We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
... going to your school’s Halloween party wearing pants embroidered with sailboats, carrying a gin-and-tonic, and wearing a name tag that says “Chip” or “Muffy” while spouting off-color jokes about Catholics, Jews, Negroes, Homosexuals and Communists trivializes the 400 years of toil it took our ancestors to build a life for us in suburban Connecticut.
A big thank you to Roger and Bruce for keeping the daily linkies flowing here at Maggie's. Y'all deserve some Reeses's cups tonight. Steal them from the brats when they fall asleep.
Sad about Norcia, one of our favorite villages in Italy. We got an email last night from our friends, the monks of Norcia (Benedictines), that they are all ok and have moved into their mountain quarters.
The meteor that just slammed into the Clinton campaign thanks to the FBI
is one of those events that is both wildly entertaining, but also a bit
baffling.
I told my father-in-law tonight (a darn good sport to take care of our pup for 12 days) that the high point of our trip was the High Mass Sunday morning a week ago at the Seville Cathedral, the largest cathedral in the world. Second was probably seeing the gigantic Garden of Earthly Delights in the Prado. I did not realize that this altarpiece is about 12' wide and 6' high.
Delightful surprises were encountering two dear old couple friends by complete serendipity. First was a couple we have known from church and many other things. Mrs. BD said, as we were having cafe con leche in the garden cafe of the Parador de Granada (which is inside the walls of the Alhambra) "You won't believe this, but I think the ___s are sitting over there." They were two tables away. Good fun. Plus their room at the Parador was next to ours. The other one was Friday when we were having high tea in the garden at the Madrid Ritz. One of my closest pals and long-time confidantes ambled over past the fountain and said how fitting it is to run into the Bird Dogs having tea at the Ritz. I love things like that.
Anyway, we managed to catch two flamenco shows at tiny little venues in Seville. This was one (approximately) of the performances we saw at the Flamenco Museum. Good luck finding that amongst the crazy maze of medieval alleys where the phone GPS won't work. The dancing is mostly improv. The clapping styles are remarkable. Very strange, emotional stuff. Ole.
He was a prolific and graceful author too. A quote from the article:
Olmsted was thirty-six when his plan for Central Park was accepted, and he had no formal training in landscape architecture. Nor had anyone else, for at that time, parks were laid out by architects, gardeners, or surveyors. Up to that point, he had led a highly erratic life, filled with false starts and brave experiments that make for fascinating biography. Fortunately, there are two very good ones, one by Laura Wood Roper (1973) and another by Witold Rybczynski (1999), and they demonstrate that one cannot make sense of the second half of Olmsted’s life without understanding the first.
19:1 He entered Jericho and was passing through it.
19:2 A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich.
19:3 He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature.
19:4 So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way.
19:5 When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today."
19:6 So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him.
19:7 All who saw it began to grumble and said, "He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner."
19:8 Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, "Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much."
19:9 Then Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham.
19:10 For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost."
On our way driving over and up up to Lake Garda from Milan in our cool Costco International Benz, we stopped to check out Bergamo for a few hours. We had read that it is undeservedly overlooked, a hidden treasure. Home of Donizetti.
The medieval citta alta overlooks a clearly prosperous modern town. We parked the car and took the funicular up to the old hilltop town. We strolled around the town and had a great lunch. Most of my pics are food, classic Lombardy cooking.
When I discuss fitness and conditioning, I use the categories of Strength Training, Endurance Training, General Athleticism Training, and Nutritional "Training."
Naturally, different regimens address each fitness category with some specificity but with some overlap. To get stronger, you have to stress nerves and damage muscle fibers by moving weight. For endurance training, 20 mins of intense interval exercise seems to beat out longer low-intensity aerobic cardio. All categories feed into General Athleticism which is most peoples' real goal - Fitness for whatever life brings - but we address it specifically with calisthenics and by playing recreational sports and other outdoor vigorous activities.
These categories of activity use different combinations of energy systems. Animal bodies have three energy systems, each with different purposes.Just as nerve pathways can improve with stress and challenge, cellular energy systems can be bolstered with stress. When you think about it, a fair amount of stress is good for both body and soul.
Your energy systems are the Phosphagen System, the Gycolysis System, and the Aerobic Oxygen System. In a balanced Conditioning regimen of Strength, Endurance, and General, all three energy systems adapt to being stressed and, ideally, exhausted. Your body will build up those systems, over time, to meet the challenge. That is called "more energy."
For one example, the Phosphagen metabolic system can be stressed or depleted by ten heavy ball floor slams or by a 30-second full-out sprint. That system is for quick bursts of maximum power.
This site, The Three Metabolic Energy Systems, explains the basic physiology of the three energy systems with a discussion of how each is best stressed (but unfortunately that discussion only addresses things like running rather than the other exercise categories which also make specific demands on the 3 energy systems).
They claim that patriarchy and toxic masculinity cause men to cut off their emotions, but the moment that men sincerely try to express any emotional pain, they are derided as tiny-dicked man-babies whose “male tears” are cause for endless sadistic joy.
Anybody with the Y chromosome can be male, but it's not easy to be a man. It is, in fact, a lofty goal depending on your definition. Like most guys, I measure myself against my father and my peers in terms of success, strength, integrity, religious progress, friendships, knowledge, good cheer, self-restraint, seeking responsibility and independence, courage, etc. Not saying these are distinctly male aspirations, just that it's hard to be an adult person and it is not easy to become a man.
So, movies are important. We talked a little about one movie yesterday, and it elicited a discussion of many. What do movies mean?
Movies are stories. Some people think movies and other forms of visual entertainment like TV shows are inferior to reading books. I think that's sort of true. If your mind is forced to picture something that has been transmitted to you by the written word, the gray-matter horsepower it takes to make the picture in your head improves its effect somehow. Even a story spoken to you is like that a little. Having all the visual work done for you dulls the effect. It attenuates other effects, though. It's a form of mind control. You'll see my story the way I want it seen, or you won't see it at all.
It's the same for writing. Writing a word with a pencil on paper makes you understand it better than selecting it on a tablet computer. That's one of 6,176,158 reasons why is our children not learning.
Movies aren't more sophisticated than text. I think movies are actually closer to the normal way our pit-scratching, mammoth-pestering ancestors communicated ideas and feelings. The parts that work are a throwback. A pantomime by the firelight. Show, not tell. Or at least, tell, not labor over commas. People are affected by movies and television. Or more to the point, people are influenced by movies and TV.
There's a reason why everyone wears their hair like Laura Petrie one day and talks like Dirty Harry the next. There's a reason why the same people we used to treat like lowlifes -- because they are -- get made into griots and petty Caesars, raised on a pedestal of their residuals. There's a reason why colleges had toga parties in the early sixties, and then again in the eighties when Animal House reminded everyone of reminding everyone about sword and sandal epics like Ben-Hur. Our behavior, mores, speech, and appearance are affected by what we see on the screen. Unfortunately, right now, what we see is pandaemonium.
Wow, there are actual male humans on that list. I thought it would be Audrey Hepburn 10 times. It's a little light on Clint Eastwood, though, isn't it? You had to wear Dirty Harry glasses in the '70s. It was like a law.
Go figure. Kevin Costner's name in the same sentence as "fraud." Must be a day that ends in Y. Of course, he's on the receiving end for a change, instead of the audience. He always sounds like he's reading a phone book with a bite from a peanut butter and Seconal sandwich in his mouth to my ear.
Actually, he was. Two-and-a-half hours of suspense, with Bernard Hermann banging away like a tinknocker, and then the bad guy trips on the stairs and dies like an actor in a kindergarten pageant.
Vincent Van Gogh, Emily Dickinson, Vivian Maier: artists who received the recognition they deserved only after their deaths. With the uproar that echoed across the internet with news of its death, it appears Vine will be joining their ranks.
Oh, brother. That little piece of purple prose is appended to a ranking of the best 6-second video clips on a defunct service cancelled by a soon to be forgotten caterwauling service. That's Remembrance of Things Past to a Millennial.
I think America has thousands of dedicated teachers, thousands of time-servers, thousands of cynical and discouraged teachers, thousands of low-IQ teachers who "love kids" (which I have never believed or understood), and thousands of teachers having a great life nurturing kids.
Only Prussians could have designed the industrial, military model that American public education has applied since the mid-1800s. Then head-in-the-clouds John Dewey screwed things up even more in the US.
One of the fallacies is that kids are passive recipients of something called education. Another fallacy is that all kids are "creative," curious creatures who can be excited about "learning."
The industrial model focuses on curriculum, as it were a nutritional plan. Of course a curriculum matters, but everybody has his own opinion on what every citizen ought to know. I know I do. However, curriculum planners like to pretend that 50% of students have below-average IQs.
I've never really understood movie lists. They're always curated under titles like, "The 40 Greatest Zombie Love Stories," or, "Four Dozen Julia Roberts Legal Thrillers You May Have Missed." The ones I really don't get begin with, "The 100 Greatest...
I don't know about you, but I don't think there are 100 movies, total, worth watching twice. A list of 100 Greatest Movies wouldn't need any additional qualifiers. There are maybe a hundred great movies, period. Even a good movie is pretty rare. Office Spaceis a good movie.
It's good because it played small ball. It used offbeat actors and looked at mundane things in a fresh way. Your job sucks and you're lonesome and your boss is just going to have to go ahead and ask you to come in on Saturday. Galaxy Quest came out the same year, and had the same fresh feeling despite the subject matter being pretty well picked over already.
If I had to explain to an alien what the American cultural and business landscape looked like when the clock was about to strike the millennium, I'd show them Office Space. Since they were aliens, I'd have it dubbed in Spanish. The movie is a Swiss army knife of quotes, too. There's one for every occasion. Let's look at the business news today, and see if the little world Mike Judge invented between the lo-pile carpeting and the drop ceiling of Initech still holds up:
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven, I told Bill that if Sandra is going to listen to her headphones while she's filing then I should be able to listen to the radio while I'm collating so I don't see why I should have to turn down the radio because I enjoy listening at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven.
So I was sitting in my cubicle today, and I realized, ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that's on the worst day of my life.
I'm thinking I might take that new chick from Logistics. If things go well I might be showing her my O-face. "Oh... Oh... Oh!" You know what I'm talkin' about. "Oh!"
Milt, we're gonna need to go ahead and move you downstairs into storage B. We have some new people coming in, and we need all the space we can get. So if you could just go ahead and pack up your stuff and move it down there, that would be terrific, OK?
Exercise science is clear that the recovery phase from intense exercise is when the benefit is obtained.
Intense exercise (meaning resistance) is designed to damage and deplete nerve and muscle and to stress bones. This is why I only do each of the big exercises (deadlifts, barbell squats, pull-ups, bench press, rows, military press) once per week. (nb: Those exercises are for women too.) 5 sets of each after a light-weight warm-up, increasing weight, once a week. I do 3 of those exercises one day, 3 of them 3 days later. That is enough frequency for a strength-building or maintenance program. More is not always better.
Like most fitness-oriented people, I do auxiliary strength exercises too but those are not so essential, like arm exercises and core exercises for my tennis and my skiing. Those more focal exertions do not need much recovery.
It is generally accepted that most cardio and calisthenics do not need more than a 24-hr recovery. Hybrid programs like Crossfit deserve a couple of days of recovery unless you are age 18-25. My middle-age fitness regime is 2 days/wk of heavy weights plus a little calisthenics, 2 days of cardio intervals (25 mins only), and one or two days of calisthenics (maybe 45+ mins), depending on my sports schedule. I play lots of sports but recreational sports, and even things like mountain hiking, are not really exercise. They are for fun even if you play hard.
Recovery days for a strength-building program can and should include cardio and calisthenics, but no heavy weight on the movements which need repair.
Good recovery entails a decent amount of sleep and hydration, and an above-normal protein intake in a normal diet. Your muscles, nerves, ligaments, and bones will be grateful for that reward.
