Things that start with P: purple, pineapple…

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/03/2018 (3034 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Today’s topic is about a medically sensitive area of the anatomy, which means if you are at all squeamish you should probably flip to the sports pages, where you can read about the Winnipeg Jets teenage scoring phenom Patrik Laine, who is from Finland, which last week was named the happiest country on the planet.

But I was not the happiest guy on the planet last week as I engaged in the main journalistic activity of big-shot newspaper columnists — randomly plugging words into the Google search engine just to see what comes up.

That is how I accidentally found myself on the website of Men’s Health magazine staring at a report that was illustrated with a drawing of an eggplant and appeared under the following alarming medical headline: “Five Reasons Why Your Penis Might Turn Purple.”

Do you know what important medical information this story relayed to sensitive guy readers such as myself? Ha, ha, ha! Well, I personally don’t have a clue because after reading the thought-provoking headline I clicked away faster than Donald Trump can type a factually incorrect tweet.

That is how I ended up reading an alarming story in Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper about a shocking mix-up involving a medically sensitive area of the mammalian anatomy, if you catch our subtle family newspaper drift.

The story described a crisis affecting the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which is home to the world’s largest collection of (OK, this is your last chance to flip to the sports pages) penises, private parts of all shapes and sizes from a wide array of mammals, including a 1.7-metre-tall, 165-pound sperm whale appendage, that have made the museum one of Reykjavik’s top tourist attractions.

The problem is the private parts museum is located in the same building, and has the same address, as the Reykjavik Coworking Unit, which has led to dozens and dozens of wayward tourists wandering into the coworking unit looking for… OK, you know exactly what they were looking for.

“You’d think you’d never grow tired of having people awkwardly ask you whether your office is the Penis Museum. But like all things, it gets old eventually,” is what one worker told the Daily Mail.

This explains why they stuck a sign on their office door stating: “This is not the penis museum. Go back to Laugavegur (the street), turn left (direction downtown), and walk 20 meters/60 feet. It will be on the same side. You can’t miss it. It has a big penis logo. Sincerely, the people who work here.”

You will not be surprised to hear that someone (OK, it was a former member of the Icelandic parliament) snapped a photo of the sign and uploaded it to Twitter, where it caused the social-media site to experience a meltdown of sorts.

That is the long and the short of it, so to speak, but it also put us in mind of another social media firestorm involving Iceland that we recently became aware of through the journalistic technique of randomly Googling stuff.

What happened was the president of Iceland, Guoni Th. Johannesson, caused the internet to explode when he waded into one of the most divisive debates in history — whether pineapple is an acceptable topping on pizza.

The president was speaking to a high school class in his country when a student asked him if he was a supporter of Hawaiian pizza, wherein pineapple and ham live together in harmony on top of a pizza pie.

That is when the president took a gutsy stand, announcing he is “fundamentally opposed” to fruit on pizza and, if he had the power, he would ban pineapple as a pizza topping, thereby causing people with too much time on their hands, both pro- and anti-pineapple, to vent their spleens via their high-speed Internet connections.

The president later clarified his position on Facebook: “I like pineapples, just not on pizza. I do not have the power to make laws which forbid people to put pineapples on their pizza. I am glad that I do not hold such power. Presidents should not have unlimited power.”

We agree that anyone guilty of putting pineapple on pizza should, at minimum, receive the death penalty, but we have to inform you that Iceland’s president apparently does not understand the motivational power of a really delicious slice of gooey cheesy goodness.

I say that because, while clicking away from the last story, I landed on a Fox News website (“If it happened, it’s news to us”) containing a news story about a study that found pizza is a bigger motivator than cash and can make employees more productive at work.

What happened was psychologist Dan Ariely conducted an experiment in which four separate groups of employees at a semiconductor factory were offered rewards for productivity — one group got a bonus of $30, another a compliment from their boss, another was offered nothing, and one group got pizza.

It turns out the promise of pizza was the biggest motivator, with dreams of cheesy carbs increasing worker productivity by 6.7 per cent on the first day.

Out of journalistic fairness, I will confess that I have suggested to my editors that I could be induced to work significantly harder if I believed there was a pizza waiting for me at the end.

Unless, of course, it was a pineapple pizza, which I would refuse to eat and would cause me to hold my breath until I turned purple, which, if you recall the beginning of this column, is a very bad sign, medically speaking.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca