We began this day with head-exploding stories from the Weird, Woke and Wonderful, so we might as well end with another. This one is genuinely funny; indeed it made me laugh out loud twice, something I haven’t been able to do for four weeks. Thank you, silly, humorless hyper-sensitive people!

As a special bonus, it involves a baseball team, and today is MLB’s Opening Day!

The St. Paul Saints announced the name for the baby pig that will deliver baseballs and provide refreshments for umpires during the first half of the 2024 season. This is a tradition for the minor league team, which has had many baseball pigs as mascots over thirty years. The Saints recently began using two pigs per season,because they grow so fast. This time, the fan submission included f a masterpiece of topical swine-naming: “Ozempig.” Here’s the announcement:

The name “Ozempig” was chosen from nearly 2,300 fan submissions this year, but when the name was announced, many on social media objected, calling it “fat-shaming.” Ozempic is a Type-2 diabetes drug that includes weight loss as a frequent side effect, and bootleg prescriptions for the drug have been used by Hollywood types and celebrities to lose weight. Negative reactions to the name on Instagram ranged from “this is not funny” to “big swing and a miss.” There were even pledges from some virtue-signaling fanatics to sit out the team’s home games this season as a principled progressive pig protest, or PPPP for short.

What is the matter with these people? My generally progressive sister, after laughing at the name and the protest approximately as heartily as I did, agreed that this reaction borders on mental illness. “And yet,” she said, “having talked with people like this, they really believe that they are on ‘the right side of history’.” She also agreed with me that it is a power play, like the Washington Red Skins foolishness. “You don’t think the team will capitulate and change the name, do you?” she asked.

“Well, this is how the crazies win,” I answered “It’s how we got from the Redskins controversy to declaring “Wuhan virus” racist to “No human being is illegal” to being offended by a punning name for a piglet. Most people are weenies. Most businesses are even weenier. It’s easy to just give up, take the path of least resistance, and say, ‘Oh, it’s not worth fighting about. Let them have their way, if they care so much.” As a result, the political correctness-driven censorship of humor becomes more and more oppressive.”

In fact, this incident rates an Ethics Alarms “Jacques Brel” designation, from the quote cited in the once popular 60’s musical revue, “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris”: “If you leave it to them they will crochet the world the color of goose shit.”

Maybe the team will not give in, however. Reader reaction to the Minneapolis Star Tribune story about the controversy attracted 167 comments and none of them supported the offended. Example: “On full display: Our society’s lost ability to know what is important to get upset and take issue with.”

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Pointer: JutGory

Note: WordPress’s bot thinks I should tag this post “Guinea Pigs.”