Just Say No To Slugs

Sometimes these blog entries just write themselves. There was a small piece in the paper today about a man who has been hospitalised with rat lungworm disease. As the name implies this is an illness that normally affects rats (or possibly lungworms). Symptoms include swelling of the brain and spinal cord and it is potentially fatal. Our hero contracted this normally rodent centric malady by eating a slug on a dare. It sounds to me like he could benefit from having his brain swollen. For the biologically inclined the slug dimension is as follows; a diseased rat craps, a slug eats the diseased rat crap, a halfwit eats the newly diseased slug and I have a five minute fit of hysterical laughter when I read about it in the paper. How can one successfully argue for the sterilization of the terminally stupid when they provide so much joy.

Still, in the absence of any policies to increase the average depth of the gene pool may I suggest a nationwide advertising campaign to warn people of the dangers of slug abuse. My suggested slogan; "Slugs, just say 'Are you out of your fucking mind? You want me to eat what?'" or possibly "Slugs, even other slugs think they're gross". For those tempted to experiment with a gastropod based diet allow me to offer one little piece of advice. Cook them! There is almost nothing you can't eat if you burn it badly enough first. If you're very lucky you will burn your fingers picking up the hot toasty slug and drop it into the fire. At this point you can use your remaining fingers to do what you should have done in the first place and dial in a pizza.

While we're on the subject of poisonous slugs I see the NSW government is at it again. It used the cover provided by the federal budget release to quietly introduce a new transfer tax on the sale of properties worth more than half a million dollars. Since you can't get a treehouse in Sydney for less than that it should be a good money spinner. They claim the funds raised will be directed towards reducing fraud in the property market. The amount of money this tax will raise in its first year is estimated at ninety million dollars. The amount of money spent on investigation and enforcement in the area of property fraud is currently running at twenty million a year. By my reckoning that leaves seventy million dollars to fund our slug awareness campaign but I doubt if they will spend it on anything so sensible.