Checkup...

"How tall are you and how much do you weigh?" my doctor asked me as he pulled a ratty paper disk out of his white coat.

"Six-one, six-two? Two-sixty last I checked about a year ago."

"Hmm..." He's sporting a goatee now which makes him look a lot like Peter Gabriel. This comforts me.

"Is that a BMI chart?"

My doc looks at me out the corner of his eye, "... Yup."

"I don't trust those things."

I'm not a fat guy. I'm a big guy.

There was a documentary on Discovery years ago about Roman gladiators. One part of the program described a gladiator's diet which consisted of mostly broth, wheat and barley and the occasional meat.

The common Hollywoodized perception of a gladiator was shown on the left side of the screen:

A still shot of Russel Crowe; rippling muscles glistening with sweat and blood, his sword and shield triumphantly raised, standing in the middle of the Colosseum and roaring behind his scary, customized helmet.

On the right was a composite sketch of what anthropologists and historians agreed a gladiator would really look like:

Me.
Shirtless.
Wooden shield in one hand.
Chewed-up sword in the other.
Looking VERY unimpressed with the artist.

I felt proud to be a genetic throwback. My body was designed for two things; extreme physical labour and brutally killing other people in combat. I'm a front-line farmer. "45th generation Roman."

A thousand years ago I'd have been a celebrity. Rich, young, noble-women would have paid my manager good money for me to "entertain" them.

Today, Dr. Gabriel is telling me that I'm between level I and level II obesity.

"It's not the most technical device," he said, holding up his little, paper, fat-calculator. "But it gives me a rough idea."

He slid the disk around.

"If I take your height and put it at a healthy weight, according to the BMI, you should weigh 180 lbs."

"Doc, if I ever weigh 180 lbs, I'll be right back here talking to you."

"Yup. And we'll get that tapeworm out of you ASAP."

Franco-fascism...

Are we in Canada anymore?

Wait... I forgot. Quebec isn't a part of Canada now, it's a nation within a nation. But if Quebec starts a kind of cultural cleansing, would Canada intervene?

Well, if you ask me, we better keep an eye open.

I think Gilles Duceppe is losing it and unless you're a Catholic francophone, your rights in Quebec might be getting trampled.

According to the Montreal Gazette, the Bloc wants to restrict non-Catholic clothing and symbols and is hinting that if you're an immigrant who doesn't speak french, you might not be eligible to vote.

"We shouldn't turn ourselves into the Taliban and demolish all the buddhas of Quebec," said Duceppe. "We're not going to stop listening to Mozart's Requiem because it was written for a mass. All that is part of the heritage of humanity and of Quebec."

I'm not seeing very much humanity here. I might be out of my head, but I'm seeing the beginning of something else;

fas·cism [fash-iz-uhm]:

• A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.

Here's the full article from the Gazette.

Powder keg...

John Wisely, a staff writer for the Detroit Free Press wrote a pretty scary article in the Nov. 18 issue of the Free Press.

But really, how bad can it be?

Well if you haven't heard, a man named John Horn in Pasadena, Texas killed two, hispanic men with his shotgun while on the phone with a 911 operator. The internet is flooded with debate on whether he's a hero or a vigilante.

And now...

Type "black panther party john horn" into google and the first two links are a white supremacy group's site.

Is this really an issue of race, or is there a bigger picture? The States deserves to be watched very closely in the coming years.