Good News, Bad News Part 2

There is good news for lobsters. If you were one and you’re in Switzerland. Why? Below was a news item in Switzerland last week, picked up by CNN and The Washington Post.

“This week, the Swiss Federal Council banned cooks from placing live lobsters in boiling water, and as of March 1, all lobsters must first be knocked unconscious by electric shock or “mechanical destruction” of the brain’.

But there is bad news. If you were a lobster, Swiss mandate notwithstanding, you’d still be in a dish somewhere, garnished with all the trimmings or simply dipped in melted butter or in vinegar with minced garlic and a dash of sea salt - all delectably enticing to the palate.

Good news, bad news jests are a distinct comedic genre by itself, sometimes morbid but mostly really funny if taken a certain way, with a swig of good humor.

Please don’t take this as if I am making light of the conditions suffered by POWs in WWII because this is simply all about humor. I remember a couple of ones that had made their rounds for quite some time – from decades ago.

Allied prisoners in a POW camp were gathered up for a word from the German commander.

Commander: “I have good news and bad news”. (He paused for a prompt from his captive audience)

Prisoners: “Tell us the good news first”.

Commander: “It has been months since you had a change of clothing, and a month since you had a warm bath, so today you will have a change of underware”. (Again, he paused).

Prisoners: What is the bad news?

Commander: (Motioning with his hand dividing the prisoners in half) “This half to my left, please exchange your underware with those to my right”.

Weeks later, the same commander assembled the prisoners again.

Commander: Which one do you want to hear first, good news or bad news?

Prisoners: (Sensing that it is better to hear the worse first, get it over with and hope for a redeeming good news), they collectively yelled, “Let’s hear the bad news first”.

Commander: “As you know, winter conditions have brought us very limited food supplies. Beginning today, there is nothing to eat but cow dung”.

Prisoners: (What could possibly be worse than that, so they were eager to hear the good news) “Tell us what’s good!”

Commander: “The good news is that we have mountains and mountains of cow dung”.

Internationally, humor transcends cultural boundaries. I got the following one from a Filipino.

 It was funny in Tagalog and here’s how it translated.

Doc: “I have good news and bad news”.

Patient: “What is the good news”?

Doc: “You are going to die tomorrow.”

Patient: “What could possibly be worse than that?”

Doc: “I forgot to tell you this yesterday.”

Seriously now. Our daily lives oscillate with good news/bad news, in one form or another.  If we want to get to work free of traffic congestion we get an early morning start. That might not seem so bad but in some places it can be taken to extremes. In Manila or Bangkok, and in a lot of densely populated metropolitan capitals, some folks leave for work at 4:00 a.m. to avoid the notoriously clogged arteries toward the workplace. But it means going to bed the night before at 8:00 or 9:00 p.m. to get up at 3-3:30 a.m. if one were to have the proper amount of sleep. In Manila, or Mumbai, a good paying job is at call centers that involve customer support tending to accounting questions, warranty and repair request services, answering technical questions, etc. If the call center is geared towards the U.S., it means working at night in Manila or Mumbai to respond to questions from the U.S. whose customers predominantly call during U.S. daytime hours. English conversant but mostly young people who do these jobs are well compensated for their work. Unfortunately, they go to work when regular workers are going home to have family dinners or social evening functions.  The good news is that they are always going against traffic. The bad news is going to bed when all others are up, so noise and ambient daylight make for sleeping soundly a major challenge. The good news is that businesses are responding to their needs. There are now daylight night clubs. A contradiction in terms but these places are designed to isolate daylight from the outside with opaque windows so that once inside the patrons can’t tell the difference. "Evening" dinners are served and dancing completes the night time activities. All good until they come out to a blinding sun.  It is always good news, bad news isn’t it.

In the animal world, good news/bad news is the prevailing daily scenario. Herbivores feed on stationary vegetation that hardly offer resistance or attempt to run away from them. The bad news is that herbivores are often prey animals to predators they are prepared to and must run away from at a split second notice. Predators have it good in that they do not have to spend a lot of their waking hours feeding, unlike their prey animals that spend 10-14 hours dining on plants. The bad news for predators is that their prey is not that easy to catch. Even the most efficient pack hunters have a catch ratio of about 25%. Juvenile lions were observed achieving very low percentages like succeeding only in one-out-of-ten attempts. Cheetahs must catch their prey within 15 to 30 seconds from the first bound or they won’t catch them at all. Gazelles, Impalas and Springbok are no slouch when it comes to running. For every bit of good news there is an equal but opposite amount of bad news. Don’t hold me to that theory but it is a good one, isn't it, albeit unencumbered by research or a doctoral thesis.

A fair question is why must there be good news, bad news in life. Well, would we appreciate daylight if not for the limiting conditions of nightfall? Would we plead for relief if not for the ill-effects of pain or exhaustion? Would we work so hard for a living if it were not for the realization that the alternative could be abject poverty? 

Good news, bad news are built into the universe and how it came to be.  From nothing was a huge explosion 13.5 billion years ago, according to cosmologists, though not too differently from how the Book of Genesis describes creation.  From nothing came something. The universe may not be what it is if the bad news part prevailed in its early inception.

"Let there be light" was, strangely enough, no different from the cosmological version of a sudden explosion from an infinitely small, dimensionless point to the blinding and energetic Big Bang. No longer debatable since galaxies are without a doubt observed hurtling at tremendous speeds away from each other as seen from ground telescopes at Palomar or through the crystal clear optics of the Hubble Space Telescope. As the theory goes, at some point, in the distant past, they must have all originated from a single point. Suffice it to say that the mathematics and calculations support it.  What is not widely known is how physical matter we see and feel today could not have come about except for one good news overcoming bad news in the beginning. I am going to go "nerdy" here but I promise it will be painless.

During the rapid expansion, the inflation of the "baby" universe, pure energy coalesced into sub-atomic particles first, then creating matter and anti-matter. Anti-matter does not exist naturally here anymore but at CERN (particle collider) anti-matter is created routinely from heavy particle collisions.

As energy condensed into particles, both regular matter and anti-matter were created. But matter and anti-matter annihilate each other reverting everything into energy.  In other words, had that prevailed, matter as we know it today will not exist. That was the bad news. But, as luck would have it, or as willed by the Creator, for every billion particles of anti-matter, there was a billion and one particle of matter. That was the good news. For every billion of matter destroyed by collision with a billion of anti-matter, one particle of matter survived from each of those infinite encounters. That was all the universe needed. Everything you see around us are the remainder of all the collisions. Now, if you do not behold that as the ultimate bad news, good  news you're not living in this universe.

That was not so painful.  Not as much as the pain the hapless lobsters must feel, according to the Swiss proponents of the mandate. However, researchers dispute the conclusion that lobsters feel pain. We must believe that the Creator had provided for that though that should be for a religious discussion. However, we must agree that if the lobsters end up on the dining table, electric-shocked or thrown into boiling water, hardly makes a difference to their predicament. They are food to us. Octopus and other predators like them too. Like all food staples, their edibility is their worse asset.

Good news, bad news is here for good. How we deal with them is what life is all about. The tally of our experiences are a balance sheet of good news and bad news.