Reading, Jan 2015 - "It is a cardinal error to theorise in advance of the facts."

Golden Son (The Red Rising Trilogy, Book 2) by Pierce Brown

Die Trying by Lee Child

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution: Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D. edited by Nicholas Meyer

Sorcery at Caesars: Sugar Ray's Marvelous Fight by Steve Marantz

Dinosaur Training: Lost Secrets of Strength and Development by Brooks Kubik

Convict Conditioning 2: Advanced Prison Training Tactics for Muscle Gain, Fat Loss and Bulletproof Joints by Paul Wade

THE OFFICIAL TESLADYNE ACTION SCIENTISTS FIELD GUIDE: Essential Subjects for Survival, Evasion, Maintenance & Combatives by Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener

Aquaman Vol. 3: Throne of Atlantis by Geoff Johns, Paul Pelletier & Ivan Reis

Aquaman Vol. 4: Death of a King by Geoff Johns, Paul Pelletier & Sean Parsons

Captain Carrot and the Final Ark by Bill Morrison, Roy Thomas and E. Nelson Bridwell.  Art by Scott Shaw, Ross Andru, Rick Hoberg, Al Gordon and others

Excerpts:
Golden Son

This is so far from the future I imagined for myself as a boy. So far from the future I wanted to make... I thought I would change the worlds. What young fool doesn’t? Instead, I have been swallowed by the machine of this vast empire as it rumbles inexorably on.

We’re all just wounded souls stumbling about in the dark, desperately trying to stitch ourselves together...

There is no greater plague to an introvert than the extroverted.

‘Home isn’t where you’re from, it’s where you find light when all grows dark.’

We are not our station in life. We are us—the sum of what we’ve done, what we want to do, and the people who we keep close.

“I will die. You will die. We will all die and the universe will carry on without care. All that we have is that shout into the wind—how we live. How we go. And how we stand before we fall.” He leans forward. “So you see, pride is the only thing.”

I would not have raised you to be a great man. There is no peace for great men. I would have had you be a decent one.

Sad to see how weak and petty the demons of my youth really were. As though I come from some hollow fantasy past.

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
I never guess. It is a shocking habit, destructive to the logical faculty.

It is a cardinal error to theorise in advance of the facts.  Inevitably it biases the judgement.

Tell them I was murdered by my mathematics tutor, if you like.  They'll never believe you in any case.

Convict Conditioning 2
The mind controls the body. No matter how physically fit we may be, or how much we should be gaining from consistent training, if our minds are not in the right place training falls by the wayside. Who cares if your muscles are strong? If your mind is weak, corrupted by destructive self-talk, you won’t be breaking any personal records.

Our “demons” are largely the result of wrong ideas. We acquire many of these ideas tacitly, almost by accident. It’s certainly not deliberate. But once a bad idea gets lodged in your brain—maybe from something you’ve been told by somebody who should have known better—it’s virtually impossible to shift. Good thoughts practically fly out of the mind, but bad thoughts dig their heels in. They want to stay forever. Don’t let them. Confront your demons and challenge them—every day, every night if you have to. If you let your negative ideas and destructive self-talk have free reign, the darker sections of your mind will grow larger and larger until they take control of your spirit and destroy you entirely. The only way to battle the negative ideas that attack your training life is to become conscious of them, and challenge them.

DEMON # 4: …AGING “I’m getting too old for all this.” Ah, this is a biggie—although you may not realize it. Yet. If you are in your teens, you probably don’t think about aging at all. Training is new, and so are you. In your twenties, you have a dim awareness that aging exists, but you don’t truly believe it’ll happen to you the way it happens to others; almost all the great athletes are in their twenties anyway. Suddenly you are thirty and your attitude changes. The pros are looking younger. Hey—where are all the champs in their mid-thirties? Guys you played football with in high school with are fat and bald. A few years pass and that big milestone—forty—is around the corner. You become aware that less and less of the people you see in fitness magazines, or working in the gym are your age. Then you are fifty. Old. Before long you will be sixty, and by then it’s positively foolish to be seen training seriously. The big 7-0 comes next. By now—if you have been paying attention—you understand just how quickly time slips through your fingers. This is how the average person thinks. You know what? It’s all total bulls***!

Scientists are only now coming to understand what Victorian strongmen knew only too well; that much of the decline seen in elderly people isn’t down to aging—it’s down to disuse.

Far from being dangerous, strength training is positively essential to health as you get older (past seventy-five). Osteoporosis, arthritis and immobility can’t be cured by chemical drugs—the best way to combat them is by resistance training. You gotta move that bodyweight. Keep training as long as you live. You never really appreciate how quick the years pass until you are standing at the end of them. Please don’t waste any more precious time.

Sorcery at Caesars: Sugar Ray's Marvelous Fight
On the night of April 6, 1987, Sugar Ray Leonard stole a fight. A couple of million witnesses saw him get away with it. Leonard's theft was so slick that the victim, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, didn't know until it was too late. His middleweight title was picked clean and gone, forever.