Ennery, I don't see myself as an exception. Obviously there are obese people who don't make much effort to try to take care of themselves. The responsibility to do that DOES rest on their shoulders.

But there is a tremendous social force telling them they're worthless. If a 600 pound person loses goes through the tremendous effort of losing 350 pounds, no doubt with medical assistance -- they will *still* be considered worthless, lazy, decadent and disgusting to every stranger who sees them.

My point here is that people should not make assumptions with their eyes. This goes almost as much for body shape as it does for ethnicity.

I weigh somewhere from 250 to 275 pounds; it fluctuates that much.

I don't eat "fat and grease and slops." I ***NEVER*** eat junk food. For the most part if I eat desserts, it's some sort of no-sugar-added thing. I don't drink sugar-laden sodas and go out of my way to avoid HFCS and partially hydrogenated oils. I probably watch what I eat more closely than 90% of you lucky people who make fun of "fatties," because I am diabetic. (And before you claim diabetes is my own fault, I'll note that my skinny-as-a-rail grandmother had it, and passed it to her daughter, who passed it to me.)

EVERY MEAL, every bite of food I put in my mouth, I worry what it's going to do to my blood sugar and my weight.

I've tried low-carb diets, and I wind up losing *some* weight that comes back but my blood sugar goes up. I've tried low-fat diets, and they don't work at all. And I've tried simply starving myself, skipping meals, eating a minimum, until I couldn't work from the distraction -- and it barely registered on the scale.

And I exercise regularly, walking a mile to and from work (including my lunch breaks) and occasionally further, plus workouts on a stationary bike and so forth.

For all you lucky skinny people who think anyone can weigh 110 pounds if they just stop being lazy -- I am having a difficult time being civil in this post because your behavior disgusts me more than you can imagine.

I've done a lot of nerdy things, but one of the most nerdy was writing an accurate orbital mechanics system for a fictional solar system for an online text-based roleplaying game.

Also I built a speech synthesizer as a science project in middle school. It was supposed to interface with a Commodore 64 but I hadn't had time to finish that part. The science teacher, also a tremendous nerd, *gave me his old oscilloscope!* and I thought it was the best thing ever. I hooked it up to my stereo.

There is no way to convert an airsoft gun to a "dangerous weapon." I recommend not shooting someone directly in the eye from 10 yards away with an upgraded gun, but these are not going to ever be lethal.

We are talking about something designed to fire 6mm, .2 or .25 gram plastic BBs.

My wife's family lives in Bossier City/Shreveport, and yeah, it is a pretty sad area.

Statistically speaking, money can buy happiness. Or at least it can pay misery to go somewhere else.

Crosswalk buttons where I live activate the "walk" signal lights, which won't come on otherwise.

But they won't do anything that causes other traffic lights to go out of sync.

Do we have a moral obligation to possibly contaminate other places in the universe that might already have, or have in the future, their own forms of life?

Hell no.

A 2-dimensional tinfoil hat will be fine. Just project it into the third dimension.

Recursive cat is recursive.

But is it full of eels?

The idea that the pyramids were not built by slaves is not at all new to Egyptology... pretty sure I heard about this 10 years ago. Folks got food, beer, and housing to work on massive projects like this for 3-month periods. As far as labor goes it probably wasn't any harder than farming anyway.

That was how most levels of priesthood worked too; basically a sweet temporary government job.

This is pretty amusing, but they CANNOT be surprised by controversy when they intentionally set out to challenge peoples' assumptions.

That was a "colon P" as in sticking out my tongue derisively, not the happy smiley that actually came out. Damn smilies.

I am married to a library assistant. She hates the stereotypes. Mostly it is creepy old men that try to flirt with library women :P

I don't believe that religion and the "goodness" of either an individual or a society are related in any way.

I do think that religions have been powerful focuses for both positive and negative forces throughout human history. But they've basically served as secondary "nations", and as rallying points for political movements. Without religion, people would have simply found other reasons either to kill each other, or to band together to support each other and better themselves.

And before you hold up Japan as a good example for the rest of the world, consider its rampant racism and xenophobia, and its high suicide rate.

(I don't know enough about Swedish or Danish culture to comment on them, though.)