Fat fighters

**Good news, at last, for fatties. The invention of the _HAPIfork_, an electronic fork designed to convulse in an irate manner if you dare eat too much or too quickly, should decisively counteract the supermarket conspiracy to fatten us with their exclusively high-fat, calorific deliciousness. And with our Slendertones and oscillating workout plates we’ll be mindlessly vibrating our way to bodily perfection in no time.**

However, even these latest fat-fighting fads will be eclipsed if the stomach tap makes its way over the Atlantic. The device (from the inventor of the Segway, no less) allows people to drain their stomach 20 minutes after a meal by connecting a pump to a valve surgically installed on their abdominal wall.

Imagine! As much food as you could physically stuff in your mouth and none of the accompanying guilt. Well, other than the obscene gluttony and horrifying waste involved in gorging on and then immediately expelling large amounts of food. Still, if the alternative is lipo or a gastric band I know which I’d choose.

Even so, some are less than keen on the whole idea. Something about the ethics of substituting personal accountability and actual thought with buzzy things. Or something like that.
I don’t know, of course. I forfeited the capacity for independent thought on receipt of my iPhone. However, a quick Google search confirms that technology is indeed depriving us of the ability to think for ourselves. So there you go.

In fact, there seems a host of studies showing that calculators, auto-complete texting and smartphones are turning us into innumerate, illiterate idiots with the memory and attention span of elephants. Or goldfish, I forget which. Wikipedia it if you must – the important thing is that Google is anxious.

Where was I? Ah yes, fat people. Not that it matters that they’re fat, of course. With the all-consuming, ever increasing ubiquity of social networking and the advent of virtual reality, we soon won’t have to leave our computers or interact with other people at all.

We’ll just march eagerly towards the _WALL-E_ -esque caricatures of the future: a mindless, overweight, immobile human race plugged into a virtual world designed to cater to our every whim. And what’s not to like about that?

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