nut allergies are very serious, and also sound funny the more often you say "nut"

I would like to alert readers of this blog to a year-and-a-half old item that is suddenly generating new controversy in the comments.

I originally wrote about the double-entendre of the expression "nut-free school."

We have now, seventeen months after the fact, been treated to a list of people who have died of peanut exposure (scroll down for it).

I love what Google does for blogs.

Update: Dear god -- from this list of the deceased, it seems clear that people with peanut allergies should just never eat dessert of any kind, ever, and also should stay the hell away from Chinese food and curry. Look, you'll be thin and free of MSG headaches. Win-win. Yikes. Also, according to one entry on the list, it's possible to die after being kissed by someone who's eaten peanuts.

I now have to write a screenplay about an impossible love between a girl who has a peanut allergy and a man whose job it is to taste-test Reese's peanut butter cups, and how they send ardent emails from afar. After years of buildup, and resistance from the girl's parents, the two eventually meet after the man has taken two weeks off work to detox, been thoroughly scrubbed, dressed in surgical garments, and ushered into a sanitized bubble, like the one that guy lived in on Northern Exposure.

But then, in an ironic twist, the man dies of a previously unknown allergy to oil of Bergamot, found aplenty in the Earl Grey tea the girl has prepared inside the bubble, because she is British. The movie ends with doctors dragging her off his swollen corpse as she cries out for peanuts, wanting to join him, Romeo-and-Juliet style. But, of course, the bubble is entirely peanut-free, which was the point in the first place.