A few days ago I pondered if Stephen Furst was doing the ads for Hi-C Sour Blast. No one has yet e-mailed me to answer “yes” or “no”, so I’m still thinking it’s him. But it is odd to think of Furst promoting a sugary concoction to kids, given that he’s now a spokesman for the American Diabetes Association.

And yes, this photo is of him. After being 320 pounds for years, in 1998 he lost 150 pounds and has kept it off ever since. He’s now 175 pounds! If they do get this B5 relaunch done and he’s part of it, they’ll have to explain the “new” Vir Cotto.

I’m buying his book, Confessions of a Couch Potato. Why? Because my weight has gone up every year since I started getting these jobs that make me sit at a computer all day, and then I go home to write and web design all night. I’m not really a couch potato. It’s not all that often I sit at a couch, and I’m not the “snacking on potato chips” kind of guy…yet I’ve managed to get in the Stephen Furst/Rush Limbaugh weight class. Seeing as how both Stephen and Rush have managed to get back down to under 200 pounds, I’m hoping to join them in the next year.


In that respect, losing my IBM Dilbert job has been a blessing. Since then I’ve spent most of my days on my feet, doing chores around the house, planting a garden and cooking meals from scratch (which are WAY healthier than packaged meals). I actually spend very little time at the computer, which is why posting on Monitor Duty has been spotty. My weight isn’t going down yet, but muscle weighs more so hopefully soon…

Anyway, didn’t mean to use the comic news blog as a personal sounding board. It’s just that…weight is something of a geek issue, isn’t it? I go to conventions and my fellow fans are either gawky stringbeans without a pound of fat on ’em or they all could stand to lose an entire teenage girl in weight.

I’ve actually thought about having a weight loss-a-thon. Some kind of public challenge where all willing participants dare each other to stick to a diet. I have no clue how to run such a thing…as a contest with prizes or a charitable pay-by-the-pound challenge, and how do you gauge the success given that we don’t all have to lose the same amount…but it would be nice to have a goal. I wonder how many comic fans/pros would be interested in doing it.

If that was a success, then I’d have to launch “hair regrow-a-thon.”