LICENSE TO KILL

Here is a new study, from the University of Florida. It proves that you can indeed kill almost every hint of bacteria on your average rancid germ-filled household sponge by simply nuking it in the Microwave for two full minutes — which will, if you try it, turn your sponge into a smoking, smoldering extraterrestrial WMD device you cannot touch for about an hour lest you scald your fingertips and wonder what the hell a basic household sponge is made of that it doesn’t actually catch fire or liquefy after two minutes in a microwave. But hey, at least everything’s dead.

This is, of course, good news indeed, given how sponges are apparently astonishing factories for bacteria and the kitchen sinks they often hang around in are reportedly the absolute best (read: warm and wet, and not in the good way) places for germs to fester and breed and given how lots of people get sick every year from (apparently) licking the sink and given how we have very much become, after all, a quivering, twitching, germ-obsessed nation.

Then again, the human animal is, after all, one giant bacteria farm. It’s what we do. It’s who we are, ever since the first caveman scraped the greenish-brown gunk from a prehistoric pond and decided it would make a fabulous sauce for his wooly mammoth steak. To attempt to somehow remove ourselves from the germy/bacterial/viral miasma of existence is like trying to remove the white from death, the sigh from the orgasm, the sky from the color blue. Ain’t gonna happen. What’s more, it just makes God roll her eyes, and laugh.