cannot stop grinning.....

ok, so this nytimes piece came through professional email...

The New York Times
April 24, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Living Longer Is the Best Revenge
By DAVID BROOKS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/opinion/24brooks.html?

The release of a report in The Journal of the American Medical
Association indicating that overweight people actually live longer than
normal-weight people represents an important moment in the history of
world civilization. It is the moment when we realize that Mother Nature
- unlike Ivy League admissions committees - doesn't like suck-ups.

It turns out she doesn't like those body-worshiping, multi-abbed marvels
who've spent so much time at the bench press machine they look as if
they have thighs growing out of either side of their necks. She doesn't
like those health-conscious rice cake addicts you see at Manhattan
restaurants ordering a skinned olive for lunch and sitting there looking
trim and fit in their tapered blouses while their buns of steel leave
permanent dents in the upholstery.

Mother Nature, we now know, is a saucy wench, who likes to play cosmic
tricks on humanity. If the report from researchers at the National
Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is
correct - and it is the most thorough done to date - then it seems that
Mother Nature has built a little Laffer curve into the fabric of
reality: health-conscious people can hit a point of negative returns, so
the more fit they are, the quicker they kick the bucket. People who work
out, eat responsibly and deserve to live are more likely to be culled by
the Thin Reaper.

I can't tell you how happy this makes me. Since I read about this report
a few days ago, I haven't been able to stop grinning.

I've been happy because as a member of the community of
low-center-of-gravity Americans, I find that a lifetime of irresponsible
behavior has been unjustly rewarded. If this study is correct, I'll be
ordering second helpings on into my 90's while all those salad-munching
health nuts who have been feeling so superior in their spandex pants and
cutoff T-shirts will be dying of midriff pneumonia and other
condescension-related diseases.

I've been happy because now there will inevitably be a shift in the
fashion winds, favoring members of the Zaftig Corps. Sports enjoyed by
people with Rubenesque proportions, like floating, will come into vogue.
More people will appreciate the thigh-rubbing musical rhythms you hear
when overweight people wear corduroys. More people will realize we
should all be patterning our lifestyle decisions on those made by
Christopher Hitchens.

Mostly, I'm happy on an existential level. I like to be reminded that
the universe is basically crooked. This is what the zero-tolerance
brigades and all the better living gurus never quite get. They're busy
trying to mold everybody into lifelong valedictorians, who spend their
adulthood as carb counters and responsible flossers - the sort of
organized folk who actually read legal documents before they sign them.

In reality, life is perverse and human beings don't get what they
deserve. The people with the worst grades start the most successful
businesses. The shallowest people end up blissfully happy and they are
so vapid they don't even realize how vapid they are because vapidity is
the only trait that comes with its own impermeable obliviousness system.
The people regarded as lightweights, like F.D.R., J.F.K. and Ronald
Reagan, make the best presidents, while you - so much more thoughtful
and better read - would be a complete disaster.

Life isn't fair, logic is of limited value and, as Woody Allen observed
years ago, everything your parents once thought was good for you turns
out to be bad for you: sun, milk, red meat and college.

The chief moral lesson I take away from this report is that Mother
Nature is happy to tolerate marginally irresponsible misbehavior. She
doesn't want you to go completely to seed. If you're truly obese and
arouse hippos when you visit the zoo, you could still punch your ticket
at any moment.

But she does want you to eat the occasional Cinnabon, so long as it
isn't bigger than Delaware. She wants you to have that fourth glass of
wine, and lecture the dinner table on the future of the papacy based on
your extensive reading of "The Da Vinci Code." She wants a little
socially productive mediocrity.

Darwin was wrong when he talked about the survival of the fittest: it's
really the survival of the healthy enough to get by. As it says in the
Good Book, the last shall sometimes be first, the meek shall inherit the
earth, and the chubby will get extra biscuits at the breakfast buffet.



ok, so the other memorable thing that woody allen said had to do with weight loss....he said and i paraphrase..... that when one loses 10 pounds...how can one be sure that it isn't one's best 10 pounds...the part with all of the humanity.....food for thought......i believe this calls for a glass of wine.....and a few pieces of cheese.....