Correspondence: Trashed

Edited by Moristotle

Could this really be the species that imagined the Old & New Testaments, the Enlightenment, the U.S. Constitution…? “Christmas Revelers Leave 16 Tons of Trash on Australian Beach” [Brett Cole, NY Times, December 28]. Excerpt:

SYDNEY, Australia — Christmas and New Year in Australia typically involve barbecues, beaches and beer.
    But a Christmas Day celebration that drew more than 10,000 people has led to a suspension of that tradition on Coogee Beach in the Sydney suburb of Randwick, where officials estimate that revelers left behind more than 16 tons of garbage. The City Council banned alcohol on the beach for the rest of the Australian summer.
    “I’m a local, and in all my time here I’ve never seen anything like it,” Tony Waller, president of the Coogee Surf Life Saving Club, told Channel 7, adding that the club used four oxygen cylinders and 15 resuscitation masks to treat drunken partygoers.
    “By late evening, it got so bad that we let the shark alarm off three times to try to get the swimmers out of the water, we had such grave concerns for them,” Mr. Waller said. “They were all intoxicated.”
    Three people were arrested over “antisocial behavior,” according to the police.
    There has long been tension between the residents who live near Sydney’s beaches and the tourists, many of them foreign, who hold all-day and all-night parties fueled by alcohol and drugs and leave behind piles of trash that greet early morning joggers and swimmers. [read more]

New Yorker cartoon, January 2, 2017

If only eight or ten of those women Trump tried to impose himself on sexually had broken his nose – up, down, and both-sideways – he might have been too humiliated to impose himself on the rest of us.

Hospital bill. You don’t have to be Catholic to appreciate this.
    A man suffered a serious heart attack and collapsed while shopping. The store clerks called an ambulance, and the paramedics rushed the man to the nearest hospital, where he had emergency coronary bypass surgery.
    He awakened from the surgery to find himself in the care of nuns at the Catholic Hospital. A nun was seated next to his bed holding a clipboard loaded with several forms and a pen for him to sign the ones that applied. She asked him how he was going to pay for his treatment.
    “Do you have health insurance?” she asked.
    He replied in a raspy voice that he didn’t.
    “Do you have money in the bank?”
    He said he had no money in the bank.
    “Do you have a relative who could help you with the payments?”
    He said, “I only have a spinster sister, a nun.”
    The nun became agitated and announced loudly, “Nuns are not spinsters! Nuns are married to God.”
    Greatly relieved, the patient said now, “Perfect. Send the bill to my brother-in-law.”

Grateful for correspondence, Moristotle