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Books Lying Open
Soul-Devouring Worry:
Answer of the Day:
Curse of the Day:
Phrase
of the Moment: Hey, it beats, "Shut up!" which is what we used to yell, which had about as much effect on the cat as you might expect. -- August 16, 2004 |
Friday October 8, 2004 |
| Quote
of the Day -- QotD Archives
"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor." --Truman Capote |
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This time, however, I mean it. Whether saying that will once again prove the kiss of death remains to be seen. As of now, I've got the wrecked exotics thing below, which I wrote yesterday, and the outline for the humorous fitness program comments, which I wrote Wednesday. I could do one or more of the three book reviews I've been meaning to write, but I'm going well on my novel lately, and would like to get back to that tonight before it's very late. Though oddly enough, I've been at my most productive during the last 2 or 3 hours of awakeness, the last few days.
The baseball playoffs are going on now, and I'd talk about them except that it's baseball and I don't care. The problem with baseball, as with pretty much every other sport at this point, is that I don't have any favorite teams. For years I was nominally a supporter of the various San Diego teams, which was tough since 1) they mostly sucked, and 2) I suspected I'd no longer care the minute I moved out of San Diego. #1 is still true, though the baseball team flirted with competency this season, and as for #2... yeah, it's pretty much true too. I did pay some slight attention to the Padres (baseball) and Chargers (football) this year, but now that I've lived 500 miles north of San Diego for 15 months, I really don't care if they win or lose. Well, that's not true; I'd prefer that they win, but I have no desire to actually watch them play, no matter what their record might be. Anyway, as for baseball, I did pay some attention to the standings and such, but since I always enjoy reading about baseball more than actually watching it (it's just so damn boring when you're not rabidly rooting for or against at least one of the teams playing) I stopped paying attention almost completely when the season ended and the last weekend surge for the playoffs was over with. So now the playoffs are going and other than rooting against the Cubs (who failed to even make the playoffs by choking unbelievably in the last week of the season) and Yankees, I really don't care who wins. Really, every team has something I can hate them for (every team but...), or else they're completely anonymous (...Minnesota and Anaheim), and that's not much to root about. I'll pay a bit more attention when the first round of the playoffs are over, and the annual Boston/Yankees matchup begins, but even that gets boring over time, with the Red Sox finding a new way to lose every year, and every hack of a sportswriter filing 5000 words a day on the Curse of the Bambino, or other crutch topics. Because, you know, intelligent analysis is like, hard. And stuff. Plus it doesn't sell papers, since sports fans aren't exactly the brightest lights on the Xmas tree. Given my feelings about Baseball, it was with trepidation that I turned on the TV for a bit Thursday evening and prepared to watch some of whatever game was on while I ate Malaya's left over chicken fajitas from yesterday. (She was out late for a work-related dinner thing.) Trepidation that turned to joy when I clicked to ESPN, and found college football. I clicked up a channel to ESPN2, and found... more college football! Thus was a happy dinner assured, with the ability to click back and forth between two games featuring 4 teams I cared absolutely nothing about. But unlike baseball, they were playing a sport I (still) enjoy watching, and enjoy it I did. A few times, when both games were in commercial, I clicked over to the networks to look for baseball, and eventually found it on FOX. Just five or so total minutes of baseball watching (5 minutes total, in 10 or 15 second chunks and I flipped channels) clearly demonstrated the basic problem with the sport; I never saw anything happen. Managers were shown chewing toothpicks, batters were shown limbering up, and insipid announcers chattered away, and occasionally I even saw a pitch fouled off or grounded out. But never, not even once, did I see anything that could remotely be considered "action" or "excitement" and after a while I gave up on flipping and just muted the football channels when they were both in commercial. Unfortunately, one of the football games got exciting at the end and went into overtime, and I ended up watching 45 minutes more TV than I meant to. The curse of something actually holding you interest on the teevee! Look forward to more of my meandering sports criticism once basketball season starts in a few weeks, and I talk about how I'm curious to see how the Lakers do sans Shaq, how Miami does with Shaq, and how other teams perform this year... while I never actually want to spend 2.5 hours sitting there and watching a game in its entirety. I really need a TIVO, except that Malaya tapes a ton of stuff now and feels obligated to watch most of it, and if we had a TIVO she'd tape more, she'd never get any work done, and I'd find myself watching more TV as well, since I like to sit beside her on the couch and snark on the programs. But if I had TIVO (or some homemade equivalent) I could record games when they were on, watch them in 20 minutes through judicious use of the FF key, and not feel like I'd wasted all day watching TV while still deriving some enjoyment from the sporting event in question.
¤ Anyway, here's a link to and some discussion of a site I've had a lot of fun with lately. WreckedExotics.com. As the name might hint, it's a huge collection of photos of wrecked cars. Exotic cars, for the most part, though on the amusing accident pages you'll see plenty of Volvos and pick up trucks and minivans, none of which are in any way exotic. What sort of shots are they? Harmless ones, for the most part. This isn't Rotten.com style road kill photos with blood and brains and such. There are no blood or bodies bodies in the photos; just lots of wrecked cars, often with a short caption giving some background information. It's driver error in 95% of the cases; teenagers driving crazily, guys driving sports cars too fast, old people forgetting which pedal does what, and so on. I'm currently enjoying clicking through all of the Weird/Funny wrecks. They have thumbnail pages, but the shots are pretty small, so I just started at the beginning and I'm going through it using the next shot link on top of the page. Spend a couple of hours and view the whole archive, or just take a five minute break and click through a few dozen shots and laugh. It's working for me.
At least every third or fourth shot is a good one, but here are some of my favorites, thematically-sorted, since I'm just like that.
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 hile
channel surfing a few days ago, I happened across Fit
TV. I don't know what channel it's on, 87 or something like that, at
the extreme upper end of the dial. I've never watched it before, other
than wincing in horror at some yoga show a few weeks ago, where they were
doing stretches that would literally have put me into the hospital.
The show I saw just two days ago though, was much less frightening and a
lot more amusing.
It was one of those "get fit by emulating your TV" programs, where shiny happy people prance around to music. The twist to this one was that there were 5 models/instructors. The camera started off on the main person, the only one who got a microphone, and she was in very good shape. While she kept talking and they started their work out, doing your typical modified tae bo faux-punching/kicking while stepping side to side a lot workout, she introduced another woman who was to her left. (They all had their own little raised circle platform which was about 2 meters in diameter, and the 5 platforms were aligned like an arrow pointing down towards the screen, so the head woman was right in front.) The second woman was a little heavy, I thought, at first glance. Not fat, but she had a bit of a fat ripple between her waistband and her jog bra top, and didn't look as low body fat as you expect a person on a workout show to look. Those thoughts were going through my head as the head workout woman kept talking, and when she introduced the 2nd woman, she said something like, "This is Stacey, she'll be going a little slower for those of you who aren't quite in top shape yet." I was like, "Huh?" My confusion deepened a moment later when the camera jumped to the 2nd assistant, a Hispanic-looking woman who appeared to be wearing a life preserver. The host said, "And here's Maria, who will be going a bit slower for the rest of you." After that they cut to the two stages on the right, and showed a man and a woman, both very skinny and wiry, like marathon runners. And of course the host introduced them and said they'd be going a bit faster, for the advanced fitness level. After that most of the show was shown from one head on camera, pulled back so you could see all five people at once, and yes, they did keep going at different speeds. The woman in the center set the moves, the two on the right did them very quickly, Maria to the left did them slowly, and Stacey to the far left did them a bit more quickly. Lest you think I'm ridiculing the show, I thought that was a very good idea, really. No one sitting around at home can keep up with the pace the superfit people set (I'm including myself in that, by the way. Not that I've ever tried to keep up with a TV fitness program, but I suspect I'd be pretty tired if I did, despite my regular steep hill running, martial arts training, etc.) so why not stagger the speed a bit? And rather than having the fit person try to slow down sometime, or the home audience give up since they can't keep up or identify with any of the triathletes on the show, it's damn smart to put on instructors of various ability levels, even if they're all in such good shape that they could all go at the highest speed for far longer than the half hour program requires. The thing that made the concept stick in my mind and sent me leaping to the computer to jot down a note to blog on, is this. What do they do with the fat and slow one? (Not that she was really fat, but comparatively speaking she was a lot bigger than your average workout show person.) To be clear, she was definitely in good shape. She did the routines just as everyone else did them, just slower, and she had super-toned legs below her spandex shorts. Sexy even. Her arms were toned too, so all of her weight was from the hips up. It was hard to tell just how heavy she was with a bulky vest on (and who the hell works out in a parka-vest anyway?) but you could tell there was some fat under there; she wasn't just some skinny chick they stuck in a big coat to make her look the part. So she's heavy, but she's really fit and kept up easily. She could probably have gone full speed if she'd wanted to, and gotten a really good workout. In fact, why don't they go faster? None of the people on the show were sweating at all, as far as I could see, so how good a workout can they really be getting? Since the heavy one was heavy though, not just faking, and she was also in good shape, I wonder how they manage that. Does she really eat a lot to keep her weight on despite working out on a TV show? Pig out on weekends to put on five pounds and keep her job? Or is the fat-chick a revolving position, where they constantly have to hire new people after the previous one gets in shape and loses too much weight? And when she loses weight, what happens then? Do they fire her, or move her down to the "slightly-heavy" spot? Does the girl in that spot get bumped off, or does she steadily lose weight from the show and eventually move over to the superfit spot, when the person working there has to go to the Ashley and Mary-Kate memorial anorexia farm to put some meat on her bones? I almost want to check in on the show every few months, just to see how the staff changes are handled, and if the 2 overweight people somehow maintain their fitness level and waistline, since they must to keep their jobs. |
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All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007. |
have said, on several past occasions, that I had nothing to talk about
in the blog. Usually I said it back in the days when I was doing a blog
a day, and at times I actually meant it. However, every time I said it I
tended to write about 40k worth of something immediately afterwards,
which wasn't the best way to prove my point.
