Hamburger gases

A few years ago I heard that MacDonalds had at last managed to persuade the city council of Ponta Delgada on the island of São Miguel in the Azores to allow it to open a fast food joint there. However, very soon after operations commenced, the neighborhood of Laranjeiras, where the three arches had been plonked down, was up in arms about the malodorous fumes they claimed were being emitted by the burger manufacturer. That reminded me of Evelyn Waugh’s claims in his column in the Times Literary Supplement from a long time ago (around 2001, if you want to know) that “hamburger gases” were responsible for the “dumbing down” of the USA.

Of course here in Boganville “Mackers” supplies the staple (solidish) diet of Bogans; their liquid diet consists of copious quantities of VB (a “beer” so hideous that I suspect it is extracted from concentrated kangaroo urine), Coca Cola, and of course vodka/rum/bourbon/gutter whisky mixed with all kinds of soft drinks in the so-called alco-pops - cans of premixed drinks. Now, taking this diet into consideration, one comes to the inevitable conclusion that the hamburger gases in combination with alcoholic liquids of dubious nature must be responsible for the strange phenomena one observes here, like people wearing their baseball caps back to front (clearly their disorientation has reached the epic levels where they can no longer discern the front of their heads from the backs); trousers with the waistbands around their lower buttocks would indicate that they are no longer capable of pulling up their pants, or that they are so befuddled that they no longer know their waistlines from their posteriors; and their general method of locomotion is vaguely reminiscent of that of an inebriated ourang-outang with an urgent need to relieve itself.

Perhaps the noxious combination of hamburger gasses and rot-gut alcoholic drinks also explains their fascination with “music” which consists of mere thumps and grunts and flatulent-sounding oral exhalations. One can surmise that families of Neanderthals would have produced similar sounds to amuse themselves around their fires at night…

Another effect of hamburger gases, it seems, is their inability to enunciate properly. Their “language” consists of vaguely human sounding squeals and nasal whines and vowels flattened to the point of extinction. Their vocabulary, indeed, has clearly been severely affected by the perniciously deleterious effects of their diet, said vocabulary being reduced to the f-word and a few other expletives, interspersed with “aawwhhhs” and “duhs”.

Clearly, one should be aware of the effects of hamburger gases and avoid them at all costs, especially if one regularly imbibes liquors produced originally as cockroach poisons.