watching "the machinist" was like getting punched in the face by muhammed ali: a painful experience delivered with obvious mastery.
Recently in analysis paralysis Category
in case you haven't been keeping up, i'm big into tea now. in fact, i've dropped coffee for the time being, as i sort some things out, but rather than give up caffeine or switch to chocolate, i've started drinking tea, and lots of it.
last night i figured out how to brew dragonwell tea, or at least, i figured out that i was steeping it too long in water that was much too hot, and once i lowered the water temp and steeped it a minute less, the astringency/bitterness vanished, and the buttery sweetness came through.
dragonwell is a chinese green tea that is so great, chairman mao served it to nixon when the potus visited china.
to make things better, my ingenuitea arrived today, finally. i have used it a total of once, and in concert with my discovery of how to properly brew dragonwell, i am seriously impressed. it could not be easier to use. the unfortunate part is that now that my tea is not bitter, i can taste the poor quality of our office water. still, it beats drinking uninfused water.
i've been putting it off for nearly a month now, and after several false starts plus at least one good workout, I'm ready to verbalize and post my new goals.
it's obvious to me that I'm now too fat. I'm 235 or so, and were I at 8% body fat, perhaps I wouldn't feel crappy, but I'm certainly not 8% body fat, and I do feel crappy. Specifically, I realized/admitted yesterday that some of the indigestion/breathing related problems are simply gut-related-bad-posture-induced difficulties.
I've looked into the velocity diet and it really, really intrigues me, especially the part where Dan John says his cholesterol numbers were vastly improved, but hte idea of loading up on supplements for 28 days really deters me. I gave up the supplement-eating part of my life, though it's creeping back, I think. Still, if I don't venture far beyond fish oil, vitamins, and protein powder, I think I'm okay. It's once I start taking "fat burners" or "workout surge" stuff that I begin to worry.
anyhow, so I need to lose some weight. I've decided I'll do Draper's tuna and water diet, starting next Monday, because I've been meaning to try it for 10 years now, and because it's only 3 days so how bad could it be, and because I'm already feeling rather crummy so I won't notice much feeling more crummy, and because the whole point of it is that afterwards, you've flexed some discipline (not as much as it takes to do the V-diet, but it's cheaper, also higher in good stuff like omega 3 and mercury) and transition into a cleaner diet, which i am definitely both ready for and capable of doing.
I'm still not as strong as I'd like to be. My bench press is just starting to show some progress, my overhead press still sucks, and my deadlift, as much progress as I've made, still isn't 2x my weight.
today I did a set of 5 deadlifts at 365. it was pretty easy, as those things go. in my original set of recent goals, i wanted 5x315 to be easy. so that's nice. i've also been slowly learning new exercises, namely the overhead squat and the power snatch. i'd like to learn the olympic versions of the clean and the snatch.
anyhow, on with the goals and deadlines:
by my birthday in november:
body weight of 220lbs
deadlift 5RM of 405
bench press 5RM of 250lbs
olympic snatch 135lbs in excellent form
olympic clean 175lbs in excellent form
eating that is nice and clean but doesn't drive me nuts from boredom, isolation, or supplementation
after that I suppose i can take stock and reevaluate my goals. i used to say that 210 was an easy and comfortable weight for me to be, but i suspect 220 is similar as long as i'm lifting heavy.
i've got all kinds of things i'd like to try, like pavel's 40 day plan, more complexes, sets of 8 (heh, i've got so stuck into sets of 3 and 5 that 8 tires me out), and, someday, cycling again. but above all, i need to get the weight back down to where it's not pissing me off any more.
i had a nice cup of ceylon tea with a coworker, from a bag.
it had a little bitterness at the end, which got me to remembering why i generally stay away from tea: like coffee, tobacco, beermaking, audio gear, barbecue, or software, it's exactly the sort of thing i will geek out on, buy a bunch of crap, finally have a great cup, and then drop the hobby. that's a rabbit hole i've been down too many times.
still, i wonder what i'd have to do to improve that cup? i'm sure it would have been better in a real mug, with proper water.
the expiration time on this week's milk jug is my ATM PIN!
i managed to pull 410 today without being stressed out of my gourd all week.
it was not as solid a lift as my 405 pull, but rippetoe points out (sensibly?) that if the form were perfect, it wouldn't be a max effort.
anyhow, i'm curious as to why i wasn't freaked out with stomach aches and stress and such all week. one theory is that i really didn't commit to a 410 attempt until this morning. another theory is that i spent all week eating like a lifter (was going to put in some kind of animal like whale or horse or something, but really, i ate like a lifter, not a plankton vacuum or a grass shitter) and my recovery was maximal (i gained 3-4lbs over last week, though measurements are far from precise).
i did realize last night that i hadn't spent every waking moment visualizing the lift. in fact i thought about it very little. really, i'd say i wasn't stressed simply because i'd already reached my goal, wasn't worried about injuring myself, and this lift was simply gravy: if i did it, great, if i didn't, i already had 405 in the bag.
it's that even if i pretend i wont, i eventually end up getting the highest quality dingus in whatever category of dingus i'm shopping.
the unfortunate truth is that i tend to ignore the above fact and buy lower quality "good enough" dinguses, and then realize i should have bought the #1, and then i DO buy the #1, and i'm stuck with the "good enough" in addition.
also, i keep forgetting that i hate shoes, but i bought myself a website to remind me. i can use that as an OTHER reason on my zappos return form.
i paired wine with barbecue!
i'd been going about it all wrong: attempting to pair reds with the smokey good stuff. well, that's a mistake. it just doesn't work and anyone who says it does isn't eating barbecue.
last night i paired a nice, cheap morovino pinot grigio with the previously here-mentioned bourbon molasses ribs, and a bit of leftover goat. in other words, i paired it with both fake and real barbecue.
it was a fabulous match! chilly, fruity, sweet -- but not so sweet that it interfered with the sweet/spicy/smokey flavors on the barbecue. it was a true pairing, the wine and the food complemented each other.
i think it went okay with hops airplant or whatever sorry excuse for food she was eating, too, but i was too greased up by goat (goat is a fatty animal, there's no denying it) to pay much attention. i'm lucky i didn't drop my glass with my goatfingers.
i don't normally do this, but for some reason, the sheer idiocy and the purposefully (i assume) deceitful hand-waving of this article has got me riled up. for the record, i am not a gay googler, nor do i know any gay googlers. actually, i probably do, but it's not like they come out to me.
Anyhow, as a practitioner of logic, not to mention a fan of google, this crap offends me.
Google to Pay Heterosexuals Less Than Homosexuals
Where to begin? How about with the headline? Is there proof that this is the case? If the heterosexuals are all making X, and the homosexuals are making X-$2 and just received a $1 raise, they are still not making as much as the heterosexuals. Is this what actually happened? Who knows? Google's salary statistics are not public knowledge, so there's no way to make the conclusion contained in the post's title.
Digging a little deeper, the benefit applies to Domestic Partners, not explicitly to gay people. Framing this as gays vs straights is false to begin with, since domestic partners in California are not necessarily gay.
I'm a little punchy after a day of listening to Elena Kagan doing her best impression of the love child of Betty Friedan and Nathan Thurm
Okay, I don't know who those people are and I don't care to look them up. Well, I know who Elena Kagan is: she's a Jew who eats Chinese food on Christmas -- just like me! It will be nice to have someone who represents me sitting on the SCOTUS. But what does this have to do with Google's actions? Absolutely nothing. So why is it mentioned? Okay, I guess it's just a blog so attempts at humor are par. But it'd be nice if the humor was funny and didn't require googling (since google has a huge "ick factor". ha ha ha! that's an obscure political humor reference! google it!).
Okay, back to DP's idiocy, enough of mine.
I'm gonna take a breath and ask: what happened to letting big business do what it wants to do? What if google wanted to employ only gay people? Aren't conservatives supposed to favor letting business do what it wants?
Skipping ahead a bit:
Since it's illegal to ask an employee (or interviewee) to divulge his or her sexual preference, how exactly is Google finding out who's straight and who's gay to they know who to pay more?
That's easy: the same way my company knew when I got married. I told them, and they adjusted my benefits. There's absolutely nothing sinister or illegal or unethical or suspicious here. Because, of course, the new policy has nothing to do with who is gay or straight. It has to do with people who are paying extra taxes due to being in a domestic partnership.
Since google already extends health benefits to domestic partners, I'd wager that there's no "finding out" anything new for this new benefit. google already knows who is in a domestic partnership.
Of course, it's pretty obvious that one could infer most domestic partners are gay (that particular invitation to invasion of privacy could handily be avoided if gays could marry), but nobody at google is asking who is gay. They're adjusting payroll based on an election in an HR database.
Finally, the big one: the false equivalency:
I own a company that employs both caucasians and minorities. I put out a memo announcing that I've discovered that my white employees are paying higher property taxes, so in order to make it "fair" to everyone, I'm going to start paying white employees more so they can cover their extra property taxes.
This setup is in no way analogous to the google situation. Property taxes are not determined by sexual orientation, marriage status, or, as in the false analogy, skin color. They're determined based on the property. The most usual reason for one person to pay more property taxes than another (or at least, the ideal reason) is that he's got a more expensive property than the other.
In other words, the blogger is equating compensating owners of expensive property with offsetting the taxes incurred by legal technicalities that differentiate marriage from domestic partnership.
Owning expensive property is a choice, and it can be argued that entering a domestic partnership is also a choice. But that is not the analogy that the blogger is making. He is equating domestic partnership to being white to curry outrage at white people being over compensated. In the analogy, the white people magically have more property tax, glossing over the cause: they bought expensive property! They could have chosen to buy cheaper property and incur less property tax. But since domestic partners have no such choice (there's no cheaper domestic partnership option), and thus no option to lower the taxes incurred by their choice to be domestic partners, the situations are not analogous.
The equivalency is false, and any reasoning derived from the equivalency ("Jesse Jackson would be knocking on my door in 3...2...1...") is thus false.
Speaking as a bay area tech worker who knows an awful lot of bay area tech workers, gay, straight, transgendered, and whatever: around here, this is not a big deal. While this blogger (Doug Powers is a Michigan-based columnist and author) may be outraged that google has decided to offer this benefit to its employees, I'm pretty damn sure that nobody inside google is outraged. In fact, I'd go so far as to say nobody in the whole Bay Area is outraged. Quite the opposite.
The only remaining question is this: How many straight Google employees will go all "Chuck & Larry" just to make Google pay them a little extra money?
I guess this is supposed to be humor, again, but again, it shows how disconnected the blogger is from Bay Area culture in general, and google in particular.
If Mr. Powers is truly outraged by this egregious injustice against... uh, who exactly? Married people? Anyhow, he should take his outrage and exercise his power within the Free Market: he should stop using Google's ads (he hasn't), divest himself of any GOOG stock he owns (I have no way of knowing if he has or hasn't), stop using their products (I have no way of knowing if he has or hasn't). Otherwise he's just another gasbag hypocritically whining about how others conduct their private business.
UPDATE:
I'd also like to point out how offensive the caption is under the George Takai photo.
Now, I'm not the sort of person who takes offense at much besides stupidity. I am offended when stupidity is righteously embraced (Sarah Palin), or deceitfully employed (Rush Limbaugh). This caption is an example of the latter, assuming that the blogger himself is an intelligent person (like Rush) perpetrating calculated stupidity for personal gain (blog hits, of which, like a sucker, I've provided several).
"Live long and prosper more than straight people."
Any cursory understanding of George Takei's life would reveal that this attitude is totally alien (ha ha!) to the man. George Takei, unlike the divisive, spiteful blogger, is not about getting a leg up on people or laughing that he's got his and fuck everyone else.
Does that sound like someone who would say "Live long and prosper more than straight people"?
How about this: Takei has developed a friendly relationship with Stern cast member Artie Lange, whom Takei affectionately calls his "cuddly muffin." The two have become friends despite Lange's notorious penchant for his supposedly "homophobic" humor.
I'm sure Mr. Sulu is no saint, but he's worked hard in his life to be a loving uniter, not a spiteful divider, and the captioning on that photo is the kind of stupid smear that gets through my hard skin and offends me.
40 cop cars lined up in anticipation of post-game Lakers riot. None for E3. Now, which games promote violence?
