Lindsay Perigo
The Politically Incorrect Show - 21/11/2000
[Music - Die Fledermaus]
Good afternoon, Kaya Oraaa & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Tuesday November 21, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd., the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit, & excellence, against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.
[Music up, music down!]
Never trust a person without a hearty, genuine belly laugh, I have always said. Politically Correct people don't laugh a lot - their crusade to root out impure thoughts is far too serious for that. Laughter itself is Politically Incorrect - it suggests enjoyment, & we can't have that. It can also suggest ridicule. Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot & co were not big on laughter, in case it was directed at them. Now it seems there is scientific evidence, if any were needed, to show that laughter is good for one's health. I quote from yesterday's Herald:
"A recent study has shown that people who say they laugh more are less likely to have heart disease. 'The old axiom that laughter is the best medicine appears to hold true when it comes to protecting your heart,' said Dr Michael Miller, director of the centre for protective cardiology at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. Dr Miller & colleagues told a meeting of the American Heart Association that they believed laughter might release chemicals that relax the blood vessels. 'It's not just going, ha, ha, ha,' Dr Miller said, 'it's having a good hearty laugh.' For their study, they interviewed 150 patients who had either suffered heart attacks or had undergone procedures such as angioplasty to clear clogged arteries. They compared their responses with those of 150 people the same age who did not have heart disease. The questions came off standard tests used to measure humour in day-to-day situations such as getting to a party to find someone else wearing the same outfit. 'We found that individuals who had heart disease had a 40 to 45 per cent reduced likelihood of laughing in response to those social situations.' Dr Miller said his team was now looking to see if the act of laughing released chemicals that affected the blood vessels, perhaps like nitric oxide, known to dilate blood vessels."
Of course, the methodology here is dubious. For one thing, it ignores the indisputable significance of bad diets in heart disease - diets high in fibre, low in fat, diets from which alcohol & tobacco are absent. Only boring people go on such diets, & being boring is known to constrict the blood vessels. And the high correlation between walking & heart disease is also overlooked - another recent study showed that 100% of heart disease patients had walked at some point in their lives.
But still, let us give these findings the benefit of no doubt - common sense would seem to back them, for sure. When I read them, having had an angioplasty myself, I thought, cripes, am I not laughing enough? Is my allergy to bossyboots & busybodies constricting my blood vessels? Am I going to be struck down with my dander up?
Heck, this is no laughing matter.
But, in the hope of expanding my blood vessels to humungous proportions, I'm going to have a damn good laugh now anyway. Care to join me?
(MAD LAUGHTER)
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