Weight Loss

Like so many things, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Someone decided that we should have a weight-loss competition at work, which involved teams of five people seeing how much weight they could lose over a couple of months. When I accepted the invitation to join a team I didn't really pay much attention to the other members - after all, I wasn't about to get all psycho about weight loss. Unfortunately what I hadn't realized was that of the four other team members, three were bone-thin bastards with no weight to lose, and the fourth had already been working hard at it for a month, meaning that I was the only one who was a candidate to lose any weight at all.

Now, I'm no fat bastard, but I could probably lose a few pounds and feel no worse for it. Mrs Bison thinks about ten, which is optimistic. Bison Daughter is expecting me to end up with a six-pack, which is simply ridiculous, but represents a charming show of faith in her old man. It's not like I'm in this to win it; there are some people in our office who could - how do I say this delicately? - comfortably lose the bodyweight of a good sized dwarf and hardly notice. Nevertheless I at least want to be sure that we're not the only team to actually get fatter while supposedly trying to lose weight.

So what's my strategy? "Eat less and exercise more" is a well-established approach, but I already exercise five or six times a week, and I'm buggered if I'm going to go hungry. The thing about lifting weights is that it's important to ingest a significant amount of protein at regular intervals during the day, so I can't skip that. The only other time I decided to lose weight I went on a "no pasta, rice, bread or potatoes" regime for a few weeks. (I didn't cut out cakes or sweets.) It worked well, but I became pissy and irritable for a few days, and the aggravation of having to try and find alternatives to these starches while traveling became a monumental pain in the arse.

This time I'm going to cut back on the carbs again, reducing the starches, avoiding cakes and candy, and adding in fruits and salads to fill the space. I've been at this for a few days now and I have to say it's a fucking pain in the arse. Of course Mrs Bison decided to mark my endeavor by making her famous cherry cake, which I had to refuse, even as she repeatedly taunted me with the offer of a slice. (Does she actually want me to lose any weight?) Tomorrow I'm going to take a salad to work, complete with a can of tuna and hard boiled eggs for protein (which hopefully means I won't look completely gay).

Obviously this isn't a diet where I eat less food, only different food. If I was a bloater I might have to reconsider, but I'm only prepared to contemplate minor deprivation in the cause of pointless competition. The problem is that I just discovered Five Guys burgers. There's a place close to the office and I only got round to trying it just prior to the start of this contest. It was outstanding, no other word for it. Fabulous juicy burger, big pile of tasty fries; fuck me, I can almost taste it now. And yesterday Mrs Bison bought ice cream. Fucking diet...



Maybe there's a better way. I could just avoid wearing underwear when they weight us in at the end, that should save a few ounces. Have a haircut the day before, leave my car keys at my desk, wear lighter shoes, that sort of thing. On the other hand, Mrs Bison is now watching one of those tiresome period drama Dickens productions on public television. Watching that would bore the shit out of me. If I can only watch long enough, surely significant weight loss is guaranteed?


Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Male Enhancement

I decided to drop my car off for an oil change today before taking Mrs Bison for a gratuitously large Chinese lunch. Normally I'd wait with the car and take the opportunity to look over the new and used cars in the dealer lot, just for fun. Show me a man who can find himself surrounded by cars and not want to look at them and I'll show you a man who doesn't need a car simply because he's on the other bus. I could have checked out new cars when we came back from lunch but today my heart wasn't in it. You see, it appears that in addition to a new car I'll also need a bigger penis.

Whoa! Hold on there - I've had no complaints (he hastens to add) - but I've been reading car magazines recently, you know, things like Car and Driver, and if the advertising is anything to go by I can't get a new car without also doing something about my dick. There was this full page advert headlined "Does Size Really Matter To Your Lover?", followed by a lot of small text, the upshot of which was that I should send anywhere between $70 and $100 to purchase some non-FDA approved dried monkey jizz (or whatever the stuff is made of) which would give me a bigger, thicker more energetic manhood with "Orgasmic Thrust Activation".

Maybe it's because the advert was in a car magazine, but I can't help thinking that orgasmic thrust activation is something you'd find on a new Corvette, maybe to help you pull away quickly at the lights. Except it would be abbreviated to "OTA" and you'd have to nod sagely when the salesman told you that the car had it, even though you had no fucking clue what it did. And it would have its own little light on the dash which would come on after two thousand miles to inform you that the OTA wasn't working, and before you knew it you'd be back at the dealership every other week for them to try and fix it. But it would still be a bragging point: "Yeah, I got the Z06 model because of the OTA - you should feel your neck snap when you hit the gas!"

There was a second advert in the same magazine under a "Size Does Matter" banner, but this time you could spend more than $300. Maybe you get a really big penis with their stuff. But what if it worked? None of your pants would fit anymore, and if you got an unexpected erection at work you'd have to hide it under the desk. Fortunately the risk is low - I'm sure none of this shit works, but there must be plenty of blokes out there willing to roll the dice. And it's got to be good business for the companies who sell it. I mean, not only does it not have to work, they don't even really need to send you any pills. What are you going to do? Complain to the Better Business Bureau? Yeah, I can see that conversation happening.

"I'm calling to complain about this company. I sent them $300 because they said I could add three inches to my penis. And girth too. They definitely said girth. Now I've been taking the pills for a month and nothing's happened. No, definitely no bigger. Because I measured it. With a ruler. How long? Is that really important? It's the same as it was before, surely that's all you need to know? The girth? I don't know, it doesn't feel any thicker. No I didn't measure it - the ruler wouldn't bend. Oh, I suppose you're right, I could have used a bit of string and then measured the string. But I want to complain - they won't send my money back. My name? It's - erm - Smith. Yes, Smith. Address? I'd rather not say..."

Or maybe the company sends you the money back on a big pink check emblazoned with the words "PENIS ENLARGEMENT REFUND". Like that's ever going to get cashed.



Some of the other ads are more subtle - they don't mention size directly but instead refer to "Natural Male Enhancement", which is right up there with Around View Monitor, Lane Departure Prevention System and Electronic Brake Assist in the list of options on your new car. "I'd like it in black with the leather interior and the Natural Male Enhancement package please."

Clearly lots of blokes want a bigger dick. I'd love to be able to reassure them that "Size Doesn't Matter" but my non-scientific survey tells me that "Women Talk About Size". At least one of my colleagues claims to be getting the "short end of the stick" whenever she takes one home. My question is, are new cars disproportionately purchased by men with small dicks who are looking to compensate? Is that the real reason the car magazines are full of penis enlargement adverts? Whatever the reality I'd suggest to any bloke considering sending his hard-earned cash to some outfit promising to add inches to his member that he would indeed be better off putting it towards a new car. Not because it'll make up for the shortfall, but simply because he'll at least get some pleasure from the car. And in the meantime remember this sage advice from a noted stand-up comic:

I took this woman home and when I got undressed she pointed at my dick and said "Who do you think you're going to satisfy with that?" and I said "Me."



Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Life Everlasting

Maybe it's fitting that on Easter Sunday, when millions are celebrating the last time someone rose from the dead, I found myself listening to a National Public Radio program about cryonics. Normally I eschew NPR, full as it is of dreary arty bollocks, lefty liberal apologetics and "black-only" racist programming, but it has its moments, and today contained one of them. The program looked back to the early days of cryonics in the sixties, when some bloke called Bob Nelson started freezing people and storing them in the charmingly ridiculous hope of reviving them later. The technology wasn't there at the time, but who knows what will be possible later, and I couldn't help thinking what a horrific thing that would be.

The idea behind cryonics is that most people who die aren't really "dead" according to the "information theoretic" definition of death, since their identity and memory is still preserved in their brain tissue at the moment of clinical death. As minutes or hours go by the brain will decompose and identity would be lost, but in theory if you froze someone who died of something like a heart attack you could revive them later.

Let's leave aside all the scientific questions about how long you could wait to freeze someone, what you'd need to do to preserve the body tissue and all that other stuff. For a start it's arse-clenchingly dull to anyone who's not into cryonics, and I have a suspicion that anyone who is into cryonics is a nutter. Frankly, I couldn't be arsed to research the subject. But let's think about this for a bit. What if it worked? What if people didn't die but just went into stasis for a bit and got revived later?

For a start it's not as though the world is short of people. The population is now estimated at 6.7 billion; when I was a kid I remember being told it was about 4 billion. Even without cryonics we're going to run out of places to put them all, and land to grow food for them. About 60 million people die every year, but even if you only consider the "wealthy" ones the number isn't small. 2.5 million die annually in the US. Assuming that cryonics becomes possible and affordable just imagine the additional land that'll be given over to gigantic frozen warehouses for all their corpses. And what are the eco-weenies going to say about the huge amounts of electricity being used to refrigerate all these bodies; instead of returning their carbon to the earth they'll be using fuel for centuries. Bear in mind that it's not necessary to prove that you can revive people for there to be a market here - there's no shortage of idiots willing to be frozen just on the off-chance of future success.

Let's hope the idea never works - with the birth rate at 75 million per year (a net of 15 million over the death rate), even if we only revived 25% of the stiffs we'd be looking at doubling the population growth.

And what would we get at the end of it? Statistically speaking an awful lot of people die when they're old. I've seen old people: forget the problem with all the senile ones, just think about how they spend their time now. Revive them and before you know it we'll be knee-deep in wrinklies. They already retired so what are we going to do? Pay them another pension until they die (again)? You won't be able to move at WalMart, and forget trying to eat during the early bird special. The economic might of the United States will be devoted to the production of dentures, incontinence pants and arthritis drugs. The promise of cryonics is that we get to see a wonderful future, beyond our dreams, but the revived pensioners are just going to moan about how much better it was in the old days so what's the point?

That's the trouble with people - they don't think things through. Everyone wants to live forever but I'm afraid that doesn't work. Instead of people trying to extend their lives indefinitely wouldn't it be better if we enjoyed life while it lasted, embraced death when it came, and realized that millions of drooling carcases, kept alive only by advanced medical intervention, should be sent on their way? Today millions remember how two thousand years ago someone got nailed to a cross so we wouldn't have to fear death anymore. Doesn't seem like it worked, does it?


Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison