Epidemic adjustment

Three of the most terrifying phrases one could ever hear: (1) “Dad, do you know where Mom keeps the morning after pills?” (2) “We will now attach electrodes to your genitals” and (3) “You’re going to have to take your car into the dealer.”

Speaking of the dealer, if the bird flu ever does become, like, you know, a legitimate problem, one of the best places to get yourself a good, stiff dose will undoubtedly be the waiting room of an auto dealer’s service center. I was in one recently, and we were all jammed in there, every seat taken, coughin’ and snifflin’ up a storm. Perfect place to launch a pandemic. And the annoyance factor in there was off the charts. You had the poor mom with two squirming brat-boys who were bouncin’ around like pinballs on No Doz, you had the old lady in there gettin’ phone calls on her cell with some loud-ass ring tone from classical music hell that would have made Chopin burst into flames, and you had CNN on the tube pounding the latest bulletins from Koyaanisqatsi City. No yogi on the planet would have been able to keep it together for more than five minutes in that stress chamber.

Speaking of bird flu, if you think the coverage of this bug is over the top now, just wait until it mutates and starts to actually kill lots of people. Right now, I am compelled to remind you that the only people who have died from the bird flu so far are (1) a guy in Thailand who slept with his chickens to make sure the rats didn’t pester them, (2) a guy in Cambodia who sucked the blood out of his prized rooster’s throat after it got slashed during a cockfight, (3) a dude in Vietnam who married his duck, and (4) a Chinese man who had an affair with his duck. Stay tuned, as the media breathlessly awaits the most breathlessly awaited mutation in history.

Speaking of pandemics, even if the bird flu finds it mutational groove thang and begins to kick ass on us for real, it would barely be a boil on the ass of humanity. I mean, if the Depravian Avian did actually dump 120 million chumps, you know what percentage of Homo Sapiens that would be? Two percent! That’s all. Two percent. Some pandemic. Makes one stop and think for a second that maybe the real pandemic on this planet is already here, and it’s name is … (By the way, the 2 percent figure was figured by using 6 billion as the human population of Earth.)

Speaking of 6 billion, something tells me that number is so last century that it’s probably time for an update. And according to the latest population calculations on a Web site that seemed somewhat legitimate, the number of human Earthlings is now 6 billion, 476 million. So for the bird flu to hit that modest 2 percent death count, it will have to bump off 129.5 million people. My advice: take the under. (By the way, latest population stat for the U.S.A.: 297.5 million.)

Speaking of significant numbers that need updating, the latest estimate on the number of Iraqi civilians killed as a result of our invasion is anywhere from 26,000 to 31,000, according to iraqbodycount.net.