Noah's ark and other lies

(OR: Fine Dining: Where and how to eat two of every animal)

It has been known for quite a while that smoking is bad for your health. Only now does the public realise that smoking is also bad for the mental health of anybody who comes within a ten-foot radius of a television. This is because I was watching FOX29 in Buffalo, New York, and suddenly a commercial appeared. It's been going on all month, and it may never stop running, even when the sun explodes, causing mass-extinction of all life on Earth, except for bits of North Korea which would have nuked itself by then anyway. These ads encourage people to stop smoking by--what a brilliant concept--showing them gory pictures of surgeons squeezing what looks like the inside of one of those Kinder Bueno bars out of major areas of the circulatory system. They sound a bit like this:

Announcer: Every cigarette is doing you damage.

(Show various Important Body Part)

Viewer: (BARF)

Announcer: Things build up in the walls of whatever you call this body part. I don't remember WHICH things, of course, but I do know that I shouldn't have turned down those cue cards.

(Surgeon's hand slides down the Important Body Part and slimy white stuff emerges)

Viewer: (VOMIT)

Announcer: This much disgusting white stuff, which I think I can safely assume is puss of some kind, was found inside the body of a smoker, age 32.

(Screen zooms out to show smoker exhaling smoke. Screen fades to black)

Announcer: Every cigarette is doing you damage.... Just a sec. (PUKE)

...and so on. But far from discouraging smokers, it completely and utterly disgusts those of us who don't smoke, with the major exception of adolescent males. An adolescent male would be intrigued that something as simple as starting smoking can force the manual extraction of this disgusting white stuff. He might just steal one his father's cigarettes and take up smoking and it will become the next fad and when his generation comes into governmental power they'll pass bills to reduce the minimum age for purchasing cigarettes from 19 to 9, and do similar things with alcohol until there is a lot of fighting and corruption and the system breaks down, similar to life in Biblical times.

Remember that? One day, God looked down on His people through some sort of giant telescope and said to Himself, "There's too much corruption, evil and greed in the world. Perhaps if I give them nuclear weapons the problem will solve itself."

He later dismissed this idea to make way for a global flood. God decided to speak to a winegrower, Noah.

"Noah, build an ark. An ark three hundred cubits long and thirty cubits wide." And as lightning started to appear in the sky, God said, "And load two of every unclean animal and seven of every clean animal onto the ark."

Noah paused for a moment.

"What's in it for me?" he asked.

"Not being dead."

So Noah built an ark that was about two cubits wide and could be controlled by a little magic box labelled "TYCO" and fuelled by an Energizer battery. Getting bored with this, he decided to build the ark that God had asked him to build in the first place.

This turned out to be a major problem. For some reason, none of the primitive measuring tapes they had revealed exactly what a "cubit" was. He asked the townspeople, and the general response was: "Sounds like some kind of toffee-flavoured gum to me."

Another problem. All the convenience stores in the land had in the way of gum was new Extra "Fresh Mint". In building his ark Noah broke his jaw a couple times, and by the end he swore that if he ever wanted to chew a Hubba Bubba again he would scrape off his taste buds with a dinner knife.

The next step was to get at least two of every animal. Luckily, most of the animals that were only located in different parts of the world were currently in his country on vacation. The easy part would be to get the animals on the ark; the hard part would be to blindfold them all so that, in case they pressed kidnapping charges, they would not be able to recognise Noah in the courtroom.

It had worked before: his mule had run over countless pedestrians and he always walked away scot-free. Of course, had God known that he would not have chosen Noah to build his ark. But, at the time that all this was happening, God was using his telescope to watch women changing clothes. After a few minutes he started leaning over closer and closer to get a better view, and accidentally knocked his giant telescope off the cloud. The telescope started falling and falling and falling and continued to fall until it hit the land below very hard. Which reveals the REAL era of the sinking of Atlantis.

Finally, the rain began pouring, and Noah finished loading all the animals, his wife, and his sons and their wives onto the boat. Then he discovered some problems:

• The ark was so crowded that just in order to enter, his body would have to be shaped like a Tetris piece
• There was no way to navigate the ark, because all the controls were being protected by a particularly vicious set of squirrels
• He forgot to make space for food, so he would have to eat the penguin to survive
• Since the ark had been constructed with gum, the giraffes kept sticking to the walls
• He never got around to installing a bathroom

There was yet another problem. The ark was so crowded that there wasn't any room for him left. So he thought this and he pondered that, and eventually announced, when the water was up to his ankles, that he didn't really like his sons anyway and that their choices of brides he disapproved of and that he was going to disown them but he just never got around to it, what with God and the flood and the fact that he was busy because it was his turn to buy groceries and the point that no matter how many things he had to do instead, he was going to disown them anyway, he just never got around to--SLAP-SLAP-BING-BANG-WHOLLOP-WHOLLOP-TROTOFFINOPPISITEDIRECTION-TROTOFFINOPISITEDIRECTION until he eventually bored his sons to death making these noises.
So their wives walked out and he entered the ark. It sank like a stone. After 40 days and 39 nights, and not, as God had claimed in his brochure, 40 nights, practically everyone except for Noah and his animals was dead.
And so, as the water drained, Noah returned to his vineyard and, surprisingly, never saw another customer again. Strange. It was as if they had all disappeared.

When Noah was an old man, he sat down with his grandchildren and turned on the television. Suddenly, he saw a surgeon squeezing puss out of an Important Body Part, and was so disgusted that he had a heat attack and died. His sons watched this commercial with awe and solemnly swore that this was the coolest thing they had ever seen and that they wanted to take up smoking RIGHT AWAY. And that is basically where we stand today. I think that little story was relevant to the smoking thing. I just can't remember why.