From the Green Room: Fat, Smoking Baby

Obesity is one of the biggest health risks facing children.  As evidence, there’s currently a viral video circulating the Internet featuring a two-year-old Sumatran boy who is so fat he has to get around on a little toy truck. It’s like the toddler version of the Little Rascal Scooter, a device ostensibly designed to help old, infirmed individuals move about, but in actuality is used by fat people to get to the head of the line at Disneyworld.  But that’s not what’s most striking about the “little” tyke.  Apparently, the kid’s also a smoker.  

Little Ardi Rizal has a two-pack-a-day habit. He hasn’t yet learned how to work the potty, but is already rather adept at blowing smoke rings. And the kid’s father is cool with it, he says, because Ardi looks “healthy” to him.  

That’s just a great big carton of unfiltered wrong.

Because if the old man’s going to sign off on the fruit of his loins needing a lung transplant before kindergarten, one wonders what other parenting faux pas he’s also making.  Does Junior Rizal have a drinking problem too?  Does he indulge in the three martini bottle lunch?  Polish off a sippy cup of Makers’ Mark after a hard day on the jungle gym?  

Perhaps Ardi also has a drug problem, overusing the Xanax or Vicodin prescribed to him by the Indonesian pediatrician who diagnosed him as having post-traumatic birth stress disorder. And maybe Pops is also okay with the “Terrible Twos,” referring not the toddler’s behavior but to his penchant for calling a pair of call girls from the escort service to accompany him on play dates. He already needs to go to Baby Overeaters Anonymous; he may also need rehab for alcohol, drugs and sex addiction. You can easily imagine a scenario where he’s shaking other babies down in the sandbox for money to buy an eight ball, just to get through the day. Or paying for a “happy ending” at his next diaper change.  

Before things get out of hand, some Indonesian official must step forward to save this baby.  Put the kid on a Snoopy nicotine patch, and get that monkey off his back before things get out hand. We already know how impressionable kids are, and how quickly fads can start. That’s how the whole Teletubbies thing gained traction.

Because before you know it, fat babies who smoke will become fat adults who smoke, and there’ll be that many more people cutting in front of you on line for the teacups at Disneyworld.     

From the Green Room: Discrediting Osama

The Washington Post reported that in 2003, the CIA considered attempting to discredit Saddam Hussein with the Iraqi people by doctoring a video that would have allegedly shown him having sex with a 15-year-old boy. As if being a bloodless terrorist and the single most evil person on the planet, responsible for countless of thousands of deaths wasn’t enough, they’re trying to make him look bad by portraying him as a kid-toucher. 

For whatever reason, the video never happened. However, they produced some footage that made it look like Osama and a few other al-Qaeda members were sitting around the campfire getting drunk and talking about sex with boys. Not exactly the kind of stuff that would go viral on YouTube. If they wanted a lot of people to see it, they should have had one of the drunk terrorists drop his marshmallow into the fire, try to fish it out, knock over the booze bottle into the flames, and then show Osama desperately trying to keep it from torching his dialysis machine by peeing on it. Or have one of his al-Qaeda buddies accidentally hit him in the crotch with a baseball bat. 

Surely, there were other ways they could’ve harmed Osama’s reputation.  If they wanted to go the pedophile route, they should’ve lured him to some remote cave in the mountains of Pakistan where a camera crew had been set up, and Chris Hansen would walk out:  “Osama…have a seat.  I want to show you something.” They could’ve completely blown his street cred with his peeps by photo-shopping a snapshot of him with Jackie Mason and Woody Allen. Or making it appear that he had done a guest spot on Glee singing something from the Lady GaGa catalogue. 

But the best way they could’ve destroyed Osama Bin Laden’s credibility would have been an interview on Nightline by Vicki Mabrey.  Make it look like he broke down on camera, crying about how the scars from his abusive childhood made him do all those bad things. 

Hey, it worked for Jesse James.




 


From the Green Room: Female Viagra

Just when you thought there was no God, the FDA announces they are considering an endorsement of a drug that would essentially be like Viagra…but for women.

Flibanserin, a substance developed to treat depression, was ineffectual in doing so, making it tantamount to those pills advertised on the Internet to make guys “bigger.”  You’d think the pharmaceutical company that developed the drug would just go ahead and market it under the name “Placebo,” and let the chips fall where they may.  But then they discovered that while unsuccessful as an anti-depressant, Flibanserin increases the libido of women. If the FDA signs off on the concept, the “Little Pink Pill” could literally revolutionize gettin’ busy as we know it. 

The “Little Blue Pill,” Viagra, was a discovery the likes of which modern medicine hadn’t seen since the Salk vaccine. It was the godsend for middle aged men, and those of us who found that, “raising the flag” was a challenging task from time to time. Suddenly, out of the depths of darkness and despair, Pfizer brought us into the Promised Land, and even spawned two similar drugs, Levitra and Cialis. However, the drawback of all three of those drugs was the man had to already be in a “state of arousal” in order for them to work, an oxymoronic notion in itself given that men are, for the most part, in a perpetual “state of arousal.”

Flibanserin will supposedly treat hypoactive sexual desire disorder, or HSDD, an otherwise unexplained loss of sexual thoughts, fantasies and desire. Some research suggests 10 percent of women may suffer from HSDD. That research obviously didn’t include the women I’ve dated. Flibanserin will address the main problem with ED drugs: despite delivering the goods for the men who take them, Viagra, etc. did nothing to increase their partner’s desire to “do the nasty.” Women require a bit more work to get to the place where they actually want to have sex, while there is never a time when men don’t. We could be at our mother’s funeral, and if one of our cousin’s girlfriends happens to look like Cameron Diaz, we will fantasize about doing it with her on top of the coffin.

Which is where Flibanserin comes in. Forget expensive, candlelit dinners, wine and flowers. You no longer need to shower your woman with compliments, whisper sweet nothings and proclamations of your deep love and devotion into her ear. All you need to do is slip your old lady one of these “Pink Beauties,” and she’s good to go.  It’s kind of like a more morally principled roofies. Still, I doubt it will be as successful as the technique that has served me well over the years; female Viagra is no match for the well-timed cash bribe.

The Little Pink Pill will never be as effective as The Little Green Bill.


From the Green Room: Off to the Ranch!

Every summer, for the past eleven years, the I-Man has done his program from The Imus Ranch for Kids With Cancer in New Mexico.  One can only hope that when he throws the switch this Monday for the inaugural broadcast of the 2010 Season, there will not be any technical difficulties resulting in digital video ‘jaggies’ or ‘tiling’ that will cause him to appear as though he was the subject of a living Picasso painting, or audio that will result in an echo greater than the one experienced by Madonna’s gynecologist. 

Right out of the box, the program will HAVE to be better, because we are now on the high-tech Fox Business Network. Last summer, we were simulcast on RFD, which has somewhat less than “state-of-the-art” video production values.  Back then, the live feed from the ABC radio studio was of the quality normally found at the Kwik E Mart; you know, the security measure they employ to keep you from stealing the Cheese Doodles and Slim Jims. Warner Wolf looked as though he was making a hostage tape in a Bangladesh Root Cellar, using the video camera on his cell phone. Osama Bin Laden’s TV messages from the cave looked better than the shots on RFD’s broadcast.  Internet porn chat hostesses sport better picture quality from their bedrooms through the built-in lenses on their laptops than the pictures we put up last year. But, to be fair, it is a daunting process to broadcast a radio and television program, live, in real time, from three or more locations: Imus in Ribera; Charles, Tony and me in the Fox Studios; Bernie, Lou and Warner from ABC. Throw in a feed from an on-camera guest or correspondent, and you’ve got a complicated scenario, with a bunch of individual boxes put up on screen to accommodate everybody, making your television look like a cross between the Hollywood Squares and the opening title sequence of The Brady Bunch.

There is still the potential for technical difficulties, albeit much less so now that Fox is in the mix.  But if and when that happens, you can expect there will be some consternation from the Quentin Crisp in the Cowboy Hat. After all, Mars, depending on where it is in orbit, can be more than 250 million miles from Earth, and yet those tang-swilling velcro jockeys at NASA are able to provide live video footage from its surface without too much trouble. How hard should it be to get the video and audio right when he’s only 1,800 miles away from the rest of us?  At the mere hint of a half second delay between Imus’s question and Dagen McDowell’s pithy answer, you can expect Imus to threaten one of the cameramen in the studio with him, using gun he keeps ostensibly to ward off coyotes, but in actuality to intimidate the crew.

And I may be somewhat callous when I say, “Better them than us.” For the next 12 weeks, they will experience what we do the other 40 weeks of the year. For three blissful months, when the tension, anxiety and anger levels rise and the inevitable Mt. St. Helen’s style eruption occurs, we will be able to just turn the sound down and watch his face turn blue as he rants like one of those weird dudes you see hanging out down at the Port Authority Bus Station.

…and fix ourselves another Bloody Mary.  


From the Green Room: A 'Brush' with Medical Incompetency

Imus’s mistrust of the medical profession has always struck me as somewhat misguided. I believed paranoia and hypochondria have fueled his doubts about doctors and their competency. But then comes a story from Great Britain about a woman who died after doctors failed to spot a six-inch long toilet brush handle embedded in her buttocks.  

Maybe the I-Man has something there.

We’ve all heard the horror stories about folks getting the wrong limb amputated, being treated for something other than what they were hospitalized for, or having perfectly healthy organs removed due to a paperwork glitch.

But how do you miss a six-inch toilet brush sticking out of a person’s backside?

Apparently, the bizarre bathroom injury happened after a drunken fall in 2005.  Which, itself begs quite a number of burning questions:

How does one “accidentally” get a six-inch toilet brush stuck in their nether region?

Just exactly how drunk to you have to be to fall hard enough to jam it in your bum?  

But most important: How on earth did doctors fail to notice this particularly foreign object lodged in her sphincter...over the course of FIVE YEARS?

You would think,, if nothing else, an object of that size and shape would present itself somewhat conspicuously. It’s difficult to imagine that a routine physical wouldn’t reveal something that was out of the ordinary.   LIKE A SIX INCH TOILET BRUSH HANDLE STICKING OUT OF HER BUTT.  

Where were this woman’s friends and family? Where was the concerned inquiry during holiday in Brighton?  “Um…what’s that rather large bulge at the back of your bikini, love?” Didn’t ANYBODY notice she was sitting about a half-a-foot higher at the dinner table over the past five years?  

Medicine is not an infallible science.  But these physicians’ powers of perception are just a little more beyond the pale.  

No wonder why some folks are against National Health Care.