Former President Bill Clinton is to undergo bypass surgery.

It’s a long standing joke about slick Willie, his bad eating habits, but the man had been on a mission since his retirement to public life to improve his health, and when he spoke at the Democratic Convention he looked like he must have a picture of himself aging in a closet somewhere.

I hate to admit it, because I was as displeased with certain well-documented events in his presidency as anyone else, but I tended to identify with ole boy-southern, family was poor, ate bad food, had woman problems. That covers a lot of fat guys in the south. The man was a pretty successful president – or it seemed so at the time – and he always had the ability to hold a mass audience in the palm of his hand yet still make you feel like you knew him personally. And he was a living, breathing, bad country song sometimes, too.

It’s to be quadruple bypass for him, and though I’m only 36 it makes me take that usual hard second look at my own personal habits and tap my fingers nervously about my health insurance becoming active again. (It was inactive due to job change, etc.)

I am posting this here in the interest of informing; I become more aware all the time that news is sometimes first imparted to some people through a blog. However you get the blogger’s personality too, not raw, just-the-facts reportage. And today you got me as your newshound, who was doggedly watching MSNBC for Hurricane Frances news and getting ready to order artery clogging pizza for me and my daughter when this news broke.

Relevancy to a metroblog in Atlanta? It’s the south, y’all. Ole Billy done et all the same fried food we do most of his life. And as hale and hearty as he’s been looking, he’s still about to get all that plumbing worked over in a hospital up there in New York. So y’all best recognize and think about it, particularly if you’re a man over 35 with a bit of extra poundage – what a fellow tenor once fondly called ‘Dunlop Syndrome’ – his belly done lopped over his belt.

Reporting for Atlanta’s one and only metroblog, I am your intrepid couch potato newshound, Steve Huff. (Where’s the Dunwoody Papa Johns’ number, anyway?)