Penkava: An unbearable approach to logic

I happened to glance down at where my wife was in her magazine and saw a page that had a photo of a bear. I wondered how a bear would make our home and garden better, so I asked my wife.

“No, Mike, I’m not thinking about getting a giant brown bear to improve the potency of our compost. It’s an advertisement.”

“We could call the bear ‘Larry.’ I always liked that name.”

“Michael, it’s an ad. Just look at the squirrels.”

But there was something intriguing about that bear photo, so I politely asked to see the ad. Above the bear in big letters it read:

Bears.

Bears love the taste of berries.

Bears don’t cough.

You draw the conclusion.

Under the picture of the bear was an offer of a new berry-flavored cough syrup.

What conclusion should I draw? This is like a puzzle. Let’s see … there are these bears, right? They are eating berries. Then they don’t cough. What does it all mean?

My first thought was that perhaps it means that bears that eat berries and are not coughing have developed an autoimmune system resistant to pulmonary irritant receptors in the epithelium of the respiratory tract. But that sounded too simple.

Maybe berry-eating bears are just too busy eating berries to cough. You know, when you’re so focused on something that you forget to do something else, such as when you’re so busy writing a column in your office that you forget that it’s time to watch “The Littlest Groom,” a reality show in which a group of tiny bachelorettes compete against average-sized women for the heart of a 4-foot, 5-inch bachelor. That would make anyone forget to cough, right?

Another theory I had about the noncoughing bears is that it is possible that the bears, in search of berries, have broken into someone’s camp and stole a backpack that contained a bottle of this new cough medicine. Somehow they opened the bottle, drank the contents, and now are wandering the forests cough-free.