Salon.com > Steven A. Shaw

Valentine’s Day with the Fat Guy

Wed, 14 Feb 2001 20:24:00 +0000

Three hundred years after Jesus' death, a priest named Valentine was imprisoned by the pagan Roman Empire for teaching Christianity. While behind bars, he is said to have cured the jailer's daughter of her blindness (through prayer, that is). He later wrote her a letter signed: "From Your Valentine." The same day, Feb. 14, he was dragged into the public square, beaten with clubs and then beheaded.

A hundred years earlier, the equally unfortunate bishop of Interamna, also named Valentine, had been arrested for secretly marrying Christian couples in violation of Roman law. He too was martyred on Feb. 14, as was another fellow named Valentine, in Africa. The day was designated Valentine's Day by Pope Gelasius I in A.D. 496.

It's doubtful old Gelasius would be thrilled to learn that, in the 21st century, these martyrs are remembered through observance of a holiday that exists primarily as a means by which young men obtain premarital sex through the purchase of jewelry and expensive dinners. But then again, he had more in mind than saints when he made Feb. 14 a holiday. He was also cleverly attempting to repurpose a Roman holiday that fell on Feb. 15, upon which young men would randomly choose the names of young ladies to be their dates to the bacchanal. (In that regard, it seems the pagan conception of the holiday has triumphed.)

Eat on me

Thu, 28 Sep 2000 19:14:00 +0000

Though I eat a lot (a whole lot) I must confess I've not done much dining on women's bodies other than the occasional and predictable chocolate sauce or whipped cream in the budding stages of a college relationship. So when my editor at Salon asked me to investigate which foods are best when eaten after being smeared on your lover, my first reaction was, "several extra meals each day!" My second was to think of all the time I'd save on doing dishes. But I never anticipated how much the simple act of eating would improve -- nay, multiply -- my sexual relations with my actual wife.

Nature may not have intended the tongue to be a sexual organ, but it turns out to be the body's most effective member for erotic manipulation. No other appendage combines such strength, flexibility and lubricating ability. Indeed, there are plenty of people who admit they simply do not find sex complete without at least some oral manipulation, and the rest are lying.

Cheesy does it

Fri, 28 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

I met "Pierre" at a rest area near the Canadian border at midnight. I handed him a $100 bill and he handed me a brown paper bag. "Don't you want to count it?" I quipped. He folded the bill, put it in his pocket, backed away from me (never breaking eye contact and never speaking), slid into his Pontiac Bonneville and drove back north to Quebec. I drove south for seven hours, through Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut, to my home in New York City. I drove the speed limit. I didn't want to get stopped. I was transporting illegal cheese.

My search for -- nay, my obsession with -- illegal cheese began in France. "Why is this Camembert so much better than the Camembert in America?" I naively asked the waiter at Maisons de Bricourt in Brittany. "Because, Monsieur, it is made from -- how do you say? -- lait cru?" As I dodged the beads of saliva expelled by his deep guttural pronunciation of "cru," deliberations ensued among the wait staff. They delivered the verdict: "Row milk!"

Images of dilapidated alcoholic cows drinking malt-liquor out of paper bags sprung to mind, but eventually we determined that what he meant was raw milk. Unpasteurized milk. Milk straight from the cow, still harboring all the wonderful bacteria that constitute the soul of great cheese. But it is this very rawness that makes the cheese illegal, and that's what makes me a fugitive.

Bottoms up

Wed, 29 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

"Drink this," says Larry as I shakily accept a glass of viscous,
mucus-colored, sulphur-scented goop. "It's the special family hangover
cure: Raw eggs, lime jello and a touch of flat Guinness. It'll fix you
right up, lad."

It doesn't, and I can't imagine that anything short of a bullet will
cure this hangover. But that's the inevitable outcome when I go
drink for drink with an Irishman.

Everybody's a hangover expert -- especially around holiday time -- and
there's no shortage of folk remedies that people swear by, with each
concoction more unpalatable than the last. So I decided to poll these
self-appointed experts, and some real experts too, in the hopes of
finding the truth about hangover cures.

Of course, we have a term for a person who has too much experience with
hangovers: an alcoholic. But even a social (albeit not particularly
sociable) drinker like the Fat Guy overdoes it once or twice every
December. As long as major corporations continue to foster the great
holiday-party tradition of free liquor, cute secretaries, horny bosses
and bad food, and as long as people are driven to drink in order to dull
the pain of awkward family gatherings, there will be overindulgence at
Christmastime.

Catching lobsters online

Tue, 28 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

"There's something moving in here, boss," said Benny, my FedEx guy, who calls everybody boss, as he dumped six cartons at the foot of the stairs leading up to my apartment.

As I wrestled each protesting lobster from its package, and as it became clear that I was ill-equipped to maintain discipline among this unruly brood, I started to panic. Sure, ordering the monsters had been easy: Just click on the little Java-script animated crustacean, enter a credit card number and go back to playing Minesweeper. But what was I actually going to do with the wriggling lobsters that now covered my entire kitchen table -- which in Manhattan is a euphemism for "the one table in the middle of my apartment that serves as kitchen, dining room, office and lobster-execution table."

These days, few animals are slaughtered in the home (my home, at least). We buy most of our meat dead and butchered, wrapped in plastic on little Styrofoam trays that leave no evidence that this was ever an animal.

But a lobster must be alive at the time of cooking because shellfish meat decomposes rapidly once dead and therefore must be killed by the cook. It brings us face-to-face with what we 're doing; there is no middleman to insulate us.

Fat Guy says eat up and shut up

Fri, 24 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

It's the Fat Guy's favorite time of year again. At holiday time, the average American gains between one and 10 pounds -- and I gain 15. It's when people eat real food, salty and rich with animal fats, and drink to excess. And, sadly, it's when you can't get through a single meal without some neurotic idiot nervously commenting that "This meal is a heart attack on a plate!"

The new national pastime is feeling guilty about food. We've all heard the
same lame jokes: "I'm going to schedule a quadruple bypass for right after
dinner!" "I can feel my arteries hardening as I eat!" "I better go see my
cardiologist tomorrow!" Everybody chuckles, but does anybody really think it's appropriate to joke about heart disease at the table, or anywhere else?
(How about sitting next to a guy on an airplane who says, "Gee, I hope some suicidal Egyptian doesn't crash us!" Likewise, I've never seen a comedian kick off a monologue with a few chemotherapy jokes -- and I've seen some pretty bad comedians.)

A tale of two marathons

Wed, 24 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

In the fifth century B.C., without the benefit of Nikes, PowerGels or Gatorade,
a Greek herald named Phidippides ran the 26 miles from Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek victory over the Persians, after which he promptly dropped dead.

Today, more than 400,000 people run in more than 300 marathons in America each year (to say nothing of the 250 Mile Mojave Deathrace), and very few die (although thousands are injured, both in the races and during training).

About 30,000 of those people run in the New York City Marathon and, this
year, two of those were my wife, Ellen, and her brother, Jon. Their
challenge was clear: To run 26.2 miles, from the Staten Island side of the
Verrazano Bridge, through all five boroughs, to the finish line at Central
Park's Tavern on the Green restaurant.

My job, as one of 3 million spectators, was to cheer my runners at as
many points on the course as possible while simultaneously avoiding the
boredom inherent in that mind-numbing task. And so, armed with a subway map and the information gleaned from several restaurant guidebooks, I devised a little competition of my own: a snacking marathon ("Snackathon," if you will). Sure, there were no other participants in my Snackathon, but, as runners like to say, "I'm only competitive with myself." Whatever that means.

I'm obese, you're obese

Wed, 10 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

I'm obese, and according to the American Medical Association there's a one-in-four chance you are too. Let's find out.

Take your weight in kilograms and divide by the square of your height in meters. Just kidding -- the government maintains a Web site that will perform this computation for you. This is your body mass index, or BMI. If your BMI is between 25 and 30, you're overweight -- that's 42 percent of men and 28 percent of women. If it's 30 or more, you're obese (mine is 35.9; Pavarotti is 42; Princess Di on a good day was probably a 19; the average fashion model is probably an 18), along with 21 percent of men and 27 percent of women.

That's a grand total of 63 percent of men and 55 percent of women who are overweight or obese, according to Aviva Must, Ph.D., of Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, lead author on the study published in the Oct. 27 Journal of the American Medical Association.

And thus it happened that on Oct. 27 Americans awoke to a barrage of sensationalist TV and newspaper stories triggered by an onslaught of AMA press releases delivering the same old news: Americans are getting fatter.

“Fat guys kick ass”

Fri, 15 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

That the world is run by fat guys is no secret (more on this later), yet Americans devote a tremendous amount of time, effort and money to losing weight without ever stopping to consider the advantages of obesity. And the advantages are many -- not least of which is that you can eat whatever you want.

I'm a fat guy -- always have been. I'm not "big-boned" (surprise, there's no
such thing), I don't "carry it well," and I'm neither "husky" nor "just a
little heavy." There's nothing wrong with any of my glands. I'm not a victim
in any way. I'm a fat guy because I eat too much. If I ate less, I'd lose
weight. But I don't, because I love food (and I even eat food I don't love,
because I love the mere act of eating). I'm a fat guy, as in I could lose 50
pounds and still be fat, as in I'm 5-foot-10 and 250 very apparent pounds (plus or minus 10 pounds depending on what I ate that day). I'm a fat guy, and I'm not alone.