December 12, 2008 | Celebrities
In more ways than one Oprah is quite unlike a shark.
However one thing she does share with those ancient, fanged, deep sea predators is a rapacious, ungodly appetite (and if you want to reach for another, like she often does a twinkie, it’s also been said of sharks that they have to keep moving or else they’ll die).
Some of our more astute fans will notice we’re The Shark Guys (the less astute ones just enjoy the site for the pictures). This was a handle given to us in reference to our book The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death) and we thought it was quite apt, as with writing, much like cartilaginous fish, you’ve gotta keep movin’, hence our Salaat like devotion to updating this site three times a week.
There’s a nautical phrase, speaking of the high seas, that ‘it’s not the size of the ship that counts, it’s the motion of the ocean’. Well, the Good Ship Oprah is taking on a lot of ballast water of late, and if you’ll permit the metaphorical shift, is moving north of ‘cruiserweight’ under Marquess of Queensbury rules.
Why the concern for Oprah, whose ego requires a Port of Hamburg just to dock it? Well, we feel a certain kinship with her that includes a) a desire to mace Tom Cruise should he ever jump on our sofa, b) a publication we routinely use to showcase ourselves and c) if you added up our weights and multiplied them by two-thirds, you’d get her current weight. 
To put things in perspective, we thought we’d compile a list of other weights and measures factoids, to show that, at the end of the day, (a day when she’d scarf down enough calories to feed an Olympic track team), we’re pretty much all the same inside.
[Low blood sugared Editor's note: Some of us more than others require a personal assistant with a license to drive a forklift]
- Earlier this year, Berkeley Bionics developed what they called a Human Universal Load Carrier, a human exoskeleton (fancy word for a motorized backpack) that can carry or help to carry the equivalent of one Oprah, or 90 kg of weight.
A study at McGill University, examined hockey players of today versus those that played in the great depression, and, taking into account tuberculosis and hobo stew diets, found that today’s Montreal Canadiens are four inches taller and 37 pounds heavier than their predecessors. The average NHL hockey player nowadays is roughly equivalent to about one Oprah, in mass.
- In the state of Texas, where everything is bigger including and especially Oprah if she should ever visit, environmental Health & Safety codes for illegal dumping dictate that anything disposed of for a commercial purpose and weighing 200 pounds or more, is a state jail felony. To put it another way, if you tried to dispose of Oprah in the Lone Star State you’d be doing some heavy time.
- In Touch Health’s flagship product is the RP7 Robot, a “mobile robotic platform that enables the physician to be remotely present”. This device weighs 200 pounds and if you replaced ‘physician’ with ‘personal trainer’, might assist The Big O in dropping more weight than Galileo off the Tower of Pisa.
- Oprah weighs about one fifth of an average golf cart. If you put both in neutral, they’d roll down a hill.
- The Joe Built Wheelbarrow has a load capacity of 1,200 lbs. It’s got a 6.5 horsepower motor and can be used to cart around Oprah, but only on gentle slopes.
- Great heavyweight champs like Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano, were actually cruiserweights according to today’s classifications. If Oprah were to lace ‘em up, she’d fight as a heavyweight and boxing insiders say she’s got solid chins.
Speaking of punching, the largest heavyweight champ of all time is probably Nicolai Valuev, a massive 7 footer who claims to eat three kilos (more than 6.5 pounds) of meat daily—so does Oprah.
- The shipping weight of the Oprah Book Club tome, A New Earth, Awakening to your Life’s Purpose is 1.3 lbs. To put it another way, you’d require slightly more than 150 copies of this doorstop (provided the door’s hinges are industrial strength) , to equal one Oprah.
- Archimedes’ Principle, ‘Any object, wholly or partly immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object’ would be employed if you wanted to toss Oprah off the dock and see what would make her 200 lbs of fat float.
You bad boy. Oprah eat you all.
I heard she had a problem with her thyroid – causing her to gain 20 lbs.
Hopefully, she will be able to loose it again!