Let’s see…here’s how this roller coaster of an entry is going to go. First I am going to tell you the most tragic story I have ever heard, and then I’m going tell you about the most disgusting idea I have heard since a televised eating contest, and somewhere in there I’ll try to illicit a chuckle or two ‘cause I’m good like that.

First of all, the Ladyfriend called me yesterday evening and said she was having a hard time getting home because a tree had fallen across North Highland Ave a couple of blocks in front of her, and it looked like it hit a car.

Now, before I go on, think about all of the stuff that you have been worried about and bitching and whining about in the last, say, ten years or so, add it up, and see if it compares to this-

The tree was a 100 year old oak tree, and it fell on an SUV. Inside the SUV was a man, his wife, and their two sons, one was 3 years old, and the other was about a year old. They were on their way to do whatever they were going to do, probably talking about how much rain we were getting, telling the kids that thunder is just the sound of God moving his furniture, or whatever you say to kids when you are in a car with them. Just riding down the street, and a tree falls on the car and kills both boys as well as their mother. In the span of what I would guess is a few seconds, the father’s life went from normal to completely inside out. Now he can spend the next few months torturing himself with thoughts of “What if I had just stopped at that light instead of going through when it was yellow?” “What if I had left ten seconds earlier or later?” and, “Why me? Why my entire family?”

Kind of makes you feel like an ass for being pissed off because they didn’t supersize your drink yesterday, doesn’t it? Call your family and tell them you love them. I’ll wait right here.

*deep breath*

I am lucky to be able to switch gears now and tell you about an article I read several times yesterday. I found it through the Bingodude, and I couldn’t quite believe what I was reading.

Here is the article in its entirety, but if you don’t have time to read it, I’m going to take out my favorite parts and explain why this just blows my mind. I’m not an obese rights activist, and lean more towards the “put down the spoon” method of weight control much to the disappointment of some large folks who say it is the fault of society, fast food, President Clinton, President Bush, Satan, God, depression, or whatever. I know a small number of overweight people really can’t help it, and I apologize to both of them. The rest know that a change in behavior is what it will take to solve a problem that is killing them.

First, the article opens with this picture-

Holy crap. Could they have chosen a worse way to portray a fat guy in the shower? If he was eating a stick of butter and had a candycane protruding from his ass, maybe, but one arm covering his face as if to say “DON’T LOOK AT ME! I AM A HUGE TUB OF SHIT!” seems to do the job when coupled with the low angle shot that makes him look like some sort of monument to heart diease. Then they start the article with this-

Christian Gassler used to dream of running down the beach like a lifeguard on “Baywatch.” But instead, the 308-pounder always sucked in his gut and stayed put in his beach chair, worried about smirks and stares.

If Mr.Gassler wasn’t already on the edge due to his battle with his weight, being portrayed as a “308-pounder” who wants to run down the beach in slow motion will soon have him weaving a very thick rope with which to hang himself.

The article goes on to explain how he could never get the massive heaping plates of food he wanted at buffets while on vacation because of all of the skinny bastards around who would smirk at him. Here I am starting to feel sorry for him for having to deal with this all of the time, and then he lost all my sympathy by touting this new resort in Mexico that caters exclusively to the obese.

‘YOU FEEL FREE’

“Here you feel free,” said Gassler, who frolics with his wife and daughter on the beach here without worrying about holding in his flab. “Here you can breathe on the beach. That’s the magic of the place.”

And the magic of that paragraph is that they just used the words “frolic” and “flab” in a sentence describing you. You would be pissed if you had any dignity. You also wouldn’t be going to a place called “Freedom Paradise”, whose business model is based on the fact that the world’s population is getting heavier, and the way to make money off of them is to give them a place to get fatter.

Give them a beach where they don’t have to compete with “Charlie’s Angels” look-alikes, and a buffet that serves up plenty of sheet cake, and they will come, the theory goes.

That was an UNEDITED clip from the article. Wake up, lardass. Competing with the Charlie’s Angels look-alikes is the only thing keeping you from eating yourself to death. Society’s “norms” are keeping you alive. Merely saying the words “sheet cake” will make you gain a pound. Here is another gem from the article:

The first thing visitors to the resort see is a lobby gift shop displaying 5XL polo shirts as big as tablecloths, and enormous matching mango-colored sweat pants, bearing the resort’s logo: “Live Large, Live Free.” It is next to an ice cream freezer. Around the corner, even the little male and female figures on the bathroom doors look like the Michelin Man.

Again, unedited.

It would seem that going to a place where every detail was designed to remind you that you are fat would not be good for you if you were already concerned about being accepted. I bet they make cute postcards of you laying on the beach with a bunch of greenpeace hippies trying to push you back in the water. How adoreable. Wait, it’s not as bad as it seems.

It’s worse-

Jurriaan Klink, the resort’s operations manager, said it is all designed to make people comfortable, not to make fun: “We say ‘oversize,’ ‘plus size,’ ‘full-figured’— but never ‘fat.’

Let us all take a moment to thank Jurrian Klink for his benevolent spirit. Drawing fat people on the bathroom doors and providing plenty of ‘sheet cake’ is fine, but if you call someone fat, you’re an asshole. Here is a quote from the resort’s general manager, Julio Cesar Rincon:

“When we were developing this, I thought: Is it possible that nobody has thought of this — it’s so obvious.”

Yes, I have actually had a very similar idea. It was a retreat for anorexics that encouraged binge eating. Every room had seven toilets with an auto-gag spring loaded finger, and all of the mirrors were the kind that made you look fat. There are scales everywhere, and the staff is trained to nervously tell all of the guests that they “look…um…pretty good?” I was going to put it in a huge complex with a bar for alcoholics. The drinks were free, and the sidewalks actually swayed so that drunk people would never look like they were staggering from place to place. The bathrooms had padded tile on the floor so that curling up next to the toilet was more comfortable, and the beds were set to spin the opposite direction the drunk person thought they were spinning, thus negating the effect. We had even lined up some people who volunteered to be beaten in an alcoholic rage, because drunks are tired of being singled out for their lifestyle. Oh, it was a grand and beautiful plan, but a plan with one fatal flaw. MY CONSCIENCE.

No, I’m not saying that beating your wife because you are drunk is somehow on a par with getting six helpings of puddin’ at the buffet, but the idea behind my hotel and Freedom Paradise is the same. If you don’t believe me, read this paragraph twice:

The resort’s four pools have wide, easy stairs; no flimsy aluminum pool ladders or diving boards here. Wooden tables at the poolside bars have wide, thick benches with tree stumps for legs. Some barstools are swings hanging from the ceiling; many could easily accommodate two average-size adults. Almost all rooms have king-size beds. Dining is buffet-style and entrees are heavy on creams and sauces, with a wide selection of desserts. Guests don’t get a mint on their pillow, they get six in a dish.

Six mints in a dish because Michael Moore and Oprah are going to get hungry on the long walk from the feeding trough to the bathroom, and might need a fistful of chocolates to help them out. I shudder to think what modifications had to be made to the plumbing in that building. Chipper/shredders in the toilets?

Lucky for us, all employees receive sensitivity training in the form of a Disney movie:

Martha Riofrio Bueno, the resort’s human resources director and a psychologist, trains all new employees on how to treat overweight people with respect. She shows the film “Beauty and the Beast” to stress that no one should be judged solely on their appearance.

Super. Really they show it because of the part where the plates and forks dance around and sing. They should show “Dumbo”, too, just to drive the point home. I mean, doesn’t everyone base their behavior on what they see drawings of fictitious animals doing? I know I learned a lot from the Thundercats.

Sandra Polley, 33, a Web designer from Illinois who describes herself as obese, remembered a horrible experience years ago at a hotel in Cancun, where she jumped into a pool before realizing the only way out was an aluminum ladder. “My choices were to struggle up the ladder, or throw myself over the edge like a beached whale,” she said. Polley seems to have left out the third choice which was to stop indulging herself and change her lifestyle just enough that she would be able to climb out of a pool if the situation should arise.

Okay, I added the last sentence in myself, but there is a certain point to it. If you can’t climb up a ladder out of a pool, do you find a pool with steps, buy a forklift, or try to improve your situation? Let’s see…my car is out of gas, so I need to get a new car with gas already in it. What a horrible experience. See the flaw in the thinking there?

“I would never go to a resort in the United States, because of the ridicule, shame and embarrassment,” she said. Despite the large numbers of overweight people in the United States, she said Americans “treat them the worst.”

Americans treat everyone the worst. That’s why we have to put up fences to keep people out. It is official. America is a horrible place full of evil people. Don’t ever come here for anything. You are only perpetuating the problem. At least now we jerkwad Americans know where to go when we need to get our “making fun of fat people” fix.

In the meantime, e-mail reservations have been flowing in like warm lard. An American couple said they wanted to book for their honeymoon.

Good, ‘cause Americans don’t need no fat people humping around here! No sir!

A woman in Florida sent a message saying she weighed 300 pounds and hadn’t been on the beach in 10 years. She said she wanted to take her 7-year-old daughter, but she couldn’t because of “the loud, rude and crude people who pick on me there.”

“I don’t want to be humiliated like that in front of my young child,” she wrote. “The world is a cruel place for big people. But thanks to your resort, large clients can live the good life, at least for a while.”

This brings me to my final point with this place. Put aside for a moment the fact that they seem to be making fun of fat folks and look at it from an economic point of view. By bringing in the heavies and letting them stuff their jowls with funnel cakes in a seemingly consequence free environment for a week at a time, you are slowly eliminating your own customers. Repeat business will be hard to come by in a market that is dying of heart disease in droves, but hey, “if you feed them they will come”, right?

Trackback URI |