NEWTON'S LAW: HOOFED HEDONISTS STAMPEDE: GET ALONG, LITTLE EVIL DOGIES

I no longer have hobbies. I used to fish. I used to do some woodwork. I ran out of time for them.

No big deal. You can buy fish. You can buy furniture.

Eating might be my hobby now. Something that is both recreation and necessity seems to fill the bill for me.

I could also claim breathing and sleeping as hobbies, but neither offers much variety. It's either nose or mouth to breath, either lying down or sitting up to sleep. You're better not to have a hobby than search those for kicks.

Besides the obvious waistline problems, however, eating is no longer a benign pursuit. Life's complicated ways are now carried over to the dinner table.

In the parlance of political correctness, perhaps I am dietarily ~insensitive. I must work on that.

This is the last Friday of Lent. You can't get a burger at my house today. Even if I cook one, I can't eat it without the risk of prayers being said for me. It's not worth the remorse.

I'm not hard to get along with in this regard. Mrs. Paul is welcome at my house any time, even during Lent. It's just that I don't like to think that hard about my food.

Believe me, I know I should. As the years have settled in on me, I notice some foods are no longer agreeable to my constitution. From the time I had teeth until the time I left for college, I ate no meal that was absent gravy, fried something or loads of salt. There was grease enough for a truck fleet. No longer.

Fat and cholesterol should be in my thoughts. I should eat grains until they go through me like a pipe cleaner.

Admittedly, it sort of takes the sport out of eating.

If it's not bad enough being unhealthy and caught by devout interests, now there's all this other guilt to contend with.

A guy named Jeremy Rifkin is the one pointing an accusatory finger at my avocation. He has written a book called "Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture," which accelerates typical vegetarian gripes into hyperspace.

The twist here is that Rifkin doesn't lay all the blame on the carnivores ... he blames the cattle.

They moo and shuffle around in pastoral settings and crack jokes for Gary Larson. But Rifkin thinks they're evil.

According to this book, cows foul water sources, gorge themselves with grain, scorch grasslands and damage the Earth's atmosphere by the ill-mannered release of their intestinal gases.

The author calls the 1.3 billion bovines that occupy the planet "hoofed locust."

Gosh, they've always seemed pretty docile to me. How can they be raising so much hell? Why would these submissive creatures, which only stampede when provoked and are known affectionately as "little dogies," try to savage our planet?

Well, only the butcher knows what lies in the heart of a cow. Maybe they are inconspicuously mean-spirited, indifferent to environmental concerns. What the hell do cows those blasted hedonists care about global warming? Live fast, die young ... and leave some good leather.

Even if you accept all that, sometimes you get a hankering for a Big Mac. But if you hate cows for their wicked ways, or love them so much you can't see them destroyed for your dining pleasure, there's no honorable way to order the burger. It's just torture.

On the other hand, if you order a chicken sandwich genuinely want one you feel guilty for letting devilish cows off the hook or buckling to the pressure of vegetarian propagandists. And you carry with you a suspicion that someone has written a book about how odious chickens are.

Some hobbies are just too demanding. Maybe I should take up needlepoint.