{"id":690556,"date":"2010-03-13T16:50:52","date_gmt":"2010-03-13T21:50:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.szone.us\/f20\/end-sideshow-fat-man-40832\/"},"modified":"2010-03-13T16:50:52","modified_gmt":"2010-03-13T21:50:52","slug":"the-end-of-the-sideshow-fat-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/690556","title":{"rendered":"The end of the sideshow fat man"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><b>The end of the sideshow fat man<\/b> <\/p>\n<p>The fat man used to be a sideshow staple: Pay 10 cents and watch his belly jiggle. But not anymore. We&#8217;ve gotten so big we&#8217;ve put the genuine freaks out of work. <\/p>\n<p>Just look at the recent death of Bruce Snowdon, the last professional sideshow fat man who often performed under the name &quot;Harold Huge.&quot; <\/p>\n<p>But what struck me wasn&#8217;t the end of his oversized life at the age of 63 so much as the death of his career years earlier. When the 607-pound Snowdon retired in 2003, he was the last of his beefy breed&#8230; not because we ran out of fat men, but because we have too many. <\/p>\n<p>And there&#8217;s certainly nothing funny about that. <\/p>\n<p>So today you&#8217;ll still find bearded ladies, strong men, snake charmers, sword swallowers, glass eaters and geeks on the midway&#8230; but if you&#8217;re waiting for the fat man to sing, just look around you. It shouldn&#8217;t be hard to find one. <\/p>\n<p>And maybe future carnivals will feature a new kind of freak: the healthy man. <\/p>\n<p>A rare breed myself,<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/clicks.douglassreport.com\/\/t\/AQ\/AAEfXw\/AAElhA\/C+U\/Ag\/Ad481Q\/xE9c\" >William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.<br \/>\n<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The end of the sideshow fat man The fat man used to be a sideshow staple: Pay 10 cents and watch his belly jiggle. But not anymore. We&#8217;ve gotten so big we&#8217;ve put the genuine freaks out of work. Just look at the recent death of Bruce Snowdon, the last professional sideshow fat man who [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2750,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4821],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-690556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9NivD-2TE0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2750"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=690556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690556\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=690556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=690556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=690556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}