I quit the South Beach diet after one week. I couldn’t handle the following side-effects:

* feeling like a lobotomy patient
* having, as my wife described it, “rotting beef breath”
* being so constipated that it was like having concrete in my colon

How can you possibly loose weight if you never poop?

So, now I’m back to my usual, infrequent-excercise-and-beer diet. I plan to write a book.

In other news, I am moving ever closer to paying someone else to host this website, and buying a domain name. I had been thinking of going with “hotdogsoup.com,” but now I think I might try something different. If you have any suggestions, by all means let me know so that I can rip off your idea.

Of course, there really aren’t any domain names left. Some enterprising a**h*** seems to have purchased ever word in the dictionary, and most of the possible combinations of those words. They have not, of course, put up websites. In a few years, we’ll all just have to use IP addresses.

A friend of mine, whose home on the web is The Blank Paper, is just wrapping up a six week stay in Yemen. For those of you who don’t know, Yemen is a Muslim state on the Arabian penninsula. Here is an excerpt from his concluding blog entry:

The people here are really no different then in most places in the world. The barriers of language and religion only serve to mask that the average person anywhere merely want to be able to provide a good life for their families and loved ones. The international intrigues are only the playing ground of intellectuals and pundits. Most people live lives of quiet ambition, rarely judging people by their governments, but by the merits of each individual.

To read the rest of this entry, click here. Or, to check out his whole blog, click here.

I’m trying the South Beach Diet. Today is day one of the two-week-long “Phase One.” During this period, I can only eat vegetables or raw meat bitten from the hind quarters of a passing animal. No animals yet, and I’m getting very hungry. My co-workers are starting to look tasty.

I feel woozy and light-headed, today. If today is any indication, I’d guess that the South Beach Diet works by fooling your body into canabalizing your brain over the course of several weeks, thereby reducing your weight by the mass of your brain (3 lbs.), and reducing you to wandering in circles, drooling, at South Beach.