In grade school we at one point watched the film version of the classic play Arsenic and Old Lace, a rather macabre tale about two quaint older women who poison old homeless men that have no family to ease their suffering. Their poison of choice is arsenic, and the old men are buried in the basement.
As a child of Romanian immigrants from the brutal era of communism, I heard quite a number of stories told about how people were routinely arrested and put into prison for the most unreasonable reasons — anything from protesting against the government to just not being in the right place at the right time. My parents were very happy that we live in a country where, as they said at the time, a person could march up and down the streets carrying signs denouncing President Clinton (I suppose this dates me pretty well) and they would never be arrested.
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“Hi! Welcome to the emergency department! Take off your coat and shoes, your freezer is right over there. Have a seat and we’ll be with you in a moment.”
I imagine that hospital welcome will be more unspoken and mostly mandatory in the coming years as we begin to realize, and accept, that our bodies are basically big bags of meat and freezing us preserves us while cooking us, ends us.
It costs a lot of money to house prisoners in cells when the idea is no longer reformation, but rather separation and dissonant punishment:
One year at Princeton University: $37,000. One year at a New Jersey state prison: $44,000.
Prison and college “are the two most divergent paths one can take in life,” Joseph Staten, an info-graphic researcher with Public Administration, says. Whereas one is a positive experience that increases lifetime earning potential, the other is a near dead end, which is why Staten found it striking that the lion’s share of government funding goes toward incarceration.
A relatively new breed of dieters out there are looking to lose weight and get in shape by sticking to a simple diet, similar to the kind embraced (by necessity) by the people living in the Paleolithic era.
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