As IF Times

link Americans Concerns About Obesity Soar, Surpass Smoking.

Really?  One of the things that weighs most heavily on people’s minds is obesity?   How about stupidity?  How is it that people are made to feel insecure about their physical appearance yet not be ashamed at exposing their lack of intelligence, wit or understanding  (otherwise known as stupidity) for the world to see?

We keep hearing about the ‘epidemic of obesity’ as if it were scabies at a frat house.  It has been estimated that $40 billion dollars per year is spent on various and sundry diet programs including Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, The Atkins Diet, The South Seas Diet, The Watermelon diet, etc etc.  Who knows how someone counts this, but if you include the entire fitness industry, it adds up to some real moolah.  So it’s a little disingenuous for people to moan about an epidemic when in fact the livelihoods of millions of people depend on making people feel guilty about having that extra piece of cheesecake.

Perhaps we should blame food companies for making their products taste so good.  Evil corporations.  Isn’t that the main point of every creature on earth? To get easy access to food?   In most of today’s societies, access to food is no longer an issue, so one of the main problems facing mankind has essentially been eliminated. Isn’t that success?  Somehow this “obsession” has gotten to the point where people are willing to have a tax imposed on themselves for being fat!  Fat tax article They are essentially admitting that instead of  controlling themselves, they’d rather pass money to the government than pass on that second helping of lasagna.

If people are worried about their physical profile, that’s a first world problem, sort of like worrying about whether your upstairs maid gets along with the downstairs maid.    Oddly, we never hear of this calamity in the Sudan.  The only reason this ‘concern’ even exists is because of the media and fashion business.  As we all know, the fashion business exists because of their pandering to people’s natural insecurities.  They somehow portray the illusion that a 40 year old person can have the idealized body of a 17 year old model if only they wore the same capri pants.  As if Rosie can look like Giselle.

We’d be far better off trying to eliminate stupidity.  We have a far larger problem of billions and billions of dollars being spent on schools to turn out functional illiterates.  If you ask me,  I’d rather be living in a society of zaftigs than one of zombies.

link Derek Dye, Ejected By Umpire For Playing Three Blind Mice « CBS Philly.

If you can’t yell at an umpire, pro sports as we know it,  is dead.  This is another in the series of neutering events foisted upon male culture in North America.  Where will it all end?  For a peek into the future of feminized games, look no further than soccer, the sport in which tactics are explicitly employed to get the referee’s sympathy by players grabbing their shins and rolling on the ground like a 5 year old howling in pain even though they were bumped on the head.   Pretty lame in comparison to ice hockey where the players continue to play with broken limbs and bloody facial cuts.

Most big ticket spectator sports are masculine pursuits.  It’s not like an opera where attendants politely clap after a long snooze.  Sports is all about visceral warfare.  Even the gentleman’s game of golf will see examples of rabid fanaticism from time to time.  Next time you watch Tiger hit a tee shot, listen to the gallery.  Or watch the Phoenix Open at the 16th hole when the crowd acts as if they were in the Roman Colosseum.   If people couldn’t cheer or jeer, it wouldn’t be sports; it would be masterpiece theatre.  Loud rounds of tsk-tsk’s just won’t do.

If the umpire in this story is hurt by characterizations of his vision, he should maybe rethink his profession, since blindness and umpires have almost as long a history of association as sex and fishnet stockings.  The mentality of nice-nice and touchy feely has no place in the world of pro-sports.  At the highest level, people want to see athletes perform at standards that they couldn’t possibly attain themselves; in essence, the public lives vicariously through their heroes.  As the bounds of socially acceptable behavior get more and more restrictive, pro sports remains as a useful outlet to vent frustration for many people.  You can’t yell at your boss for fear of being fired, or berate an underling without fear of being sued, but you can legitimately vent at players and referees alike, heck you pay for that privilege.

And come on, to be criticized at your job is the American way.  That umpire is lucky he’s not in the political business like the commie-pinko-socialist-useless-marxist-entitled-President of the United States.