Penn Jillette is a remarkable guy… three quick stories… One of my friends used to work backstage in Las Vegas, and got invited to Jilette’s mansion for a party

Penn Jillette is a remarkable guy… three quick stories… One of my friends used to work backstage in Las Vegas, and got invited to Jilette’s mansion for a party. Besides being obese (at the time), he is also very tall, 6’6”. According to my friend, the entire mansion is built to his scale —- every light switch is 6” higher than you expect. Every counter is high. Every chair is a little too tall. It has the effect of making folks feel a bit crazy. He wrote a pulp mystery novel called Sock. It is told from he perspective of a detective’s plush sock monkey. The last sentence of every paragraph is a line from a classic rock tune. He used to write a tech/humor column for PC/Computing magazine back in the nineties. In one column, he described a practical joke wherein one could write an autoexec.bat file that would print a countdown to detonation for airport security dudes who snooped in laptops to find. (As for the efficacy of this “diet,” most of you are overlooking the fact that, like everything Jillette does, it’s a trick. Some folks just need a bit of psychology to get on the track, that’s fine.)