes and books and flash cards and other crap, usually produce dumb kids. Shocking, isn’t it? After 8 to 16 months worth of worthless “Brainy Baby” crap pounded in to those tiny plastic minds, according to a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington State, and those unlucky infants with success driven parents actually know 6 to 8 fewer words than those disadvantaged children with the “normal” parents who used the stone age technology of reading and talking to their kids. They got dumber!
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Of course the addendum to this study is that the percentage of parents who read to their kids and talk to and around their kids is absurdly low, which is why so many kids learn at a very early age that learning is dull and pedantic, which is, of course, not a description of learning, which is a process, but is actually a description of the people who designed our education system, the same people who gave George Bush a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration; Yale. They should have stuck to making locks, because his brain sure reminds me of one – rusted shut. I would think that he was a “Baby Einstein” baby except the rest of his behavior cries out for attention, indicating that his parents wrote him off as an idiot and a lost cause before he was even toilet trained.
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And here’s another shocker; the brains of people who are addicted to the game of Mahjong develop wiring problems. And why is this? Well, Mahjong was invented in China in 1850, and is played with suite tiles (dots, bamboos or characters), honor tiles (wind or dragons), flower tiles (plum, orchard, bamboo and chrysanthemum) and some other tiles I forget. First they deal out 17 tiles to each player – unless they are playing with 152 tiles, when everybody gets 19 tiles – and then somebody shouts “teen woo”, which is Cantonese for “frig you”. Everybody then gives him all their money and the game starts over again. No, really, that’s how it was explained to me. And it makes developing seizures sound like a perfectly predictable out come.
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The Hong Kong Medical Journal has reported 23 cases of people with Mahjong induced seizures, which they claim is a unique form of epilepsy produced by up to 11 hours of intense continuous Mahjong playing. Good, God, please tell me, Doc, what you could do for 11 hours consecutively without having seizures? But, say the Doctors, to cure the seizures the afflicted merely have to avoid playing Mahjong. Please say it with me; Duh.
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And finally, here may be the biggest “DUH” of the last two decades; after 1,300 suicides, and after fourteen years of a press black out that he had urged, Marion County California Coroner Ken Holmes has decided that officials really ought to extend the four foot high railing which is all that inhibits people from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. At last count 23 people have jumped to their deaths this year, alone. Last year the total was 34. And the only reason a higher barrier has not been erected so far, other than some B.S. about there being no “proof” it would work, is that it would damage the aesthetics of the bridge, which is like saying “Lovers’ Leap is such a pretty name, why change it?”
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Here is why - a study of the leapers has exploded all the romantic myths. Suicides are not drawn to the bridge for the romance; 92% of jumpers are from Northern California. It’s convenient for them. Name another spot in San Francisco where you can get that high with that low of a railing between your urge and the payoff; there isn’t one. At impact the idiot – excuse me, the foolish depressed person – is traveling at 75 miles per hour, which turns their flesh and bones into gooey hamburger, and is like jumping off a 25 story building, except there is nowhere you can find a 25 story building that lets people on the roof with only a 4 foot high railing to climb over. The fall lasts 4 seconds, and as one lucky survivor tells it, he spent all that time thinking, “Why did I do that? I don’t want to die.” Duh, too late.
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What I don’t understand is why some survivor, wife, parent or friend, hasn’t sued the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation Company, because the bridge is an attractive nuisance. If some kid comes into your yard to pet your dog, and gets bit, that’s what your insurance company will say; the dog was an attractive nuisance and you will pay the bill. In this case the nuisance is 8,981 feet long, 90 feet wide, 220 feet above the water with a four foot high railing that people have been climbing over since August 7, 1937 (41 days after it opened) when Harold Wobber, a psychiatric out-patient at the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital, turned to a friend midway across the bridge and announced casually, “This is as far as I go," and leapt over the railing to his death. One lawsuit and all excuses about a railing would evaporate.
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Building a higher railing seems like such an obvious idea it makes me wonder why it hasn’t been obvious before now. When does an idea pass from “interesting” to “Duh?”
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