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I hope you all had a blissful, gift-filled, alcohol-fueled holiday season, which of course doesn’t FULLY conclude until my birthday later in the month. Like most Americans, I have made resolutions. Unlike most Americans, they don’t have much to do with fitness, because I am already in the middle of my lifelong fitness resolution (more on this later), which is to get crazy jacked and look vaguely like Daniel Craig but without the haunting blue eyes and luscious, pouty lips (my own lips are quite full and luscious but I cannot maintain the same extruded pout without looking like a fish and/or duckface, aka duckfish).

My resolution is to attempt to produce, on time and without exception, a new update to this website every Monday that is insightful, enjoyable, and full of both fun witticisms AND as many pictures of Daniel Craig as I can fit given current intellectual property law.

What will it be? Who knows. It’s a Presidential election year, so I’ll probably make fun of the GOP. It doesn’t appear that Sarah Palin is running, as of this writing, so sadly that eliminates some easy humor, although Rick Perry is doing his darnedest to be equally stupid in public, and then there’s good ol’ butt juice Rick Santorum, and it’s only a matter of time before Ron Paul says something hilariously racist, which is a shame because in a past life I probably would have been a big Paul supporter, at least until the realization some time ago that the Libertarian ethos of “everybody get yours before I gotta get mine” is not really an effective way to govern society.

I may also do the occasional movie review, although I should warn you the movies will not be recent as I don’t like going to movie theaters, and I’m certainly not going to beg my wife for 2 hours away from her and the roughly 7 million children I appear to have at home to do something I’m largely indifferent to doing, with the obviously exception of any James Bond movie. So there’s a strong chance that any movies I’ll write about will be along the lines of “Street Kings,” a film from 2008 that I watched about 75% of the other night. (I can report that Keanu spends the entire time being Keanu, and Forrest Whitaker chewed so much scenery that I suspect he pooped drywall for a month, although at least a lot of people get shot, so it’s really the perfect thing to watch while rocking your infant son to sleep.)

I’m sure I’ll have lots to say about my fitness progress as well. A short update: I’ve been lifting hard and eating like a pig since just before Thanksgiving, and have gained a rather significant amount of weight. The gut has come back a little, but I see a big difference in my shoulders, my butt has become extremely Kardashian, and my thighs are getting so thick that 1) I’m having a very hard time fitting into pants, even though the waist and inseam fit fine, and 2) there’s not much room left for my testicles and I keep sitting on them. My back squat has gone to 327.5lbs, and my bench press is up to 212.5, although my deadlift is hampered by the fact that I only have 390 pounds of weights so I’m stuck there until I can buy more. I’ve been pretty strict about the Starting Strength program (not adding or replacing any exercises), but yesterday I decided it would be extremely nice if I had big ol’ swole-up guns so I’ve started adding a few curls and tricep extensions to the end Friday’s workout so the ladies will look at my arms and go DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN.

I was planning to start dieting again around my birthday, but I may push it off until later in the winter. I’d like to cut down to a trim 230 by summer and see how close I can get to having visible abs (something I’ve never had, EVER), but I hate, hate, HATE cutting because my lifts stall, and squatting over 300 pounds makes me feel like a real man.

So, uh, that’s what you have to look forward to. It’s gonna be real. Really real.

I wrote about 600 words of a September 11th piece and realized I was “writing angry” and was going to come off as a huge jerk. In lieu of actually posting it, I’ll break it down: Lee Greenwood sucks, we’re worse off than we were 10 years ago, the Republican Party is destroying America from within, and the terrorists won.

Nobody wants to read that crap. So, spiked.

I spent September 11th at church, mostly. I’m now singing “full time” (in the sense of singing every Sunday, not working a 40-hour workweek in the choir stalls) at the church where my parents and sister sing/play. It offers a lot of cool music opportunities, so in the afternoon we sang a Requiem Mass by Sir Philip Ledger written specifically for the church a few years back. It was pretty moving, and was topped off by going to Brandywine Prime for a light supper, dragging Sarah along for a last “date” before she has another baby carved out of her on Friday. I ate too much and drank too much, all of which is to the good.

Sat in front of the TV for a bit last night to take in a little football, but discovered I couldn’t care less about the activities of the Jets and Cowboys, and also PBS was showing the New York Philharmonic playing Mahler’s 2nd Symphony, which is superduper pimp. I performed it once in college and would like to note that Mahler was a jerk: no rational musician makes the basses hit F#s and Gs, that is just redunkerous.

WHYY apparently had the rookies at the controls, though, because a few minutes into the last movement, the TV inexplicably cut to commercials (on a public TV station, no less). Eventually the music came back on, after we’d missed several minutes of high quality German romanticism. During that time, I may have accidentally tweeted that WHYY should suck it. I stand by my statement.

I hope everyone had a restful weekend, devoid of airplane tragedies and Lee Greenwood songs. I’ll come up with something more substantive later in the week, and were I you, I would expect to see pictures of a new offspring come Friday, if we come up with a name for him.

In order that this site feels less like a juicehead blog and more like something that the average person would actually enjoy reading, I’m taking a quick break from the recounting of my “fitness journey” to hit on a few things that have been bothering me lately.

• Can someone explain to me how the “offsides” rule in soccer came to be? I thought of this during last year’s World Cup (USA! USA! USA!), was reminded of it during this year’s Women’s World Cup, and then again now that the English Premier League season kicked off over the weekend. It’s almost as if some FIFA official sat down one day and said to himself, “There is altogether too much scoring in football, we have to cut down on all these goals.” It’d be like moving the outfield fences 40 feet out to cut down on all those pesky home runs…something I would actively support. My point is…I have no point.


• I would just like to remind everyone that the Phillies are 9 games up on the division and on pace to win 106 games. Daddy like.


• The downside of dieting: sometimes my farts are just unbelievable. I laid a sulfurous bomb at work earlier that subtly altered the DNA of everyone in nearby cubicles. On the plus side, if any of ’em reproduce, the kids should be able to fly, or detect cesium with their toes, or something.


• I was pretty excited to see Michelle Bachmann win…whatever the hell it was that Iowa just did. It wasn’t a primary, right? Just some kind of “proof of concept” vote? Whatever it was, I was pretty stoked. I mean, the GOP’s batting a thousand with its presidential front-runners since 2008: every damn one of them has been bat-shit crazy. I think they’re 3 for 3 now, right? Hopefully Rick Perry will talk more about Texan secessionism or attempts to pray away droughts and they can lock in 4 for 4.


• “Texan Secessionism” would be a pretty pimp name for an alt.country band.


• The other downside of dieting: HOLY CRAP I’M SO HUNGRY ALL THE TIME.


• That reminds me, I need to do a post about Creatine and why it’s very effective and really annoying. So, uh, look for that.


• I cannot recommend highly enough a band I have discovered named “Passion Pit.” The fact that I have now purchased their album means that 1) they’re completely mainstream and everybody already knows about them, and 2) they’ll probably break up within the next two months, but I am a HUGE fan. I’m somewhat indifferent to electropop, but something about PP makes me happy in my bones. Go grab their album “Manners” and give a million listens. Apparently they’re working on a new album to be released next year, which would be hella rad.


• HW and I are having a boy and are having a hell of a time thinking of a name. Any suggestions? I open the floor to you.

Peace, playaz.

Who got a perfect score (15 out of 15) on this quiz about general religious knowledge? THIS GUY. Take the quiz, and then check out the demographic information. The second most knowledgeable were Atheists/Agnostics. “Worship Service Attendance” (weekly, monthly/yearly, seldom/never) had almost no correlation to increased knowledge. All in all a pretty interesting result.

I can’t decide if this is funny or not. Thoughts?

Been enjoying the “About My Job” series over at Andrew Sullivan’s crib. Two of them in particular resonated. A community college professor (and apologies, ’cause it’s kinda long):

I believe the assumption is that instructors are the product of a liberal-biased education and then we decide to join that liberal bastion and are just going with the established flow. For those of us in the junior college ranks, however, I think there is a more concrete reason for the lean left, rather than the abstract leftism offered in certain courses we took as students.

When I hear friends and family offer specific illustrations of why they list in a more conservative direction, it often has to do with anecdotes revolving around the person they check out at the grocery store using food stamps to buy a jug of Carlo Rossi zinfandel or spending their welfare check on some other decidedly non-essential item. Or the stories they hear from mutual friends in law enforcement or social services who deal with the dregs of society on a daily basis. Who could possibly support any form of social safety net when a portion of that net will be devoted to such vermin?

Well, on an equally anecdotal and emotional level (not pillars of rational thought, granted, but clearly major inspirations for why and how most people choose a side) we here at a community college tend to see the better side of our fellow humans who are struggling on the low end of the economic ladder. We see them trying to better themselves, working hard in spite of their conditions to try and take a step up said ladder. Hell, some of them may even be spending public money on a pack of Winstons, but we don’t see that. We see them in their best light, for the most part.

And that’s what I want people to know about my job: I don’t have empathy for poor people because I read Sinclair Lewis or Karl Marx; I have it because I work in an environment in which I see them at their best. Some of them are clearly not cut out for college, some of them are unpleasant to deal with, some of them probably do spend their meager checks on stupid things. But they are also trying to change their lot. And they have much less margin for error in doing so. If I taught at an elementary school or high school, I may assume that the kids in my classes were on their way to the destinies that social research and my own perceptions had fated for them. If I taught at a university, I would never meet people who take an English class so they can legitimately compete for a promotion at the hotel chain in which they work, or pass the nursing program to get their AA degree. The world would be easier to categorize. But since I work in the gray area between, I know that it’s not that easy, and that people defy your definitions for them all the time.

The whole thing also strikes me as interesting because it demonstrates how much of our “knowledge” is merely anecdotal. I had a good-natured argument over the weekend with a Twitter buddy who supports draconian sentencing of criminals. He defended this by talking about a woman he knew who was stabbed outside a movie theater by a recently released convict who just wanted to hurt “somebody white,” and also mentioned a family destroyed by a drunk-driving naval officer who escaped punishment. I don’t have any more information than this, and didn’t press him for details. I merely pointed out that modern Penology seems to indicate that deterrence wasn’t a factor in preventing most crime, and incapacitation tended to just produce hardened criminals who were more likely to be recidivist and stabby.

Politicians often talk about how they met Dorothy Babool in East Gabip, Iowa, and she patiently explained how such and such federal policy had deprived her of the money she needed for her excema medication which is why her skin was bright yellow and sloughing away in chunks the size of Delmonico steaks, and this means we have to change such and such federal policy so folks like Dorothy get the help they need. (On the left, it’s usually a policy that helps pay for Dorothy’s medication; on the right, it’s usually a tax-cut for people with Dorothy’s specific medical condition.) This works because while people may not know anyone with horrible leprosy, many of them can certainly identify with someone like Dorothy because she’s the same race, and roughly the same age and economic status.

Americans don’t deal well with statistics like “46 million American citizens with no health insurance whatsoever.” They respond better to anecdotal evidence, which is of course the least reliable evidence of all.

The other, largely unrelated Job, was Baroque Countertenor:

Being a sort of lower level, highly-specialized professional classical vocalist is really fun (I sing mostly in smaller pro choruses and as a soloist in local concerts), but can be annoying. For example, whenever I tell anyone what I do, they try to helpfully summarize by declaring I’m an “opera singer,” which I’m absolutely not. Then when I tell people that countertenors sing in their falsetto voices, they also helpfully summarize, “like a castrato?” No, there are no more castrati in the world, sorry.

Most annoyingly however is how, especially in North America, many assume that because singing is a wonderful gift and so much fun to do, I shouldn’t worry too much about remuneration. I can’t live exclusively off my earnings (although if I lived in Europe I probably could), and I am paid a fraction of the money of my instrumental counterparts, even though my skill is just as specialized. I find too many people associate the words “community” with “choir”—and friends of mine continue to express incredulity that I as a professional chorister with some of the best early music groups in North America should deign to get money for it. Working in the arts, as liberating and wonderful as it is, is a specialized livelihood, and it’s really hard breaking through the culture here where kicking a ball accurately is worth millions of dollars whereas perfect sight-reading, constant vocal practice, and good knowledge of period performance and ornamentation is considered a fun hobby for just about anyone.

Man, do I feel his dog. I realized some time ago that the thing I do best above all others is sing as part of a choir. I certainly enjoy singing solo, but I’m never going to be Sherrill Milnes. My skills (the aforementioned sight-reading, good performance practice, as well as a bizarre ability to concentrate at 3-hour rehearsals that is completely unavailable to me in any other part of my life) are perfect for being the section leader in a good choir. Sadly, if I were to quit my job and try to make a living as a professional chorister, I’d take something like a 70% cut in pay, if I were lucky, and took every single job offered me. The best choral musicians move on to become directors and choirmasters, but at age 32 that boat has probably sailed, and I’m a particularly poor motivator and people manager.

Semi-related: Happy New Year to all my Chosen friends! (I only remembered it because I’m singing the High Holy Days at a local synagogue this year.)

Golly, this post is just all over the place. Sorry about that. I’ll try and do better, you know, at some later date.

As a follow-up to Tuesday’s post, I came across this, which is only tangentially related: an old article at The Atlantic about the “real” Second World War. It discusses the remarkable dichotomy between the way the war was reported to the public, particularly in America, and the way real soldiers would describe the combat:

In the popular and genteel iconography of war during the bourgeois age, all the way from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history paintings to twentieth-century photographs, the bodies of the dead are intact, if inert — sometimes bloody and sprawled in awkward positions, but, except for the absence of life, plausible and acceptable simulacra of the people they once were… The same is true in other popular collections of photographs, like Collier’s Photographic History of World War ll, Ronald Heiferman’s World War II, A.J.P. Taylor’s History of World War II, and Charles Herridge’s Pictorial History of World War II. In these, no matter how severely wounded, Allied soldiers are never shown suffering what in the Vietnam War was termed traumatic amputation: everyone has all his limbs, his hands and feet and digits, not to mention an expression of courage and cheer…

What annoyed the troops and augmented their sardonic, contemptuous attitude toward those who viewed them from afar was in large part this public innocence about the bizarre damage suffered by the human body in modern war. The troops could not contemplate without anger the lack of public knowledge of the Graves Registration form used by the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps, with its space for indicating “Members Missing.” You would expect frontline soldiers to be struck and hurt by bullets and shell fragments, but such is the popular insulation from the facts that you would not expect them to be hurt, sometimes killed, by being struck by parts of their friends’ bodies violently detached. If you asked a wounded soldier or Marine what hit him, you’d hardly be ready for the answer “My buddy’s head,” or his sergeant’s heel or his hand, or a Japanese leg, complete with shoe and puttees, or the West Point ring on his captain’s severed hand.

What got my attention, and made me think of Tuesday’s otherwise unrelated post, was this quote attributed to Norman Mailer:

You use the word shit so that you can use the word noble.

I also found it attributed to Dwight Eisenhower with the phrase “without sounding ridiculous” on the end. I actually think it’s more effectively turned around to “You use the word noble so you can use the word shit,” which is one way of saying that one’s limited use of profanity has more impact because of the simple rarity of it. Like if your mother became infuriated at something and screamed an F-bomb. Whoa.

I, on the other hand, drop F-bombs so regularly that it’s difficult to tell if I’m angry until I start flinging poop.

The Prop 8 decision (Judge Walker declared that Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage in the state of California, is illegal) has been covered rather extensively in the blogosphurr, but here’s a quick round-up of things I’ve seen and liked. From Jason Kuznicki:

I asked myself — couldn’t they have gotten Maggie Gallagher to testify? She comes across as reasonable most of the time. She might have offered one of her frequent catch phrases, that societies that “lose the marriage idea” die out. As a sound bite, it’s frightening and often convincing. But at trial, she’d have been asked the obvious follow-up question — name just one such society — and a moment of hilarity would have ensued, because there aren’t any.

Or she might have said that kids need a mom and a dad. Then she’d have been confronted with the deep dishonesty of many of the studies that are used to disparage gay and lesbian parents. These studies all either extrapolate from single-parent homes to two-parent homes or else fail to control for divorce. Thus they draw conclusions that are pretty obviously doubtful. Comparing two-parent same-sex families with two-parent opposite-sex families and controlling for divorce demonstrates little difference in childrearing outcomes — a point Gallagher commonly avoids at all costs.

A commenter quoted on Andrew Sullivan’s site:

I really, really hate – as in, this is extra special slimy, even for them – the fact that only now, since the Prop 8 proponents have lost, is the whole “he’s gay, should he have recused himself” meme starting to take hold. Folks, if you think your judge should recuse himself, you put on your big boy or girl pants and you file the damn motion. 22 years ago I did a jury trial for a client who was charged with molesting his kid. The judge originally assigned had handled the civil restraining order, and I felt that created bias, so I filed a motion to recuse, which he granted. (By the way, with a different judge, the jury acquitted in 55 minutes.) About a week later, I ran into that judge and started to apologize for the motion. He cut me off before I could finish and he said, “You should never, ever apologize for doing your job. Ever.” The point is this: if you are a good lawyer, and you’ve got grounds, you file that motion. And if you don’t file it, either a) you’re not a good lawyer, or b) you got no grounds in the first place, and you know it.

And the Prop 8 proponents knew it. And didn’t file it. Because there was nothing to file. It’s no more bias to be gay in this case than it would to be African American, Latino, Jewish or female in a discrimination case. This is a smear. And a cowardly smear at that. Nothing less.

I love “put on your big boy or girl pants and you file the damn motion.” I wish I’d gone to law school. Now the right wing has lathered itself up to the point where they believe they can get Judge Walker impeached.

Judge Walker is an open homosexual, and should have recused himself from this case due to his obvious conflict of interest.

What can be done?

Fortunately, the Founders provided checks and balances for every branch of government, including the judicial branch. Federal judges hold office only “during good Behaviour,” and if they violate that standard can be removed from the bench.

Judge Walker’s ruling is not “good Behaviour.” He has exceeded his constitutional authority and engaged in judicial tyranny.

I’m not entirely sure how judging the facts of a case and rendering a decision is not “good Behaviour.” Perhaps they think that being an open homosexual is not “good Behaviour?” You stay classy, American “Family” Association.

I really do intend to get this thing alive again. I really do. But, let’s face it, I have two bloody children. It’s frequently 9pm before all the offspring are abed, which gives me roughly 90 minutes for myself before I have to start considering getting my beauty sleep. Last night I spent those 90 minutes installing a new toilet seat upstairs because my obese ass cracked the old one. So you can see where finding time for updates is, well, non-existent. I will try and do better.

I do have plans to discuss the Triathlon I did 2 weeks ago, and in fact started a post on that subject, which I’ve not had time to work on since, well, the day after the Triathlon. So, you know, don’t hold your breath too long. Although, frankly, the fact that a 257-pound human successfully completed a triathlon might be a tidbit that would cause you to expire from surprise anyway.

In lieu of coming up with something hilarious and original, I can offer a particularly foul-mouthed quote or two from a story on the feelings of elite soldiers on DADT by Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic:

As one former member of a special missions unit put it to me recently, “It’s really about competence. If you’re competent, it doesn’t matter who you are.” And then, switching instantly from an analytical posture to a machismo mode, he said, “If a guy saves my ass, he sure as hell can look at it.”

Damn right. To folks who are afraid of gays in the military, what exactly is the issue? Are you afraid of getting propositioned? I can count the number of times I’ve been hit on, in 32 odd years, on one hand, so I’m afraid you’re not getting any sympathy from me. I’d relish the thought of a gay guy finding me attractive, with the exception of the freaky gentleman that kept cruising me at a gay club in London in 2003, and the problem there was not his homosexuality but the fact that he was at least as old and doughy as my father, and wearing a white T-shirt and black pants that were at least 3 sizes too small.

How, exactly, is being hit on by a gay guy any different than being hit on by a particularly ugly woman? Either way, you just have to say “no thanks,” and usually that puts a stop to it.

The next quote has some particularly naughty language:

One soldier — call him Ben — checks his e-mail. “Fuck,” he says. He opens his cell phone and makes a call. … A beat. … “Heeeey cock breath, how are you?” … “Yeah, that sucks.” “Yeah, why is he doing this to us again?” “No, he told me his partner was in town for the weekend and he really needed to see him.” … “Dude, why can’t he break way for one weekend!”

The conversation continues.

“Yeah, well, you know I’m just going to come over and [perform an obscene act involving testicles — this IS The Atlantic, after all, and I already typed ‘cock breath’].”

He hangs up.

What was that about, I asked?

“Oh, this guy we haven’t seen for a while is in town, a really good buddy, but his partner is also in town and he wants to see him. So we were just complaining that he wanted to see his partner rather than hang with us.”

The soldier reminds me a bit of myself (minus the part where he’s undoubtedly in pristine physical condition and well-trained in the art of combat, and I’m filled with clotted cream and frequently walk into doorframes). For kids of my generation, you grew up insulting your friends by calling them either “gay” (or one of its many derivatives, such as “gaywad” or “gayon”) or “retarded,” sometimes combining the two into particularly biting forms such as “gaytarded.” It’s something I struggle with even now, because my first instinct upon hearing moderately poor news (such as “turns out that John won’t be coming, he’s got to work” or “I don’t like eggplant, it’s gross”) is to think, and possibly say if I’ve been overserved, “That’s gay” or “You’re a retard.” And yet you will be hard pressed to find a greater advocate for the rights of LGBT men and women that isn’t actually LGBT than I.

The fact that the soldiers use words like “cock-breath” and (I’m assuming) “tea-bagging” is not the salient point. The fact that the soldier used those words and clearly has no problem with homosexuality is. I think it’s a perfect reminder that political incorrectness is by no means an indicator of someone’s actual feelings on a subject.