{"id":19827,"date":"2020-08-06T11:51:52","date_gmt":"2020-08-06T15:51:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/?p=19827"},"modified":"2020-08-06T11:51:52","modified_gmt":"2020-08-06T15:51:52","slug":"vegans-and-other-ravings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/vegans-and-other-ravings\/","title":{"rendered":"Vegans and Other Ravings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 24pt;\">Vegans and Other Ravings<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">I must admit that letters to the editors and responses to articles on Web sites are one of my main sources of fodder for my rants. &#8220;USA Today&#8221; prints the best letters to the editor though. They tend to pick out some great letters from morons all over the world. I don&#8217;t have any particular Web site that goads me into open rebellion. Web sites vary, but you can be sure that many idiots post replies to articles on news and technology sites that inspire me too.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">For some reason, I get very angry when I see or hear coolspeak. Words like &#8220;partying&#8221;, &#8220;party animal&#8221;, &#8220;bonding&#8221; &#8220;mic&#8221; for &#8220;microwave&#8221;, &#8220;fridge&#8221; for &#8220;refrigerator&#8221;, &#8220;hang out&#8221; &#8211; as in &#8220;wanna hang out with me?&#8221;, &#8220;cloud&#8221; when used in place of Web server, &#8220;interwebs&#8221; in place of\u00a0 &#8220;Internet&#8221; or &#8220;Web&#8221;, &#8220;a gathering&#8221;, when used to describe what used to be called a &#8220;get together&#8221; or &#8220;party&#8221;; well you get the idea.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">I digress&#8230;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">&#8220;USA Today&#8221; recently published an article on how sled dogs might hold the key to curing diabetes in humans. This might be good news for those who suffer from this nasty malady, so no doubt diabetics read the article with some degree of interest. The article, of course, opened the door to a raft of coolspeakers who blew off the article as just so much drivel. This brings me to another coolspeak word I loathe and that word is &#8220;vegan&#8221; (pronounce vee-gin or vee-gun depending on how cool the cool speaker is). It used to be &#8220;vegetarian&#8221; or maybe I&#8217;m just stupid and\/or lazy and there now have vegans. I guess so many vegetarians were slacking off by drinking chocolate goat milk, eating Cheetos, fish, chicken, turkey, shepherd&#8217;s pie, etc. that those old-time vegetarians now call themselves vegans. It&#8217;s a badge of honor. They became the protestants of vegetarianism; a separatist group so to speak.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">Or like I say, I&#8217;m stupid, confused, out-of-touch&#8230; in short, I&#8217;m a dolt.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">Better than mere vegetarians, this band of holier-than-thou cool speaking vegans believes that a vegan diet can prevent or cure all manner of diseases including diabetes and cancer. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\"><em>&#8212; I want to note here that vegans do, like everyone else, die. And they die of the same things everyone else does. &#8212;<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">If you know any vegans then you know they like to make a big deal out of their veganism. If you have ever known any, you know what I mean. With just a glance at their gleaming white eyeballs, they say to me, &#8220;You dirty, scummy, meat-eating dolt! You&#8217;re going to die from eating that cottage cheese, dude &#8211; wake up!&#8221; Hey! I like cottage cheese &#8220;dude&#8221;!\u00a0 I like it with ketchup on it. Anything wrong with ketchup? Is ketchup OK?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">I know I am a cantankerous, anti-social, meatbag. I don&#8217;t need a vegan to point out the errors of my whales. The vegan assault on the &#8220;USA Today&#8221; article about sled dogs and diabetes riled me &#8211; not that it takes much to rile me these days. Their comments smacked of oily, snake oil salesmen spreading their cheesy gospel from a wagon in a traveling carnival. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">Telling people with diabetes that they would have never become diabetic if only they wouldn&#8217;t have eaten hot dogs, chicken, dairy products, fish, or anything else that comes from or is extracted from animals &#8211; which I want to point out includes Jell-O &#8211; really irritates me.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">Can you tell I&#8217;m a curmudgeon? Good!<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\"> And, vegans condescending to diabetics with such advice as &#8211; &#8220;if only you&#8217;d switch to a vegan diet you could throw away those insulin pumps and blood-sugar meters&#8221;, makes my blood boil. Blood is verboten for vegans, I presume.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">I would find it hard to bond with a vegan and I sure wouldn&#8217;t like hanging out with one. I can&#8217;t see myself partying with a vegan or going to a gathering of vitality-filled vegans. Vegans are the worst proselytizers of all &#8211; even worse than those guys and gals that bang on my door and offer to save me from the fires of hell. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">That&#8217;s another rant for another time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">If you are a vegan keep your cool speaking, purified bodies away from my disease-ridden, meat-fouled, carcass &#8212; you eat your bean sprouts and let me eat my Big Mac.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\"> I&#8217;m doing just fine, thank you. A hundred years from now we&#8217;ll be dead and your tofu-veggie-stuffed corpse will be just as rotten as my omnivorous one. You don&#8217;t think you&#8217;ll be dead, but you will. My only regret is I won&#8217;t be able to put a bouquet on your grave and whisper lovingly, &#8220;I told you so.&#8221; I would love to do that &#8211; those are my favorite four words.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">I would expect that a swell of vegans (that&#8217;s what I call a group of vegans &#8211; like a gaggle of geese type of thing) would attack me while I prepared my famous pan-seared Pacific Wild Salmon with dill sauce if they ever read this. I know that salmon will kill me -but not as quickly as an angry rhino. I know salmon has mercury in it &#8211; but I eat it anyway. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">I know that that next glass of milk could be my last. I&#8217;ll drink it anyway. And, on those rare occasions when I order a filet mignon -which is a rare occasion indeed &#8212; and I do order it rare &#8211; I promise myself I&#8217;ll not think of those lithe-bodied tofu-on-a-stick-eating vegans who look with vile disdain upon my meat-and-cheese-addicted, medically obese body.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">Count me among those who choose to enjoy life rather than spending it reading vegan cookbooks, inspirational screeds from other suffering vegans, or worrying about death. So what if vegans live to be 99? Our nursing homes will be filled with mindless vegans sucking pureed carrots from a sippy cup.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">I know what causes death. It isn&#8217;t meat, fish, fowl, dairy products, eggs, pork gelatin &#8211; no, it&#8217;s not even smoking and drinking. The biggest cause of death is birth. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">If you don&#8217;t want to die then don&#8217;t get yourself born. If you were never born you&#8217;d never have to choose between eating tofu-filled crepes made with organic buckwheat or a sizzling, succulent pan-seared rainbow trout served with spicy au gratin potatoes. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">You&#8217;d never have to worry about being obese, having a heart attack or stroke or being a burden on your children and forcing them to choose between warehousing your old, mindless, carcass in their home &#8211; and thus become a huge load of baggage &#8211; or sticking you in a nursing home and forgetting you except at Christmas.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">Next time you can avoid all these tough choices by making the right choice &#8211; choose not to be born. Birth is the single biggest cause of death even for vegans. It&#8217;s going to happen to you, no matter what you eat.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">&#8220;I&#8217;ll have a cheese omelet and a glass of milk, please.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; Vegans and Other Ravings I must admit that letters to the editors and responses to articles on Web sites are one of my main sources of fodder for my rants. &#8220;USA Today&#8221; prints the best letters to the editor though. They tend to pick out some great letters from morons all over the world. I don&#8217;t\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/vegans-and-other-ravings\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15825,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1681],"tags":[2432],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19827"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19827"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19828,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19827\/revisions\/19828"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}