Such a Nice Laboratory, It’d Be A Shame If Something Were To Happen To It
By: A George Bush Goon

Well, well, if it isn’t Dr. Logan, the esteemed environmental scientist. Finally we meet! I’m a big fan of your work. I just read the most recent paper on global warming you submitted to Science the other day. Very alarming. Anyway, my colleague Clyde here and I just happened to be in the Princeton campus area and wanted to stop by and pass along our kudos on behalf of the Bush administration.

Lots of fancy looking equipment here. What’s that one? High Perfomance Liquid Chromatography? Wow, that’s a mouthful. You use that one in your ongoing study of PCB and pesticide levels of our nation’s coastal regions? Yeah? Boy, that’s one important machine, then. Be a real shame if something were to happen to it. Hypothetically speaking, of course, but accidents do happen, don’t they?

Hey, I remember these from high school. What are they called again? That’s right, Erlenmeyer flasks. Now Clyde, you be careful with those; you know how clumsy you are sometimes. Whoops! Ahh, that’s too bad. Sorry for the mess. See? I told you my partner is clumsy. You should see him with a flame thrower.

But what do a couple of flasks cost? I’m sure my boss ain’t squeezing you so hard you can’t afford to replace a couple Oppenmeyer flasks or whatever the fuck. I mean it’s not like Clyde came in here in the middle of the night with a tire iron and smashed the shit out of all your computers or nothin’, am I right?

Of course, just between you and me, you could probably get a lot more federal grants and afford all the test tubes and Mass Spectrometer doohickies you wanted if you changed your tune just a bit – you know, cheered your research up a little. You see, speaking for myself, I don’t mind reading about how the melting of all those glaciers is freshening the oceans and stalling their heat circulation system, and how this will eventually cause England and Northern Europe to more resemble Alaska, their latitudinal counterpart, but Mr. Bush, eh, you know, he’s more of a softie than me. You see doc, my boss likes a happy ending. He don’t pay money to go to the movies to see the story of some sorry bastard who loses his job and ends up begging for change on the street because, despite his fancy Ivy League education, he’s too dumb to know what’s best for him, and he don’t pay money to read about how rising global temperatures induced by greenhouse gases are making cute and cuddly polar bears starve to death up north, capisci?

Now if you’ll excuse me, the sight of watching Clyde scarf down your tuna sandwich has made me a bit hungry. Guess there’s no such thing as a free lunch, eh Dr. Logan? Uh oh, there goes a bottle of buffer all over the floor. Let’s go Clyde; you’re like a bull in a china shop.