A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Double Double

There are some things I’ll never understand – Stonehenge, advanced algebra, beading.

Quantum mechanics, quantum physics, or quantum all by its lonesome. How a radio works, the concept of black holes, religious fanaticism.

Why we’re born. Why we die. Why men of enormous girth water the front lawn wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and a St Christopher’s medal.

I don’t believe women are from Venus, more sensitive or more emotional than men. Psychologically, individual human beings differ from each other, the sexes, not so much. But there’s one soft and squishy brick wall I can’t get through: The amount of belly real estate each sex will share with the casual public – women calculate in square inches, men round it off to the nearest acre.

Evidence is everywhere. On a Sunday afternoon, driving through the pastoral streets of Pasadena, I’ll see enormously inflated, hairy male stomachs doing yard work, oblivious to the fact they are making women like me gag and spill Sausage McMuffin down the front of our muumuus.

Gain five pounds, a woman goes tent shopping. Gain fifty pounds, a man tucks in his wifebeater and cinches his belt at the kidneys.

It’s not that men lack vanity – they, after all, invented the combover. I think it’s a manufacturing defect, you know, like one of the blind spots on a Range Rover. No need to recall the whole model, but do alert the owner.

And if the owner should choose to do nothing about it, sadly we’re all at risk.