Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh....They Could Be Watching

A quick programming note: The Common Man, The Uncommon Wife, and The Boy are winging home to Heaven-on-Earth, aka Minnesota, until the end of the week. Expect light blogging between now and then, by which The Common Man means two or three short posts. Sorry, but The Boy needs to meet his great-grandmother.

Last week, The Common Man hinted at "The Atkins Conspiracy," and in the interest of getting himself sued for libel, he thinks it is important to relay it here. It is important to note that The Common Man has no evidence for his beliefs, and nothing aside from his own sparkling reputation to back it up. Nor does he really know if he believes in this conspiracy, or whether it's just fun to talk about and speculate over.

This story begins a little more than four years ago, in Maine, where The Common Man was more like The Common Fatass (not that The Common Man is The Common Skinnyass now). Recognizing that fat, drunk, and stupid was no way to go through life, The Common Man searched for a way to lose the weight while not giving up his carnivorous tendencies. At that time, Dr. Atkins and his diet were all the rage, and The Common Man and the then Uncommon Girlfriend decided to give it a shot. To The Common Man's surprise, he dropped almost 25 pounds in two months, it was a revelation. Ultimately, the diet was not sustainable (in part because The Common Man already has high colesterol and didn't want to know what he was doing to his poor poor arteries (which he swears he could hear screaming in the night)).

Shortly thereafter, Dr. Robert Atkins, the inventor of the Atkins diet, apparently slipped on some ice outside of his apartment, bumped his head, slipped into a coma, and never woke up. Before his death, Atkins had built up a personal fortune in excess of $600 million dollars based on his controversial, counter-intuitive diet plan. Here is where things get interesting.

Sure, the Atkins family tells the public that the good doctor "slipped on some ice," but let The Common Man ask you a question: What would have happened if Dr. Atkins had not slipped and fallen on the ice that day? A very real possibility is that the already elderly Atkins (73 years old) could have (eventually) died from one of many coronary or renal related causes (the two most common complaints about his diet). And how would that have looked, eh? The inventor of the world's most famous diet, dying from the effects of his own diet, a cash cow.

That's why The Common Man wonders whether Dr. Atkins was murdered by someone who feared the financial ruin that would accompany such an unfortunate and ironic demise. Indeed, given the timing of his death, the inheritors of the Atkins empire could reasonably have expected to go on making money for years.

Meanwhile, that bastion of responsible journalism, The New York Post has spent recent days covering the saga of Atkins' widow, apparently the sole beneficiary of the doctor's will. Allegedly, she is "living in fear," with her new husband (who has a reputation for marrying rich women and getting divorced), of the trustees she hired to manage her husband's estate. Apparently, when the trustees refused to release $100 million of the money to her (she's only supposed to get $1.2 million per month), she stopped paying them. In response, the three trustees have brought suit for their back wages ($1.2 million per year, each) and taken out a $15 million insurance policy on her life.

So, given the (thoroughly shaky) motive and cast of weasily characters, there is just enough to give The Common Man's Atkins conspiracy theory just the slightest whiff of plausibility. This is, of course, all that a conspiracy theory really needs to find legs. And now that so many 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists have been disappointed to learn that, indeed, steel can melt. The Common Man recommends The Atkins Conspiracy as the new theory-du-jour to give those idiots something to talk about.