Pressed for time yesterday, I acquired dinner via McDonald’s drive-thru and headed home.  Once there, I sat upon the couch, lounging too far back for civilized man, and consumed a double quarter pounder with cheese.

Inspecting the packaging, I noticed that this little sandwich packed 740 calories all on its own.

This got me to thinking about obesity in general, which led me to ruminate on why it is our bodies are so unable to properly handle the excess material we now consume.  And that led me to state: God does not exist.

Here’s how I got there!

It is quite clear that the human body is not able to recognize when there is no scarcity of food resources and is especially unable to trigger greater amounts of caloric evacuation when the body continues to ingest food while there is no exertion generally involved.

My thought is that this is because the body has not yet reprogrammed itself for our current fat, happy state.  It has been evolved over millennia with the idea that the consumption of food follows scarcity and exertion, that the body has to engage in physical work in order to acquire food.  It is also geared towards the idea that there might be a lengthy period of time between meals depending on whether or not food acquisition is successful.

So how does this negate the existence of God?  Pretty easily, actually.  If God had created us so perfectly, then wouldn’t our bodies have started off with the ability to adjust caloric retention in the face of increased consumption?  Adam & Eve were, after all, “born” in paradise where they wanted for nothing.  Adam didn’t have to lift a finger to get some grub.  Heck, the animals walked right up to him and, apparently, apples were plentiful.  But of course, he liked them apples and got kicked out at which point God made him horrifically mortal.

So for the time they were in paradise, Adam & Eve, supposedly, were not fatties even though hunting and gathering wasn’t really a concern shared in Genesis.  Besides, a perfect creator is perfectly capable of building a creature that doesn’t just suddenly get chubby every time he sits around too long.  Unless he’s looking to punish that creature for being a schlub.

Anyway, out of paradise, stuff changes.  Eve has to have labor pains and everybody goes mortal.  But only sort of mortal.  They still get to live hundreds of years, so God has essentially changed the DNA of his creations in order to rough them up a bit.  And then he does it again when he decides even that hundreds of years is way too much.

But, so far, no mention of letting them get fat.  If obesity isn’t a punishment from God, then why would he have created us in a way that would lend itself to our eventual fattening?  Does God get fat?  I mean, really, he just sits around all day listening to people, probably eating Kentucky Fried (mashed potatoes and gravy are as close to the Rapture as one can get).

And I just kept thinking about this.  The omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being must have purposefully created us to get fat!  What a jerk!  Somewhere in his grand design, he said, “Man, if these cats ever get lazy, I’m gonna make it so they just balloon up and spawn a plus size clothing market.”  Otherwise, why not engineer us so that we always stay thin?

After the rush of sodium and grease worked its way through my system, I stopped thinking about this topic, but when faced with the choice between the idea that our bodies have not yet evolved to take into account an abundant food supply and a sedentary existence versus the idea that an invisible guy made us to get fat in order to punish our success in being lazy, I decided to go with the one that at least seemed plausible.

And since I ruled out the involvement of a deity, well, I just threw the baby out with the bathwater and concluded (as I always do) that it’s easier to believe he doesn’t exist at all than to believe he’s a putz.

Come on.  It’s 2009. I can’t believe I actually found this on a web site.

I was stumbling through six degrees of LJ Friends pages and ended up on madamewoselle’s YouTube site where I sat down to watch Palin Rally, Penn State 08.

There’s a guy in there, wears glasses, chokes when challenged to contrast Palin’s supposed down-home nature with Cindy McCain’s uptown girl persona.  Yeah, I work with that guy.

And now I have to live with the knowledge that he had nothing other than campaign soundbites as his defense for supporting the McCain/Palin candidacy.

You are obligated to visit A BeTaMaXMaS in order to watch a virtual TV carrying nothing but the programming of XMaS’s of yore.

If you’re bored or just want to play with a soundboard, check out PALINdrome, which allows you to drag and drop Sarah Palin soundbites like so many refrigerator poetry magnets and then hear the results.

Just recently, Brandy and I were talking about a segment from The Electric Company in which one of the cast sings a song regarding his inability to tell the difference between lettuce and cabbage.

I was reminded of this song when I today read this:

“my cat is bleeding from the anus and penis what do i do or what else can i look for until i can get her to the vet??!”

Either that’s the world’s first hermaphroditic cat or somebody is a bit confused.

Oh the wonders of digital television!  It appears that there are three channels viewable on our bedroom flat panel TV that pick up the On Demand content of other folks in the neighborhood.

As a result, I’ve been able to watch every episode of TrueBlood (which isn’t all that bad) and get caught up on this season of South Park. 

The real fun comes when they fast forward through the commercials for me.  It’s like TiVo but with even less effort.  Of course, I don’t get to choose what I watch on these channels, but I do get a unique insight into the tastes of my neighbors.

This is apparently not a new phenomenon, but it’s a fun way to inject some randomness into my day.

First, it was two weeks of fake “CNN Alerts” in my spam box. Now, it’s all Paris Hilton. For example:

• Paris Hilton’s Bust Goes Missing
• Paris Hilton Hates Nicole Richie
• Paris Hilton In Online Plea For Leniency
• John McCain To Paris Hilton: “Cosmo, bayatch!”
• Paris Hilton Fires Talent Agent!
• Letterman to Interview Paris Hilton’s Vagina
• Paris Hilton: Let Me Be Yearn For Zion Girls’ Role Model
• Paris Hilton asks: Has anyone seen Mike Hunt?
• Paris Stilton no longer FHM Magazine Sexiest Women List big cheese
• Paris Hilton Had Sex With Aliens
• Paris Hilton confuses Animal Control Cops

My favorite is that last one.

My favorite time of the day is when I wake up from an overly elaborate dream and then find my mind racing through a variety of thoughts.

This morning, I had a dream about daywalker vampires gathering to celebrate the worldwide lord of all vampires.  Unfortunately, he was unable to be there, so his second in command (largely considered an eccentric undead dude) took over for the festivities.  This allowed an opening for a renegade faction, which included the #1 vamp’s mom, to penetrate the grounds and go after #2.

I woke up from that and imagined a story in which vampires had finally conquered the Earth.  It seems to me that nearly any story about vampires ends up having somebody that stops them from ruling humanity but also has any number of living humans who aspire to be vampires.  So what happens in a world where vampirism is the dominant state?  Would there exist a sub-culture of people who eventually declare their individuality by harkening back to imagery of a brighter world?

Specifically, I imagined a group of anti-goths called the Waukees, named for the city of Milwaukee, setting of Happy Days.  Hundreds of years from now, the visions of bright 50’s americana would be as counter-culture as the visions of darkness and isolation that drive counter-culture today.  In a dark world, what would be more jarring than to see people patterning themselves after Richie Cunningham?

Want to give your friends, enemies, and acquaintances some gin-yooo-wine Hannah Montana wake up calls? Wal-Mart to the rescue!

No, you can’t have my phone number.