“You worked too hard, you ate too much, the cheesecake made you greedy… Let your aching head and stomach hear this message from old Speedy…
“Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is…”
Some Daily Post readers may remember this little song, sung by a cute little character named Speedy…back in the days when America was still great…
Or maybe… America wasn’t really so great, back then? Maybe we just thought it was great… because we had speedy relief from headache and upset stomach?
Because we didn’t know we were … plop, plop, fizz, fizz … destroying our planet?
Well, we should have known, because back in 1856, a scientist named Eunice Foote demonstrated experimentally that a glass tube containing “carbonic acid gas” — carbon dioxide — absorbed and retained more heat from the sun than did a glass tube containing normal, everyday air. You can read about that subject on Wikipedia.
Ms. Foote was, incidentally, a women’s suffrage activist as well, but we needn’t hold that against her.
120 years later, we still hadn’t learned anything. Here we see an immature, happy-go-lucky rascal named Speedy — to all appearances, a white male, and probably a chauvinist as well — telling us to plop a couple of white tablets into a glass container and obtain selfish relief from too much cheesecake.
Yes, selfish relief, my friend.
As he peddles a dangerous product with his seemingly innocent jingle, Speedy doesn’t reveal to us the main ingredients in Alka-Seltzer: aspirin, sodium bicarbonate, and anhydrous citric acid.
We all remember, from chemistry class, what happens when you mix alkaline sodium bicarbonate with an acid, in a glass container?
You generate thousands, perhaps millions, of tiny, fizzy bubbles — of carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide, my friend. The killer greenhouse gas discovered in 1856 by Eunice Foote, decades before women even had the right to vote. The invisible, insidious gas that’s causing us to feel guilty every time we plop two tablets into a glass container.
“You worked too hard, you ate too much, the cheesecake made you greedy…”
I personally have nothing against hard work, as long as other people are doing it. But I would never recommend working “too hard.” Slow down, take it easy… and don’t eat too much cheesecake.
Follow these simple rules, and we can save the planet. Without unnecessary fizziness.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: These essays by Louis Cannon, published in the Pagosa Daily Post, are intended for entertainment purposes only. There is no current scientific evidence showing a connection between cheesecake consumption and climate change.)