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Riley, shown here completing a work schedule for a local family restaurant.

I’ve recently stumbled upon the design for a new weapon.     First, locate a crying toddler.     Second, pick up the toddler and hold him/her under your arm with the noisy end pointing toward your enemies.     Congratulations! You’ve assembled your very own Sob Cannon.     This surprising* weapon is capable of clearing public restrooms, busy shopping aisles and other public spaces.     It may be an effective form of self defense against obsequious wait-staff or commissioned salespeople as well, though I’ve yet to try it on anything more threatening than a timid waitress who apparently was immunized as a child. I found that in her case a stern glare was just as effective but deprived me of a much-needed coffee refill.

Unfortunately, it seems to have the opposite affect on my parents and other older relatives.

* Surprising in that no one expects a Sob Cannon attack. NO ONE.

This is a 230lbs (105kg) SafeTinspector photographed cavorting in water with his eldest SafeTspawn in the summer of 2006.     At this time he wore pants with a thirty-eight inch (97cm) waistband–and when he did, he found that they were a bit on the snug end of the belt spectrum.     As recently as August of 2008 he was still 215lbs (98kg).     Note the prominent jelly-rolls, mound of back-fat, moobs*, and the protective barrier of flesh artfully concealing the waistband of his swimming trunks.

Now, here is a 183lbs (83kg) SafeTinspector in mid-November, 2008.     The waist of the Inspector is now a full five inches (13cm) narrower than in the above picture and he can very nearly bench-press his former weight. He last saw this low a body weight 19 years ago at the age of 17. And since he had no muscle to speak of during that bygone era, he is actually in much better shape now than at any time in his life.     How did this happen? Simple. Inspiration and perspiration.**

I realized that my dream of being the star of a 1978 pornographic cinema feature could never happen in my current state. My naturally hirsute nature was ideal to please the pubic shrubbery acclimated public of the time, my wacky eyes and practiced sneer fit the task of gentle misogyny perfectly. But the flab needed to go if I wanted even the slightest chance at being an adult film star in the 1970′s.     I’d succeeded in shedding the coagulated lipids and man-curd from my belly meat, and had already posed next to this trendy dream catcher when the fatal flaw in my plan finally was revealed:     I don’t know the way to 1978 and my GPS says its not a location in the continental United States.     EIther I need to purchase a new map-pack from Magellan or it is back to the drawing board for ShapelyInspector.     Regardless, the weight was lost the old fashioned way: diet and exercise. Diet: I cut out the junk food stopped eating out so much started eating a lot more fruit cut down my portion sizes reduced animal flesh to a minimum*** took one multivitamin a day (just in case my diet was missing some vital nutrient or another) Exercise: Increased the frequency and length of time playing DDR for my lower-body and to provide aerobic exertion Dusted off and began to actually use the fine set of olympic free-weights in my basement to build up my upper body and to provide anaerobic exercise.     Once upon a time, in 2001, I was able to get myself down to about 185lbs briefly through near-starvation. I was not exercising at that time in any meaningful way and the weight piled back on as soon as I started eating again. I can hope that I’ll be able to keep it off this time; it’s really neat being able to wear “medium” shorts and “large” shirts (as opposed to “large” and “extra large”) and I would love to make this a permanent development.     I’d hate to finally figure out how to get to 1978 only to find that I’m too fat to make it in the skin trade.

* Moobs: man-boobs. And now you know.
** This marks the end of the third-person portion of the posting. Sorry about that.
*** But not entirely. I’m not a vegetarian, I’m a meat-minimalist

    For those of you outside the USA, Thanksgiving is a holiday many people believe was instituted first by the so-called “Pilgrims,” who are more accurately called the “Pilsners,” a name that has since been solely associated with their egalitarian meal-replacement drink, “pilsner beer.”

    On June 15th in the year 1215, the first batch of Pilsners stepped off their sole remaining ship the Lusitania onto the beach of Plymouth, in a territory the natives of that time called “Zeropercentfinansinga,” which means quite literally “Milk of the Bitch”.

    There they met the Incan delegation of king Imhotep who extended the “Wreath of Solitude,” a halo of vegetation said to produce ennui and irritability–qualities indicative of holiness and/or royalty. Uncertain of the meaning of the gesture, and still quite disconsolate following the loss of the Lusitania’s twin Pilsner ship the HMS Edmond Fitzgerald, the Pilsner leader named Herbert Hoover used part of the wreath as kindling to light the hearth fires of his swiftly erected shanty town and consumed the rest as a sort of salad cooked entirely in the hollowed body cavity of a local game bird, the Turkey.

    And while the long and bloody war this diplomatic faux pas created ultimately ended in the destruction of the Incan empire and the adoption of Puritanicism amongst the pagan Pilsners, that first meal was said to be quite a thing to behold as it worked its laxativatious magic on the exhausted and soon-to-be-evacuated Pilsners.

    So from that day forth the god-fearing people of North America have celebrated Thanksgiving and today is the day.

    Also, if you noticed my website was down last night, gee, thanks for calling me and telling me about it. Jerks. If you didn’t notice, well, you need to come around more often. Lastly, Arth! We need an article about the resurgence of the Dummies series! This time….with PROPS!

Here is a list of animals I wish I could have as pets.

1 – Llama
    Llamas have the prettiest eyes of any quadruped, bar-none. No one can deny this. Plus they have lips like fingers and therefore can play the banjo if properly trained and so inclined.
    Lastly, their poop is a fairly inoffensive collection of pebbles–much like rabbit droppings–and they naturally attempt to poop in the same spot each time, making for easy clean-up.
    I could keep him in my back yard. Whenever I feel blue, I could go stare into his languid eyes and slowly draw my grandmother’s silver, filigreed brush through his luxurious hair.

2 – Goat
    Goats have sideways pupils, are surefooted, are not picky eaters, and are usually very friendly if raised from a kid. They sound like Fran Dresher, which makes me think of Spinal Tap whenever I feed one of them; this is a happy memory for me and one which I can only reproduce by remaining in close proximity to a goat.
    I don’t like sheep, however. Their coats are messy to deal with and they attract cartoon wolves.
    A goat could live in my garage, and I’d feed him only the best kitchen waste in return for his undying love and gratuitous bleating.

3 – Bat
    I don’t want a vampire foxbat. I want one of the little, cute kind of bats we get in Michigan. Bug eating fellows what can comfortably fit in a lady’s brassier, I would keep mine in my car. His glove-compartment guano could provide me with the saltpeter I so desperately need as well as a bug-free car interior. Someone once told me that bats all turn left as they leave the cave; in my mind this makes them natural NASCAR fans. I won’t hold this against them*.

4 Chicken
    So stupid that they’ll be fooled into tasting the same inedible limestone pebble multiple times in a row, a chicken is nature’s Rob Schneider**. I would like to train one to fall asleep in my lap while I watch television, and to possibly steal Cheetos and corn chips from me.

* Can’t be much worse than a relatively colossal breast. Imagine a boob the size of a house. Now imagine you are strapped against it with a couple dozen square yards of premium sail-cloth. Depending on what you’re into I think it might be more traumatic than being publicly slandared as a NASCAR fan.

** Admit it, when you think of Herr Schneider your mind centers immediately on the cloaca.

    You may have heard the good news: the restaurant that popularized if not actually originated the Crap-On-The-Walls style of theme restaurant is out of business.

    You are probably at least as happy about this as I am. But, unfortunately, my plans to celebrate this happy occasion were cut short as I learned yet another reason Michigan is a depressed state:

“The trickle-down is that half of the Bennigan’s in the country close – that’s the bad news,” Hansen said. “The bad news is thousands of people lost their jobs today. The only good news is that none of them were in Michigan.”
-Tri-Cities Business Review

    So franchise owners are free to continue operating as Bennigan’s, polluting the food supply with deep fried ham sandwiches covered in jam, while all of the corporate-owned establishments are mercifully closed, increasing the nutritional quality of the American foodscape by default.

    Sucks for us, but still a good day to be an American on the whole.

    I used Google maps to locate my nearest Bennigan’s. I won’t eat there, no, but I’ll drive by and wonder where they’ll get replacement crap for their walls.

    A certain peddler of faux-Italian meal pies from my area of the globe, a merchant whose name rhymes with ‘Vittle Cheivers’, has a commercial in which the final frame asks us, the viewer, to imagine ourselves about to be devoured by a ravenous family of four.
    Forgive the quality of the picture, it was taken by my cell phone directly off the cathode ray tube that occupies the viewing shrine in my home.
    Pictures like this have a universal quality in that an observer is forced to regress to the point of birth and think back on what innocence they have lost in the intervening years.
    This nuclear family, salivating at the prospect of consuming our be-pepperonied and cheese-riddled bodies, is as close to an analogue of your hospital delivery staff as any you’ll encounter in Western culture. Only, in a delivery room you would be looking out from the womb towards a panoply of nurses and obstetric doctors instead of gazing helplessly from a cardboard box next to a landfill-bound jalapeno pepper. …either way there would likely be much drooling and licking of chops from the principals involved in the endeavor.

    So it is that on this, my 36th birthday, I find myself pulling this picture from my collection and, with a single tear running down my scrubby cheeks, I slowly caress my lcd panel. How I long for those simpler days when the youngest child would seek to pick my mushrooms off while his sister burns her chin on my scalding hot mozzarella. I get this way every June 7th.

    Happy birthday to SafeTinspector (that’s me). buon appetito!

    Correct me if I’m wrong, friends, but I’m pretty sure popcorn wouldn’t work if it weren’t whole-grain.

    Also, they felt it necessary to footnote the fact that the 0% Trans-Fat is only on a per-serving basis. Meaning that, perhaps, enough servings of 0% may equal some other percentage than zero, a mathematical limb I’m not willing to climb on. It won’t hold my weight on account of all the hot buttered popcorn I’ve ingested.

    The people designing this box, do you think they intended the packaging to be anything less than ironic?

    Perhaps they honestly thought a selling point of microwavable popcorn is the fact that the popcorn is still structurally sound.
    And trans-fat free as well! But considering the bucket of butter-flavored grease the popcorn is packed in I think the trans-fat free brag is as meaningful as a bottle of vodka proudly proclaiming itself free of antifreeze.