ROUND EARTH SOCIETY

There’s an old saw that, if you stood all the people in the world shoulder to shoulder and back to belly, they would take up a space no bigger than the Six Flags Great Adventure amusement park, making the waits for rides only slightly longer than they are currently. This thought experiment has never been executed, primarily because of the temptations it poses for marauding aliens bent on the conquest of earth. But in light of the recent Obesity Epidemic scourging the developed world, we need to ask ourselves: is Six Flags big enough? Or do we now need Disney to bail us out?

Morbidly, comically, spherically fat people are nothing new to society – ancient, crudely sculpted earth-goddess idols illustrate the lack of gym facilities in the pre-civilized world, and those damn Romans with their vomitoria proved that even bulimia couldn’t stop decadent, fiddling emperors such as Nemo and Dracligula from expanding their bodies to the same bloated extreme as their untenable empires. But with all the current head-wagging and finger-shaking about the Obesity Epidemic, we’ve seen a level of awareness and judgment that surpasses all previous historical benchmarks.

First, a clarification: yes, obesity is communicable, but it’s not nearly as easy to catch as most pundits would have you believe. The obesity virus is only transferable via human saliva, especially saliva involved in the eating process. For this reason, you should be very careful about sharing a Snickers bar or French kissing with an obese person, or, heaven forfend, both at the same time. If you keep your tongue in your mouth and your fingers off other people’s food, you’ll most likely be safe.

Secondly, an elucidation: obese people and overweight people are two entirely separate categories. Overweight people are those who, for glandular, genetic, or nutritional reasons, happen to have a lot of body mass. The true medical description of an obese person, however, is “a person who is afflicted with the obesity virus.” But according to epidemiologist Dr. Alfred Yankovic (who recovered from the affliction himself), there are some less tautological ways of determining whether a person is obese:

• They are wider than they are tall
• They are the same height lying down as they are standing up
• Their hands cannot touch each other without mechanical aid
• Their earlobes touch their shoulder padding
• Their feet are only visible from the knees down
• They need a map to find their own ass
• They have their own zip codes
• When they sit around the house, they really sit around the house

Thirdly, an explication: obesity can be cured. This is not a chronic illness, and the means to defeat it are similar to those required to simply lose weight. This is because the obesity virus lodges itself in the pores; by preventing the escape of toxins through the skin, the virus causes a massive buildup. The main way to expel the virus is therefore to sweat profusely, dislodging as many of the virus’s clones as possible. But we’re not talking about the regular, workaday sweat of walking up stairs or lifting one’s hand to point the remote at the TV – when the sweat is merely a trickle, the virus can easily dodge its flow. No, sufferers from obesity must make their sweat pour from their corpuses in cascading torrents of salty release, positive geysers of perspiration, capable of knocking a hat from the head of an unsuspecting bystander. Only then will the virus be expelled and destroyed.

If a proper sweat regimen can be followed, we’ll find the world’s obesity epidemic will fade to a distant, unpleasant memory (much like the Boer War). Only then will mankind be able to take its proper place, en masse, at Six Flags. Once there, however, we highly recommend the population of earth lay off the communal corndogs, lest the whole cycle begin anew…