We all know that smoking will kill you. But then we all are gonna die anyway. More importantly, statistical estimates suggest that smoking one cigarette will shorten your life by 11 minutes. No biggie if you get to pick those 11 minutes, but no such luck. So roughly 3.5 hours less of your life per pack, just over 73 hours of missing out on some of your golden years per carton. The time adds up quickly and the day you check out for good draws closer with every drag you take. It’s those kind of numbers that should make you quit such a disgusting, filthy, and vile habit. Or you may want to give up watching television and start smoking instead. According to a recent study out of Australia, you’ll live longer.

Published recently in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the findings of a study on sedentary television viewing suggests that you’ll trade 22 minutes of your life for every hour you sit in front of the tube. I’d have to double check, but I believe it’s 45 minutes if you are watching Dancing With The Stars. Or anything on FOX News. Which, like smoking, is a disgusting, filthy, and vile habit.

The researchers used data collected from over 11,000 adults over the age of 25 to construct what they call a “lifetime risk framework”. From that framework, the authors determined that just 2 hours of television viewing a day was enough to decrease life expectancy in men by 1.8 years. Watching for 6 hours a day was linked to a nearly five year decrease in life expectancy. Those conducting the study pointed out it was the sedentary behavior in itself, and not a lack of exercise, attributable to a shortened life span.

Guess that pretty well tells you that if you plop your ass down in front of the TV, you’d better be watching porn. Nothing else on is worth killing yourself over.

In related news (at least in the warped way my mind operates), if you live in the small costal Peruvian town of Huarmey, you may want to stock up on gay porn ‘cuz all of the men in your village are turning into ‘mos.. Mayor Jose Benitez is concerned that mineral levels in the water provided by the launching of a new project to provide more water to his town will reduce male hormones and could cause an increase in homosexuality among the town’s population. The water comes from Tabalosos, a town nearby which a Lima-based television station reported was inhabited by 14,000 exclusively-gay men. (And everyone just clicked over to Google Tabalosos.)

“Suddenly we’ll be as Tabalosos, as other towns, where the percentages are increasing of homosexuality,” Benitez is reported as saying in broken English.

His statements sparked a fevered protest from Tabalosos’s women, who blocked highways with tree trunks and boulders and shut down local businesses to express their outrage. The women of Tabalosos are quoted as saying the men of their town are “really manly men,” but are not on record as to why a village filled with really manly men needed it’s women to go out and chop down trees for the protest. They were probably too busy planting pansies.

Going mano y mano with Peru over who has bragging rights for having the gayest population, Bolivian President Evo Morales is upset with chicken farmers in his country who inject female hormones into their fowl, because “men who consume them have problems being men.” Yup, it’s a bitch being a straight man in South America. One night out dining on chicken and bottled water from Peru and you wake up singing show tunes.