1418 Good Wood

Everybody likes a good wood story. Like the news recently about an Australian pilot who was attempting to land a vintage plane. Apparently, he lost control and it headed off the runway to certain doom. Except he ran into 20-ton heap of chicken droppings mixed with sawdust.
Although it hasn’t been scientifically tested, it appears chicken/sawdust manure has all the makings of freeway crash barrier material. It absorbed just enough of the impact to save the pilot’s life. No word whether 20 tons of chicken manure were the direct result of “factory farm” chickens but it’s certainly a possibility. Everything has its bright side.
The pilot was happy as well. “I’m still a little stiff,” he said “but the stuff was just firm enough. I’d been a goner if I ran into a pool of chicken spit.”
Which is probably about as low as the Rolaids company feels. They recently recalled a batch of the antacids. About 13 million packages to be exact. Turns out they may contain wood and metal shavings. Rolaids is made by Johnson and Johnson, the same company that had to recall 136 million bottles of children’s Tylenol because of “manufacturing defects”.
The odd thing is, I didn’t hear a big media outcry over the whole thing, just a small item in CNN Money. I guess not many people were hurt by ingesting wood. Who knows? Maybe the shavings actually worked well to quell acid indigestion.
Next time I’ve got an upset stomach, I’ll just raid the pencil sharpener. Or not. Maybe there’s danger from lead in the pencil.
So there you go. Sawdust mixed with chicken poop preventing a guy’s death and wood shavings curing antacid...
How good to have wood in your life.
America, ya gotta love it.