M-I-C-K-E-Y B-L-U-N-T

Joe Camel may have been forced out of the business by the feds, but Mickey Mouse is ready, eager and more than willing to step into the breach and sell tobacco to schoolchildren.

That's the basic message of an article in the March 24/31 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association ("No More George Lundberg, but the Same Silly Articles") entitled "Tobacco and Alcohol Use in G-Rated Children's Animated Films." Three researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, evidently without much to do after #14 seed Weber "Barbecue U." State knocked out UNC's men's basketball team in the first round of the [1999] NCAA tournament, spent hours and hours away from their cancer vaccine labs cataloging every single use of alcohol and tobacco in the aforementioned films, timing their onscreen duration, evaluating whether the character involved is "good," "bad," or "neutral," and applying for NIH grant money for a follow-up project involving X-rated adult live-action films.

Since it is hard to imagine JAMA publishing this if they had found nothing, you can well imagine the shock of the researchers when they found that (a) there was, to their minds, a whole lot of alcohol and tobacco use and (b) their children became, over the course of this study, chain-smoking drunks.

Of particular interest to those who have suddenly become interested in G-rated children's animated films would be "The Great Mouse Detective," which features a total of 165 seconds during which some character or another is smoking and a whopping 414 drinking seconds, putting it in the overall lead with 579 seconds of sin, just barely beating out "The Three Caballeros," which had 548 smoking seconds but a mere 8 drinking seconds. (They seem to have missed Mighty Mouse sniffing opium, which Pat Robertson told us all about, but I doubt that these people originally received degrees in this field.)

This may seem like small potatoes to those of us who watch real movies (and what was that baby doing watching "The Matrix" two rows behind me last weekend?), but our intrepid researchers find it quite alarming, noting via the use of two references that "many animated films influence the children who watch them." The conclude the report with an impassioned plea: "[T]he makers of children's animated films should eliminate the use of alcohol and tobacco by characters in their scripts." This plea is undoubtedly destined to join the ranks of impassioned JAMA pleas that will be fulfilled right about when JAMA hires Jack Kevorkian as editor. I mean, to Hollywood screenwriters, these scripts must be ludicrously unrealistically drug-free as they are.

Another reason to rethink this idea is that harping on tobacco and alcohol will blind us to the real danger to America's youth: Slurpees. We learn about this new danger in the April issue of the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology ("Now: More Sexual Deviants Per Issue!"), in an article entitled "Sudden Death After Cold Drink: Case Report." I quote:

"A 12-year-old boy of Asian descent died suddenly and unexpectedly after rapidly ingesting a frozen slurry drink [read: Slurpee]. After 'chugging' the drink, he suddenly passed out and fell to the floor...After a few minutes he woke up and described having 'brain freeze.' A few seconds later he passed out again and fell to the floor. Resuscitative efforts showed defibrillation [heart attack]...he was pronounced dead shortly thereafter."

The scientists say that this boy's cardiac arrhythmia (again, heart attack) was "possibly initiated by ingestion of a cold drink," and it sure sounds like an airtight case of death by Slurpee to me, at least if I manage to shut up the part of my brain which is saying "FALLACY! POST HOC, ERGO PROPTER HOC!" I mean, sure, he passed out twice, but the heart attack might as well have been due to embarrassment, for all the evidence these guys present. Still, we shouldn't let logic stop us from picketing our local 7-Elevens, chanting, "2-4-6-8! Don't let kids de-fib-rill-ate! Ban Slurpees! Ban Slurpees!" and holding up signs saying "7-Eleven=Killers of 12-Year-Old Boys Of Asian Descent!" You first.

Of course, maybe the problem was really that he didn't have a lady present to calm him down. You know, because what a man really needs when he's feeling agitated is a woman to tell him everything's okay. That's nature's way. You might think I just engaged in reactionary sexism, but actually I am summarizing an article appearing in Psychosomatic Medicine titled "Gender, Social Support, and Cardiovascular Responses to Stress." Researchers from Southern California and New York City had men and women give impromptu speeches to a group, to induce stress, and then had men reassure some of them and women reassure others. The results: the gentle ministrations of the fairer sex greatly eased cardiovascular stress (rapid heartbeat), whereas "support from men did not." The authors speculate that this is the reason men with wives are healthier than men without. Think of the healthy dialogues this article would engender with the proper distribution:

Wife: "But doesn't the societal shaping of gender roles play a major part in shaping both men's and women's responses to support coming from each gender? Surely this discrepancy is not physiological in origin."

Husband: "Honey, you're not being very reassuring right now. If you would only be more uncritically supportive, I could avoid chronic cardiac dise- Honey? Where did Jason get that Slurpee! GRAB IT! GRAB IT! OH, DEAR GOD!"

Or maybe not.

What I want to know is, what flavor Slurpee?

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