I lost my tact in a drawer

I'm skipping the introductions, because chances are you know me anyway. If you don't, an introduction won't do you any good. I'm not that interesting. Unless you consider a lack of tact interesting.

Rather, I would like to start with a burning question. It was prompted by this article. For the lazy, you really only need to read the first sentence:

More and more obese people are unable to get full medical care because they are either too big to fit into scanners, or their fat is too dense for X-rays or sound waves to penetrate, radiologists reported on Tuesday.

Now, what caught my eye is not the first part. Those tubes are pretty narrow. Rather, the notion that someone's fat can be so dense that X-rays cannot penetrate is completely astounding. X-rays, you'll note, can have some nasty health effects if one is exposed for too long. (Hence those fashionable lead blankets). Although from this article, maybe we should be using fat instead of lead as radiation shielding. Could we possibly be missing the implications of dense fat preventing X-rays from penetrating? Would Cold War-era bomb shelters have been effective if we had lined them with fat? Or maybe just fat people. Could a bubble of extremely fat people protect us from nuclear fallout? Science needs to devote time and resources to further study on the subject. And pronto. I hear North Korea's getting antsy again.

While we're on the subject, this reminds me of the stories that I hear occasionally that go somewhere along the lines of "really fat person is stuck on couch." These stories end one of two ways. Either the fat person is removed using heavy construction machinery and a hole in the wall, or the fat person dies and is removed using heavy construction machinery and a hole in the wall. So I guess that's one way. But that leads me to my burning question of the night: What would possess a person to lay on a couch one day, and never get up? Because you know the breaking point is when the decision is made that "I have to go to the bathroom, but it's too far. I guess I'll just soil myself." Once that line is crossed, there is no turning back. More on this tomorrow.