Frankie Say, “How’s Your Bird?”

The other day, President Bush outlined his plan for fighting the avian flu, or bird flu (not to be confused with the Evian flu, which is commonly known as bottled water flu, or the Elian flu, known as the underage Cuban political pawn flu, or the EvaGabor flu, known as the “Olivah, your hotscakes are retty” flu).

With all modesty, I must confess I have a better plan:

First, isolate the chicken farms of China and southeast Asia and treat every bird there with a strong strain of the Ebola virus. Then, among the birds still standing, expose them to SARS and feed them a steady diet of aspartame. For any infected waterfowl that migrate to North America, determine the most effective way to spread the flesh-eating bacteria identified in Toronto some years back and apply that. At the same time, set up feeding stations for the ducks and geese in the countryside to keep them away from cities and suburbs. These feeding centers would be stocked with grain laced with alar, anthrax, Legionnaire’s disease, the swine flu virus, and the human papilloma virus, just to be safe.

And any birds that emerge alive after all of that, we bow down and worship with tribute and sacrifice as if they were King Kong.

Now, my brother heard that Bush’s avian bird flu plan in large part relies on lifting restrictions for developing wetlands that harbor these “duck-billed pterrorists”, especially those areas that may contain oil. “Less birds, less flu,” the thinking goes. This can’t be true, can it?