Think, People

I’m no Angelina Jolie. I’m certainly no Brad Pitt, or Bono, or that asshole who used to be in the Squirrelling Banshees. Can’t remember his name now, but he’s a SIR, don’t you know. SIR Asshole.

But I digress. I, as you know, am a profligate philanthropist — I shell out more than my share of quarters when the martini is a good one. And often that leaves my pockets flat. But I don’t complain. It’s for a good cause.

But what I discovered recently just makes my altruistic millionaire-wannabe self’s blood boil. Forget Darfur. Forget Tibet. Forget Global Warming. For God’s sake FORGET GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS and LOCOVORISM! Forget it, forget them all and just look what is right in front of your nose.

Look at this. I’ve shown it to you before, but I’ll show it to you again.

.

See? here, I’ll frame it with some inverted commas so you can see it better: “.”

That, my friends is a period, otherwise known as a full stop, or to our French friends, a “point” (“pwån”).

You think the Earth is overcrowded, teeming with whole segments of the downtrodden who yearn for the bare necessities such as clean drinking water, whose children die like flies due to overcrowding?

Well consider this. In that “pwån” there are, count them, 500,000,000,000 protons. Lass’ I heard that’s FIVE HUNDRED TRILLION. Can you imagine THEIR squatter camps, THEIR favelas? Their drug problems, their teenage pregnancies, their continuing internecine conflicts that cause no, not a mere twelve dead and eight wounded at a school shooting but FOUR HUNDRED BILLION DEAD and TWENTY-THREE BILLION EIGHT HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN MILLION WOUNDED in any given incident?

Where’s the charity? Give generously. Every time you take a shower you wash twenty-seven billion of these communities, each of 500 trillion, down the drain. Who's going to cover the funeral costs? Huh? Even at 0.00001 cents per proton it would still be more than the entire national debt of all the G20 countries combined.

Think about it.

UPDATE April 11, 2009

Heh . . . *red face* . . . umm, sorry, people, I just found out that protons go on for all eternity, no matter WHAT you do to them, so cancel the White Cross shipments and food packages. Especially cancel that huge batch of T-shirts saying "NEUTRONS RUUULE!!!!!!" that somehow got mixed into the relief effort.

Sorry. My bad. Sorry.