January 21, 2008
Mayor L. Douglas Wilder is recuperating this morning at VCU Medical Center after fainting from the lightheadedness caused when he tried to inflate his ego, hospital officials said today.
In a press conference on the medical center’s third floor, Dr. Gopinath Lavanya said the mayor is in stable condition after spending much of Sunday trying to reinflate a continually deflating ego. Wilder, the doctor said, was at his Charles City County home in the midst of watching the the Giants-Packers football game while trying to pump up his ego when he collapsed.
“It appears the exhalation of the lungs led to a shortage of oxygen to the brain while attempting to fill up an ego that was already at an unnaturally high, some might say dangerous level,” Lavanya said.
The surgeon added that rational, cognitive decision-making can sometimes become distorted if the ego, located deep in the cerebral cortex, has inflated to such a tremendous size.
“Several EEG scans this morning revealed that the mayor’s inner id – once filled so much that you could have attached a basket to the bottom and soared well across Central Virginia – has in fact been slightly shrunken,” Lavanya said. “The ego does not have the robust buoyancy it once had.”
Wilder’s ego was first inflated in 1990 after being elected the first African-American U.S. governor. Throughout the 90s the ego stayed relatively full, leading up to his 2004 ego-booster: winning election as Richmond’s mayor. Since then, the mayor’s ego has become overly inflated, filled with such self-love gasses like winning nearly 80 percent of the mayoral vote, a mandate that has caused Wilder to walk and speak with a sense of excess machoness.
In recent months, however, Wilder has subjected his citizenry to several bizarre, high-profile incidents in addition to his ongoing feuds to keep his ego dilated with the City Council and School Board. The mayor is being blamed for the failed eviction of the school offices last year, as well as the recent loss of the 42-year tradition of Richmond Braves baseball. An Atlanta suburb scooped up the minor league team this month after the Wilder administration and its related psyche apparently failed after years of negotiations to build a new ballpark here.
“Though it appeared that these events were just brushed off Wilder’s shoulders, our tests on the brain show that the over-sized ego has blocked the passage of rational information from the cortex to the thalamus and basal ganglia,” Lavanya said. “In layman’s terms, deep down he knows he screwed up the Braves loss and with the eviction flub, and this has caused significant deterioration of his admiration of self.”
A spokesman for the mayor’s office said there are several initiatives planned in coming months that should help reinflate Wilder’s ego, and in no way could they possibly backfire.
Comments
No Comment
Richmond Now Available In 3-D
Thought you knew the Richmond skyline? Take another look.
Buildings, parks, trees, highways and more now appear to show length, width, depths and height when viewed from any angle - and without the need for special 3-D glasses.
"I was ...
Heard on the VCU service elevator, “If he blew any harder he would have popped and I’m not going to clean up that mess.”
If I’m not mistaken, another term for this phenomenon is hypervaintilating.