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January 11, 2006

Fat Is The New Thin

Well, not really, but it's not the as looked down on as it used to be, either:

A survey finds America's attitudes toward overweight people are shifting from rejection toward acceptance. Over a 20-year period, the percentage of Americans who said they find overweight people less attractive steadily dropped from 55 percent to 24 percent, the market research firm NPD Group found.

That said, if you find that you can only leave your apartment via a crane and a hole cut through the wall with an plasma cutter, you should probably consider doing some vigorous calisthenics. Jumping jacks, maybe, or doing whatever the hell you're supposed to do with that big "medicine ball." Far as I can tell people just flop down on it and roll around a little, which doesn't seem like something that would really work that cardio system.

Reminder: This may be a survey, but they sure the hell didn't survey Chris Klein. So, you can feel a little freer to put on some "comfort pounds," but if you're dating Chris Klein, and you have your period and you're retaining weight, don't expect him to placate.

You're only asking for heartbreak.

Thanks to BrewFan of reminding me of that. Chris Klein has thing thing going that's working for him, but he has to be firm.

posted by Ace at 08:28 PM

Comments

Fat is Phat! But I don't placate.

Posted by: BrewFan on January 11, 2006 08:35 PM

Im not sure i believe this. I think that maybe since a lot more people are fat these days, that when a fat person is asked whether they could find another person attractive, they will say ''yes'' so that they dont appear(or feel) hypocritical. Does that make any sense?

To sum up: Fat Chicks are like mopeds. Theyre ok to ride-- as long as your friends dont see you.

Posted by: Pleasantly Amish on January 11, 2006 08:40 PM

Bart sure fell off the thin wagon.

Posted by: geoff on January 11, 2006 08:40 PM

Well with 60 percent or so of adults in the U.S. being overweight/obese themselves, is changing attitudes a surprise? These hogs are looking in the mirror and saying "yeah, I don't look so bad, pretty good actually", then marking fat is phat in the surveys.

Posted by: Otho Laurence on January 11, 2006 08:45 PM

Ahh, Amish, you beat me to it. When a fat person says fat is ok in the attractiveness dept. they're thinking either: a) I'm fat and I look pretty good, b) not wanting to be a hypocrite and lying, or c) genuinally attracted to fat because people are often attracted to people who look similar to them. One of those three I think.

Posted by: Otho Laurence on January 11, 2006 08:49 PM

Oh and loose shit Ace, you mean a plasma cutter, not an arc welder.

Posted by: Otho Laurence on January 11, 2006 08:51 PM

That survey isn't helping MY friggin' sex life...

Especially in L.A. Anybody wider than a credit card is "fat".

Posted by: El Conquistadore on January 11, 2006 08:55 PM

Otto,

You miss the subtlety of my humor.

Posted by: ace on January 11, 2006 09:07 PM

But I've changed the reference for people like you who don't "get" high-level comedy.

Posted by: ace on January 11, 2006 09:08 PM

Who says you can't cut through a wall with an arc welder? Use a thick-ass stick and turn the amperage up "to eleven", and you can burn through damn near anything.

Sure, the hole will be damn sloppy, but how neat do you have to be when you're cutting a hole in a wall to free a couch-bound orca?

Posted by: Russ from Winterset on January 11, 2006 09:14 PM

Exactly. Otto just doesn't appreciate "puns" like the one I did with "arc-welder."

Okay, maybe I pulled a boner on that one.

Posted by: ace on January 11, 2006 09:17 PM

My name is fucking Otho, not Otto.

Yes I know that with enough juice and the steel being thin enough an arc welder will indeed cut (knew someone would bring that up). One question though, I have a self feeding MIG welder that I use for small jobs (including welding the frame on my dad's 'vette), is there any reason the stick arc welders are still being made? Seems like that's old technology and would be obsolete.

Posted by: Fucking Otho Laurence on January 11, 2006 09:27 PM

just effin' with you, of course I made an error, I meant plasma cutter.

Although, you know, seriously, given enough time, an arc welder would work too.

Posted by: ace on January 11, 2006 09:29 PM

"Otto? Is that like 'otto parts'?"

(There's gotta be some geek here who can identify that quote.)

well, "fucking Otho", stick welders are still useful for people with large equipment that needs to be stitched back together periodically. I learned how to weld with a Lincoln unit back on the farm, patching discs, trailer frames, and other various pieces of metal. MIG's are nice if you're working on car frames and stuff smaller than that, but they probably wouldn't get enough penetration to do a proper job on 1" plate steel. Of course, oxy/acetalene units are the gold standard for a welder who needs to be able to do anything with his stuff, but as the man says......"That...is another story".

Posted by: Russ from Winterset on January 11, 2006 09:37 PM

Actually "hole cut through the wall with a sawzall-n-sledge hammer" would probably sound better and be closer to reality. Sawzalls being the ultimate cut through any god damn thing tool, the ducktape of the cutting world.

Posted by: Otho Laurence on January 11, 2006 10:05 PM

And then this thread turned into an episode of "This Old House"!

Posted by: Enas Yorl on January 11, 2006 10:38 PM

Otho, you are correct. Cordless sawzalls are a gift from the Almighty.

Posted by: Russ from Winterset on January 11, 2006 10:55 PM

Are you guys feckin high?
You're going to burn down the damn house if use a welder.

More people are okay with fat people because the parameters for obesity are broad enough to include practically everybody.

I'm considered obese or severely overweight according to most charts. Crap, I say!

Posted by: Bart on January 11, 2006 11:09 PM

You guys are closer. It wasn't a SawzAll, though, they used a Chain Saw (Stihl, I believe). But the point is I'm out now.

Posted by: HobbieHawk on January 11, 2006 11:13 PM

My name is fucking Otho, not Otto.

That's right Ace! If someone is named after an aged, senile, homosexual Roman Emperor, you damn well ought to make sure and call them by the right frickin' name!

Posted by: Red Jode on January 11, 2006 11:13 PM

Chris, Katie is looking mighty hot tonight in her red lace teddy...time to go placate.

Posted by: Tom Cruise on January 12, 2006 02:16 AM

Do all of you guys really live in houses built of plate steel? 'Cause no way you are strikin' a arc on my concrete bunker, ain't gonna happen.

Posted by: B Moe on January 12, 2006 08:28 AM

HA!

I always knew my day would come!

IN YOUR FACE! I AM THE MAN!!

OH YEAH! OH YEAH!!

Posted by: MichaelMoore on January 12, 2006 09:22 AM

Chris, Katie is looking mighty hot tonight in her red lace teddy...time to go placate.

If by placate you mean, retire to your bed with a copy of playgirl, then yes I am sure you will placate. I did it all the time.

Posted by: Chris Klein on January 12, 2006 10:57 AM

It's just the influence of PC. Fewer people want to tell some surveyor that they really do think that disgusting fatbodies are disgusting fatbodies.

Posted by: angler on January 12, 2006 11:34 AM

Michael Moore? Hah! Check out Mikey's bowling buddyin Michigan!

Posted by: machs on January 12, 2006 11:49 AM

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What? Skeleton of the most famous Musketeer, D'Artagnan, possibly discovered in Dutch church closet.
Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*

Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
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D'Artagnan was killed during the siege of Maastricht in 1673, and there is a statue honoring the musketeer in the city. His final resting place has remained a mystery ever since.

A lot of Dumas's stories are based on bits of real history. The plot of the >Three Musketeers, about trying to recover lost diamonds from the queen's necklace, was cribbed from the then-almost-contemporaneous Affair of the Queen's Necklace. And the Man in the Iron Mask is based on real accounts of a prisoner forced to wear a mask (though I think it was a velvet mask).
* Oh, I should mention, Dumas says all this, about finding the names in an old book, in the prologue to his novel. But authors lie a lot. They frequently present fictions as based on historic fact. The twist is, he was actually telling the truth here. At least about these four musketeers having actually existed and served under Louis XIV.
Fun fact: You know the beginning of A Fistful of Dollars where the local gunslingers make fun of Clint Eastwood's donkey and Eastwood demands they apologize to the donkey? That's lifted from The Three Musketeers. Rochefort mocks D'Artagnan's old, brokedown farm horse and D'Artagnan is incensed.

A commenter asked which should be read first, The Hobbit of LOTR?
Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR.
Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
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The Hobbit Challenge: Read two more chapters. I didn't have much time. Bilbo got the ring.
I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
But the narrator -- who we will learn in LOTR was none of than Bilbo himself, who wrote the book as "There and Back Again" -- says this about Gollum's ring:
"But who knows how Gollum had come by that present [the Ring], ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world? Perhaps even the Master who ruled them could not have said."
In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
Now I don't remember when Bilbo wrote the Hobbit. In the movie, he shows Frodo the book in Rivendell, and I guess he wrote it after he left the Shire. I guess he might have added in the part about the ring being a ring of power created by "the Master" after Gandalf appraised him of his research into the ring.
I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do.
But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.

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