War On Fat

photo contest winner at peopleofwalmart.com

I actually made it through the whole State of The Union address a few weeks ago. Especially with the recent election of Scott Brown, I was interested to see how the President would address his failing health. care. bill. clinton. uh...anyway, a highlight for me was the announcement of the First Lady’s war on fat. She’s calling it the “Let’s Move” initiative. Someone should make a dance called the “Let’s Move” so you can support the cause and stay in shape while yer at it!

Of course I understand obesity is undesirable and there’s nothing wrong with recognizing it as such. That being said, I don’t think this plan to reverse obesity will work, not that Michelle Obama isn’t capable. Those prominently displayed, ample biceps never fail to impress.

But why is the First Lady the one leading the charge, and not Harry Reid? I think its because she’s a mom.

You see, it was Mom who taught me about eating moderately, and eating well. (Aside: another reason why big families rule – overeating is not an option). Mom made me go outside and play. Mom taught me tv was usually a waste of time.

And in this new war on fat you have an icon of a mom in Mrs. Obama. But she’s a Mommycrat. She’s not really your mom. She won’t really be able to make you go outside and exercise. She won’t really be able to make you eat right. It’s just that she has millions of taxpayer dollars and lots of bureaucrats at her disposal.

She’s calling obesity an epidemic. The military just said it was a threat to national security, since many of the new recruits are overweight. But you cannot fix obesity from the White House. Their job description does not include telling me what to eat and when to take a jog. One must have a degree of will power to get fit and stay fit. Revised lunch menus at public schools and psas encouraging healthy living will not fix the problem, which starts in the home. Parents are the ones who need to instill these values in their children.

I wish “Let’s Move” the best of luck, but by the looks of things, Michelle has already done a good job keeping herself, her two kids and hubby in shape, which is to her credit. In five years from now when America hasn’t moved too much, she’ll have still done her job. Unfortunately she may have expanded the government that much more. Now if they could only apply “Let’s Move” to federal and state bureaucracies – I wouldn’t mind seeing their waistlines trimmed a bit.

Women who look like old aliens.

As a follow up to the last post, and just so the ladies don't feel left out, here are some weird pictures of women. I'm sure I'll end up talking about women's fashion because it's hilarious, but I think most of these photos speak for themselves.

Men who look like old lesbians.

People have been looking like women for millennia. And sometimes, those people have actually been women. But every once in a while those people are men, and when that happens gosh it's funny. Which is why a blog like men who look like old lesbians exists.

It's an odd form of humor, maybe better classified as "high school" humor, the type of humor that makes people laugh when someone farts or when they fall down, or when they fall down and then fart. It is unexpected, something engrained in the vast majority of the population that tells us that men probably shouldn't look like women. They should probably look like men. And when that doesn't happen we laugh. Or I guess that's why we laugh. All I know for sure is that a lot of people laugh. And that strikes me as some kind of plot.

I know that through the ages, artists have idealized the feminine form, even when that form is actually a man, and maybe not a lot has changed. The most fashionable men I know here in Nashville actually wear a lot of women's clothes, and the men on the old lesbians website aren't normal Joes. They're guys that have in most cases spent a lot of time and money cultivating this look that trends towards femininity (hence, their inclusion on that website).

I've been told that the movie Fight Club is about the emasculation of the modern man, something the main character, Tyler Durden, blames on the fact that "we're a generation of men raised by women." The movie portrays men pitted against the reality of a cultural shift that seems to induce a loss of identity and gender. Masculinity is lost, and the characters of the movie rage against this vacuum by pursuing stereotypes of hyper-masculinity.

The men who look like old lesbians site isn't a whole lot different, though it provokes a response of laughter rather than beating the crap out of each other. In either case, we see picture of a culture that is wrestling with gender roles and norms when the reigning wisdom states that Equality supersedes any conversation about the differences between the sexes. And so our culture trends us towards one sex, a slightly feminized, slightly masculinized person (and keeps us from using male/female pronouns in general applications).

Anyway, maybe we're just creating a new male archetype, men who look like old lesbians. Which begs the question of discovering the men and women who love the men who look like old lesbians. What do they look like? Either way, I'm sure lesbians have enough stereotypes to fight without men jumping in and ruining everything.

fan the pickle

Is it possible this pickle, so green, so bumpy, so simple, could gain more fans on facebook than the Canadian rock outfit Nickleback, so Canadian, so Canadian, so Canadian? When I saw my little brother join the facebook fanpage I immediately joined as well. Though I enjoy breaking into Nickleback vox-stylings and chord progressions in the middle of band practice, the goal there is to be obnoxious. There's nothing I'd like to see more than a victorious pickle. Apparently someone's already making t-shirts in honor of our little pickle-who-could, who, as I write has 788,365 fans. There's also an opposition "crush the pickle" fan page that has 12 fans. Good luck with that. Here's a sampling of fan posts in support of pickle:

I #@*&ing hate pickles but the pickle gets my vote

Pickle is Awesome !!!!!!!!!!!!

Will somebody please auto tune this pickle?!

The amazing thing is that this page gains, on average, 100 fans a minute. Nothing against the pickle's talents but I believe this is a reactionary cause. People really hate Nickleback that much. And really, it's hard not to with lyrics like:

I want a brand new house

On an episode of Cribs

And a bathroom I can play baseball in

And a king size tub big enough

For ten plus me

That nugget comes from "Rockstar". I hope he's attempting irony. But one wonders if the band is capable of it. And either way, whenever you hear that voice...Ahhh...the voice! Talk about nuggets. It sounds like he's eternally forcing one out the rear.

But the band has been subject to ridicule before so I'm sure they're used to it. Take this video mash up of a screeching rooster and one of they're kool music vids for instance.

So join the revolution now! Be a part of this cultural movement. People are saying something. Something like: we know there's a lot of music out there and a lot of it's bad, but it shouldn't be THIS bad.

fan the pickle.