> So I tried to give blood today. A local brewery was offering a "give a pint, get a pint" deal. I don't drink, but even so this strikes me as a hilariously bad idea.
>
*laughs uproariously* That sounds like a fantastic idea! You could go in, give blood, get just drunk enough to think stupid ideas are really good ideas, go back, give a different name, repeat until almost dead and end up with three pints left in your body.

> Seriously, this strikes me as the stupidest thing of all time. The furor over Mad Cow Disease involved some of the most useless medical paranoia in recent memory.

Tell me about it. I remember when the scare had just started, and no-one was touching anything that had the slightest connection with beef. Even in the supermarkets, people were carefully scanning the labels of fruit yoghurts and diligently putting back everything with gelatine in it. Then the government had some weird idea about beef on the bone being bad for you, and beef off the bone being OK. So we had the very odd situation of seeing the butcher get the (obviously unsafe) joint of meat out of the freezer, and with a couple of deft cuts perform the double miracle of removing it from the bone and completely removing all vestiges of any nasty diseases lurking within it.

The sad thing is that this load of tripe was swallowed completely by the meat-headed public.

Si-"And that's as many meat puns as I can fit into one sentence"-gi