Terrorists protect bananas, sleep-drivers are on the loose and a warning for March Madness gravy trainers

- If you want to be totally technical about it, then I suppose you can make a mildly convincing claim that Chiquita Brands International did something kinda sorta a little bit wrong in paying a Colombian terrorist group for protection of the company’s farmlands in a volatile region of the South American nation. I, however, choose to take a different view of the situation. The incredible $25 million fine being assessed by the U.S. Justice Department seems extremely high, because if you look at it this way, it doesn’t seem like such an egregious sin: in recent months tomatoes, spinach, lettuce, cantaloupes, mushrooms and spinach have been recalled for bearing dangerous bacteria and illness-causing agents like E. coli. But have you heard of any such offense from bananas? No. Now I’m not saying for sure that the protection from the terrorist group helps Chiquita stay pollutant and bacteria free, but if having their fields and orchards protected by some leftist terror group allows Chiquita’s people to focus on making their products safe and free of E. coli, then I might allow them a little more leeway. We’ve got enough illness-causing food on the market, slowly we are running out of fruits and veggies that are actually safe to eat.

- Ain’t smoking great? Besides being a deadly killer for both smokers and the unfortunate victims upon whom smokers foist their secondhand smoke and being a vile addiction that millions of people are unable to shake, now smoking is causing fires and explosions. An adult care home in Raleigh, N.C. was smoking near oxygen tanks (always a super idea, assuming you know nothing at all about chemistry and physics and what happens when you mix pure oxygen and an open flame) and caused three explosions and a massive fire that left one person dead and 20 others injured. Super, just super……you make a product that’s so addictive that people are willing to use it in a setting where it can cause massive explosions and fires and result in the death of an innocent bystander. The tobacco industry is the most worthless and vile industry we have in America, and if they were shut down and permanently banned tomorrow, America would be a better place for it.

- This could be a problem: the Food and Drug Administration warned Wednesday that all prescription sleeping pills could sometimes cause sleep-driving, a fact that isn't at all alarming considering that millions of people nationwide are on these drugs. Makers of the 13 prescription insomnia pills currently on the market will have to put warning labels on their packages alerting consumers to this danger, but how many people really read the fine print? Ironically, though, I’m debating whether people driving while asleep would actually make out nation’s highways any less safe, considering how some of the ass hats on the road drive when they are awake. If you’re drinking your uber-hot coffee, talking on your cell phone, steering with one hand and trying to apply makeup or fix your hair with your other hand, is being asleep really that much worse? This sleep-driver phenomenon is just one more danger on an already too-long list of road hazards, and maybe not cause for as much alarm as you might think.

- A brief human rights rant: an Illinois couple is pissed, claiming that the state’s ban on the arcane practice of administering shock treatments to certain mental patients is harmful to their son. To be fair, their son is 48-year-old Bradley Bernstein, who suffers from autism, and they say an electronic cattle prod (yikes!) is all that keeps him from having fits and seizures and harming himself. I’m not a doctor, but I’ll play one here: there has to be something more humane and less crude than a cattle prod to treat your son. Autism is a scary and difficult disorder, but I can't bring myself to get behind the use of a cattle prod for any treatment of any sort. There’s a reason it’s called a “cattle” prod and not a “human” prod, people…………

- My love for March Madness is matched by my utter disdain for all of the cutesy name ripoff attempts made by businesses, networks and pretty much any other entity trying to sell or promote something during the NCAA Tournament. These March Madness Knockoffs, as I have labeled them, include gems like “Mattress Mania”, “Mazda Mania,” and one especially moronic term created by the boss at a place I used to work, “Banquet Madness” (to promote uber-boring, all-too-frequent banquets used as fund raisers). People who use these terms think they are being funny and creative, and I stress think. What they are is disingenuous, idiotic, unoriginal and ass hats. If what you’re doing has nothing to do with basketball and is, especially in the case of those banquets, not exciting, not interesting and not something I want to be anywhere near, then don’t try to gravy train on the popularity of the best event in all of sports through some ham-handedly crafted name for your event that not-so-cleverly tries to play on the name of March Madness. You look like even more of a jabroni than you already are, so if you’re thinking about going this route, do us all a favor….don’t.