The blightings on the wall

Something struck me yesterday when I was in the toilet at the pub. Thankfully it was a thought, because it does not bear thinking about what sort of thing would strike you in the toilet at the pub if the thing that strikes you is not a thought. Anyway, I was thinking about the occasional 'because it's good for you' government-sponsored health advertisement you see in bars and pubs around the city. (Because if you can read it in proximity to the occasional dirty limericks you get on dunny walls at pubs, then you've really got to believe it.)

So, I thought, why doesn't the Health Department at the government get into the business of writing dirty limericks, toilet wall poems, and the like? Clearly-printed, neat, bureaucratically-produced saucy limericks about sexually-transmissible diseases, that sort of thing?

There'd be the standard warnings about the importance of contraception:

If you have unprotected sex, you'll probably get rabies,

Or any number of other diseases, such as lower-class babies.

If it's by the government, it wouldn't be the same without anti-smoking propaganda:

Regret regret

The cigarette

The cigarette

 Regret regret

The cigarette

Upset upset

Upset upset

The cigarette

Dead yet dead yet

The cigarette

The cigarette

Dead yet dead yet.

These days, funnily enough, you only seem to hear about legal drugs being bad for you, but the risky behaviour of illegal drug users would get the occasional look in:

Little needle -

Small disease -

Huge burden on the public health system -

Taxes please.

And of course I suppose you'd occasionally have to put up with a spot of nakedly self-interested political barracking. There's poetry for that, too:

Vote for Gillard vote for Gillard

You'll be full of vim and vigour

Vote for Gillard vote for Gillard

And the parts that you want will get smaller and the parts that you want will get bigger

Vote for Gillard vote for Gillard

You'll eat better every day

Vote for Gillard vote for Gillard

Everything you worry about will just wash away

Vote for Gillard vote for Gillard

Your life will be a ballad sung by Anthony Calleja

Don't vote Abbott don't vote Abbott

You'll get gonorrhea. 

Hey, everyone, I think this thing's a goer. Excuse me while I get the Health Department on the line and work up my application to be the first publicly-sponsored Sycophant Poet Laureate....