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Being fat won't kill you: John Luik at TCS explains,

Despite the alarmist cries of declining life expectancies, the scientific evidence of the last half century does not support the claim that obesity will mean shorter lives for our children. As the Journal put it so well in 1998, "The data linking overweight and death, as well as the data showing the beneficial effects of weight loss, are limited, fragmentary and often ambiguous. Most of the evidence is either indirect or derived from observational epidemiologic studies, many of which have serious methodologic flaws."

And sometimes being real big might make your hunger strike all the more dramatic.

Columbian artist living in Paris Fernando Botero's showing in Rome some of his big fat paintings, now with a trendy Abu Ghraib theme. As TigerHawk points out, Botero conveniently sidesteps Columbia's own history of human rights abuses,

Or maybe Botero just assumed that Europeans would not flock to see depictions of brutality in Latin America, but that he could buy his way into massive publicity in Europe if he took on the big, bad United States.

On to the fattest airplane of all, which EU Referendum calls a flying black hole, and has managed to take off and land:

Speaking after he landed the plane, test pilot Claude Lelaie said the flight was a "milestone".

More like a millstone, since, as EU Referendum points out,

is set to make losses in excess of £4 billion over its commercial life. As a result, Airbus will never repay the £2 billion-plus state aid paid to help launch it.

I dread to think of the lines waiting to get through security, customs, boarding, and luggage retreival for one plane that carries 800 passengers (just imagine two or three at the same time in one terminal), all the while managing to loose that much money. The International Herald Tribune says "Now that the Airbus A380 has taken to the skies on its first test flight, this giant bird needs someplace to land."

Oh, that.

Much more aerodynamic is the recently sighted ivory-billed woodpecker, which is not only big (the largest woodpecker in North America and third-largest in the world), but was sighted at the Big Woods region of eastern Arkansas.

Back on land, the Big Board merge with Archipelago will apparently generate a $2.5 million bonus for NYSE seatholders. That would make them fat(ter) cats.

And it won't kill them, either.