Is that my fat ass they're showing on TV?

I was watching the Today Show this morning and they did a segment on this completely ridiculous beauty makeover of the USDA's food pyramid plan. The original, as we all know, was just one food pyramid. Allegedly, they thought this confused people, so now there's 12 food pyramids. Gee, sounds perfectly logical to me. When something's confusing, it's always a good thing to increase the amount of confusing things by TWELVE. I sure wish when I started playing guitar that it had 18 strings instead of 6. Yeah, that would have been way more helpful... For those of you who want to end your sleepless nights over the chaos that once ensued over our now defunct single-food hierarchical graphic, you can visit http://www.mypyramid.gov. I'll touch more on this insanity in a few seconds... but for now I want to focus on the title of this post.

Whenever you see obesity segments on the telly-a-vision, you probably notice the stock footage of obese people they show thruout the clips. They never show faces - it's always from the neck down with the camera focused on the belly and/or ass. My question is this: do the people that don't know they're being filmed ever sit at home watching TV and suddenly spot their ass jiggling around down the street in a segment on how obese America is becoming? I can't imagine that to be the most flattering experience.. "Look ma - my ass is famous! It's right there on the Today Show! I know it's mine - I was carrying a shopping bag just like that and wearing shorts that were hiked up on the insides of my thighs!"

Also, you've got to remember some guy gets paid to go out and film random obese people from the neck down. How about that for a job? I never really thought about it before, but I guess there's probably a pretty steady amount of work for very short cameramen who are able to blend into crowds. And then people get paid to edit the footage, having to pick the best ass and belly shots out of the lot to use in the segment.

*sigh*

So anyways, back to the food pyramid. I'm not even going to attempt to read up on the 12 new pyramids. That's not precise enough for this monkey. I'm going to wait 5 or so years until the 12 are subdivided into 24 or 48 more pyramids, and then those pyramids will be subdivided into even more pyramids. I'm waiting for the "shaggy brown haired glasses wearing Ace Frehley tattooed musician who drives a Pinto" pyramid. Or I maybe I should just take a shortcut and design it myself.

Food Pyramid for shaggy brown haired glasses wearing Ace Frehley tattooed musician who drives a Pinto:

Fruits and vegetables: 1%
Tap Water: 5%
Ice cream: 5%
Fast food: 5%
Cheetos: 5%
caffeine: 9%
Sugary cold cereal: 10%
Meat of some sort and french fries with A1 sauce and a pickle spear: 20%
Diet Coke: 40%