In The News

The front page of the always-good-for-a-laugh Ottawa Citizen today features a story about a group of scientists who have discovered that Viagra is effective in helping regulate the biological clocks of hamsters in order to help prevent the effects of jet lag. It is postulated that the effects could be similar in humans and therefore Viagra would be effective for long-haul flights. This raises a few questions:

1) Long flights are uncomfortable enough as it is. I don't think anyone really wants to put up with an 8-hour-long hardon while being crammed like sardines in "economy" class. Not to mention the undesirable and uncomfortable knowledge that the guy sitting next to you reading Men's Fitness has a raging hardon as well.

2) Who the hell thinks of and funds these studies? Does someone wake up one morning and decide it would be great to give Viagra to hamsters in order to test a random hypothesis that it would have benefits in fighting jet lag? Isn't it kind of weird to be artificially giving hamsters erections? This would no doubt be described as a "side-effect" of the drug. I suppose an erection is still a lot better than the side effects of most drugs. Also, I wonder why they couldn't just test this hypothesis on humans? The drug has already been approved, so why didn't these scientists just pop some Viagra, take a flight to London, and gather some notes on the process? Not that it wouldn't be as much of a waste of time, but at least nobody has to watch hamster hardons all day.

3) Why is this front page news? Was there really nothing more important going on in the world today other than hamster penises?

In other news, the Citizen has a typically worthless editorial running today. It's about the new archbishop in Ottawa and how he should be politically involved in his community, advocating policies, and all this sort of junk. What really got me was the final line. Being that the archbishop is not native to Ottawa, they mention that he was apparently a Montreal Canadians fan, but he now "puts his faith in the Senators." How fucking nauseating.