Many a hearty winter Canadian will brave the snow and ice for their morning coffee and a Timbit. It has becomes somewhat of a national ritual and unbeknownst to the masses, a secret testing ground for the fossil fuel industry. Muahahaha.
For those of you south of the border, no not the Rio Grande, south of THE border…it’s all relative you know…a Timbit has been a Canadian institution for decades. You have your Twinkie (or the newer smaller and less creamy Twinkie imposter), and we have our Tim Horton’s doughnut hole— the Timbit, still as corrosive as it ever has been.
Human blood vessels were not designed to effectively process doughy rancid fat sponges, but as long as we don’t jam them in like sugar-junky tic-tac-popping gluttons we should be able to avoid bursting an artery. Just to be safe though, the cautious Canadian combines the bite-a-ten (10-pack) of cholesterol balls with a suitable diluent.
Coffee of course is the fluid of choice. It not only liquifies the solid oil for easier passage, but it also creates the spike in pumping pressure crucial to ensuring those nasty little plaque-inducing globules don’t cause blockages. The thinning fluid is especially important because the Timbit, unlike a regular doughnut, does not have any space in the centre through which blood can flow freely…it is the material equivalent of a hole, the anti-hole so to speak.
And now for the juicy stuff (remember that you read it here first).
Since 1976 (curiously the year Enbridge’s Line 9 was built), the fossil fuel industry have enlisted a variety of clandestine test subjects all along the Toronto-Montreal corridor who have been “processing” 240,000 Timbits per day. Understandably, there has been random spewage, but the question that really drives the experimenters is how much more can one person safely eat?
After 37 years of cooperative clinical trials, the major players in the Canadian fossil fuel industry have finally agreed upon the maximum rate of Timbit consumption that a 6-foot tall adult male of average weight can withstand before exploding.
Furthermore, in the unlikely event that other unforeseen factors could trigger a smaller rupture while a subject does laps in a pool, no doubt to burn up all the excess fuel thereby contributing to greenhouse gas emissions— CO2 and methane (try eating 240,000 Timbits and you’ll smell what I mean), the studies conclude that the cleanup would be a simple matter of skimming the mess off the surface of the water with a fancy shop vac. Right.
So what’s the verdict?
Since the current consumption rate of 240,000 Timbits no longer supports the business plan targets of the industry, 300,000 Timbits per day is the new “black” standard.
And blacker than black it is!
From the land of the Timbit comes the DilBit— a food item generally NOT considered safe for human consumption but miraculously considered safe for Gaia’s consumption.
“That’s nonsense,” you say. “No one is saying that DilBit [diluted bitumen] is environmentally safe. On the contrary, scientists are very specific about the carcinogenic, corrosive, hormone disruptive, explosive, and immune system and DNA function jamming qualities of the bitumen and benzene, naphta, toluene, and micro-polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) diluent.”
Well, I beg to differ purely based on behaviour.
If we really believed that the over 90% probability of rupture of Enbridge’s Line 9 and the subsequent contamination of the rivers flowing into Lake Ontario would doom millions of people to cancer-infested drinking water, why would we approve of an aging pipeline system prone to rupture (see this article on the 2010 Kalamazoo Spill) transporting 300,000 barrels per day of trendy little moat monster balls, the nouveau prairie oyster delicacy from Alberta?
There must be a subconscious belief that even though we have no clue how to clean up the muck that DOES sink in water and the carcinogens that dissolve rather than float on top, our urban watersheds know how to do this for us. Gaia’s blood vessels were not designed to process bitumen. That’s why it’s buried in the Tar Sands.
Or there must be some underlying belief that “Coffee and the DilBit” is actually an improvement over “Coffee and the Timbit”, because that’s exactly what would give our morning brew the little je-ne-sais-quoi.
Or…Shriek!…It’s a conspiracy! Timbits have been laced with DilBit the whole time (remember…1976) and all Canadians are now immune to its effect.
Phew! Good thing Harper revamped the tax policy to bring the Timbit back to Canada, eh?
Photo Credits:
Coffee and Timbit via The Star
Oil spill via Inhabitat.com
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