A Toute Le Monde...

I guess I better keep posting content, or people who read my blog will stop checking it, right?

I've decided that life is, in fact, a game. Not that I've ever taken anything seriously....but yeah, I'm trying to lose some weight, which is fun when you're fat, because with some well focused exercise and watching what you eat, you can practically stand on the scale and watch it spin backwards.

I found a site I used when I was in England, fitday.com. You enter what you eat and what you do, and then has graphs for if you're getting enough of various nutrients, calories burned v. consumed, etc. But yeah, it's like a game. Eat less than you burn!! While this is the base concept of weight loss, it's much more fun when you have numbers and charts. The best thing is, I think I'm addicted to it. I'll go for a run in the morning, do pushups and situps at random throughout the day, and if I'm bored at night, I check my calories and decide I'd win big if I go to the gym and ride a bike to nowhere for half an hour.

And just like a game, there's ethics. You get X amount of calories burned from your base, a.k.a. how many calories your fat ass burns just by existing, and then you select a lifestyle from sedentary, some activity, active, very active, which figures out how many calories you burn during your every day routine. Now here's the bit I refuse to take part in. When inventorying your activities from the day, you can include anything. Seriously. i.e. Going to the bathroom, brushing your teeth, getting dressed, showering, and various other things that obviously should be included in your lifestyle. You can even include eating as an activity. I feel that's just cheating to include eating. If you could burn a significant amount of calories by eating, I could have starred in Schindler's List my senior year of high school.

The other part of my life that I've made into a game is money. That started ever since my crappy 5 branch bank went online. I used to have to pay for things by taking money out of an ATM and paying with cash. Now I just use my debit card and check my bank account all the time. It's no longer money, it's a score! If your score is higher than someone else's, you're beating them...unless you're not materialistic and shallow....

two thoughts from this blog:
1)Today I lowered the heat in the apartment to 60 degrees. The thinking is that if I'm cold, I'm more likely to be active and not just lay around. Second, if it's warm, my body has to do less work to keep to maintain 98 degrees. Thus, the colder it is, my shiver reflex will burn calories trying to keep warm. I would go cooler than 60, but it's as low as my thermostat goes. I asked my landlord if he could adjust that, but he said no. Something about the pipes.

2)Next Christmas, I'm gonna confront one of those bell-ringers from the Salvation Army and break it to them that their profits are presumably down because nobody has change anymore. Cold, Hard Currency is obsolete...and it sucks, I can't save it in a big jar because I never have any shrapnel because you don't get change from using plastic. But I digress, I'm going to tell those annoying-do-good-ers that instead of a change bucket, they should have a swiper thing that I could just run my card and it would charge it a dollar, because then I would donate. Unless I had to sign something or put in my pin. That would just take too long.

Bone and Sinew

I've been watching a lot of medieval movies lately. When I die, I hope Valhalla is just a great big mead hall in the sky, for if I see one more Elysian field with a slow, haunting, woeful hymn, I'm going to puke.

After seeing Beowolf & Grendel, 300, and about all 14 hours of the extended Lord of the Rings movies in a week's time, I have a question. Just how easy is it to shear a limb asunder using a sword? From the looks of the sword play in these movies, almost effortlessly. I can understand how rending the head from the body could be achieved with a single blow with some regularity, as the blade could pass between vertebrae.

However, I believe that arms and legs would be a different matter. While I believe you could do an arm at the elbow, it would have to be a perfect landing. I can't imagine that a sword can cleanly cut through an arm for two reasons: (a) The limb would most likely give. Unless the arm would be irrevocably being swung into the path of the oncoming sword, it would give, drastically reducing the force of the blow, the bringing rise to my second issue, (b) bone. Could a sword pass through flesh, cleanly cut through the bone, then continue through more flesh? I imagine it would shatter the bone similar to a bullet, but you would think that would cause some sort of resonance along the sword, causing it to lose momentum.

Having seen various Al-Qaeda videos, it looks much harder than they make it look in the movies...unless maybe a sword has a sweet spot. Does a sword have a sweet spot?
Maybe it's just that Monty Python is more true to life than we ever considered.

Furthermore, I also discovered what Bullion is made out of. Basically, they take all the meat by-product that they can't use and boil it down, dehydrate the meat flavored water and add a ton of salt. To me this means they use whatever can't be used to make hotdogs and scrapple. Then figure the other inedibles used to produce glue, oils, pet food, cosmetics, anything collagen based, jell-o, leather, and, to some degree, scrimshaw. I have formulated two conclusions from this.
1. Bullion is probably pretty gross when you think of it.
2. Bullion is proof that industrial society truly uses every part of animals, thus in turn showing how wasteful Native Americans truly were.

p.s. I recently saw "Spamalot." While it was hysterical, I was disappointed when King Author failed to parry the Black Knight's errant blows.

Second Thoughts...

Yeah, already having second thoughts about having a blog. It's not so much that it goes against my general belief that blogs are absolute shit and it's arrogant to think that your life is so much more interesting than everyone else's that people want to read about it...it's more the fact that if I post everything interesting online, my life will no longer be interesting.

Example: Saturday night I attempted to make something simple for dinner. I figured some potatoes and kidney beans boiled with bullion would be pretty easy to make...something I could throw in a pot, set the stove to 7 and go poke at every few minutes. I can't leave anything alone when I cook, as I constantly have to test it. Even boiling spaghetti, I have to eat 3-4 noodles to see if it's done even though I know that it hasn't been in long enough. I cut baked potatoes in half so I can get in there with a fork and eat some of the center. It could be a sign that I'm impatient, or it could just be because I'm fat. Or maybe I'm fat because I'm impatient? That doesn't make any sense, but if it did, it would be something to think about.

Anyways, about 40 minutes go by and I can tell just by looking that the kidney beans are still as hard as getting your hands on today's copy of New York Magazine (finally, no more embarassing "lilo nip slip" appearing under 'recent searches!') After an hour, they're soft enough to spear with a fork and eat, still a bit tough. I was hoping to have eaten by now, so I go a quick google search about dried beans, and discover that a dried bean has to soak anywhere from 3-4 hours before they're readying something something pressure cooker something poisonous toxins. While the thought of using a pressure cooker captivated my imagination, I skipped to the toxic poison part.

Apparently most beans contain Phytohaemagglinutnin, which from what I read seems to be latin for "causes severe vomitting after three hours, which then subsides to onslaughts of diarrhea." This toxin is highly concentrated in red kidney beans, and as few as 4-5 raw beans will cause you to yearn for death's sweet embrace for several hours. Boiling the beans for 10 minutes will break down 99.99% of this toxin, but it's funny to think that kidney beans are gastrological Death Stars.

So here I am trying to recall how many beans I ate at each test phase of boiling, just waiting and dreading what could be, calculating out how many hours of sleep I can get before I have to coach at noon, figuring that the expulsion of my innards will start in 1-3 hours and the symptoms will last 5-8. The worst part being, after all of the bleeding steaks, raw burgers, undercooked pork, and other vindictive meals that can only be contrived after drinking beers all day in the sun then later attempting to grill by twilight, my bout with food poisoning would be caused by an undercooked bean.

But back to the point. This blog will preempt all conversations. If I do all of my ranting here, I will lose all my friends, as they'll have already heard my various non-adventures. I'll start to jabber away, they're just going to go "Yeah, the kidney beans, whatever, I already read about it... and did you ever get sick or what? That story was horribly written in the sense that we never did find out what happened."

And, perhaps, they never will...

it was inevitable...

....first an ipod, then a cell phone, then a mac, now a blog. My life has been slowly sliding downhill into conformity. Before you know it, I'll be relinquishing myself to a higher power, admitting responsibility for my actions, and taking personal inventories.

But yes, now to the nitty gritty details of my life that no one truly gives a damn about, but being that the internet is the single most greatest gathering of information ever created, I will help to squander it by polluting it with drivel (I feel I've done my part to the environment and now want to poison something new before my grandchildren get the chance.)

Sean and I went to the Brunnerville Hotel today for dinner (if you don't know, Sean is my best friend from high school. We're both unemployed, so we waste a lot of time formulating pipe dreams.) I order the Bacon Bleucheese Burger, and the barmaid, whom i refer to as "Brainparasites" due to an occasion in which she flaunted her inability to wrangle up three shots despite being reminded multiple times, writes down BBC Burger on her pad. Sean orders the same thing (minus the crab bisque and fries w/ mayo, for those of you were questioning the legitimacy of this story because you know damn well that I am not sated on a single burger.) We have a beer and then the food comes out, and instead of a Bacon Bleucheese Burger, I am given a BBQ Bacon Chedder Burger. I understand how the cook confused the BBC Burger part of it, but what I don't get is how Brainparasites correctly conveyed Sean's order, as his burger had both bacon and bleucheese. However, the half a quart of bleucheese dressing slopped on his burger looked rather unappetizing, so I just went with the flow and ate the burger.

mmmm.....now that's a good waste of internet!