Fatties of the world, unite!

Will Saletan, the writer I love to hate, posted an article today suggesting that the zaftig are far more numerous than stick-figure pinheads like him had ever imagined. I'm not terribly surprised. I went home to Manayunk for the weekend and saw big folks a'plenty around Philadelphia. Even at the Penn-Yale football game, where most people are rich enough to eat well and exercise, there were some big folks.

That's just another reason to prefer Franklin Field to your modern stadium -- bleachers are easy on the bottom, unlike the airplane seat I endured on the way home.

Crazy-cons

I've just read a story about someone in England who left 8 million pounds to the Conservative Party. The judge struck down the gift for insanity, and awarded the estate to the dead guy's son. If only we could enact a similar law for votes, we might have avoided that debacle in 2000.

Nah, the Supreme Court would've still found a way to steal it for Bush.

Re-elect Gore!

La Pièce de Résistance

Finally, Will Saletan gets one right. When he's not hating on the ample-of-bottom, he's not all bad. I agree that ages of consent are too high here in the U.S. We should emulate our enlightened European friends, and drop it down to sixteen.

If the laws were different, I definitely would've gotten laid in high school. Or college.

Government Cheeseburger

Apparently Los Angeles wants to ban fast food in poor neighborhoods. I have mixed feelings on the idea. I like that they're doing something to help the poor and downtrodden live healthier lives. We need government to help people make smart choices sometimes.

But banning fast food? I enjoy a trip to Jack-in-the-Box now and again. The "Ultimate Burger" is hecka tasty after a long day of sociology research. I mean, they look at you kind of weird when you roll through the drive-thru in a Segway, but they'll give you the food. Eventually.

Maybe what L.A. should do is, instead of banning fast food, mandate that they serve only selections from a city-approved menu. As long as the Ultimate Burger is on that menu, I'd be satisfied.

Tim Finnegan

My goodness, William Saletan really hates fat people.

My good friend, also named Tim, has been visiting this week. He doesn't sympathise with the adversity a pudgy fellow has to face, but since he teaches at a public school in Newark, he probably deals more with other kinds of adversity. Still, it's heka surprizing, since most Green party members like him are known for their compassion and acceptance of all people, even the zoftig.

Getting it awwwn

A new survey caught my eye today. The gist of it is that smart people are far more likely to be virgins. Specifically, "[e]ach additional point of IQ increased the odds of virginity by 2.7% for males and 1.7% for females." I must have been really smart in college. Things have improved in that department since I moved west, probably because I am surround by more smart people here in Seattle than I was when I lived in Manayunk, although my one unfortunate dalliance with the ladies occurred while I was at Penn.

Even more interesting was the graph showing virginity my academic major. 0% of the art majors were virgin -- no surprise there. I wasn't sure what category sociology majors fell into. Anthropology is kind of similar, and is one of the more promiscuous majors. It's also similar to psychology, which has a majority-virgin population.

The study also said that Princeton was the most virginal of all the Ivy League schools. Again, this is not much of a surprise to anyone who has ever known anyone from Princeton. Oh, heck no.

An Explanatory Paradigm

I read an article today about how dieting can make you gain weight in the long run. Being a pudgy fellow myself, this paradigm seemed to ring true. My sociology training tells me that the whole skinny-normative pattern is a learned behavior imposed by the patriarchy in order to deny agency to the large-of-bottom. Bill says I just need to get on the treadmill. I say Bill is a tool of the establishment. Dieting is not a way to lose weight, but merely a Symbolic Interaction, playing out the metaphor of man's domination by residual Jack Sprat-ism.