Tuesday, March 07, 2006

A Seductive Enemy

 
The Journal of Ongoing Litigation reports:

In the last few months there has been a groundswell of class-action litigation filed from all over the country against ‘Big Sleep’ – the mattress and bed industry. The plaintiffs are citing hospital and funeral home statistics, which indicate that at least 93% of Americans die in bed, up from 77% in 1968.

A spokesman for one plaintiffs’ group in Oregon says, “Why isn’t there any outrage about this? ‘Big Sleep’ is causing mortality at twenty times the rate of drunk driving, but you don’t hear about MASP – Mothers Against Sealy Posturepedic!”

The American Society Supporting Less Inherently Comfortable Environments (ASSLICE) recommends that the following steps be taken by the US sleep industry:

The stealth destroyer?
  1. Make mattresses harder and more lumpy. People will thus spend less time in bed, increasing their chances of survival.
  2. Increase normal working hours to 12 daily, and extend the work week to include Saturday, thus removing some of the opportunities to encouch oneself.
  3. Persuade the President to spearhead an advertising campaign in the national media, ridiculing those who spend large amounts of time in bed, and also linking sleep-related behavior to various disorders.
  4. Initiate a study (perhaps supported by a grant from the NIH) to find and test alternative methods of sleeping, e.g. standing in a line at the bank, hanging upside down from tree limbs, etc.
It remains to be seen whether juries will find the arguments compelling enough to order the kind of cash awards that will make Big Sleep sit up and take notice. But I’d keep my eye on this one.


As a4g says: Yes, it’s satire.

6 comments:

Wally Ballou said...

Finally - a use for the International space station - they sleep standing up in straps up there. We just need more of them. I'd like to vote on who gets sent.


This whole mattress situation is really "ticking" me off. We shouldn't take it lying down - we should spring into action and tell Big Sleep to take its cushy mattresses and stuff them.

Decline to recline!

It's too bad you had to label the post "satire" but it's probably wise - the world is full of humor-impaired people.

Wally Ballou said...

The answer to the mattress threat is in New orlaens - or was - maybe that's why the Bush cabal had the Big Easy destroyed. They were in the pay of Big S. Look at this listing of the Walter C. Carey Papers, in the Manuscripts Collection of the New Orleans Public Library

About quarter-way down:

"The design and construction of the reinforced asphalt mattress." Published in Military Engineer (Nov.-Dec., 1935)

Must have been suppressed.

Baron Bodissey said...

Wally, I found out the hard way that I'd better label a satire as such. People get upset if they think they are reading a real news story, and then find out I made it up.

Also, given the fact that so many things today fall under the heading of "You Can't Satirize This", if I'm any good at such things, no one can tell it from the real thing.

Prominent example: The Rachel Corrie Memorial Pancake Breakfast. Not a joke -- look it up (I found it in LGF, but it's probably a DU project). You might even consider breaking the carb rule and down a flapjack in her honor.

Solomon2 said...

Outlaw mattresses entirely! That way people can never die in bed!

unaha-closp said...

Unfortunately simple alternative treatments (futons, hamocks) have been unable to limit the incidence of sleep related deaths. It is only through the making of significant lifestyle changes that reduction in sleep lethality is achieved. It is recomended therefore that greater effort is made to educate people in the benefits of regular base jumping, motorcycle riding, pot holing and drying-hair-whilst-bathing.

Coupled to this educational approach we will continue to lobby our representatives for the use of death penalty for the crimes of jay-walking, using cell phones in movie theaters and driving slowly in the fast lane.

Join us at PATSI (People Against Terminal Sleep Illness) as we attempt to wake up the world.

Rick Darby said...

This is only the tip of the iceberg. I am consulting an attorney as to the possibility of suing over the amount of passive sleeping I have absorbed from government employees while waiting in motor vehicle bureaus and post offices.