Recently in angarrrrrgggh!!! Category

2 days ago i went to the grocery store and bought all the tuna I'd need for 3 days on the tuna and water diet. it turns out this is quite expensive, especially if you go for the Dave's tuna, but not from his website, where it's relatively cheap, but from the local gourmet grocery store, where everything is expensive but Dave's tuna causes the checkers to ask if they rang it up right because, after all, the can says "TUNA" and they've never seen anyone pay so much for a can of tuna.

anyhow, I rationalized that, even though 3 days of tuna would cost me nearly as much as a month on the V-diet, it was all for a good cause, and anyhow, whatever.

But then my imagination kicked in. I looked at the 5 cans of Dave's tuna, and visualized that as not only all I'd be eating on monday, but also, as all I'd be eating on monday. It wasn't just that it was not a lot of food. It was also: I don't really like tuna that much. So I'd be hungry and constipated on not much food that I don't like very much. Constipated? The diet calls for metamucil! But I like fruit, and beans, and those really do the job quite well.

So screw the tuna and water diet. I'll put it off for another 10 years. I'll keep my over priced line-caught santa cruz tuna packed in fairy dust, and I'll eat every last ounce of it, but over the span of a month or two, and I'll still meet my goal, but I'll get to poop beans and fruit instead of psyllium and sugar, as god intended.

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.

okay, prepare yourself. i don't use soap when i wash my face, i use a foaming cleanser from aveda. it's kind of expensive. it has a mechanical pump. it's totally effeminate. it's also effective: i stopped using it for a month, switched to soap, and got all kinds of pimply breakouts. there might be some other alternative, but i haven't discovered it.

now, as i said, it's got a mechanical pump to create the magical "foaming" action. i've used this stuff for a couple of years, but last year they came out with a "refill" version of this stuff, which is exactly the same as the regular version, but you don't get the pump head, you just get the bottle. it costs one dollar less. you take your old pump and put it on the new bottle. it's no more difficult than changing your bathroom soap dispenser, but you get to convince yourself that you're saving the environment or poor children in indonesia or something.

except that the pump has a lifespan of 1 refill. after that it breaks. i've had one replaced already. last week i took the broken one in to the store... where it magically worked for the clerk. when i got home, it again did not work. i gave the pump a thorough cleaning, soaking it in hot water and passing lots of hot water through it, as recommended by the aveda guy. it began working again.

then, two days ago, it stopped working. i disassembled the pump this time, cleaned it thoroughly (while showering!), reassembled it, and it worked.

until this morning.

fresh from my deadlift, brimming with testosterone, eager to get to work, i went to pump, and... nothing. the pump was again broken.

it was at this point that i reflected on the wisdom of my stance against steroid use. had i been juicing, my shower, probably my bathroom, and possibly the entire apartment would now lie in ruins. the epic roid rage that this incident would have induced would have been, uh... epic. as it was, i did my best to repair it and vowed metrosexual vengeance against aveda corp: i will now spend the extra one dollar to insure the safety of my shower door against metrorage outbreaks.

the failure, by the way, seems to be mechanical wear. there's a little ball bearing that lies over the pump input but beneath the pump spring. you push down on the pump, and, when it's broken, it doesn't come back up (so you can't dispense foaming squirt #2, which is required for my big old face). I imagine that the bearing must pop up a little from the input tube to refill the chamber with the soapy sebum dissolving substance i pay so much for, and that in the broken state, the bearing remains wedged in the input tube, maintaining the vacuum which keeps the pump depressed.

the dude in the store said the mechanism was clogged with dried soap stuff. i don't think so.

heard on the radio on the morning commute, re: elena kagan: "some people feel she is not mainstream enough"

right. she's a friggin supreme court nominee. by definition, that makes her non-mainstream. there's never been a mainstream person on the supreme court. so what?

i was gesturing during a phone call and pricked myself on my desk cactus. two thorns. argh!

i really needed a shave today, from the looks of me, it's been at least a week.

when i reached for my ultra modern super duper high tech cordless electric shaver, it had 0 battery charge.

this appears to be a feature of this shaver: if I don't use it for a week, even if it is sitting in the charging cradle, when I actually really need it, the battery is dead. To make things even worse, it turns out that this shaver must be run on battery -- I can plug it into the wall, but that will only charge it, not allow me to use it! Argh! And it takes a good 20 minutes to charge up enough for a shave, maybe.

So I fell back on my old double edged razor. I took one of the two remaining Swedish Gillette blades, the most awesome blades I have, and gave myself a shave. It turns out the super duper high tech electric shaver delivers both a closer shave and a less irritating one that even my best and most unavailable (no longer produced) double edged razor, but the DE does have the distinct advantage of being actually usable 24/7/365.

she: why are you so cranky?
me: sorry, i just had a very expensive bad dinner and i had to drink most of the wine
she: so you should be happy!

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.

In 2004, the government of Japan conferred the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette, which represents the fourth highest of eight classes associated with the award. This decoration was presented in acknowledgment of his contributions to U.S.-Japanese relations.

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.

:/

Ship date Jun 7, 2010
Estimated delivery Jun 15, 2010

WTF fedex?!