Workout Laughter, Vogue & LeBron, & a good internet video

Haha funny NO!

Today I got in my workout. Yay for me, except that I had to laugh at myself once I was damn near through.

See, I had started doing my back exercises, and I felt really strong. So I upped the weight a little, then a little more… 20 pounds more than I would normally do. Like, 20 pounds more than I would have done the last time I did them. That’s quite an improvement! Trust me!

Well it seemed like quite an improvement. Until I was damn near done, and I realized that I had put on the 25lb plates instead of the 35lb plates I normally use. Whoops!

Anyway, I guess it goes to show that I know my limits rather well. (2x25+20=70; 2x35=70).



The Guffaw over LeBron & Vogue
I got a glimpse of the “provacative” Vogue Cover featuring LeBron James & Giselle Bundchen (she’s hot btw). But have you heard all the ruckus over the perceived “racial overtones” of the cover? You know, that it portrays black males in a “vicious manner,” with an angry face and “clutching” a helpless white woman…

I know it sounds absurd, but in reality I see where they’re coming from. It DOES look like a scene from King Kong (the good version, not the “Jack Black’s in it totally f*cking it up version.” I hate Jack Black, btw). What would have been so bad about him being dressed to the nines? He could have still held a ball or something. Why have him in such an “active” stance, with such a scowl on his face (yes I know he’s almost smiling, but still it’s not a “hi nice to see you” sort of appearance either)?

They may not have necessarily meant it in that way, but they should have nabbed that before it went to print. Voque’s been around awhile, their covers are usually pretty well-conceived; this might not have been intentional, but it probably wasn’t an accident, either.



Did you see this video yet?
If you know me personally, then I already emailed it to you. But if you don’t know me personally, then maybe you haven’t seen this video.

It’s a rather lengthy video by internet standards (upwards of 20 minutes), but also very important. It’s also very spot-on. I’ve been saying essentially the same thing for years, and I’ve seen how people tune out; it’s funny how quickly people will bury their heads in the sand and just claim ignorance, so they can continue being someone else’s pawn.

Anyway, I didn’t learn anything from the video. Which isn’t to say that I’m smarter than anyone, only saying that it’s not news, if you’ve listened to me you may recognize some of what the narrator says. But it’s put together well, and ties a lot of things together nicely.

Definitely worth checking out. What are you waiting for? Click already!

Peace.

Dems & The Housing Market, & Gas for Workouts

I don’t get the Dems sometimes

They keep on saying that we need to bail out the damn mortgage industry, some sort of “economic stimulus” plan, prop it all up with some $30 billion. I just don’t get it.

To me, it would seem that amounts to perpetuating the republican agenda. I mean, the dems didn’t create the housing boom, it serves the purpose of keeping most of the people (whom they’re supposed to be “for”) out of one of the biggest facets of the American Dream… yet they keep right on going for that. Election year politics? Man, f*ck.

Sorry, but propping up the housing market serves no one except the people looking to turn around and sell for profit sometime soon. The market’s overvalued, and if they prop it up and keep the prices artificially high, then they’re locking soooo many low-income families out of the possibility of ever owning the roof over their heads.

This is decidedly not a democratic ideal. I don’t know what the hell they’re thinking. I actually – GASP! – agree with McCain on this one.



Workout stories
I haven’t worked out much recently. I was hit by the flu bug, albeit not too hard. But then I just sort of never got much better for the better part of two weeks, and only recently got good enough to lift frequently. Like, 3 days ago.

One thing I noticed during my hiatus: lack of gas. Yeah, that gas. Almost as soon as I got back on the bandwagon though, the gas came back. And it hit me: I may not be as naturally gassy as I feared myself to be; it may be a byproduct of the whey protein supplement I take when I work out. Er, used to take. I have been off it for almost two weeks and haven’t had any issues, so I am going to try getting on it again, see if the gas reappears. If so? Then I’m screwed.

More specifically, my wallet’s screwed. Because it’s not like I’m going to not lift. Rather, I’m going to have to relegate myself to actually eating the protein I need, as opposed to drinking it on the cheap. And it’s not like I don’t enjoy the eating. It’s just a bit more expensive.

So if you’re a workout buff and you think gas is just a way of life for you? Maybe not. It may just be a “whey” of life. May be another point to the old adage, “you get what you pay for.” No way to cheap out on the weight gain either, apparently. At least for me.

Peace.

Atonement, & another Celeb F'ed up Bodypart

Seen: Atonement

We ran out of things to do on Monday night, so we popped into the video store down the street and rented Atonement. It’s set in WWII-era England, involving a love story gone awry. Two lovers, torn apart by the vindictive accusations of a little girl, separated by time in jail and a horrific war, but most of all by the jealousy of a young girl.

It’s a good movie almost all the way around. We were actually warned by The Girl’s grandmother just before we sat to plop it in, that it a) wasn’t all that good, and b) there was some ‘raunchy’ sex scene in a kitchen. Now, we usually take movie recommendations from her with a grain of salt, if not a shaker-full. Good thing, too because she wasn’t quite right on either front. Firstly, the movie’s not that bad. It’s overall a fairly well-done flick, if a little rough at the end.

Secondly, the raunchy sex scene? In the Library, not the kitchen. And furthermore, it wasn’t even raunchy! Odd perhaps, but far from raunchy. I’ve seen raunchier on TV. This was not raunchy. It was actually kind of understated & intriguing.

For me, the worst part of the movie was the ending. You go along with the story, you hope they find each other, then it seems they did. But then you quickly learn that they never did, they died, and the part you just saw was the imagination of the vindictive little girl – now 143 years old – in her new novel, Atonement, an “autobiography” of her horrible act. She explains in an interview that those moments were in fact how she wrote it out of her imagination, to give them the time together they never had (because the died, victims of the war, a continent apart).

That sucks enough, but then she keeps talking, and it keeps sucking more. Oh now she tells us that she doesn’t think of it as a cheap ploy, a copout, she thinks its what they would have wanted. You know, for her to be a famous writer at the expense of their love & lives. Yeah, they wanted to die apart. So you could ‘imagine’ them together. Yeah.

Newsflash: It IS a cheap ploy. It WAS a copout. You ARE a raving bitch. And this catastrophic ending, in which you teased us with happiness – no, gave it to us and then ripped it from our grasp – was a complete disaster. We’d have rather have just received the bitter ending without the soft buildup.

But aside from the ending, it’s quite alright, cheerio! I’d give it a straight B.



F’ed up Celebrities we’re allowed to mention, part 2
So one star in this film is well-known for her good looks. Not so much known for her f*cked up eye, though. Yeah, Keira Knightley has a f*cked up eye I noticed, and again, it seems no one is allowed to mention it. It struck me – like, popped out of the screen and almost hit me – in a café scene where she meets her lover after a 3-year hiatus that he spent in prison. She’s standing there in her blue ‘thing’ that she’s wearing, and her face just fills up the screen with a “deer in the headlights” sort of look. And that’s when it almost hit me: her left eye is noticeably bigger and higher than her right. I mean, the camera was slightly off-center to her right, making that eye closer to the screen to begin with, yet still her left eye just dominated the screen. It was eerie. Or, well, eye-ie or something.

Not saying she’s not a beauty, no one’s perfect, but still, why can’t these things be mentioned?

I mean honestly, her eye doesn’t really bother me. But MAN, Joaquin’s f*cked up shoulders bug the living hell out of me.

Peace.

We Own the Night, Joaquin's F'ed up Shoulder, & Archives

Seen: We Own the Night

Netflix sent this our direction and we partook of it. It’s not too bad. It’s a crime drama, there’s really not much more to say about it. It’s not breaking new ground. The Russian Mafia is sneaking in dope to New York, the cops are trying to stop it, war ensues. Nothing new.

There were a few irritating parts, though. It’s hard to explain without giving the whole movie as background, but if you were in a car behind two cars having a shootout, and one was your friends & the others were not? Would you merely speed up to see it? Or would you, say, try to spin the other car out? Well apparently we only get the option to watch here.

And the final act. You’d think that if cops had a place surrounded, this would mean they had the place surrounded. Apparently not. Nope, here, surrounded means “ok we’re at the front door, please don’t a) shoot at us or b) run out the back doors, thanks.” So yeah there’s a few little dumb things, but the one thing that bothered me most about it was Joaquin Phoenix trying to become a cop…

It's OK. It's not the best, not the worst, yet as much as it's viewable, it's also passable. I say C+. It's a fair assessment. I'm being fair on that.



F’ed up Celebrities we're not allowed to mention, Part 1
Why is it that no one talks about Joaquin’s fucked up shoulder? I was curious as to what it was, but there’s, like, nothing I could find about it. Like it’s a taboo subject or something. Or like everyone’s trying to pretend that no one notices.

Yeah right! C’mon, it’s plain as day! He has a f*cked up left shoulder, dammit! He can’t be a cop! He can’t pass the physical! What the hell!? Why does all of Hollywood ignore this fact?

I want to see a parody of his Johnny Cash Performance in Walk the line. You know how they replayed over & over that “hello, I’m Johnny Cash” line? Yeah well I want to see a skit where someone comes out being him being Cash, and says, “Hello, I have a f*cked up shoulder.”

Can we at least admit it’s there? We can all see the elephant, right?



Archives updated
OK so I did finish my updating of the Archive. However, I did get a little lazy about it. Well, not really lazy, just all historical and stuff.

See, there were some entries I came across that the links were simply too good to get rid of, and there were too many to worry about reformatting everything. Blogs like this one, about Michael Jackson’s 50-foot tall robot with lasers for eyes. So I compromised. I did reformat the spacing to match, but I left the text as it was. So some entries will be a slightly different size & font.

And for the record, I’m never going to do this again. They’re stayin the way they are. That was too damn boring, and I’ll be damned if I ever do that again.

Peace.

Archives, Movies recently viewed, & Miles' Health

Almost Done!

As of right now, I am nearing completion of the old blog updates. It was actually made easier with the realization that not all would need so much work. I knew I wanted to add an introductory pic for each entry, and a lot were missing, but that’s relatively easy, it’s the text that is the labor.

I have been using this basic “format” since about August of last year, and even before that, I used only a slightly modified version of what I’m currently using. So theoretically, once I get to about June 2007, I’m all but through. I say theoretically because had I gone straight through chronologically, that would be true. However once I skipped ahead to see where I’d have to go to, I started just fixing those small issues to break the monotony of the full-fix entries…

So right now, I have about 2 months of full-fixers, and say one month of slight-fixers.



Seen 2 movies, no reviews
I have seen both Atonement & We Own the Night, and not blogged about either. Those are forthcoming, don’t worry. But I think they will wait until I’m done with the archival updates.



On a sadder note
Miles had been looking a little injured a few days ago. Wasn’t sure, couldn’t figure it out, but he seemed to get suddenly better, I figured maybe he was constipated, who knows. Anyway, off to the beach yesterday, and now he really is injured. Threw the ball along the sand, and I guess he twisted his front right ankle in a funky motion to grab the ball off the ground as re ran passed it.

He’s doing better this morning already, but still….

I was talking with The Girl about how I react differently when Zoey & Miles get injured. I do tend to act more “concerned” when Miles is involved. And it’s not that I don’t care about Zoey, it’s that I know Zoey is young and it’s “just” and injury. Miles is 11-½ years old; is this “just” and injury, or the beginning of the end, you know? So yeah, I am always very concerned with his health, because the older he gets, the less likely he is to bounce back. I know this. I don’t want to admit it, but I know it.

I mean, a week sidelined? No problem for a young dog. For him? He’s really active, but if he has to go a week just sitting around, then it takes a bigger toll on him. The next time out he may injure something else.

I may need to get him on a stretching regimen. Maybe enroll him in Yoga classes or something.

Peace.