It’s the Worst Flu Season in a Decade! Is Your Own Video Game Controller Beating You in the Scrote With the Germ Stick?

Spoiler: Yes. Yes it is.

Doctors, actual doctors of medicine, say so. (Not enterprising paleontologists, who spend their days with their gloved hands firmly ensconced in heaps of dinosaur excrement. No one would involve those crazy bastards in matters pertaining to personal hygiene. Nor, incidentally, do they care to see/prescribe a cream for that thing growing on your dick.) You don't eff around with doctors. They know their shit.

As such, it's disconcerting indeed to hear of the extent of this year's flu blight. Having just hauled their collective asses off of their couches following the holiday hangovers (and, perhaps, in the midst of wiping the vomit/piss from the upholstery) mankind was further struck by a righteous jackboot of germ-pain to the plums. As a report from this morning laments, ‘Doctors are now calling this the worst outbreak in more than a decade... in fact, 41 states have reported cases of the virus and in some cities, emergency rooms are overflowing.' (-www.abclocal.go.com) Or, as another reputable medical practitioner proclaimed, "several kinds of holy shit are converging, right here. It's like the days of the Black Plague that ravaged Europe; the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are stabbing us in the nutsack with wanton abandon."

We'll concede, they didn't say this, even slightly, but it's certainly true.

How, prithee, do these uber-bastardly germs from Satan's rectum spread so easily? Healthychild.org introduces us to the OCD-inducing notion of CFUs (colony-forming units) per square inch, as a manner of ascertaining how many of these invisible, homocidal mofos reside around us. A computer mouse in an office/school is festooned with 23, for instance, while a restaurant food tray harbors 204. For a video game controller at an arcade, the figure is a discomfiting 551. You'd be forgiven, then, for striding over to your nearest hospital, pounding your meaty fists on the windows and shrieking, "What the shit, man? How much disease-y diseaseness is on my game controllers at home? I must know!"

You'd have right on your side, that's for sure.

Or something to that effect. It's abundantly plain, nonetheless, that disinfecting your gaming paraphernalia is an odd concept for all but the most neurotic. Most pertinently, this heightened epidemic is a pre-ordained downfall of the holiday season, where we're all gathering for social merriment/alcohol consumption/the annual opportunity to all bitch en masse about those goddamn in-laws. As our pissed great-uncles get their dicks out. Again. For the germs, then, opportunities are as bountiful as for a veteran ogler at a nudist colony.

He/she can only hope that it isn't over 75's beach volleyball day.