June 03, 2007
Sunday

Ketchikan, Alaska - Lately, I've been getting a lot of email about something called "Hoodia."

Supposedly it helps you lose weight.

You want to really lose weight? Fly on a float plane. No, really.

Airline regulations require you to announce very loudly to the ticket agent - in front of your fellow travelers - just how much you weigh (and you have to add 10 extra pounds because they know, and you know, that you are lying). It's enough to make a beanpole go on a diet. But as usual, I digress.

Anyway, the purveyors of "Hoodia" think that I need to get some of their product in order to slim down to my appropriate body mass.

Fine. I'm not as thin as I used to be. I suppose it's the healthy thing to do. I was already pondering going on a "health kick" before the person standing next to me at the floatplane counter said "gee, you must be pretty big boned!"

But why "Hoodia?"

According to the info in the "spam," it is a plant from Southern Africa that suppresses your appetite and if you don't feel like eating, you lose weight.

I guess that makes sense. Just about anytime anything plantlike (especially of the green vegetable variety) is put in front of me my appetite immediately decreases. That will always be the case until rib-eye steaks start growing on trees.

So, so much for "Hoodia."

I can get the same result by staring down a plate of broccoli.

Besides I have already found a sure-fire way to lose weight that does not involve fad diets or appetite suppressants or limb amputation.

Move to Hudson's Bay in Canada. No, really!!!

I know what you're thinking.

If you move into the area that has the highest concentration of polar bears in the world, you will automatically become a lean, mean exercising machine by out running the fearsome white overweight humanoid eating beasts every time you have to use the outhouse.

While that may be true up to the point, it has also been determined that people who live around Hudson's Bay really do weigh less that you or me.

It's because of a "gravitational anomaly."

What the heck - you ask - does that mean?

Beats me.

I know what a "gravitational anemone" is (a sea anemone that is so big that smaller sea creatures are caught in its force field and eventually spiral into its mouth).

I know that "gravitational androgeny" is a deep space world in which all the women look like David Bowie and all the men look like Ellen DeGeneres.

And I know what "gravitational anadromy" is (it's the reason why folks - against their better judgment - return to their hometowns to spawn).

I've also heard of "gravitational anatomy," the odd force that keeps that keeps males of the human species circling around Dolly Parton.

But a "gravitational anomaly" sounds like some sort of a science mumbo jumbo thingy that is used to explain what was previous unexplainable.

For example, "why does Ketchikan have a tunnel that you can drive through, drive around and drive over?"

It must be caused by a "gravitational anomaly!!!"

Anyhoo, there is one of these anomaly thingies hanging out at Hudson's Bay and it makes people weigh less there than the same people would weigh elsewhere (and, no, it has nothing to do with Hudson's Bay people prevaricating about their weight because of weird floatplane regulations).

It seems that 20,000 (give or take a decade or two) years ago, there were these big glaciers squishing the bejeezus out of the part of Canada that eventually became Hudson's Bay in 1611 when explorer Henry Hudson got marooned there by a mutinous crew that wanted to go home rather than float around Hudson's Bay enjoying the fact that they weighed less there than they did in jolly Olde Englande.

Hudson, his son, and some loyal crewmembers were set adrift in a small boat with no provisions, leading some latter day historians to speculate that Hudson was the first person to succumb to a fad diet in the New World. He would not be the last.

Anyway, back to the glaciers!

Now in the modern world, glaciers don't have much of a "skill set" to recommend them . Pretty much everything they can do centers on their ability to "compress." If you don't believe me try standing in front of the Mendenhall letting it run (very slowly) over your toes!

These massive glaciers over top of Hudson's Bay caused a couple of "ice domes" that further helped compress the land mass (like I really know what this sentence means, I stole it from a website about the Hudson's Bay gravitational anomaly!) and hence creating the anomaly in which the force of gravity is slightly less hence objects weigh less than they normally would.

So how many pounds will you lose if you move to Hudson's Bay?

(drum roll, please)

The gravitational force there is approximately 1/25,000 of a percent less than normal.

(continued drum roll)

Therefore, your weight - the thing that really concerns the arbiters of airways - will drop by four one thousandths of a percent. In other words, if you lived in Hudson's Bay, you could safely have approximately one one hundred and twenty-eighth of that single Reeses' Peanut Butter Cup and honestly tell the float plane operator that you still weighed the 150 (plus or minus) pounds that you weighed that morning when you got up.

Okay, so it's not all that big of a weight loss. But it is guaranteed, which is more than I can say for "Hoodia."

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