Those Kows are Ka-razy!
While eating a few cheeseburgers and a quarter pounder the other day me and my brother were talking. He told me about how he was strongly considering giving up eating beef. At first I thought it was just idle rambling, but then he started talking about mad cow disease and how its more than just an hilarious but unimaginative name.
I have one brother, he's the man of science and I'm the man of god, in the sense that I am my own god. My brother is a good guy and is very scientific, he knows about fire and molecules and the magick witches that make the spirits of the wind appear on my television. But more importantly, if I am ever killed, I fully expect him to avenge my death and save our family from dishonor.
So we were talking about beef, and mad cow disease and I learned some amazing things. There is a disease in sheep called scrapies which they get when they eat food that contains high quantities of recycled sheep nervous system. So they would go insane and die. The disease once it gets into the sheep is then fed back to the sheep and anything that eats the sheep, ie humans.
Then along comes mad cow disease, which they discovered is a lot like the cow version of scrapies. Cows were being fed rendered meat, which is all the parts of a cow too crunchy or polygonal shaped to fit into a hot dog like the bones, spine and head. These parts were ground up, seasoned with grain and fed back to the living cows, who just loved it, and were none the wiser.
So cows that had not gotten mad cow disease somehow, which in cows is called BSE, which stands for bovine (cow), spongiform (this can't be good), encephalopathy (brain trouble), were eating the rendered meat of other cows that already had the disease, and then they surprisingly also developed it. The name BSE is funny, because spongiform encephalawhatever basically means your brain gets full of holes like swiss cheese, which has hilariously insane but lethal results.
Shockingly, mad cow disease is not just bad for the cows. If you eat a cow with mad cow disease you get it too. My brother told me all this. What causes the damage isn't a virus or a microbe, its something called a preon, which is a wacky type of protein. From what I gather it replicates like a virus, and the next thing you know you're the next flavor flave for a while, then a little grand mal dancing, and then your lucky brain implodes.
The beauty of mad cow disease is they don't know where it comes from, how it gets around and how to test for it. And it just popped up in Spain. So here's my brothers theory, mad cow disease is probably going to spread to north america eventually if it isn't already here, and when it does they will have to kill all the cows in north america. But no beef rancher is going to want to kill all the cows since that will mean he goes broke and has to move to Houston and sell his daughters, or his own, sexual orifices to transient Dallas businessmen.
This rancher might just look the other way when bessie roars out an angry moo, chomps the legs off her best cow friend, jumps the fence and caves in the windshield on his truck with a few donkey kicks. Sooner or later people are gonna start acting spongiform-arooney and then die, and we'll know mad cow has finally made it to America.
I love all meats, owl, kangaroo, pepperoni, basically anything that is lower than us on the food chain. And I really like steak. But even I like not being crazy and dead, so I guess it makes sense to stop eating beef.
There is no beef substitute, how can I live without steak? And what about milk? I have no idea. But since I can't think of an answer, and in keeping with my new japanese theme, I have composed a haiku
Menu
menu items of chicken, fish
no big mac for you
turn away from spongiforms