Civilization's Redeemers: Porn and Beans

While our Lord and Savior president continues to ensure that America’s near future will be defined, much too early given America’s age, by the usual trappings of imperial reckonings — defeat, decline, ridicule — it’s good to know that civilization’s forward march is not without its advocates elsewhere on the planet. “It is an ‘objectively determinable factual reality’ that beans,” South Africa’s daily Mail & Guardian reported on its front page yesterday, “make you fart.” This, the paper said, according to South Africa’s Advertising Standards Authority, which was compelled to rule on the matter following a complaint by the country’s Dry Bean Producers Organisation against a television commercial for Wildeklawer Sweet Onions. “The commercial,” the paper goes on to tell us, “shows a rugby player sitting in a change room with his coach. The rest of the team is standing outside the door refusing to enter. The lone player is eating a can of beans, and his coach asks: ‘Why, Roy, why? With sweet onions there are no tears, no burn and definitely no stink.’ The pay-off line is: ‘Wildeklawer Sweet Onions. Stinky is out. Sweet is in.’” Naturally, the beans association was offended by the suggestion that its product foments anything less than fibrous pleasures. “The producers claimed the commercial failed to recognise that gas formation due to beans was ‘merely a temporary condition which occurs while a person’s body gets used to the added fibre and prebiotics contained in beans.’” Well, yes, but those are mere words lost on the broken wind. Beans will be beans, while the truth about flatulence shall, we can now rest assured, set us free.
Equally vivifying is the somewhat belated if arousing report out of Saudi Arabia that the House of Saud has decided to phase out salesmen at lingerie shops, and to replace them with women. Read the rest...