Over the last few minutes I've noticed that the domain of the heart smart has been slowly extending its tentacles beyond the kitchen. It now pays to be heart smart in the office, in the gym, even (yes) in the bedroom. I wonder what people will think when the heart smart hegemony conquers the rest of the world - and beyond?

THE SEA

(thinks) Hmmm... well, the sea is full of fish, and seafood's supposed to pretty good for the heart, with all those unsaturated fats, and then there's the exercise you get from swimming, and I bet there's tons of great minerals down around the seafloor... especially near that trench?... but then the sea's really salty, and I've gotta watch my sodium... plus my lungs aren't optimized for the extraction of oxygen from water. How'm I gonna breathe down there, anyway? Guess the sea isn't so heart smart after all.

VOLCANOES

Well, I'm sure that all that lava's gotta have some great minerals, probably iron, which I need because I'm kind of anemic, and anemia can't be good for the heart... plus a lot of those volcanoes sit around the Pacific Rim, and people eat lots of fish there. That's healthy, yeah? I could jog up and down the side of the volcano, and that's good aerobic exercise... mind you, the incline's hard on my tendons, and I don't want to screw up my knees from excessive jogging, there's such a thing as being too heart smart, I've heard... can you be knee smart and heart smart at the same time, or is it a necessary tradeoff?

AFGHANISTAN

Slim pickings here. I don't know much about geopolitics these days, but unexploded cluster bombs can't be too heart smart to pick up. There's a lot of running whenever US planes buzz overhead, but I've heard about the effects of stress hormones on the circulatory system. I wonder if opium lowers blood cholesterol levels? Bet it does. There's a dead guy floating in the well... you can see his face if you lower a candle in a basket. It's hard to be heart smart in Afghanistan.

MARS

Sigh. The time has come to be heart smart in outer space. What a pain.

parode - exode