Archive for August, 2008
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White woman or black man?
Palin for VP as a white woman. Obama for President as a black man. One of these two will find themselves in one of the highest (or highest) positions in the planet. I’m proud to see that my country has finally found a little diversity in our politics because we’ve had it in our country for quite some time. Some of this, particularly the pick of a woman as a VP candidate, could be construed as an entirely political choice in order to pick up the remaining Clinton vote. The talking heads are going to have fun with this one – this race got incredibly interesting. Time to do some Googling and find more about the Governor from Alaska.
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News snippets
It turned out that the civilians are working on Friday so I actually had one extra day of work this week. I find out about my extra shift eight hours before I was to be at work so it wasn’t that bad of a deal. They were, apparently, unsure if I was going to show up and didn’t know what to do. Someone suggested that they call me – what a novel idea. My mind has been in vacation mode since I left work yesterday so I’ve just been goofing off – yep – goofing off. I’ve had some time to snag a couple of news snippets – the excerpts don’t tell the whole story but most are amusing enough to stand on their own.
The finale of a political convention is a little like a wedding: the bride is always radiant, and the nominee is always stirring. In an unusual turn, even Senator John McCain, the expected Republican nominee, felt compelled to pay tribute to Mr. Obama’s historic milestone with a television advertisement congratulating his opponent on “a job well done.” (No good ad goes unpunished: after Mr. McCain’s spot on CNN came a Mutual of Omaha commercial about retirement plans for the elderly, and another promising to reverse baldness.)
I love irony
John McCain’s campaign is keeping a close eye on Tropical Storm Gustav as it heads towards the Gulf Coast and Republicans begin the trek to St. Paul, Minnesota, to nominate McCain for president.
Gee – it would be a shame to have people correlate your nomination with Bush and the debacle that was Katrina. It’s no wonder you’re worried about the path of the storm.
With a day’s program that included music from Jennifer Hudson, Sheryl Crow and Stevie Wonder (“a personal highlight for me,” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said), it was a bit of an Obamapalooza. Joe Biden showed up unannounced — to jam, as it were. Perhaps he just wanted to feel what it was like to address a crowd of 84,000.
Ouch – that’s just mean.
This time, like before, the argument is that labels would like to sell the albums as a unit instead of singles, and the new part is that some of them are beginning to bypass the iTunes behemoth distribution machine. Apple insists that labels can’t sell the whole album as a unit, and has also stuck, for the most part, to its 99 cent-per-song philosophy, which labels have fought against.
The music industry wants to get back to the selling 10-14 songs at a time while only giving you two songs you’ll actually like. Great business plan!
Eleven beheaded bodies were dumped close to a graveyard outside a sleepy southern city on Thursday in the latest shocking crime in Mexico’s vicious drug war.
I read the eleven beheaded bodies and thought – its gotta be drugs. You might as well call me Carnac the Magnificent.
Defense attorneys filed 95 letters in court Wednesday night as part of a bid to get Abramoff out of prison early. They describe him as a humbled, changed man whose family is suffering and nearly broke after his first 18 months in prison… …In prison, Abramoff has focused on studying Judaism and helping fellow inmates, friends said. He has taught classes entitled “Parenting from a Distance,” “Modern Marvels,” “Cinema Studies,” and “The Holocaust in Films,” his attorneys said. He is currently teaching a motion picture theory class.
Almost anyone trying to get out of jail early finds religion. I have a feeling Bush is going to give him a last minute pardon – its a shame – the guy deserves to spend his time in jail. They should give a fair trial to the West Memphis Three before they even think of dealing with this guys crap.
After Adrian Beltre’s walk-off homer in the bottom of the 11th inning Monday, the Mariners went completely nuts. Winning pitcher R.A. Dickey told The Seattle Times, “We celebrated just like we would have celebrated if we were in a pennant race.” Nothing like the manufactured excitement that comes from reducing a division lead to … 30 1/2 games
Our team is… what’s the word? Horrendous
The Lindsay Lohan sweating an athlete thing isn’t brand spanking earth shattering news. She’s already discussed, in a rather profane manner, how attractive she thinks Michael Phelps is, and the now, she may or may not be infatuated with a certain Chicago Bears quarterback. That’s right, Kyle Orton, you are pretty, pretty, pretty attractive. Also spied dancing with an attractive blonde at Crimson Lounge: new Bears quarterback Kyle Orton – dubbed ”super-hot” by Lohan, Ronson and Lauper, who all admired the NFL player’s dance-floor moves.
Last year he looked like a child molester with his molestache – this year he’s attractive?
“Gentlemen, I’m the last person to disagree with you on the chicken hawk, lying coward, sexist, racist, needs a face-lift, whore stuff, but you really need to re-cut this track,” Olbermann said addressing the Avengers last week on his MSNBC show “Countdown.” “Nobody’s life should be threatened, not even in the hyperbole of the moment. Beside, you are rappers. You have better ethics than Bill O’Reilly does. Live up to them. Don’t live down to him. Word to your mother.”
Way to go Olbermann
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31 days, 744 hours, or 44460 minutes
Irregardless of which way you add up the numbers, I’m going to spend a long time away from work. I have a bunch of leave available and I decided, hey, why not take a bunch of it all in one giant go? I won’t be traveling far from home during the duration of my leave but I’ll have plenty of time away from work to goof around. I only have a few goals while I’m on leave
1. enjoy my time away from work
2. avoid thinking of work
3. goof off whenever possible
4. read a book or two
5. study
6. hang out with Jessica
7. hang out with my parents (who will be here from the 6th-12th)
8. wear all of the dogs out
9. Train for snowboarding season (its right around the corner – hooray!!!!)
10. Go to the Mariners game on the 9th (my birthday coincidentally)None of the goals are monumental and all are achievable. The only ones that will take a little bit of willpower to achieve are numbers five and nine.
I’m going to study for a few CLEP tests while I’m on leave so that when I return to work I can enroll in school. Due to the manning situation at work (we don’t have enough manning at work) I’ll still be on mid-shift for the next few months. The current schedule looks like I will be working nights until Thanksgiving. It could be drawn out longer but we’ll see what happens when we have people return from this current rotation to the desert. As a military member we sacrifice, this is my current sacrifice; I work a shift that nobody else wants because I’m the only guy that can do it. It messes with my personal life and its going to mess with it further when I enroll in classes in late September. I should have plenty of time to do my homework at night but some of my classes are going to be during the evening. There is no way that I can avoid that – oh well, gotta get my education finished sooner or later.
Training for snowboarding season means a tweak in my workout regimen. I’ll target all of the flexors and core muscles in my body while doubling my lower body workout. I lift legs once every 5 days and do cardio every other day. I’m planning on doing a two day leg lifting split that will have me doing one day of ridiculously heavy lifting followed by another day of endurance lifting. I’m not worried about the heavy lifting – I’m worried about the endurance lifting. Simply put, its going to hurt – alot.
I should have a busy, and hopefully relaxing, month ahead of me.There are times when it’s great to be a government employee – thank god for paid leave.
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The Manning brothers and Oreos
I caught the last of the three videos tonight while watching television and laughed – alot. A quick search of youtube led me to the original and some “behind the scenes” interviews. All three of the videos are worth a watch. At times like these I wish I would have gotten into advertising – I’m not sure I could have ever imagined putting the Manning brothers into a Oreo licking competition. Somebody has a imagination that is slightly more bizarre than my own.
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Democratic convention preempts my fun
Its eight o’clock and I want to watch TV. The Olympics, along with some obscure and nearly unwatchable sports, are gone and back is the regular television schedule. Unfortunately, on the second night on Olympics free television I’ve found that everything that I want to watch has been preempted by the Democratic National Convention. Hillary is jabbering at the moment about blue collared Americans – she hasn’t really mentioned wall street employees and members of the financial sector – how odd for a Democrat to make such a major gaffe. Uh oh… here comes the let’s think about the children line. What a trite and tired line – I love politics but come on. This is why I love the internet. I can get a full transcript of this speech in a couple of hours when I’ll have the time to properly dissect it. Most of us are only watching this because there is nothing else on at the moment – we really don’t care. In fact, the overwhelming majority of us are already decided and only a minority can be considered swing voters. As a swing voter I think they’re making a mistake. They really don’t want to piss off a potential voter by preempting my regular television schedule. It’s time to pack it up DNC – go to bed – I’ve got some TV to watch.
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It’s too strange
The following website is too strange not to share – so – here you go.
Sexy People is a collection of some truly horrendous photos of people trying to look decent. Get your fix of professionally photographed mullets, people that inhabit bus stops, and those that shouldn’t be allowed to breed. This site, despite the moniker, is completely safe for work. -
A Day for the Dogs
Today I volunteered for an event with the K9 Scooters NW club. It was a pull training course. Basically, you bring your dog and all day we teach you and your dog how to pull. We get them fitted with a harness and you both get to learn about scootering together. It’s usually a really fun and interesting clinic to help with; today was no different. We were short on volunteers so it was just Sue, my mom, and me. But there were only 3 dogs signed up so it worked out perfect.
We got a good chance to work one on one with each dog, and they all did VERY well. Most of the time people bring their out of control, exercise deprived, dogs and say “here, make them run” but today we had 3 very well behaved pooches.
It got pretty warm so we didn’t push the dogs too much, but boy did I get the work out. One of the last stages of the clinic is hooking the dog up to the scooter and having “master” ride the scooter, while we run with the dog. It was a challenge but I seemed to keep up with Quincy, the 2 yr. old black lab, pretty well.
They all did a great job and everyone was excited and eager to learn. It’s always nice to see a person a their dog find an activity that they can have fun with together.
Here are some links for more information about the scooter stuff ( in case you have no idea of what I speak!)
Meg C.’s advice on hyper dogs!
And here’s a little shameless plug for an AMAZING, One of a Kind company to get all the gear you need for your doggy escapades!!
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Bluecoat – the harlotrous jezebel of pain
My opinion hasn’t changed in the past few months. I think Bluecoat is a horribly coded web filter that does a poor job of characterizing content. Much to my surprise, they have tweaked the algorithm and I’ve seen some noticable changes. First off, they no longer categorically block websites that have the word blog in the URL. Yes, somebody out there heard the clamouring from the masses (or the screaming minorities as it may be in this case) and made some changes to the what they define as a personal page. Surprisingly, my website is no longer considered a personal page. To think about it, I think they might be right. If I write about something thats going on with me its often centered around something else going on in the world. I rarely write directly about me aside from whatever asprirations I may have in life. My website is chock full of right off the top of my head uncensored goodness – if you’re in to that kind of stuff. If you’re not, why the heck haven’t you navigated away…. at this moment 9/10 readers will have left this page to find something else. Good for them – thats the joy of the internet.
I still loathe bluecoat – and I may never stop. I’m just glad they decided to tweak the code.
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O’hare, snow, and a cat
This is the best short story I’ve read in quite a while – here’s an excerpt
I can’t explain this, so you’ll just have to believe me: last month my brother and sister-in-law asked my wife and me to adopt one of their cats. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much to you. Maybe you think it happens all the time — somebody decides they have too many cats and somebody else absorbs the surplus. But there was one little anomaly in this situation. We live in Ravenswood, and they live in a small town an hour’s drive from Seattle.
Why didn’t they look for a respectable, cat-needy household in their own neighborhood — even in their own time zone? That’s what I can’t explain. It was just one of those things: as Johnny Carson once said, “If you buy the premise, you’ll buy the bit.” They thought it made sense to ship a cat two thousand miles, and I ended up in a live-action version of a Magritte painting. Life works out that way sometimes — my life in particular.
Check out the rest of this amazing story at LeeSandlin.com
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Bikes
The stationary bicycle has been my preferred form of cardio for quite some time. The first time I got on it I thought I wasn’t going to make it but I figured out how to get my rythm and I figured out how to use the up and down stroke to reduce muscle fatigue (foot straps are an invaluable tool when riding) Yesterday, I had a little too much energy at 5AM and I didn’t have anything that I interested me in the few hours before I was going to sleep. So, I did what any other unstable person might do, I chugged a pre-workout drink and headed to the gym. My current regimine consists of alternating 4 and 5 day lifting cycles. The current day in my program was legs
My workout consisted of
Squats – 20x225lbs 10x275lbs
Leg press – 40x275lbs
Calf raises – 50x135lbs
Medicine ball lunges – 60ea
Medicine ball bridges
Side bridges
Three point bridgesI’m not moving around a bunch of weight because I’m not trying to pack on muscle – I’m just trying to stay a lean mean fighting machine.
If I’m feeling especially ornery I’ll go for some deadlifts. They are quite hard on my back so I tend to shy away from them. After my workout I hit the stationary bike and did 15 miles in 37 minutes while climbing 2400ft of elevation. (If I did my math right I maintained a near constant speed of 24mph – not too shabby) Needless to say – I nearly killed myself. I was amped up from the workout when I got home but I knew my body had nothing left in the tanks. I’m sure parts of my body think there is a disconnect between muscles and brain. I should have stopped working out when I was done lifting, I should have given in to the pain, and I should have not set the stationary bike on level 14. There are days when I’m amazed by the amount of drive that is hiding deep inside me.
It was quite an odd feeling when I woke (at 1400)- I wasn’t really sore. I was simply wore out – still. I downed a bunch of cereal and couple of bananas and waited for it to kick in. I was dragging until 0030 this morning when I finally started to get out of the slump (I work nights at the moment).
Previously that day Jessica and I took our bikes out for the first time this year. She has an old Roadmaster mens bike, its a “wal-mart” special thats 2-3 inches too tall, and I have a Giant Sedona, a trail/city bike, that allows me to do a little of anything. I got it a 6-7 years ago for roughly $400 because I knew someone that worked at the bike shop. It was the cheapest entry level “non-walmart” bike I could afford at the time. I feel bad for her because she doesn’t know how easy I’ve got it compared to her. If you’ve ever ridden on a cheap bike and moved to a higher quality bike you’ll understand exactly how much easier of a ride you’ll get. I’m sure that if I rode her bike, which I couldn’t because its too darn small, that I would have burned 25% more energy just trying to get the darn thing moving. I forgot how much I liked to get out and just feel the wind in my face while hearing the ratchet of the chain as I rode around.
As a kid my bike was my primary form of transport until I was old enough to drive the Plymouth Voyager (the model with the monstrous, earth rotation altering, 2.2L I4 generating an amazing 96hp complete with fake wood paneling). I only had a heavy ass “roadmaster” type bike at the time and probably did no more than 20 miles on any given day. I rode that darn bike everywhere. I’ve never owned a road bike but I’m thinking next year – next year I might try and get one. I can always pick up a used bike on Craigslist or I can just wait until the end of the season and try to pick up one on clearance. I’ve got to get back on the road more often. I’d like her to come along with me but I know that I’ve got to get her a better bike first – she’s never going to make it if she is trying to keep up on her bike. I’d like to ride from our house to Sunrise point on Rainier (its only 83 miles away with a 5900 foot change in elevation – childs play…. or not) next year. We’ve got a lot of training to do in the off-season if we’re going to make it.
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