It's been awhile...

Dearest readers, I apologize for the long gap between posts. As I previously mentioned, I left the comforts of the computer room for a brief fact-finding trip. Surprisingly, the trip ended up being something like Congressional fact finding trips in that it was fully financed by someone else, which was very nice, and in my case it didn't involve complex ethics rules. Unless someone forgot to tell me something. Hmm...I'll get back to you on that. Anyway, apparently cross-Atlantic fact finding trips don't lend themselves to immediately returning to night shift duty, which meant that my usual mastery of wit abandoned me for much of the past week, leaving you without posts. Thankfully the Wife was there to pick up the slack - head on over to her blog to see the summary of what we learned on our trip.

Now that we're back here in beautiful mid-Missouri where the weather is heating up, we've had a chance to head outside to take advantage of the trail system in town. The city decided to give us further motivation to head outside today by hosting Art in the Park. It was a great time, the art was good to look at, and we got exercise. All was perfect except for the fact that it's warm here. And when it gets warm outside, the sorostitutes start wearing less clothing. And when the sorostitutes start wearing less clothing, so do their less attractive friends and those girls that just want to be sorostitutes.

Okay, I'll freely admit that I'm carrying around a few extra pounds. It comes with eating pizza and drinking beer. But I don't wear clothing that looks like it was painted on, except someone forgot to paint the bottom three inches that were supposed to cover my bulging belly. I respect the fact that no one else wants to see my lard hanging like a fresh ham over my belt. To me, it's a moral obligation to cover one's unsightly rolls. If others are unwilling to do so, I propose that it should be the moral duty of the sales people in the stores to refuse to sell clothing that is clearly 3 sizes too small to any person, regardless of size (we can't be discriminatory here). It comes down to basic utilitarianism. The utility the world gains by not being forced to look at obscene amounts of fat spilling out of undersized clothes far outweighs the utility lost by the stores and manufacturers selling undersized clothing. Heck, the utility gained by the individual who would have otherwise worn said undersized clothing by avoiding social scorn and ridicule probably exceeds the utility lost by the store that blindly pocketed the poor sap's money (and probably snickered about it as soon as the person's back was turned).

In short, unless you're on a beach, I don't want to see your stomach while you're walking around, regardless of how skinny or fat you are. However, I find this to be particularly true for those, like me, who have a few (or 20) extra pounds on them (particularly in the gut). It's just the right thing to do.