For those of you visiting California, or for those who haven’t been in California since February 2011, you may find something very unsettling every time you buy anything to eat…or enter a building….or buy clothes….or shoes….or a car….or pretty much anything. In California, there is a certain thing called Proposition 65. It has nothing to do with gay marriage, so if you vote against it, there really isn’t anything to fight with your family about at Thanksgiving.
Proposition 65, was born in 1986, just like me, and it requires businesses to post a notice if there are any chemicals known to cause cancer present. There are 800 chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer. Kentucky doesn’t know anything about these chemicals. Kentucky hasn’t even found out about tobacco yet (shhhh don’t tell).
800, is a lot of chemicals. Therefore, these signs are everywhere! Like on your shoes, on your car, on your apartment building, and since February 2011, at your local Starbucks. Now, since I work at the green logoed “Central Perk” I have recently been confronted about our cancer causing coffee (what great alliteration!!!).
The warning looks horrible, and basically says that something in this place causes cancer, and they put it right on the condiment bar. So, as soon as you buy your coffee, and start to put sugar and cream in it, and get ready for that first sip, you brace yourself, and read about how you’re going to die or have to pay for chemo, and cause your family tears and gnashing of teeth (And you thought paying $4.05 for a latte was bad). So people flip out and bring their coffee back to me, with a look of “Take this cancer out of it! I didn’t order that!” and then they ask if our tea has, “All those chemicals in it too?” I have to tell them that those signs are everywhere and we are the only place dumb enough to put it out in a very visible spot. I’ve done some research and found out that the sign is because when you cook certain things past a certain temperature, they naturally create a chemical that some Sweedes back in 2002, discovered caused cancer in lab rats. So, roasted coffee beans could….haven’t…but could cause cancer in a lab rat.
So, there you have it, people who don’t live in California. There are things, almost as bad as the stupid people in LA, they are these signs about how all the chemicals in the world are going to kill you.
Another stupid California thing, is that LA needs subways. There is no parking in most of the city, there is way too much traffic and pollution, and the place is way too crowded. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are subways, but there aren’t enough subways stops for people to get to where they need to go. I take the subway, but I have to drive to the station, and park my car there….yeah, that kind of defeats the purpose of taking the subway, but it saves me money on having to park in Hollywood.
So to summarize: Cancer warning signs and driving to the train stop, are dumb. Get it together LA.
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