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What in the hair-raising hell is this all about?

Let’s just cover everything in rapid-fire list form, ’cause that’s how I be rollin’ fo sho. (I don’t understand many of the things I just typed.)

• I’m down to 249 as of this morning, despite drinking more than I should have over the weekend; I attribute the continued weight loss to constantly working on my house and not eating much. Saturday I was 750 calories under where I should be, which is roughly the equivalent of a cheeseburger. I compensated on Sunday by sharing half a Bobbie and drinking a lot of beer.


• How about that old Tom Watson yesterday? I wish he’d made that last putt on 18. Perhaps he should borrow my new putter; I am a horrible golfer, and yet the first time I used my new clubs I was dropping 8-12 footers like what. I was an unstoppable putting deity. I’m just saying, if Tom wants some pointers, he should totally call me.


• Progress on the purchase of a new house and sale of the old one continues apace; the home inspection on the “new” 150-year-old home revealed that, in the words of the inspector, the house is “totally rockin’.” We also discovered that the radiators, which we thought had been disabled in favor of a modern heat pump, are fully functional and heated by a boiler in the basement. My new house has the same heating system as Harlan Elementary School, and in no way is this a bad thing. Apparently the boiler is just about the best one money can buy, it’ll last for 40 years, and it was installed just three years ago. Acres and acres of win.

  
  On the current home front, we’re cleaning and scrubbing and patching holes and just generally making the place look less like the family home of 4 dirty people and more like Felix Ungar lives up ins.



• Why don’t people name their kids Felix anymore? If HW and I have a third kid I’m totally pushing for that.

Are you a grammar nazi like me? Do you enjoy secret societies? Well then have I got a club for you!

On the subject of overeating and large portions, James Joyner writes (via Andrew’s guest blogger Patrick Appel):

…[O]ne of the things that has long occurred to me about restaurant dining is that, because every customer must be served the same portion size (within allowances for human error) they’re naturally going to provide huge amounts of food. If you serve a 275 pound man an amount of food that would be appropriate for a 125 pound woman, he’s going to still be hungry at the end of his meal and therefore a dissatisfied customer. Because the marginal cost of additional food (especially pasta, potatoes, and the like) is negligible, it’s just good business to pile it on. Naturally, everyone else will be given too much to eat and all but the most disciplined will overeat.

It might be “natural,” but it’s still stupid. I myself weigh roughly 250 pounds, and if I go to a restaurant and am very, very hungry, I’ve been known to order and eat two meals; they arrive at the same time and I shovel them both in at the same time, usually in under 10 minutes.

At higher class restaurants, the servings are smaller, but because they usually have more courses (appetizer, salad, meal, dessert), which are spaced out over the course of over an hour, I find that I’m just as satisfied having eaten less, of higher quality food.

Big chain restaurants can argue that they’re just offering what Americans want, but that’s a cop-out. Drug dealers are only meeting a demand as well. I’m not saying we need to enact legislation to limit how much food chefs can put on a plate, and I’m certainly not saying “if it weren’t for McDonald’s I’d be totally skinny,” but big chain restaurants who focus on stuffing food into their patrons need to stop dodging their share of the blame for the obesity epidemic.

I honestly don’t know if this is good or bad. Luckily, it’s funny.

(Sorry for minimal posting; home inspection today. Everything looks good! We appear to be GO FOR HOUSE.)

Penny Arcade on the subject of Mixed Martial Arts:

I can honestly say I never had an Atari 2600, and therefore I never played Adventure. Thank God for the internets! Although I can’t defeat that last bloody duck.

UPDATE: I beat that last bloody duck. Woooooo

Oh, West Virginia. You never disappoint.

I haven’t updated everyone on the status of my gut, so here’s the lowdown: still fat. Lost 19 pounds in a little over 5 weeks, though, so I guess I’m doing something right (not eating; occasionally running until I throw up).

I’d like to lose about 38 more. That’s gonna be tough; even in 2004, when I was about as skinny as I’ve been since high school, I bottomed out at around 225. Getting down to 215 would make me positively hott, methinks, but it’s gonna be really, really hard. Particularly since we have a long vacation scheduled in a month or two. I’m going to try and run or ride every day while I’m beachin’, but who knows. I highly doubt I’ll be paying much attention to diet.

Annoyingly, I ha’en’t had much time to exercise, because we’ve been so busy; my usual lunch hour spent running through the woods or lifting weights hasn’t happened in nearly two weeks. You might be wondering what’s kept us so busy, and to that I reply: we bought a house. It was all very quick, mostly because we’d been admiring the house from afar for literally years, it came back on the market, and we found out somebody else had put an offer in. We overbid those folks and got it. Home inspection is tomorrow, after which I should be able to post a few photos.

Now I just have to be able to, you know, pay for it. And sell our current dive, which is really what’s keeping us busy; we’re throwing stuff into storage and doing Xtreme Kleening 2009. There’s a little bit of touch-up painting to be done, plus the basement where Veronicat (aka The Cheat) has made her litterbox, i.e. the entire basement floor. That’s the biggie; we won’t even let our realtor come look at the house until we get the basement cleaned up. But keeping the basement clean requires keeping The Cheat from peeing and pooping on it, which unfortunately for her means she becomes an outside kitty. So tonight I’m getting her vaccinations up-to-date, we’ll be getting her groomed, finding her some kind of shelter, and then her ass is on the streets, son. (Well; the fenced in backyard. I’m not letting her roam free, for heaven’s sake.)

So that’s what be happ’nin’. More updates on the subject to come.

People sometimes ask me, “Hey, didn’t you use to be a Libertarian? What happened with that?” (Okay, nobody asks me that. Anybody who knows I once subscribed to Libertarian principles is probably unaware I’ve changed. So I should probably say: I no longer consider myself a Libertarian, but a Liberal, albeit with certain caveats, such as the fact that I think people should still be allowed to pack heat.)

This article taking Governor Palin to task on cap-and-trade doesn’t really have much to do with Libertarianism, except for one excerpt:

My decision to drive creates traffic that imposes a cost on society. A company’s decision to fish in the ocean imposes a cost on the world’s common stock of fisheries. A banker’s decision to take on a huge amount of risk creates danger for the economy as a whole. The problem is that none of these private actors adequately bears the cost of their decisions.

(Italics mine.)

The short version of why I no longer consider myself to be Libertarian is that “Every man for himself” doesn’t seem like particularly good public policy.