John Callan wrote:

> shit tends to stay put until acted upon by people...which may also be
> how shit multiplies.

I've finished reading Al Franken's book Lies, And the Lying Liars Who
Tell Them. In the chapter titled Vast Lagoons of Pig Feces: The Bush
Environmental Record, I learned about CAFO's, Concentrated Animal
Feeding Operations, and that pigs shit 10 times as much as humans... and
that there is a single CAFO in Utah with 850,000 pigs that shit as much
as the city of New York in one day... all of it into a large containment
pond. The chapter opens with a geyser 30' tall of pig shit. In 1995 a
spill from a pig shit lagoon killed a billion fish in the Neuse River of
North Carolina due to the proliferation of pfiesteria piscicida, a
single-cell creature spawned by the concentration of pig shit. The
fishermen and bridge keepers of the Neuse have developed ugly sores,
bloody lesions, and it is why, "...they don't wear shorts on a first
date." Any Feng Shui here? Obviously not a place for Sushi!

Though Franken is a comedian, he uses a term in his book "joking on the
straight", which means to tell a joke that is funny, but that is
probably most funny because it is terribly true. Franken elucidates a
vision of our political environment in the US in a manner to cause a
sense of impending doom, pig shit geysers and all, and foreboding of
terror not from Islamist radicals, but from the current presidential
administration, the conservative right, corporate interests and the
entrenchment of an American ruling class aristocracy. Franken's liberal
use of humor does little to alleviate the angst produced by the facts.

Worth reading. First encountered the book while browsing in Shakespeare
& Company (reminded of the demise of the small bookstore in NYC) where a
cameraman doing a spot for NBC asked me to hold and look at the book,
then Joe Jenkins (our favorite slater) recommended it to me at IPTW 2003
at Columbia, MD, then my son bought and read it and I heard bits and
pieces from him. Finally I found it in the bathroom, where the truly
read and good books tend to end up at our house of books, and I snuck it
off to read it on my own. Could hardly put it down once I got started. I
never much watched Saturday Night Live as it was past this workingman's
bedtime.

][<en

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