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.
I do not mean to disparage real boot camp - that is just what the trainers here named this program for middle-aged people, but they also modify it for young athletes and older folks. No comparison of course with real USMC or US Army boot camp which is full-time and not for those over 40.
As I posted before, my program is designed for my expressed goals - overall conditioning and endurance/fitness first, strength maintenance and improvement second, and fat loss third. I am not overweight despite a little pudge I do not need and which, honestly, does not look like my old self that I know and liked despite never having been muscular but slim and plenty athletic. My trainer is very attentive to my limits - and seems to sense when I can go further than I think. I like to push to muscle failure on my third sets to teach me humility and because I like to feel the burn. OK, OK, I am a weakling!
'He wants to leave me feeling like a wet noodle.
2 days/week focus on strength with "active recovery" (30 second rest or a 2-minute "rest" on bike), and one day/week is full-body exertion which he terms "functional" (eg medicine balls, steps, etc). It's a killer. As I say, aerobic is intrinsic to the constant exertion with minimal rests.
I have just been promoted to being required to add 18 minutes of high-resistance elliptical, rower, bike, or fast treadmill, as tolerated, for my off-days. Mix and match, just a few intense minutes of each. Until now, I really did need a full day off to recover from the high-pressure stuff. They call it "waking up your body," and it takes a month or so of high demand. When he thinks I am ready, he will add a bit more to off-day demands but not too much. I can do it - I am always up at 4:30 AM so I have time.
His food program is 3-4 quite small high-protein meals/day with one fruit snack. I won't do that fruit. He says we American eat far more than we need and I agree. He wants to get rid of fat and build muscle - not big muscle, just useful muscle. By a meal, he means like 1 or 2 hard-boiled eggs, or 2 slices of meat with some vegs, or a cup of yoghurt with fresh fruit on top, or a few a few slices of cheese with salsa or Greek olives, and so forth. It is spartan but high-protein, and not for the long-term. I have stuck with it with rare exceptions. If you are paying for advice and direction, take it or quit it. Mrs. BD is on the same program.
After 4 weeks, how do I feel? Good. Tired. The good kind of tired. Losing 6 lbs. per month and do not have much more fat left to lose. My posture is much better. My stride is more vigorous. I get less out of breath during exertion. My heart gets a good workout. My appetite is way down, and I only want smaller amounts of tasty things. Not to sound new-agey, but I sort-of feel "in my body" more than before. I feel muscle and bones moving when I am moving and I mostly always ignored feeling their activities. That's cool.After another month of this, I hope for another ramp-up of that interesting feeling of physical connection and energy.Most of my life, I have been more in my head with body as a necessary accessory which only came in handy for fun sports and etc.
We recently linked Surber on Col. John Gunby. A history buff pal emailed this comment:
Saw your post about the colonel. Cowpens indeed was an interesting battle and a first class case study in the power of effective leadership and using an opponent's aggressive tendencies against him (mental jiu jitsu). The real hero there was Brigadier General Dan Morgan. He was a veteran of French and Indian War (shot through the neck, the bullet knocking out two teeth and exiting through his cheek), present at the disastrous siege of Quebec (where he served with honor and took the responsibility of surrendering when his commander was killed). He led a corps of riflemen at Saratoga (as a colonel) and then, sick and not promoted by Congress, went home to Winchester, Virginia, where his home, named Saratoga, still stands. He came out of retirement to defend the rebellion again during the calamitous situation in the South in 1780 and came up with the strategy that won at Cowpens. Among the British regiments that surrendered there was Fraser's Highlanders, the 1st battalion of the 71st regiment of foot. I own one of the 200+ Second Model Brown Bess muskets issued to that battalion, used as a foraging gun after the war.
Last week, B. and I walked the Cowpens battlefield alone with the chief park ranger on a beautiful sunny day (very unlike the January day the battle actually occurred). It was very evocative, as was the reality that practically no one visits the site anymore (history, what is history?).
The best book on the battle from a detailed perspective is A Devil of a Whipping: The Battle of Cowpens. If you would like to read it I will deliver it to your door.
Ninety Six, North Carolina, where Morgan later conducted a siege that failed through a lack of supplies, also is quite interesting. His engineer for that siege that that bridge guy: Thadeusz Kosciuszko (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadeusz_Ko%C5%9Bciuszko).
Morgan's superior at Quebec, Benedict Arnold, was wounded not killed.
... most of the elite media—overwhelmingly left liberal—have largely neglected to cover the left's crusade against free speech. Operating out of newsrooms, as Powers observes, in which "there is nobody to push back on their biases," reporters seem unable to detect anything amiss on campuses, in the media, and in the political arena where, after all, the draconian regulation of speech is intended to serve avowedly left-wing causes.
...
From feminism to the media to the professoriate to the West Wing, the illiberal left has been empowered to curtail freedom of speech by the transformation of liberal education—whose classic purpose was to emancipate the mind and promote toleration—into a means for reproducing progressive dogma and inculcating intolerance of alternative points of view. Because Kirsten Powers is right—our colleges and universities have become ground zero in the fight for freedom of speech—the restoration of free speech depends on the restoration of liberal education.
These little guys are found across the US and southern Canada, mostly in deciduous woodlands.We have a pair nesting somewhere nearby, but you never see their nests, which are high and in small holes.
They pretty much always walk headfirst down a tree.
“[A]t present there is absolutely no solid evidence that strength training—or any other exercise or dietary program—will substantially prolong our life spans. But the preponderance of the scientific evidence, flawed as it is, strongly indicates that we can change the trajectory of decline. We can recover functional years that would otherwise have been lost.”
Exactly right. Fitness for life and postponing decline. That's my goal. A generation or two ago, most American middle-aged people were overweight, weak slugs unless they did manual labor. The cultural change has been dramatic: people avoid heavy-lifting jobs, then pay for the privilege of lifting, pushing, and pulling weights for an hour.
Surber's American stories are inspirational and great fun. Sometimes I wonder whether, in retrospect, that war against Parliament really needed to be fought. Feel same way about the US Civil War/War Between the States. Maybe I am an outlier, though.
Paraprosdokians (Winston Churchill loved them) are figures of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected; frequently humorous.
1. Where there's a will, I want to be in it.
2. The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it's still on my list.
We posted about Armenia this week. Armenia is a mountainous nation. It is said that Noah's ark grounded on a mountaintop there. The Caucasus mountains.
It's the area whence Caucasian carpets. Of all of the varieties of "oriental carpets" (ie Middle Eastern,) it's the Caucasians which most intrigue us at the BD homestead. The antiques, hand-loomed with vegetable dyes are the only ones really worth having, and they come so costly that people often hang them on walls. Folk art.
They were only made in small sizes, always smaller than 5'X8'. As with any type of valuable antique "oriental" carpet, you can only find them in the US and Europe. Not in the Middle East. Today, like 100 years ago, they were made in the villages for export.
Photo is a cool antique Kazak carpet in perfect shape. Would you want to step on that with your work boots?I'd guess you could own that small one for between $6-10,000.We can't afford this stuff but it's fun to look at.
I have a few more modern imitationsfor high-traffic places and you can tell the difference instantly.
Mother's Day breakfast. Make a good mess in the kitchen! Don't wake up Dad either.
Even if you are not Jewish, Challah bread makes the best French toast with bacon: Challah French toast with perfect bacon. A couple of stiff Screwdrivers too would probably be appreciated.
Who knows, she might even decide she likes you brats. Real Maple syrup with it, on the side.
He made two errors: I like to hear what my wife has to say about things because she is darn smart (if emotional) - and he omitted one mokita: Lesbian domestic violence reaches crisis levels. Other than that, he goes easy on the Jihadists but he hits most of the non-PC points.
Record 93,194,000 Americans Not In Labor Force... Record 56,167,000 Women Not Working... APRIL UNEMPLOYMENT: 5.4%... +223,000... Most gains go to immigrants... 100% of job gains among women...
Read it, and Chomsky’s technique becomes obvious, a three-step bit of linguistic legerdemain that begins by emptying words of their meaning, continues by assigning them some random and temporarily advantageous value, and ends with accusing anyone who questions the new meaning as a depraved monster oblivious to the misfortunes of others.
It may be a phony Capitalist commercial day invented by Hallmark to sell their stupid cards, but we Americans are generally forced to observe it now. That's ok, but every day should be Mother's Day (and Father's Day too). It's #6 in God's Ten Suggestions.
We'll have 3 mothers here for lunch, along with misc. other family. I'm cooking of course, but maybe a daughter or two will lend a hand. Darn well had better do, with 10 or so of us here.
My simple rustic American menu:
Grill: A few fat one-and-a-half-inch thick Costco ribeyes - or maybe butterflied lamb
Creamed spinach and/or grilled vegetables with olive oil. (I usually grill onions, sweet peppers, yellow and green squash, mushrooms, maybe some asparagus or eggplant, and toss in a bowl with oil, basil, parsley, and salt and pepper.)
Mashed taters
Sliced tomatoes/vinaigrette
Beer/wine/lemon Perrier/Lemonade
A Trifle for dessert, with Bird's Pudding (but no sherry, rum, or Riesling to flavor the Pound Cake - makes it better but we have some careful teetotalers and kids). Somehow, I have two large English glass trifle bowls. (For a very large crowd, a punch bowl works well but it takes a lot of stuff to fill a punch bowl and it doesn't really fit in the fridge, so for over 15 people best to use individual stemmed glasses)
Strawberry, Blueberry, Kiwi, Raspberry, Banana is my plan. A good few hours in the fridge is good for a trifle.
In half a century, astonishingly, we’ve come full circle and achieved the exact inverse of what the Free Speech Movement claimed it intended. What began as lawless civil disobedience now exploits campus regulations to rescind from others the same rights these erstwhile campus radicals once demanded for themselves. In other words: the oppressed have become the oppressors. Talk about Freudian reaction formation!
1. To speak of Islamist violence, or to suggest there is a problem in Islam, is racist, and hateful, and irrational, and "islamophobic."
2. It is so predictable that Islamists will kill you if you say something "anti-Islamic" that victims of murder attempts can be said to have brought their attacks on themselves.
Hillary Clinton: We knew her as a grim, charmless harridan; a pear-shaped harpy. Now, after reading Peter Schweizer's new book, Clinton Cash, we see the ultimate Hillary, one of the world's truly scary women.
Why not take away the faces on Mt. Rushmore? They pollute the scenery too.(I hate the very notion of Mt. Rushmore. The US is not the Assyrian Empire with government-worship)
Whatever you intend to do with a potato, you need to select the variety for the job at hand. If you have ever made gluey mashed taters, or had taters disintegrate in a stew, you know what I mean. Wrong potato. All of our potato types have been genetically-engineered for specific qualities. Special thanks to Mr. Johnson who came up with the Yukon Gold a few years ago.
As I have commented in the past, it's fun to think about all of the foods the New World native farmers and plant breeders contributed to Old World cuisine. For starters, potatoes,tomatoes, peppers, beans, maize, zucchini and summer squash, winter squash and pumpkin, cocoa, strawberry, sunflower, sweet potato, peanut, vanilla, etc. etc.
At the time of the European invasions of the New World, there were few communities of pure hunter-gatherers (eg the Eskimos). Farming was big, supplemented by hunting-gathering.If you recall, the Pilgrims took over Indian hundred-acre cornfields.
A weighty matter:
These little guys are found across the US and southern Canada, mostly in deciduous woodlands.We have a pair nesting somewhere nearby, but you never see their nests, which are high and in small holes.
Chevy - not Ford - has finally made the truck I have wanted for over 10 years but now hardly need anymore. I'll consider it anyway.
We posted 
Headline at 
It may be a phony Capitalist commercial day invented by Hallmark to sell their stupid cards, but we Americans are generally forced to observe it now. That's ok, but every day should be Mother's Day (and Father's Day too). It's #6 in God's Ten Suggestions.
Pic is a small bouquet Mrs. BD put together for my office 
Potatoes, mashed or fried, are the most popular side dishes in North America. Rightly so - the original tiny