Plot
A Piece of Cake is a black comedy which concerns a surgeon's last ditch attempt to win back his ex-fiancee, despite the constant attempts at sabotage by his overbearing stomach. Norman recently lost his job as a renowned surgeon in tragic-comic circumstances. The upshot of his subsequent fall from grace also saw him lose his love, Rosemary, the daughter of the Hospital's Chairman of Medicine. Norman is desperate to win back his fiancee but has succumbed to an sensational bout of gluttony, propelled by his stomach which has seen him gain 150lbs in three months. Norman cannot say no to food. His stomach has morphed into a devilish personality with a sinister voice so commanding Norman feels compelled to obey its every desire. The films begins when Rosemary, against her better judgment, agrees to give Norman a second chance by accepting a lunch invitation. Norman is a nervous wreck preparing for her visit and his stomach's obnoxious and poisonous comments adds to his fractious state. Finally Rosemary arrives and is startled by Norman's obese presence and slobbish lifestyle, which has swiftly transformed him into a gluttonous beast. After some awkward formalities and the occasional nonsensical outburst it occurs to Rosemary that Norman may be borderline schizophrenic. Rosemary becomes upset and frightened enough by Norman's bizarre behavior to decide to leave. But Norman and his stomach have other very original ideas for Rosemary. What follows is a combination of medieval pantomime, dark horror and absurd comedy, that results in Norman accepting his fate as a life-long bachelor and slave to his constant cravings.
General Knowledge: Your job - if you can cut it - will be to run the most sophisticated information system ever devised: the human brain. You! There in the back! Suck in that gut and wipe that smile off your face! The brain is serious business.
General Knowledge: Without you, the brain is nothing. Without your brain, you are nothing! It took three million years of research and development to make this lean, mean thinkin' machine what it is today. In those years, we had some successes [we see a photo of Albert Einstein] and some failures [and a picture of Ernest P. Worrell] .
General Knowledge: Real stress or imagined stress, it doesn't matter beans to your body crew. They can't tell the difference. Only you can.
Buzzy: Now remember, gang. If you get stressed out, just call on your general knowledge, balance your body crew, and get your cranium under command. Use your head, don't lose your head.
Hypothalamus: I'm only the hypothalamus. I only monitor all the automatic functions of the body. All the things you don't need to worry about. I'm used to being taken for granted. Blink, blink, breathe, breathe, day in, day out. Never a "Thank you," never a "Job well done."
The stomach is a muscular, hollow, dilated part of the digestion system which functions as an important organ of the digestive tract in some animals, including vertebrates, echinoderms, insects (mid-gut), and molluscs. It is involved in the second phase of digestion, following mastication (chewing).
The stomach is located between the esophagus and the small intestine. It secretes protein-digesting enzymes and strong acids to aid in food digestion, (sent to it via oesophageal peristalsis) through smooth muscular contortions (called segmentation) before sending partially digested food (chyme) to the small intestines.
The word stomach is derived from the Latin stomachus which is derived from the Greek word stomachos, ultimately from stoma (στόμα), "mouth". The words gastro- and gastric (meaning related to the stomach) are both derived from the Greek word gaster (γαστήρ).
Bolus (masticated food) enters the stomach through the oesophagus via the oesophageal sphincter. The stomach releases proteases (protein-digesting enzymes such as pepsin) and hydrochloric acid, which kills or inhibits bacteria and provides the acidic pH of two for the proteases to work. Food is churned by the stomach through muscular contractions of the wall called peristalsis – reducing the volume of the fundus, before looping around the fundus and the body of stomach as the boluses are converted into chyme (partially digested food). Chyme slowly passes through the pyloric sphincter and into the duodenum, where the extraction of nutrients begins. Depending on the quantity and contents of the meal, the stomach will digest the food into chyme anywhere between forty minutes and a few hours.