Earlier this week I wrote about Sonya Thomas, a.k.a. the “Black Widow,” who has won numerous competitive eating contests involving hotdogs, oysters, meatballs and plenty of other foods. The Wall Street Journal did a story on how this 100 lb eating machine trains.

She now eats one huge meal a day spread over an hour or two and accompanied by nearly a gallon of water or a no- or low-calorie drink. She thinks eating like this stretches her stomach so it can handle the large quantities of food she eats at competitions. She usually eats around 8:30 p.m. when her Burger King shift ends and five days a week her meal is the same: a grilled chicken sandwich without mayo, a king-size order of fries and three 42-ounce Diet Cokes.

She also walks 90 minutes each day on a treadmill and has actually lost weight (from 108 lbs to 100 lbs) since she started eating competitively three years ago. Watch her destroy her competition in his YouTube video. I feel inspired. I think I’ll have a couple brownies.

The media has definitely covered the obesity epidemic in America in recent years and the situation doesn’t seem to be improving. Doctors are coming up with anything they can to try to get kids to exercise a little more. One idea is to trick them into lifting weights by putting weights in their toys.

One study included five boys and five girls, who were an average of 7.5 years old, who were randomly assigned to carry either large, cardboard toy blocks that weighed less than a quarter of a pound (0.10 kilograms) or blocks that weighed about 3.4 pounds (1.55 kilograms)…

Overall, after an average of 10 minutes of carrying weighted blocks, the children experienced significantly greater increases in heart rate, oxygen uptake and energy expenditure than they did after carrying the lighter blocks, study findings indicate.

Interesting idea but I’m not sure this will work unless they come up with a really heavy GameBoy.

It occurs to me that between the football and the skinny-dipping, I am probably painting the media retreat I’ve just attended as some sort of hedonistic summer camp. Which it was. But we also took statistics classes while we were there (3.33333 [to infinity] classes per day, to be exact), and so I thought for the next few days I’d share a little of what I learned, starting with this: I’m making you a deal. You have a choice of:

A) A lottery with an 80% chance of winning $4,000 and a 20% chance of winning nada, or
B) $3,000 in cold hard guaranteed cash.

Now, let’s say I’m making you a raw deal instead. You have a choice of:

A) A lottery with an 80% chance of losing $4,000 and a 20% chance of losing nothing, or
B) Giving me $3,000, preferably in small unmarked bills.

Let me know in the comments section which option you’re going with in both cases — people generally answer in a counterintuitive and logically silly way. When we come back from the holiday I’ll explain why….

Sometimes we at mental_floss make mistakes, or just don’t get all the facts. Over at the magazine we call ‘em “mental flaws.” Whelp, here now is, perhaps, our first mental flog (that would be a blogging flaw):

Yesterday I pontificated thusly: “Not sure how one can pinpoint the exact 50-year anniversary of our illustrious Interstate system, but today seems to be the day.”

Insert foot in keyboard, as we skip to today where I luckily discovered this fact via The Christian Science Monitor:

“On June 29, 1956, President Eisenhower signed a bill to build the Interstate Highway System — a dream of his since he crossed the US in 1919…”

And so that’s why yesterday was the 50-year anniversary, and, more to the point, why I hang my head in shame today.

Want to take a trip back in time through the Internet? No, I’m not talking about real time traveling, I’m talking virtual time traveling, of course. Thanks to the good folk over at The Wayback Machine, you can relive web pages going all the way back to 1996!

For instance, check out the Coca-Cola site back in 1998 vis-à-vis today.

Check out this old Apple site from 1996! Yowza! What a difference ten years makes.

And just because it’s Friday, and you know you want it:

As I was clicking through the past, I somehow wound up in the future and happened over to the very last page of the Internet, so I thought I’d share it with you all here.

a) They both lean to the right (ants’ left legs are markedly shorter than their right ones)
b) They both hate magnifying glasses
c) They both use pedometers

If you said c) they both use pedometers, you’re right! New Scientist magazine is reporting today that ants have an internal system that counts exactly how many steps they take, and probably “resets” when they get back to their nests. The phenomenon, in conjunction with previous studies that claimed ants use the position of the sun as a compass, helps clear up how the insects can remember their tracks and find their way home. The research is also pretty fascinating because when the legs of the ants were shortened by scientists, it threw off their internal meters, and they found themselves completely lost.

But back to Rummy: for those of you who don’t pay attention to his fitness regimen, the man wears a pedometer, and tries to walk 10,000 steps every single day. There’s no word on whether he bounces to the National Review’s Top 40 Conservative Rock songs as he’s exercising, but I’m guessing he doesn’t.

While thumbing through the new issue of Wired magazine, I was amazed to see all the gadgets that are available to help hobbyist fishermen catch dinner. While any of this equipment would have made Santiago’s life a whole lot easier in The Old Man and the Sea (and also probably have pissed off Hemingway), my favorite of the devices is a $699 fish caller you use to make your bait more enticing. You simply dangle the Fish Activator electronic speaker system under your boat, and choose one of the digitally mastered tracks to attract prey. So, what are some of the hit singles fishermen will be blaring from their underwater systems? Choices include the swinging sounds of “Distressed Bait” and “Shad Clicks.” The calls were all developed, recorded and tested in a 957-gallon tank by scientists at Biosonix Systems in Louisiana. Of course, the notion of referring to electronic-aided fishing as a “sport” is debatable. Picking up a fish and fighting off the lines at the grocery store almost seems like the harder chore.

In addition to honing my skills as a wide receiver, I also spent some time at the Cape Cod media retreat swimming in the Atlantic (as you’d expect) in the buff (as you might not). Before you tut, consider:

* Back in the 60s when the YMCA was no-girls-allowed, skinny-dipping was more than de rigueur — it was required. In the pre-fast-drying-lycra era, swimsuits were deemed unsanitary and banned from the pools.

* At least one of our presidents was a fan of swimming au naturel — John Quincy Adams almost drowned while frolicking nude in the Potomac.

* Senator Patrick Leahy has also been a political crusader for skinny-dippers; in 1973, as Vermont’s attorney general, he decreed that the state had “no legitimate interest in nudity on private land out of public view” or in public but secluded areas. Of course, much of Vermont is a secluded area. Of all the states, it has the highest concentration of nude swimming holes per square mile.