Ethnic Avenue – The Street That Crosses All the Others

Archive for the ‘Fat People’ Category

If you’re up late enough watching TV, you start getting the extended commercials for things that tend to appeal to up-late slobs (e.g., Girls Gone Wild tapes, no-work exercise machines, seductive get-rich-quick schemes).

Lately, I’ve been seeing this gem from our friends at eDiets a lot (watch as much as you can tolerate):

Apart from being entirely too long, repetitive, and giving you a nagging case of that embarrassed-even-though-it’s-not-you feeling, this commercial is another sign that the end-of-days is hurtling toward us.

Five Disturbing Things about This Commercial

1. We’re such collective fat-asses these days that you can actually take out two-minute ads on TV for unnecessary “diet plans” and still turn a nice profit.

2. People know so little about basic nutrition that having someone else prepare every single one of your meals and ship it to your door “fresh” is considered a viable option for eating healthy. What’s next: eShits.com, a service where someone else takes your shits for you? You heard it here first.

3. Insultingly out-dated “rap music,” with whack-ass rhymes and tired “hip-hop” phrases (“I got it going on”) and gestures (raise the roof). The only thing missing is a line of kids doing the Running Man in the background.

4. Lamely, and transparently, trying to legitimize the use of a “rap song” by prominently featuring a black girl—who, from her before-and-after pictures, doesn’t even appear to have lost very much weight.

5. Setting back White girls everywhere—who have been working tirelessly to erode the pesky stereotype they can’t dance—by putting on some of the worst White-lady dancers imaginable.

Sooner or later, everyone encounters one of those fat guys that thinks his girth automatically makes him tough or, worse, that his fatness is roughly equivalent to being muscular.

Sadly, there’s wide pandemic of this type of wannabe-tough-guy asshole in the urban Latino and black communities, a problem I attribute largely to the popularity of football, which rewards a few linebackers–with little more ability than that of clogging up space–with the largely undeserved labels of “tough” and “athletic.”

I usually ride back here.

It’s pretty easy to know when you’re dealing with one of these idiots. For one, they’re enormous. They waddle around, often in some sort of sports gear, trying hard to look hard. And, they’re one of the more likely candidates to diagnose your staring problem. If he’s assumed any position of authority–however minor–rest assured that he fully, and regularly, trips on his power. Think bouncers, the occasional bus driver, and–of course–tow-truck operators.

There’s a TV show that relies almost entirely on these characters for its poorly staged theatrics—TruTV’s Operation Repo. The show, which features a group of (mostly Latino) male and female “tough guys” doing sham repossessions, is an unsettling reminder of why the United States and Mexico are numbers one and two—respectively—on the list of the world’s fattest countries.

It used to be that we consistently portrayed the fat guy as inferior to the fit guy.(And, often, as the bad guy.) The Blutos of the world routinely got their asses kicked by the slimmer, buffer Popeyes.

But nowadays, we celebrate the Blutos.