I am not (I assume and desperately hope) the only person seeing these ads about how someone lost 83092348097234 pounds (or 7 million freight trains' worth) of stomach fat following one simple rule that you must obey. At first it seemed like a regular Internet ad: bland and boring, like Kansas in the summer or winter or fall or spring. I mean, I've been a 'Net junkie for like twelve years, starting in those faraway halcyon days when there were actually more humans on Earth than there were webpages and any chump could register www.milk.com without getting ruined by toughs from Big Milk, probably hailing from Ontario as such blackguards tend to do. Yes, that's right, Canada, I'm on to you.

So anyway, I've surfed the 'Net for many a year, and I've seen a lot of ads. And this one about freight trains or whatever the hell I was talking about seemed really boring, though it does prey on the crucial fact, known by all sound ad agencies, that Americans are hideously obese. That is, we are, as a nation, so obese that we pretty much deflect the moon out of orbit and will, on December 12, 2012, cause it to crash down somewhere east of Moscow, leading to general rejoicing except among people actually on the Earth; International Space Station residents, you luck out. Until you starve to death. Suckers. And given this obesity, people want to lose it without having to do anything like "eat less" or "exercise more" or "try not eating the whole damn bag at once for crying out loud". So despite its uninspiring form, its ubiquity plus its massive target demographic (ho ho, capital punnery!) mean that lots of people click on it.

Naturally, it never reveals the "one simple rule" that people must obey, and presumably that holds even after people pay whatever gougery is requisitioned from our corpulent and hypothetical consumer. But I'm thinking, what if the rule is, like, "support Tom Smith as dictator of Earth"? Tom Smith could totally conquer the Earth. And that's starting to worry me a little. Because Tom Smith is a dick.