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Friday, March 29, 2024 | Back issues
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Cutting The Fat

Having trouble sticking to a diet?

I have the solution for you: move to Japan.

Yeah, I know you can get sushi here, but no one is going to force you to eat it. (Hence the phrase, "You can lead a fat person to sashimi, but you can't make him not order fries with that.")

But if you're a Japanese citizen over 40, it's now illegal to be overweight.

OK, they're not throwing people in jail, but what they are doing, according to recent news reports, is measuring people's waistlines and forcing some sort of reeducation program on them if they're just a tiny bit chubby. There are also penalties for companies and local governments if their employees or citizens are too wide.

Space is at a premium in Japan, so it's easy to understand why they'd want to keep people compact. Still, it would be nice to utilize this sort of regulatory scheme to solve some of our problems over here.

We probably couldn't implement the direct fat restrictions here - the hefty contingent has too much political clout and they're really big and intimidating. But there are government schemes that just might work.

Like buying and selling credits.

If it's feasible for greenhouse gases, why shouldn't it be feasible for human gases?

Give everybody, say, 2,000 calorie credits per day. Then allow people to buy other people's credits, sell them, or save them for a binge day. This way, no matter how the trading goes, the population as a whole will be limited to a healthy amount of food.

Lower-income families can sell credits to improve their lot and the wealthy can buy as many credits as they want, get sick, and die.

It's a win-win.

Gyms, naturally, would be authorized to grant extra credits to people on exercise machines that generate energy.

With a little imagination you can solve any problem.

THE POWER OF TV. Maybe we're all on TV and we don't know it.

Or at least most of us don't.

Some of you may remember that a San Diego-area woman has sued the producers of the "Judge Mathis" television show for, allegedly, not giving her a fair trial. The suit goes on at some length, but here's the line that caught my eye: "(S)he ... believed that she would be attending a real, although televised, small-claims court."

Apparently the flight to Chicago didn't strike her as unusual for small claims cases.

It gets better: "Indeed, it would not be until over a year later, that Ms. Burnham would become informed that 'Judge Mathis' was not a real judge and that she had not been in real court."

Someone must have turned off her TV.

All of this, of course, begs the question: why aren't all small claims cases being televised?

A little commercial sponsorship could go a long way in solving the judicial budget crisis.

DEPARTMENT OF IRONY. A man in California has sued a woman in Los Angeles Superior Court after, he claims, he poured more than $2 million into a partnership and the woman took a lot of the money and bought a BMW.

OK. Nothing that unusual there. Your typical love story.

Here's the good part: "When first formed, the partnership was going to own and promote a website. Subsequently ... other websites were included in the partnership. These websites included businesses known as: 'Company X,' 'Happy Couple,' 'Duology,' 'Just Dify,' and 'Good Person Seals.'"

I'd recommend not taking any advice from any of those websites.

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