#1201 Got Sand

I read this magazine article about how beer is good for your health. As I’ve commented before about how beer was the original energy drink, it made me perk up.
Let me refresh you too. Archeologists have determined that in the early days of civilization, primitive man’s first use of yeast was to make beer. Making bread came later. In what was widely viewed as the first instance of not just civilization but capitalism, they eventually learned to make bread from beer.
All that is old news. The new news is that beer is good for osteoporosis. Which is fortunate, because other aspects of the beer-drinking lifestyle, namely laying on the couch and doing nothing, are not good for bone density.
If you don’t exercise your muscles, they don’t provide pressure to your bones to increase bone density. That’s why doctors recommend weight training for oldsters.
Couch potatoes need some help. So it’s nice to know drinking beer is part of the solution. Turns out beer has lots of silicon in it, which increases bone density. Silicon is what sand is mostly made of.
So maybe when the bully was picking on that 99-pound weakling in the Charles Atlas matchbook ads he was doing the weakling a favor. Making him eat sand and all.
Instead of running off and signing up for a Charles Atlas muscle building course, the victim could have been saying, “Thank you, Mr. Bully sir, as you just gave my metabolism the opportunity to increase it’s bone density. And anthropologists have indicated it’s easier to attract the opposite sex for purposes of promulgation of the species if one has evidence of genetic health and vigor displayed by the erect posture promoted by bone density.”
The bully would have wandered off shaking his head—after pounding the smart-aleck weakling one more time in the sand for good measure.
There may be something to this, even in our language. The expression “that guy’s got sand” is a description of a person who is tough. And tough people aren’t known for brittle bones.
Then again, they also make glass out of sand.
Which is handy, since glass is the perfect container for beer.
America, ya gotta love it.