Llama Llatte

Unreal shares our coffee with a posse of camels, finds out if a fitness guru is truly "lovin' it" and gets competitive with Howie Mandel

Comments (0) Wednesday, Jun 7 2006

...continued from page 1

What do you do for McDonald's?

I'm their physical-fitness representative for Southern California.

Nancy Sexton

More About

Isn't that kind of like being the NAACP liaison for the KKK?

Yeah, kind of. Ha-ha! No, not at all. McDonald's introduced a program this past month that involves DVDs with fitness — basically the Adult Happy Meal. They wanted someone who could verify that the workout was valid, and it is.

What is an adult Happy Meal?

It's a salad and, I think, your choice of drink, and the DVD, which features a computer-generated character named Maya who walks you through different workouts.

So "No fast food unless it's a chicken you can't catch or McDonald's."

Well, if it's a salad from McDonald's.... It's all about making choices. You gotta realize — McDonald's is not all that bad. They're one of the only restaurants in the country that provide a playground for children that's enclosed, that a parent can actually go to and watch their kid play, and have something to eat. It really is all about choice. Reach Around
The local blogosphere has been patting itself on the front in recent weeks, and with good reason. According to Google Trends (www.google.com/trends), St. Louis ranks first in Google searches for the phrase "hand job," beating out jerks in Denver, Boston, Chicago and Minneapolis.

We're also tops when it comes to searches for "chastity" and "lose weight." All of which would seem to be good public-health news for a city notoriously plagued by syphilis and obesity.

Then again, we're also number one for "White Castle" and "Vanilla Ice" searches, and that can't be good for anybody. To make sense of it all, Unreal attempted to consult Hugh Stallworth, M.D., M.P.H., and Melba R. Moore, M.S., former and current (respectively) commissioners of the St. Louis Department of Health. When they declined to talk to us, we rang an old roommate, S. Thomas Ives, hand-job aficionado and resident in internal medicine at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis.

Unreal: Does it surprise you that St. Louis has the most hand-job searches?

Dr. S. Thomas Ives: It is surprising. I would think they would be more conservative about their Google searches, that people in the Midwest might be worried that someone would check their computer and know they'd been searching for hand jobs.

Is it difficult for you to reach your mind around this concept?

Until it bursts with understanding? Yeah. Normally I feel like I need death-grip knowledge before I have a superfirm hold on issues.

Do you think this points toward a local public-health renaissance?

It points to a city in crisis about its identity. People want to indulge in classics like the White Castle burger while wanting to lose weight, and want to have their hand job while preaching chastity. But I think as soon as Albert Pujols shares his secret steroid recipe with the rest of the citizens, you'll all be better off. Either that or his age-defying document-forging technique.