Nuclear Puffs?
Radioactive Tissue Boxes Point To Conspiracy

I'm not sure if we should blame al-Qaeda or the giant drug conglomerates that make up Big Pharma, but I know one thing is for certain: a conspiracy is afoot.

I realized this after reading a news story regarding retailer Bed, Bath and Beyond over the weekend. The firm was recalling tissue holders they had sold which had been found to be radioactive.

That's right. Radioactive! That cutesy ceramic container holding the box of Puff's in your bathroom, just might be nuclear!

Apparently these radioactive tissue boxes weren't sold at all Bed, Bath and Beyond stores, but one location in St. Louis did get a dozen. Six of the contaminated containers have been recovered, but the others are still at large.

There is the nagging -- and at the time of this writing, still unanswered -- question as to how some simple tissue holders exactly became radioactive. Could this be a new type of attack by al-Qaeda?

Perhaps its members realized that American culture embraces not only baseball, hotdogs and apple pie, but also cutesy containers to hold our various disposable paper products. And what better way to create fear and doubt with the American public than to make them afraid to blow their own noses? This is practically textbook terrorism, rooted in the Tylenol-poisoning scare of 1982.

It would not surprise me if al-Qaeda is already thinking beyond just contaminating our cutesy containers and is exploring ways of infiltrating a Georgia Pacific plant and lacing plutonium-239 into random batches of toilet tissue. I could have a roll of Nuclear Northern sitting in my bathroom right now! Is it safe to wipe? Has anyone thought to notify Homeland Security?

While I feel al-Qaeda is the likeliest culprit for this predicament, I do think there is a chance that they're not to blame. Maybe instead these radioactive tissue containers are not actually a menace to society, but in fact a miraculous healthcare breakthrough comparable to the engine that runs on water, which everyone knows Big Oil smothered back in the 1920s.

Perhaps, someone discovered that if you have the sniffles and blow your nose with a slightly radioactive Kleenex that the cold goes away. It sounds plausible to me. Certain kinds of radioactivity in certain size doses kills certain kinds of cancer, so why not the flu?

And of course Big Pharma would want to cover up an innovation of this magnitude. Remedies and prescription drugs for the common cold generate billions of dollars in annual revenue for these firms. If you can cure what ails you by blowing your nose with a tissue that has been slightly radiated by the container it is in, it would be devastating to the bottom lines of a whole lot of drug companies.

If this were the case, Big Pharma would want to throttle this innovation as quickly as possible and what better way to both snuff it out and shift the public's focus, than to suggest it is the machinations of a notorious terrorist organization?

I have no proof as to which group is responsible, but I'm positive one of these organizations has something to do with these radioactive tissue holders.

I know that I probably don't have anything to worry about. It's been several years since my wife and I have visited a Bed, Bath and Beyond and while I'm not the most observant fellow, I'm 90 percent sure that my wife hasn't gotten any new tissue holders for our home recently.

However, I do believe you can't be too careful, so if you happen to be visiting a public toilet and hear a clicking sound coming from one of the stalls don't be alarmed. That's probably me with my Geiger counter.