Coke roach
Vermin: part of a balanced breakfast of champions
Give me harebrained home-remedies, or give me death! (Or maybe both, depending on how much improperly cooked chicken is involved.) Cure insomnia by slipping thin lemon wedges underneath yr eyelids! Cure bladder infections by shotgunning 100 CCs of chutzpah! Cure the sophomore jinx by wearing a necklace made from sliced yellow onions! Cure mass hysteria by rubbing chilled tea-bags (something caffeinated works best) on the affected population! Cure world hunger w/ a really big steak! I could go on & on & on & on. But I won’t, unless my word-count comes up short.
Prob’ly the best homespun remedy I’ve heard all week is the one used by that A_str_l__n Olympic aerial freestylist to mend her mangled back: drinking crushed cockroaches dissolved in Diet Coke. She sez th’ elixir drew the "bad blood" away from her smunched spine, which is why she’s competing in S_lt L_k_ C_ty instead of sitting at home screaming at her TV. According to a mole inside the Coca-Cola corporation, the company is toying w/ the idea of adopting the motto "Coke Adds Life, But Adding Crushed Roaches To Coke Adds Even More Life And Maybe Even Super-Powers." The mole also claims sunlight hurts his eyes. The cockroach thing hasn’t gone unnoticed by Coke’s rivals, either: over at Pepsi, advertising’s brightest minds are working ’round the clock to convince Britney Spears to gargle w/ silverfish during the Grammys. Meanwhile, on the scientific front, scientellectuals (not to be confused w/ Scientologists) are wondering whether the athlete is confusing "Coke" w/ "crack." But it all just sounds like good old-fashioned healing to me!
Call me a traditionalist, but it reminds me of Galen’s ideas re: the 4 humours. (Historical note: Galen is perhaps best known as the personal physician to Marcus Aurelius, a/k/a the old coot in Gladiator who got whacked in Germania.) This "bad blood" sounds an awful lot like the humour Galen dubbed "black bile," the one responsible for melancholy & other bad vibrations (like, oh I dunno... a sore back, maybe?), or maybe even the humour he called, simply, "blood." Galen argued ill health was due to imbalance of the 4 humours (in add’n to "blood" & "black bile": the phlegmatic "phlegm," and the creamy delicious "good humour"), and a little medical tweaking would do the trick. Galen, a cruel prick, advocated bloodletting as a restorative procedure, but it’s perfectly obvious how drinking cockroaches would have a similar effect, right? Other helpful approaches to self-medicating include:
Cure a common cold by inhaling the steam from a raging grease-fire! Cure lockjaw w/ a colourful scarf! Cure ennui w/ bacon fat, and plenty of it, now ain’t the time to be cheap! Cure pink-eye w/ a mittful of good intentions! Cure jetlag by thinking about baseball! Cure hangnails by starving a fever! Cure St. Vitus's dance by applying castor oil to pulse points! (Warning: not to be used in conjunction w/ cures for trick knees.) Cure a staph infection by barking up the wrong tree! Cure drymouth by sipping water off a duck’s back! Cure the heebie-jeebies w/ generous doses of hootchie-coo! Cure motion-sickness by volunteering! Cure early-onset rigor mortis w/ both hands and a flashlight! Cure male pattern baldness by being truly honest w/ yrself for a change, maybe even for the first time in yr entire life! Cure hiccups by letting it all hang out, backwards! Cure minor swelling by humming your alma mater’s fight song! Cure a skimpy word-count by padding things out w/ a list! Cure reader backlash by self-consciously admitting to using a cheap ploy in the hopes of coming off all "self-referential" or "po-mo" or "ironic" even tho that’s not really what "ironic" means! Cure being pelted w/ rotting fruit/veggies by running! Like the effin’ wind, or even a gazelle! |
