ROGER BANNISTER AND THE THREE-LEGGED MAN
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
I don’t know if you realized the World Transplant Games scheduled for May 29 to June 5, 2021 in Houston were cancelled because of COVID 19. I am embarrassed to say that I am sorry about the cancellation, but I have to admit I have a problem with the games anyway.
Now look, I am a huge fan of international sports. I also support the Special Olympics, the Paraplegic Games and any kind of event that promotes persons running around in skimpy clothing. But this Transplant business is going too far.
First runners started shooting up with steroids to run faster, and then football players and weightlifters joined in to build massive muscles. Today we have the Transplant Games where athletes graft on body parts to reach even greater speeds. It took years of constant training before Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile. But now some guy with three legs is going to knock seconds, if not minutes off what was once considered unattainable. I ask you, is that fair?
This transplant business will ruin competitive sport as we know it. Not only sports: think of the confusion the fashion industry will face when some clown shows up at the Gap with three legs. And it will not stop there. Before you know it, female swimmers will be transplanting dorsal fins and webbing their feet.
“And what size sandals does madam wish to see?”
“Oh, something in a 42 flat.”
Olympic records will fall like dandruff on a midnight blue suit and it’s already started.
Do you remember Kevin Costner in Waterworld? We found out that Kevin has feet like a frog. He may look stupid, but by Gar, that boy can swim.
A few years later, Maid Marion saw his bare bottom in Robin Hood, the Prince of Thieves. I hope you noticed Kevin never showed her his feet. There is nothing that will cool off a burgeoning romance faster than seeing big flaps of skin between your true love’s toes. If he had showed her the old tootsies, Marion would have been Mrs. Sheriff of Nottingham before Friar Tuck fell off his beer wagon. The wicked Sheriff may have been a jerk, but at least she wouldn’t have to worry about the kids spending all day on a lily pad flicking their tongues at flies.
What the surgeons of today seem to forget is there is a natural order of things and men and women should not be fiddling around with Mother Nature. I can go along with breast transplants if for no other reason than I am a man and we are interested in that sort of thing. However, should the same woman add a third or fourth one, I would assume she was nothing but a show-off and would likely only stare for an hour or so before going about my business.
Granted enhancing one’s body by surgery is tempting. Even I once considered the possibility of offering myself up as a test dummy at the Electrolux School of Liposuction. Not because I need a few yards vacuumed off my middle, but hopefully my sacrifice of a stone or two of excess lard might enable some surgeon to get in a few hours practice before he tackles a really big job like… I had a name in there but common decency and sheer terror made me take it out.
Some nights I lie awake wondering just where humanity is heading as the medical scientists and surgeons become more and more skilled at revamping our bodies. No telling what I will look like when I reach 2050.
Most of us remember when a nose job was considered radical surgery. But getting the old honker repaired today is about as normal as having a tooth filled or having one’s ears stapled to the side of one’s head to cut down on wind resistance. One thing that does worry me though is that gradually we will all be changed to fit some stylist’s idea of the perfect man and the perfect women. Eventually, we will all look the same. That will be wonderful if all women look like Sophia Loren when she slinked down the stairs in that skin-tight yellow dress on Cary Grant’s houseboat. But what if a thousand years from now, all men look like Doug Ford? Or worse, what if they look like me?
Enough, my friends! We must stop foolishness like the Transplant Games before the world becomes…
“What?”
“Oh!”
Now aren’t I the silly ass? Mary just told me the Transplant Games are for people who have had organ transplants, not arms, legs, and feet.
I can’t comment on that. I know next to nothing about music.
