Elvis Has Consumed the Building

The man pictured is Pete "Big Elvis" Vallee, a five-hundred pound Elvis impersonator who works on the Las Vegas Strip. The other creature is obviously the decomposing corpse of Strom Thurmond, exhumed and dressed in female garb for this occasion.

I mention Big Elvis because I was reading something in the Las Vegas Weekly the other day that caught my eye. A local ambulance company reports that in the past six months they've had approximately seventy-five runs in which the person they had to transport to the hospital weighed over six-hundred pounds. That's Big Elvis and a supermodel, folks. It's enough to make the ambulance company invest in a new ultra capacity model to handle its more porcine clientele. No lie.

Of course, some of those were probably repeat customers. My guess is if you weigh six-hundie, you most likely spend a lot of time at the hospital. I thought about that story this past Friday and while two of my friends went to In-n-Out for lunch, I opted for a salad with the dressing on the side. The way I like food, if I don't watch it, in a few years that's me without the ability to carry a tune.

Despite the title of this post, which I meant as a joke, this is not a personal attack on Big Elvis. I saw him interviewed in the local media and he seems like a nice man who enjoys what he does. But does he have to eat himself to an early grave to satisfy a bizarre marketing niche? Learn more about the legend that is Big Elvis at www.bigelvis.biz

Note: For those of you who don't read blogs on the weekend, scroll down and join the anti-Tom Cruise bandwagon.