The Program, chapter II

By way of update, I’ve graduated from Phase I of the 20/20 Lifestyles program; going into my fourth week in Phase II.

That means I work out with Penelope only twice a week and check in with my nutritionist every fortnight.

I’m still at the gym six mornings a week because, surprisingly, it feels good. And I started layering in some intervals on the treadmill. You have to understand that I never thought I’d walk a 12:30 mile again when I started with Penelope in July. But now my “rest” speed on the intervals is 12:45. While my “work” speed isn’t going to win any races, it’s still a matter of amazement that I can actually move in some form approximating a jog.

Even for two-minute intervals.

On the food side, I’ve actually had a couple of glasses of wine over the past three weeks—whoo-hoo! But for the rest, I’m still on the weight-loss (as opposed to maintenance) track. I’m about 70% of goal, and feeling pretty good.

Well, except that the intervals have buggered my knees. Or exacerbated the existing condition. My physical therapist diagnosed uneven muscles around the knees, so I’m laying off the intervals, doing some killer stretches(evidently intended to even out the muscles) and buying the most expensive pair of running shoes I’ve ever owned.

(I spent 30 minutes at Super Jock ‘n Jill, trying on shoes, sprinting up the hill next to the shop & then reporting back to Morgan, the sales clerk, on the level of pain shooting through my knees. I’m satisfied that however these manufacturers architect their wares, the designs really do make a difference.)

Well, it was either shell out for the runners or give up the intervals. And after working out six days a week for four months, I’ve got the bug, and I just can’t be satisfied with the elliptical contraption.

So: 15 weeks after start, feeling demonstrably better, getting into my skinny clothes and looking forward to pounding the pavements around town.

Pie in the sky

Ah, one of the comedic rocks of my childhood has passed: Soupy Sales is dead at age 83.

I never liked Our Gang, the Three Stooges or any of those staples of non-network children’s programming. In fact, let me stress that there’s nothing at all about the Three Stooges that I have ever found funny.

But Soupy was like Rocky & Bullwinkle. I didn’t understand everything that was going on in his shows, but it still struck me as hilarious.

(It broke my heart to discover recently that the Dudley Do-Right Emporium, next to the Jay Ward Studios off the Sunset Strip, had closed. I wonder if that makes my Super Chicken tee shirt more valuable? & if you have a bottle of Evening in South Pasadena cologne, it’ll probably put your kids through professional school.)

I imagine the Afterlife is finding itself covered in pie cream about now.

Greek to me

It’s been a rough few weeks for Bas Bleu—the strain of refraining from committing justifiable homicide several times over has laid me low.

But this story from NPR finally broke through my black fog: the Greeks have opened a museum of antiquities dedicated to the Acropolis.

With a great, huge gaping space for the marble friezes chiseled from the Parthenon 200 years ago by a Brit and sold to the British Museum. The BM has steadfastly refused ever since to repatriate the marbles, the reasons reinvented every time one is kneecapped by the Greeks.

I suppose the underlying cause for the intransigence is that imperial legacy that the Brits just can’t shake off. “We stole them righteously when we were the Big Boy on the Global Block; we’re keeping them because we can.”

Well, maybe. But I love the Greek approach—rather like one of my journalism professors, who was always threatening to publish an issue of the paper with a gaping hole of white space and marking it “this space courtesy of Reporter X, who missed deadlines”.

That’s one museum I’ve got on my must-do list. Almost makes me lose the thoughts of mayhem.

Teaching your grammar to suck eggs

Still on the theme of the dumbification of American letters (or possibly the illiteratization of written communication), this post about five grammar mistakes “that make you look like a chimp” crossed my email.

Really—I don’t know why you’d stop at five. What about the people who don’t know the difference between a transitive and intransitive verb (and therefore misuse lay/lie in ignorant bliss)?

Or subject/object pronouns—“he gave the tickets to Mark and I”—with particular attention to who/whom. “Give the tickets to whomever can go.”

Number/amount: “the amount of people who got tickets was limited to whomever paid a bribe”. Or, one of my faves: TNT’s “more movie, less commercials.”

Subject/predicate agreement: “anyone can get tickets if they pay a bribe.”

Indiscriminate splattering of their/they’re/there, or its/it’s.

The list goes on—feel free to add your own bêtes noires.

And don’t even get me started on punctuation.

This is what comes of people thinking that anyone can be a writer, without training or talent. They wouldn’t think that anyone could be a cardiothoracic surgeon (at least one they’d let cut into their chest), or even that anyone could play the clarinet, without training or talent. But writing? “Hell, Ah kin rite—jes’ watch me on this here net-thang!”

In your Facebook

I can’t be the first person to have noted that the social networking phenomenon has resulted in the complete trivialization of communication.

I mean, it’s one thing when any buffoon with an Internet connection and the ability to type can spew authoritatively the kind of crack-brained opinions that you used to encounter only on talk radio. Only now with misspellings and a complete absence of understanding of punctuation.

But Facebook has elevated the annoyance of minutiae to Himalayan heights.

It seems that the combination of a guaranteed audience (your “friends”) and the access afforded by the BlackBerry and iPhone (examples of “smart phones”, although they actually seem to bring out the moron in their users) has resulted in the kind of “update” that just boggles my mind.

I’m talking the, “At the pizza parlor”, followed by, “Hard to choose—pepperoni or sausage?” followed by, “Went half-and-half” (with a photo), followed by, “Couldn’t finish it” (with another photo), and finally, “What to have for dessert?”

Or the, “Packing the car for Florida”, “Getting in the car and heading out”, “Just getting to I-95”, ad nauseam for 758 miles. (Special attention to South of the Border.)

So far I haven’t encountered the trips to the loo, but I have no doubt whatsoever they’re on the horizon.

I’ve had to hide two friends’ posts for precisely this reason. (And, interestingly, one of them was a complete Luddite until she got her BlackBerry not long ago.)

Honest to God—can’t people just sign up for Twitter and splash their tiny little updates amongst the crowd that can’t pay attention for longer than 140 characters?

Here come de judge

Word comes that a Federal judge has told the SEC to go back to the drawing board with its paltry $33M slap on Bank of America’s wrist over neglecting to mention to anyone the bonuses they’d agreed to pay Merrill Lynch management when the two firms merged.

This coincides with President Obama’s speech warning the financial sector that they shouldn’t expect to get bailed out & then return to the wild west environment of hot & cold running excess.

My money’s on Jed S. Rakoff’s ruling having more impact than Obama’s injunction. After all, the government’s already shown that it has no spine when it comes to standing up to Wall Street. But Rakoff has a history of demanding actual, you know, justice from perpetrators of corporate malfeasance.

Time, gentlemen

It’ll be interesting to see how this one plays out: the British Medical Association has issued a report calling for a ban on all alcohol advertising, including sports and music event sponsorship.

They’re looking to slow rising consumption with the ban, plus some other government mandates: mandatory minimum pricing scheme, reduction of licensing hours for both on-premise and off-premise sales, reducing the density of alcohol outlets, etc.

The focus is on young people (defined in the report as under 25), even though they admit that the entire nation is essentially in its cups most of the time. And that treating alcohol-related conditions costs the National Health Service up to $5B per year.

While I don’t dispute the social and financial costs associated with the kind of drinking that results in piles of vomit outside pubs every night, I have to wonder what they’re talking about when they refer to how cheap it is there. Unless they’ve lowered the prices considerably in the past three years, drink is definitely not the most cost-effective way of numbing your brain. (That would be reality TV shows.)

Plus—it’s unclear that the linchpin of their plan to dry out Britain, a ban on alcohol advertising, would have much of a positive effect. According to the Australian Association on National Advertisers (admittedly not an unbiased group), multiple studies by apparently legitimate and respected researchers would seem to indicate that advertising bans have little or no effect on actual, you know, consumption of alcohol.

Naturally various trade associations are rushing to the defense of the status quo. I particularly love the Wine and Spirit Trade Association’s dire prediction that a ban would “threaten the livelihoods of thousands of people working in the media, advertising, television” and other industries.

Kind of the argument used to prop up GM and Chrysler.

We the suckers...

In case there was any doubt in your mind, a report by the Congressional Oversight Panel has made it official: we-the-people’s involuntary bail-out of GM and Chrysler was basically billions washed down the drain. It’s a “loan” we’ll never see repaid.

You can kiss the initial $23B flung out by the Bush administration goodbye. And even though some chick at Treasury says there’s a “reasonably high probability” that we’ll get some of the nearly $40B back the two failed behemoths cadged from this administration, I don’t see her betting her own McMansion on that probability.

All in all, we’d have been better off investing in amusement parks or chinchilla farms.

Learning from history's mistakes (not)

Ah, the grand old days of black-is-white socialist realism are not entirely behind us. In the revisionist Russian regime of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin & President Dmitri Medvedev that old blackguard Josef Stalin is on his way to rehabilitation. & the latest step in that process is a libel suit being brought by the Man of Steel’s grandson against a historian who wrote a journal article that would not qualify as hagiography.

Seems that Stalin never made policy of the destruction of whole classes of Soviet citizenry (in their tens of millions); didn’t really make a deal with Adolf Hitler & refuse to believe that his fascist friend would actually breach the pact by, you know invading the Soviet Union; didn’t eviscerate the Red Army with the show trials of the 30s; didn’t order the murder of 21,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest; & blah, blah, blah.

This is an example of the cyclical nature of both historiography & national development. Were it not a desecration of every soul starved, shot, drowned, frozen, tortured & overworked to death in the service of Stalin’s ambition & by his direct mandate it would be rather farcical.

I mean, really—suing for libel instead of just eviscerating the offender in the bowels of the Lubyanka & sending his family to Siberia? Somewhere Stalin is whirling like a dreydel.

Any road—it doesn’t bode well for Russians today or the nations that interact with them.

Losing fizz

Sad news for those of us who love bubbly: reacting to lowered sales, Champagne houses are acting like OPEC & cutting production.

Seems like an odd response: consumers have cut back on buying the stuff because of straitened circumstances—clearly a statement about price sensitivity; but rather than lower their prices the producers are moving to uphold them artificially.

Zut alors!