WEEKLY WHINE

Let's talk about noses

Do you have a nose? If you do, there was much that happened this week about which you'll want to be concerned. Thanks to the BBC [which would like to apologise for the constant repetition in this site], it's now possible to find out what dangers are lying in wait for your nose.

BLOODY ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION!

Does Viagra make blood fall out of your nose? If so, it's okay to talk about it. Doctors have reported on two cases of nosebleeds that they think are related to the potence drug of which Senators and baseballers extol the virtues. The BBC say it might be because "the nasal passages contain erectile tissue". Did we really need to know that?

[ BBC article ]

The doctors work at St George's Hospital, in a London suburb apparently called "Tooting". Sounds like a good place to set up a hospital, doesn't it. Anyway, they said that both people had been bleeding from their noses for upward of five hours. After all, don't you get four hour nosebleeds all the time? Once the fifth hour rolls around, that's when you start worrying.

Pfizer, which makes Viagra, says its drug had nothing to do with it. In a statement, it responded, "You shouldn't be poking around up there, anyway."

Apparently in one case, "more advanced techniques eventually helped to stop the bleeding". Those advanced techniques include the acquisition of a bucket of "special sauce" from McDonalds, the smell of which will shut anyone's nose off within six seconds. But be careful next time you take Viagra. It's only a matter of time before there's a more serious case, one that requires amputation.

BUT IT'S NOT IN THE CARD CATALOGUE

Also in the nose news this week, it seems your friendly neighbourhood librarians, long the guardians of all that is nasally sacred, are having their freedoms stifled and their inhalations unstifled. Yes, that's right: Librarians in Queens are being told to remove their nose rings. What for? It is Queens, after all.

[ BBC article ]

Well actually, the Queens library Mafia say that the librarians' union agreed to the terms of their dress code back in 1993, which was modified a few years later to include casual Fridays, the day when bifocals may be worn upside down. Along with pierced noses, other novelistic no-nos include miniskirts, sandals, tattoos, contact lenses, and clean hands. "Vera! There's not enough dust under those fingernails! Spend more time in the Chaucer section!"

No word yet on the reasons for this sudden crackdown, but our sources in the return slot and the microfiche reader say that some of the librarians were feeling inferior to their colleagues who could read hands free, hanging their books from their nostrils.

Underdressed librarians are reportedly the second most serious threat being faced by Queens's libraries today, after the coffee stains that are rapidly rendering one of their copies of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea illegible.

Okay, that's all for now. Next week, how to keep your thighs safe. In the meantime, remember to keep your business out of other people's noses.