"Honey, do you think this blog makes my butt look too big?" — A cranky (and perhaps politically incorrect) photo essay.

It started in Paris. By accident.

The Crank's beautiful girlfriend ducked into a boutique to buy something. I impatiently waited outside. Suddenly, a woman with a very large rear end stepped in front of me to look at a card and magazine rack.

I freely confess. Out of impatient boredom, I snapped the woman's picture from, uh, behind. The bottom-most (no pun intended) of the photographs above is the shot.

At first, the Crank's beautiful

girlfriend was shocked. Shocked!

"How could you do that?!" demanded the Crank's beautiful girlfriend when I downloaded my pictures to the computer and she saw what I had done. "That is shameful of you!"

(For the record, because I know somebody's going to ask, the Crank's beautiful girlfriend is a willowy size six.)

But soon after, the beautiful girlfriend happened to notice a big butt in a Manhattan boutique and before she could stop herself, she whipped out her cell phone and snapped away.

Unstoppable compulsion

That was it. The beautiful girlfriend had caught the bug — the worst inexplicable compulsion she has had since she collected a baseball card for every single player on the 1986 New York Mets, and rounded out her collection with Mets jackets, shirts, baseball caps and a couple of signed baseballs.

She finally kicked that Mets compulsion. But now she has a new one. She has become a compulsive big butt photographer.

What it all means

Is there a message for society in all of this? Well, maybe it has to do with media confusion.

First we all get told, we're all too fat. We feel we have to get thinner or we'll get diabetes and our healthcare costs will rise and it'll be our own fault.

But then, some TV news program does an expose on bulimia and anorexia, inevitably entitled something like, "Starved for Beauty." And we get taught that dieting is killing us. Sometimes they even blame it on Barbie (the doll) with her unachievable bodily proportions.

Then in New York they warn we're getting too fat again and the mayor tries to slap a calorie tax on sugared soft drinks and snacks. Then there's a declaration from heavier-set women that Big is Beautiful. But then Matt Lauer or somebody on the Today Show brings on a restaurant snoop who tells us that Big Macs are killing us. But that so are "diet" salads. But then...

Ping pong at warp speed

It's like watching a supersonic ping pong game. It's a wonder that our heads don't snap off as our attention gets turned from fat, to thin, to fat, to thin, to fat again. No wonder some people start focusing on other peoples' butts.

So that's the big butt lesson for today. Except to say that until the Crank's beautiful girlfriend finds a new compulsion to replace her current one (this blog post may help) watch your ass.