The Daily Fail strikes again

So, I was reading an article on the Daily Mail website about how young women who inherit their body type from their hippy mothers (no, not mothers who like to wear patchouli and wear love beads, necessarily) should literally diet and exercise their asses off. The impetus for this is a picture of Princess Beatrice in a bathing suit which shows that the girl has the nerve to have hips, just like her mum! Mind you, the writer starts out by saying the princess is not by any means fat. So, burning calories is supposed to do what exactly? (Leaving aside the argument about how effective weight loss is in those of us who actually are fat, of course.) And then some ass of a commenter refers to the woman as morbidly obese.

When I was done banging my head on the keyboard, I noticed that there was a link to a story about an alleged Jimi Hendrix sex tape. My curiosity aroused, I followed the link and read the story, which was accompanied by a number of photos, including this one:



The caption is "Hippy values: Hendrix pictured with two un-named women in the late sixties." Well, I am notoriously bad at putting names with faces, but those two unnamed woman sure as heck looked like half of the Mamas and the Papas to me. And, whaddaya know— a Google Image search for "hendrix phillips elliot" brings up many instances of that same photo. Now, I know nobody considers The Mail a great newspaper, but FFS, if I of all people am better at identifying the people in a photo that they are, they're more pathetic than I realized.

via Shapely Prose

Fat hatred: the game

I just read about a new game called Fatworld over at Wired. The "obesity epidemic"--it's fun for the whole family!

I'm sure the creator of this game thinks it's all about "healthy choices." I appreciate the acknowledgment that high-quality food and fancy gyms are more readily available to the wealthy, but we all know (or I hope we do by now) there are people who eat healthy food and work out and yet--hold onto your hats, folks!--are still fat.

Besides, if you're gonna have characters named things like "Gordita," it's pretty clear where you're coming from.