What’s up Your Butt

Public health advertisements which read “What’s up your butt?” and feature people with pained expressions on their faces, will not grace billboards in Benton and Franklin counties after all. It’s probably for the best: I know that the sight of someone grimacing because the doc is plumbing their back-passage doesn’t exactly inspire me to head down to the clinic to get my keester probed. Might as well have them biting down on a pencil.

Via the Bellingham, WA Herald

Health district pulls out of colon cancer campaign

KENNEWICK — The Benton Franklin Health District will not endorse a colon cancer billboard campaign after all.

Benton County Commissioner Jim Beaver, who is chairman the health district board, announced Thursday, “Benton County won’t be a supporter of that particular advertisement and that campaign.”

Plans were to bring the “What’s up your butt?” campaign from Yakima County to the Tri-Cities. It uses provocative language to encourage testing for colon cancer.

Read more: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2011/04/22/1980473/benton-franklin-health-district.html#storylink=mirelated#ixzz1NWTDYpPJ

Mr. Crabs Barred From Public Transit

The following comes to us via Lisa, in reply to “Bill To Ban B.O….Fails.”   I think you will agree that it’s a pretty clear-cut case of when someone should be barred from riding public transit.

From The Northern Light Police Report, Whatcom County, WA (some of the best reading in newspapers these days BTW)

August 28: A Whatcom Transit driver had to call police to intercede with an angry customer at a downtown bus stop. The customer was denied boarding because he was carrying a smelly, large plastic bag leaking fluid. He took offense at this, argued with the driver and then stood in the street to block the bus. The man explained to arriving officers that the bag contained fresh crab, and the leaking material was just seawater and crab juice. He was advised of the bus driver’s rights and responsibilities, and that blocking a vehicle constituted criminal disorderly conduct. Ultimately, the crabber decided to find alternative transportation and the driver departed on his seafood free bus route.

Mister Crabs is clearly at fault, here. Crab juice and seawater dripping all over the interior of the bus? That would REEK,  long after Mr. Crabs was gone.

The “Sunnyland Stench”

I would be remiss not to cover a current stench-situation in the town where I was born and raised, Bellingham, Washington. (no, not a suburb of Washington D.C., foreign folk – the state of Washington, NW corner of the U.S.).

Awful odor wafts over Bellingham neighborhoods

Coffee roasters, manufacturer possible sources

BELLINGHAM — An unpleasant odor wafting through neighborhoods has residents plugging their noses and searching for answers.

The offending aroma is known as the “Sunnyland Stench” in reference to the Sunnyland neighborhood, where the odor seems most prevalent. But people in neighborhoods such as York and Columbia also have smelled it, said Patrick McKee, the Sunnyland representative on the Mayor’s Neighborhood Advisory Commission.

The odor, described by residents as “chemical” and “sweet,” has been a problem for more than two years but has become stronger within the last year, McKee said….

Read the entire article

I hardly gave stench a second thought in Bellingham, growing up; it was just a fact of life. For the entire time that I was stretching into the 6’2″ frame I now occupy, the Georgia Pacific pulp mill was churning out emissions of one sort or another, down by the bay (it has in recent years severely cut back its operation). Its odor was so ubiquitous that a local publication once solicited opinions about what residents thought the “GP odor” smelled like. Opinions were of course, diverse, but the one I could relate to was “tuna on whitebread.”