Relaxed Focus: September 14, 2014

Friday, September 19, 2014

Training - "...when you’re in shape, you know it’s the result of doing a little bit every day."

9/19 - pullups/pushups, ng chins/pushups, chins/pushups, alt db curls, ovh tri xt, wrist curls

"It was getting to the point where I would wake up in the middle of the night and I wasn’t breathing. A little bit of sleep apnea. My neck was pushing down on my throat, so my sleep felt like it was panicked all night.

I like clothes now. I have more energy. I sleep better. My sex drive is up. Blood’s flowing. I’m less susceptible to impulse. I’m in a different mode. When I was way out of shape, the idea of using whitening strips on my teeth seemed terrible. I have to do that every day? I’ll never do it. What you want is instant results when you’re out of shape. You want your teeth whitened in 45 minutes with the use of lasers. But when you’re in shape, you know it’s the result of doing a little bit every day. Moments aren’t just moments. A moment might be a week or a month.

So instead of Boy, I’d love to eat this hamburger right now, I’m considering a little further into the future. I’m thinking, I eat that hamburger and that’s 1,200 calories, and I’m gonna work out tomorrow and lose 800 calories. I may as well eat a salad here, still do that workout, and then I’m actually making progress."

"You get what anybody gets..."

That's about right.

Is The Foreign Policy Elite Clueless? - Reason.com: "Let’s begin with March 2003. President George W. Bush, citing imaginary weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s fictitious connection to Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks, sent the military to invade Iraq, overthrow the government, and occupy the country. Saddam’s regime was secular, but he was a Sunni Muslim and the majority Shi’ites were especially oppressed under his dictatorship. With Saddam gone, the Shi’ites have dominated, and the emerging successor regime predictably moved close to Iran, the large Persian Shi’ite country next door. (Saddam, assisted by the U.S. government, launched a devastating eight-year war against Iran in the 1980s.) In response, Al Qaeda (which is Sunni) arose in Iraq for the first time and participated in an anti-U.S. and anti-Shi’ite insurgency, until the CIA paid the local Sunni tribal leaders to turn on Al Qaeda, whom they disliked anyway. Thus Bush alienated the Sunnis and created a Shi’ite ally for Iran. Yet since 1979 (when the Islamic revolution overthrew the dictatorial monarchy of long-time U.S. client Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) Iran has been demonized (falsely) by U.S. administrations as one of America’s mortal enemies...

Meanwhile, next door in Syria, the brutal Iran-backed dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad became even more egregious in 2011 in response to growing protests. Assad’s regime is also secular, but his and his cronies’ religion is related to Shi’ism, putting the majority Sunnis at a disadvantage. Obama, with the help of then secretary of state Hillary Clinton and British Prime Minister David Cameron, made a bad situation worse by declaring that Assad must give up power. Thus compromise would be suicidal for Assad, and Al Qaeda-type fighters from the region (such as next-door Iraq) were encouraged to flock to Syria because Assad’s days were apparently numbered. ISIS was born when a capable and especially fanatical group of foreign fighters in Syria had strategic differences with the al-Qaeda affiliate. So here we are. ISIS, a product of idiotic U.S. actions, controls large parts of Syria and Iraq, effectively erasing the border between them. In response, Obama wants to obliterate ISIS (by air) without helping Iran or Assad or alienating Sunnis. Talk about squaring the circle! If recent history is any guide, arming the Iraqi army and the phantom moderate rebels against Assad amounts to arming ISIS. The nonaggression pact among ISIS and other anti-Assad groups, along with the U.S.-blessed Free Syrian Army’s announcement that it would not join Obama’s anti-ISIS coalition, seems to sink the president’s plan."

Addiction & Drug War Lies, when faced with science.

#math

"You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime." - Neil Gaiman's Death

Well, this changes my childhood considerably.

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Training - "Sweat, muscular soreness, and an accelerated heart rate are all necessary parts of the game."

9/18 - squats, lunges, calf press - stretch

Bodybuilding.com - Look Like A Badass After Age 40: "...many Americans over 40 assume they have no choice but to deteriorate with age. But you do have a choice—and more than that, you have an opportunity. Ask anyone who has successfully achieved the best shape of their life after the age of 40, and they'll tell you it's more satisfying than it ever was at age 30. Yet it's also trickier to achieve...

DO WORK HARD

If an exercise doesn't feel strenuous, it isn't. In life and fitness, lasting results almost never come without hard work. Sweat, muscular soreness, and an accelerated heart rate are all necessary parts of the game. It's not supposed to be effortless! By the same token, be wary of fitness systems that boast of easy success. No matter what anyone says, fitness after 40—or any age, really, but especially after 40—must be earned. That's part of what makes it so spectacular when you achieve it...

DO BE CONSISTENT

People in our age group tend to overthink when it comes to training. They dwell on questions such as "Should I train Monday and Thursday? Run Tuesday? Take a class on Sunday?" they ponder, often talking themselves out of training at all. The simplest—and in my opinion, best—answer is this: Train more days than you don't. If you didn't work out yesterday, do it today...

DON'T MAKE EXCUSES

Often times we dupe ourselves into thinking we don't have the time to make healthy choices, but that's not true. We all have time, and each one of us chooses what to do with it...

A lot of well-meaning folks waste time in the gym. This isn't totally their fault. In fact, many modern fitness facilities seem deliberately designed to waste time. Don't believe me? Just look around at all the TV screens, products for sale, smoothie bars, and other similar distractions. It's as if the focus has shifted from working out effectively to taking as much time as possible! There are ways you can maximize efficiency. Get to know the gym. Circuit training, supersetting and self-stabilizing bodyweight and free-weight movements—as opposed to using benches or machines—are surefire ways to get the most bang for your proverbial buck. Get more done in less time, and you'll be able to come back more often."

"Which is nonsense!"

Some days...

Kevin Smith Embraces 'Tusk's' Weirdness, Reveals Secret of Casting Johnny Depp - Spinoff Online - TV, Film, and Entertainment News: "So I’ve known him through the kids, and I texted him. I was like, “Dude – hi. You know, I never wanted to be this guy, but I’m going to be this guy, man.” And I said, “I’m making a movie, and boy, there’s a part you’d be great at.” And so I said, “Before you fucking turn your phone of, here’s the blog that I wrote about it” – because I had just written about it – “I’m going to make this walrus picture. I’m going to move forward.” So he read it...

I remember sitting there trying to text him and being like, “Don’t be that guy. Everyone does this to him.” But I was like, “You know what, man? He’ll say no. If he wants to say no, he’s such a class act, he’ll say no in a way that makes you think, he could have done it, but he just can’t because of his schedule.” So I was like “You’ll be able to see him again in public. It won’t be weird and shit like that. I’m sure he gets asked all the time.” So I felt like, all right. fucking based on that, let me just go for it. Let me just chase the whimsy because he would love this, I think. And sure enough, when he read it, he fell in love with Guy LaPointe so he called me right away. He was like, “I’ve always wanted to do a French Canadian accent – I have an internal dimmer, and I can dial it up or as low as you want!” And I said “Dial it to comedic.” And he was like, “Gotcha.” So we set cameras on him, and off he went...

And so we shot 15 days in North Carolina, and then three months later, we shot two days in California with Johnny. All the Johnny stuff is two days. He’s just that good a fucking performer. We blew through like 30 pages of dialogue in two days. Now, he’s sitting in one place, so you’re not doing a lot of camera movement and stuff, but my lord, it was fun. That’s the thing. He came to set – your job’s easy. You don’t direct that day because you just make sure, like zoom, focus. Here we go. There’s nothing to do. He’s a genius. He does it all. So he brought like a performance that – our budget was under $3 million – it was like, $2.7, $2.8 movie. Everyone got scale. This was a guy who gave us the same performance he’d give a $20 million, $25 million dollar movie where he was getting paid $20 million bucks. A $100 million performance in a fucking under-budget movie about a guy who turns another guy into a walrus. And so he came to play, and he had such a good time. So much so that he lent us his daughter, and we put her in the movie. And that spawned the movie that we’re all working on now."

"Fast forward some more, June 16th 20seventy-four..."

So much fail, so many levels. CIA to Obama: We Already Did Your Dumb Plan And It's 'Doomed to Failure' - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "A top CIA official told HuffPost that opinions among agency analysts range from "ambivalence to outright opposition." And they have good reason to hold those opinions—the CIA is already covertly arming the Syrian rebels, a strategy that has already been show to have failed, in no small part because the rebels are unreliable and the equipment eventually finds its way to ISIS."

The World War III Project by The Americans for Whatever Barack Obama Wants, Did you Know He's Friends With Jay-Z? Truest thing you'll see today. "A $25 dollar donation will get you a piece of rubble from a war-torn Middle Eastern country kissed by Senator Lindsay Graham." 'World War III Is a Very Important, Very Progressive War' - Hit & Run : Reason.com: ""Help Obama Kickstart World War III!" is a darling little video made by improvisational comedy titans Second City. I was introduced to it today via Twitter, but the video was made and released in 2013, during President Obama's push to use force against the Assad regime in Syria. Perhaps it has new relevance now that the U.S. House has voted to train and arm Syrian rebels in support of Obama's advertures in ISIS-slaying. Enjoy!"