This column was inspired by emails sent to me by friends whose genuine concern for the improvement of police service in the country has brought them to places with names like Tightsqueeze, Virginia; Dorking, Surrey; and Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

I don’t know of any cosmic connection between police work and places with strange names, but none of the emails I received came from friends in Panorama City, Los Angeles or Utopia, Texas. It’s always Intercourse, Pennsylvania; Condom, France; Batman, Turkey; Hornytown, North Carolina; or Satan’s Kingdom, Vermont… Wait. The more you run through the list, the more you actually see the connection.

To digress further, if you want to receive emails from practically anywhere in the world regarding police work, try writing an article about nightsticks and have some newspaper publish it online with your email address. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Back to the topic. Many of the letter senders are particularly concerned about overweight policemen. One asked me to check out a news item online and suggested that our officials here should give it a thought. The article was about paying fat cops to trim down.

If you think I’m making this up, the place is in Mexico. Residents of the central Mexican city of Aguascalientes woke up one morning to find the streets teeming with cops the size of Mexico’s Eschrichtius robustus (Latin for “cops as huge as gray whales). After much finger-pointing, city hall officials agreed that the ones responsible for the problem were sugary soft drinks and fatty hamburgers, which the report said were increasingly becoming part of the national diet.

I don’t really…

Noting that the problem had grown out of proportion, and annoyed by the cop-gray whale analogy, the officials scrambled for possible solutions. Proposals to ban soft drinks and hamburgers were immediately shot down, along with free liposuction procedures for all obese cops. (……….. add…,, add)

A little note on word meaning first: a fat person is “fat” while an obese person is “really very fat.” That’s what the dictionary says. But this column will not make that insignificant distinction here.

In ….. ..

Going back. The plan most favored by the officials was to pay each fat cop 100 pesos for every kilogram (2.2 pounds) that he loses. At the current exchange rate of $1 to 10.72 (Mexican) pesos, that’s about $9.32 per kilogram. If we convert that to Philippine peso (at the current exchange rate of $1 to P40.64), that’s P379.10 for every kilogram or P189.55 per pound of slimy fat…

Shet…. bullshit… Deadline!!!!! What the..>!!! ++#%*2@#$@ %@

I’M DEAD!!!!!!!