The New York Times’ Style section is always good for a laugh — nothing lights up my day like a breathlessly earnest piece on the new fanny pack masquerading as serious journalism. But the newspaper outdid itself yesterday with "The Collarbone’s Connected to Slimness," a delightful meditation on the latest symptom of mad fashion-cow disease: skinny clavicles. Tormented by this season’s roomy trapeze-style dresses — the kind that would more easily accomodate a normal-sized (as in fat, fat, fat!) woman — anorexic fashionistas are turning to their protruding collar-bones to establish their skinny cred:

"Sharply outlined collarbones say ‘Don’t let this tent dress fool you: Underneath it all, this girl can fit into a sample size.’ ‘The clothing threatens to make you look overweight and so you need a certain body to undo that threat,’ said Virginia Blum, a professor of English at the University of Kentucky, who has written extensively on women and beauty. ‘In that clothing, one has to find a way of revealing the authentically thin body.’"

Ah, if only authentic thin came so easy. Sure, my dear, you can count every vertebrae on your Darfur-esque bosom, but what about those gross rolls of fat you’re hiding next to your liver and heart? Doctors have identified a new peril in the obesity epidemic: "TOFIs," folks who are "thin outside, fat inside." Worse news for the celery-chewing crowd is that they’re the most likely to be secret fatties, since "people who maintain their weight through diet rather than exercise are likely to have major deposits of internal fat, even if they are otherwise slim." And so it is that most Sumo wrestlers are much healthier and "skinnier" inside than the average super-model.

Not that it matters to women who care more about what they’re buried in than living long — which in any case only means getting really, really old. How gross is that?!