Another Myth Trashed

It occurred to me that I might have gotten the saltpeter story mixed up with some information that I thought I knew about Spanish fly, so I looked that up too. (How did we ever settle anything before Wikipedia?)

Spanish fly is the flip side of saltpeter, it supposedly is or was used to stimulate breeding behavior in livestock. Stories have been told about some smart aleck putting Spanish Fly in the punch bowl and turning his senior prom into a sex orgy, but such stories are of dubious authenticity and will not be repeated here. My old friend Orin Bolin, who was a real farmer, told me that he once tried it on a boar hog who was reluctant to do his duty, but all it made the stupid hog do was masturbate. Orin also told me that Spanish fly is not really an aphrodisiac, it's an irritant, and is considered too dangerous to be used on humans. This correlates with what I just learned on Wiki, except that Wiki doesn't mention the stuff as being commonly used on livestock.

Spanish fly doesn't really come from flies, but at least they got the "Spanish" part right. They make it from grinding up certain types of beetles that live in Spain. Ironically, the one beetle species that is actually named "Spanish fly" is not one of those commonly used to produce the product. The active ingredient is cantharidin, a toxic substance that the beetles produce to coat their eggs so other bugs won't eat them. This stuff is toxic enough that it has been historically used to poison people as often as it has been used as an aphrodisiac. I suppose that, if taken in sufficiently small doses, it might not do you any harm, but it certainly won't do you any good either. Here's what Wiki has to say about that:
"As it passes through the body, cantharidin irritates the genitals resulting in increased blood flow that can mimic the engorgement that occurs with sexual excitement.^[3] For this reason, various preparations of desiccated Spanish flies have been used as some of the world's oldest alleged aphrodisiacs, with a reputation dating back to the early western Mediterranean classical civilizations. The ease of toxic overdose makes this highly dangerous, so the sale of such products as Spanish fly has been made illegal in most countries."

I am not aware that our RINO governor or his cronies in the Michigan legislature have done anything to discourage abortion clinics but, if they have, it seems that it would apply to the whole state, not just the northern part. I still think that the reason we don't have any abortion clinics near by is that there isn't sufficient demand to make them profitable. Individual doctors probably refrain from doing abortions because of liability issues and/or because they can make more money doing other procedures.

A girl can't even have a baby in this town any more either. Our local hospital went bankrupt and was bought out by a conglomerate outfit who now uses it only as an outpatient clinic. If you need to be kept overnight, they ship you off to their other facility in Petoskey, some 40 miles away. When I had my bleeding ulcer in 2008, a three mile ambulance ride cost me $700, and I'm sure the price of a ride to Petoskey must be a whole lot higher than that.

This whole gay thing has become a pain in the ass, I wish they would go back into the closet where they belong. Every time you turn on the TV, all you see are Blacks, Hispanics and gays. Sometimes, when I get discouraged about it, I think that it's too late to save this country. Instead of being the land of the free and the home of the brave, it has become the land of the Negroes and the home of the homos. Funny though, when I go out and about in the real world, I don't see anything like that. We have a few of those kinds of people around, but they seem to mind their own business. They don't bother anybody, and nobody bothers them. Why can't the rest of the world be like Cheboygan?