Everything.

There are a lot of fat people here. But how can you blame us? Food tastes so good! Sure it makes us overweight and clogs our arteries with cholesterol (although thankfully my conscience has been given a bit of  reprieve with the new data suggesting much of our cholesterol buildup is genetic - haven't you seen the Vytorin commercial? Sheesh!), but it also gives us energy and keeps up alive so that we can, you guessed it, consume more food.

It is ironic that the surge in healthier food spending has resulting in more Americans being fatter than ever, but I guess that's not really surprising if you think about it. Dieting sucks. Diet food sucks. It's about as satisfying as a glass of water. So you have to eat more "low fat" food to feel satiated. Well, eating a 30 fat gram hamburger or six 5-gram diet dinners amounts to pretty much the same amount of fat, or calories, or carbohydrates, whichever source of food energy you may have decided to cut out - except the hamburger tastes a whole lot better.

Thank God we have so many dieting options too. Low carb, low fat, low calorie, The Scarsdale, The Zone, The Atkins, The South Beach Diet, Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Fenphen, liposuction, banding, gastric bypass, and, if all else fails, bulimia or anorexia.

It's become so ludicrous that infomercials are selling their diet pills by outright claiming their products are way expensive. The theory being that if it's expensive it must work (which I have to admit is a fair point - and one that is the center of my philosophy of comparison shopping). Naturally, this is America, so it didn't take long for the competitor to come out and claim that they have the expensive pill, but for much cheaper! Of course all these pills come with the magic disclaimer promising weight loss as long as you eat sensibly and exercise. Well, if I eat sensibly and exercised I would naturally lose weight so why the fuck do I need a pill?

I say fuck dieting. Be happy with who you are. A very small percentage of people have the capability of looking like Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, which is why they're so rich. If everyone looked like them, Hollywood actors would be making minimum wage.  Sure being overweight increases your risk for pretty much everything under the sun including diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.

But where's the fun in life without a little risk?

It's a well known fact that policemen don't appreciate being thrown up on, especially considering the fact that he had just started his shift. Boy was he in a cranky mood after that. Although in all honesty, I do believe he was a bit out of bounds smashing that bottle of Black Label over my head. Just because I charged straight for him with arms swinging wildly, haymaker style, was no reason for him to become uncivilized. Slamming the car door on my head was just plain mean. After that I began to suspect that this beating was more personal than business.

Needless to say I spent a night in jail with the result that my license was revoked and I was forced to ride a bicycle to work until I was able to get it reinstated.

In 1687 Isaac Newton wrote Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (also known as The Principia), a book that changed the world and the way we see it. In it are the 3 laws of motion.

319 years later Fenrez, forced to ride a bike after his license is revoked (see picture above), with the aid of said bicycle and a pothole, unwittingly proves Newton's 3 laws of motion to be correct. Mind you, I didn't start the day planning to do prove anything except that I look like a moron riding a bike. However, if the winds of fortune decree that my face is to be smashed into solid concrete, might as well get something out of it.

So, anyway, back to the Three Laws of Motion:

This is also known as the Law of Inertia, and is played out with the help of the pothole. This law states that an object (or Fenrez's body) will continue to move in the direction it was going until another force acts on it to change its direction. Fenrez and his bicycle are moving forward, enjoying a lovely day. The bicycle suddenly hits a pothole. Here is an appropriate force to change the bike from one direction of motion (forward) to another direction (downward into the hole).

You will notice, however, that although there is a force acting upon the bicycle, there is no such force acting on Fenrez. He continues to move in uniform motion forward until the fact that his legs, which are tangled up with the bike, slow him down, at which point the force of gravity is applied on his body, and he begins a very uncomfortable arc towards the Earth.

Unfortunately for him, standing in between him and the planet is a layer of man-made concrete which will break his fall, and make this a most painful lesson. How painful will be determined by laws II and III.

This is basically saying that a force applied to an object (or Fenrez's body) will only change it's velocity (or speed) in another direction. Hence the pothole changes the bicycle's velocity from 15 miles per hour to 0 miles per hour in an instant. Fenrez's body, however, continues to move forward at 15 miles an hour (law I) until acted on by another force, mainly gravity (since he no longer can depend on the bicycle to offset the force of gravity). The effects of gravity begin to force his descent towards the dreaded concrete in a slow, graceful parabola (law II).

How hard he will hit the ground is determined by law II in two different planes.

One plane (forward) was determined initially by the original velocity the bike was traveling and can be controlled by Fenrez. The other plane (downward) is based on gravity for which Fenrez has no command over and must bow to its control. The combination of both these forces will determine how hard his face will hit the ground.

Unfortunately for poor Fenrez, his face colliding against cement that will not give any leeway means that he will decelerate from 32 feet/second/second to 0 feet/second/second in an instant, and his skull will take the full brunt of that.

This is the law of motion that will assure Fenrez will feel pain. When he collides with the concrete, his face will push down on the Earth, and the Earth will have an equal and opposite reaction, pushing up into his face.

Of course the third law unintentionally describes the events that follow the physics lesson. For as much pain as Fenrez suffered, there is an equal and opposite pleasure he will receive after he sues the shit outta the city for their lax attitudes on pothole repair.

The moral of this story: don't get your license revoked.

You're probably starting to notice that this is not a good year for me by way of transportation. Having spent two weeks under the care of several orthopedic surgeons thanks to my little bicycle accident pictured above, I was beginning to get stir crazy. As soon as I was discharged from the hospital, I got behind the wheel and took a pleasant drive.

In retrospect, I should have taken a few hours to let the 60 mg of IV morphine eliminate from my body.

At least I can say that I was having a pleasant dream involving a Chinese food buffet and several naked pygmies before the thunderous thumping sound startled me out of my comfortable nap. Had this photo been snapped a few moments later you would have to endure another hopeless physics lesson entailing the poor gentleman standing a few feet in front of my rapidly approaching automobile, and a discussion on the  forces acting on him as he performs a complicated, but aesthetically pleasing, complete up-ended somersault over my vehicle.

The good news is the guy recovered from the mishap. At least, I think he did. From the view in my rearview window, he looked like he was doing okay. I could have sworn I saw him actually get up after I was about 300 feet away and high-tailing it out of the area, but that may have been the morphine causing hallucinations. Or I may have gone back to sleep and dreamed it. If the truth be told, I've always been a punch-the-snooze-button kind of morning person.

Shame, really.  I could have given him the name of a couple of really good orthopedic surgeons.

You know, I've always wondered where the hell they find they guys who become Buckingham Palace guards. How the hell do they stand there completely still all day long? 

Any why don't they ever laugh? Are they human? Are they capable of expressing emotions like the rest of us? Do they not feel joy? Sadness? Fear? Do they get really angry when some idiot sneaks into their little blue box? I know I would. Hell I'd be pretty pissed off simply because they forced me look like a black and red Q-tip.

I don't know. Although I think a part of that may be due to the fact that it's probably obnoxious American tourists who attempt to make them break their strides and laugh, and as most of the world already knows, obnoxious American tourists are anything but funny.

I know, because I am one.

I have to admit I do like British culture, though. I mean, they gave us The Beatles, the Spice Girls, AND Who Wants to be a Millionaire. All in the same century! What more can Western Civilization ask for?

Holding on to a job pretty much takes everything out of me. It's a real exhausting enterprise, this whole "employment" nonsense. I never realized how much work it was. Although I have to admit it's nice to earn a paycheck now. $4.50 an hour plus a case of beer out the back every day adds up to a pretty sweet deal. And of course there's my buddy, Carl.

If I could only stay up long enough to engage him in meaningful dialogue.