It doesn't take the spontaneous upwelling of downtrodden peoples to the strains of the Russian national anthem to fix a problem. It's a lot of little boring solutions. But the folks here think that One Glorious Thing is the answer. Use a little less, make cars a little more efficient. Set a strategic national policy with periodic goals to reduce our reliance (note - reliance, not use of) OPEC oil by a small percentage every year for the next decade. Add non petrochemical power plants a little bit at time. Set a path to increase renewables by a small amount every year for the next decade. And so on. You'd see that by 2020 we'd use less, and rely on OPEC less. Why is reliance over usage important? Because reliance implies we have no control over the cost. It's simple - about 9% of all our oil comes from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia alone. We should set out on a path to reduce that reliance by 0.5-1.0%/year for the next ten years. And make a corresponding adjustment to all other OPEC sources as well. Transfer that reliance and demand to Mexico and Canada slowly over time while at the same time taking rational steps to use less and exploit other sources including nuclear and renewables. There are 103 nuclear plants online in the US today. They take about 7 years to build. With the decades long moratorium on new plants most will be decommissioned by the mid 2020's. That is a 20% energy shortfall that has to be addressed in the next 6 years or lots of people are going to freeze in the dark.

Or we could demand everyone walk, ride bikes, or camels and viva la revolucion.

Running didn't exist until Oprah blessed it? What kind of trophies line your shelves, "Nice Try, Retard" awards?

Anyway you know what pussified it? The fact that in any High School in America they make the kids run a mile, but they give them 12 minutes to do it. You need to just give up, light up a smoke and quit, at that point. I'm 48, had two coronary 'events', 2 bouts with cancer, suffered 2 broken bones in both feet last year, am 6ft tall and 180lbs and can run a 6 min mile on the street w/o breathing through my mouth. It's called being normally healthy. And I work out mostly with weights and light cardio maybe 5 days a week and hour per. You huffers who work all year to finish 26.2 are doing it wrong. And any personal trainer would tell you that that's not the path to health or endurance. Joint injury, inflammation and a lot of time down the drain, yeah. But not those other things.

And if Oprah is such a devotee of the running, why does she have a lifelong problem with see-saw weight, which, as any doctor will tell you, is worse for you than being chronically overweight. None of the 'groundpounders' who run the USMC marathon every year (31 years) are what you would call rail thin whippet distance runner body types. The equation between weight, health and endurance are much more complex than simply run=lose bulk=get fit.

I have bad genes - you had the brilliance to chose better parents than I did, but thanks for gloating, that's awesome. You should hang with the cystic fibrosis people and laugh at them.

But in this day and age, I fail to see how all the mall rhinos at 5'4" 245lbs, regardless of their internal medical history are in 'better' health than I am just because they've been going to the gym for ten years, trudge on the treadmill for 30 minutes 6 days a week and seem to show zero improvement. If all this 'let's hand out ribbons to the people who show up-ism' was so wonderful don't you think that people would, generally speaking be in better shape? Or have we come to the point where, if you show up to exercise and you're still 60lbs overweight and you eat poison, well that's cool, because, you meant well and you feel good about yourself. I would hate to see PC weight-ism turn into a general acceptance of poor diet, flab and excess in the name of so called 'health' foisted on us by the body-type nazis.

By the by - thanks for supporting the joint replacement and orthopedic surgery injury, because all you marathoners, that's what you're doing.

Ran their PW camps in the 1950's like concentration camps. Survival rate for POW's was less than 50% overall and for any captives who were wounded the survival rate was 0 (zero). The overall rate of <50% included both French and VN prisoners but the differences were staggering. The VN prisoners survival rate was 9.5%. Where was your Geneva Convention then?

Source: Bernard B. Fall, "The Street of No Joy".

You can't have a simple run or race anymore. Everything's got to be the Race for the Cure or the Run for the something or other. Usually it's breast cancer, because lord knows no one knows about that one. Then there's Austism, everyone's favorite new discovery. You can't sign up without getting hit in the head with a ribbon magnet.

Anyway Raleigh held their first Marathon in about 7 years. 3800 runners, I guess. Winning time was 2:35. I think 300-400 DNF. But because it's Raleigh, every street in the downtown capital area was shut down for most of the whole damn day. Luckily though the few resturants that normally bother to stay open at all on the weekend closed in 'celebration' so there was no reason to sit in traffic and go there anyway. Hosannah's for the Raleigh PD though which managed to screw up traffic and a be a bunch of brainless threatening morons even more than usual.

With a two share and already getting canceled. Network television? How plebeian. I only watch fund drives on PBS in black and white.

Write an essay if that's what you want to do. First rule of comic strips is don't make your audience read like it's Tolstoy.