Shorts

Here are two thoughtless one-offs for you.

First, if you’re one of those mystifying people who enjoy being screamed at by television A-type weirdo Jim Cramer, did you know he’s right only about half he time? Deprived of the market-moving leverage his hedge funds offered, he’s not quite as likely to make a correct call on a stock as a tossed coin is.

Second, if you have some time and electrons to waste, check out Wine Enthusiast’s website. I defy you to find a single product that’s not amazingly overhyped and aimed solely at douchebags who can’t imagine how humans drank wine for thousands of years before the advent of $225 Antique Style Wall Mounted Corkscrews. Next time you need  an $18,000 refrigerator, you know where to look.

I hope you are all having a happy, relaxing and fulfilling year’s end–unless you are an idiot, in which case I hope nature is allowed to run its course before you or your descendants attempt to breed with my daughters.

ridin’s not here right now

I’ll be not posting for the next few weeks. My daughters are visiting; and then we’re taking a road trip for New Year’s. My usual drivel should resume the week of January 7th.

Muscle

The best way I’ve found to add muscle fast is the 5×5 workout. You can google it and you’ll find lots of information. Basically, I’m in the gym 4 days a week–Mon, Tues, Wed (optional), Thurs, Fri. I do only four exercises each visit and it takes only an hour or less.

Each exercise is five sets of five repetitions, with a 90 second rest between sets. When I can do all 5 reps in all 5 sets for 2 or 3 sessions, then I add weight–either 5 or 10 lbs depending on the exercise. Most exercises engage many muscles and are really old-fashioned: bench presses, squats, the horrible Turkish get-ups. Some are specific, like curls. Always, I eat enough and correctly.

I’m not the biggest guy in the gym nor do I intend to be. My goal isn’t to bench X pounds. My goal is only to keep improving. I keep notes of each session, and every second I’m pushing against a weight, I’m determined to succeed. After eight weeks I’ve advanced across the board and am changing the way my clothes fit.

5×5, using almost entirely free weights and combined with sound nutrition, is the bast way to gain muscle I’ve yet found.

Shaving

Well, I’ve started shaving in the shower. I don’t really like to shave but I don’t like getting all whiskery either. For a while, I used to shave with a straight razor. Honest! I went through a long phase of “practicing gingerly,” which was synchronous with the “showing up to work with a lot of tiny nicks” phase, before morphing with, well, agonizing slowness, into “can get the job done.” I enjoyed not using piles of stupid disposable razor blades, and I enjoyed that when the zombie apocalypse comes I wouldn’t have to be all whiskery. Once the drugstores ran out of all those damn disposable blades, I mean.

The problem was, it took frickin’ forever to do each morning. I think that’s partly because I was pretty much self-taught. Some directions on the intertubes were all I had to go with. So no matter how good it felt, morally and facially, I just couldn’t keep it up. I switched to only doing it on weekends, when I had more time. Then it dawned on me it’d be easier still to just do nothing on the weekends, and hey presto, I wasn’t straight razor shaving any more.

So for no reason, I started shaving in the shower. I don’t need shaving cream, so that’s nice. And I kind of thought, “Well hey, I’ve been shaving this face for a few years; I bet I could do it without a mirror.” That led to “Or even with my eyes closed.” That’s kind of challenging, mentally. But it feels nice in the hot water and all. Then eventually I got to “Hey, I could shave my chest!” I stood there looking down at my chest. I’m by no means hairy. Be easy. Just a few strokes, water washes everything off, and Robert’s my father’s brother I’m done.

Then I thought, “What the hell am I thinking about? Why on earth would I do this?” I did not wind up shaving anything but my face. What a weirdo, I thought. You nutjob.

Tomorrow: continuing a more personal look at this blogging of me, but moving on to something the three of you might actually be interested enough to finish reading and not think “Geez, what a nutjob”: the best workout I’ve found for building muscle, fast.

Please

…Can Alan Greenspan just shut the hell up? This is a guy who cannot let go of the spotlight–a government finance media whore. It’s not enough his job was incredibly dull. I mean, who, except some Wall Street assholes, even talks about the Fed? No, he has to go on and on about how no one saw the subprime lending crisis coming and there wasn’t anything to be done. Shut up. Shut up. Just please shut up.

Because lots of people saw it coming, and lots of people asked the Fed to do something about it. It just so happens, according to the New York Times, that Greenspan disagreed with all of them.

“An examination of regulatory decisions shows that the Federal Reserve and other agencies waited until it was too late before trying to tame the industry’s excesses. Both the Fed and the Bush administration placed a higher priority on promoting “financial innovation” and what President Bush has called the ‘ownership society.’ On top of that, many Fed officials counted on the housing boom to prop up the economy after the stock market collapsed in 2000.”

“Mr. Greenspan and other Fed officials repeatedly dismissed warnings about a speculative bubble in housing prices. In December 2004, the New York Fed issued a report bluntly declaring that “no bubble exists.” Mr. Greenspan predicted several times — incorrectly, it turned out — that housing declines would be local but almost certainly not nationwide.”

Even though I wish he would please shut up, I know he won’t. This hard-headed error will follow him to the grave, and he craves attention so much he’ll spend his last lucid moments defending his mistakes.

P.S. By the way, the link I provided above was to a single-page version of a three-page article. You might see fewer ads that way. But an awesome way to see no ads is to use the AdBlocker Plus extension for your Firefox browser. Since I installed it a few months ago, I literally have not seen a single ad anywhere on the interweb. It’s the single best thing that’s happened to my intertube experience ever. Thank you, Wladimir. You created something really useful and good.

Consultants

So I was browsing around the Gallup site (66% of Americans polled think God created humans in the past 10,000 years) and it turns out they have this consulting practice. I don’t know what makes Gallup consulting different from any other squadron of douchebags with Blackberries and PowerPoint, but they have a case study up there about a family owned bunch of Caterpillar dealerships. The Cat dealer wasn’t in the top 25% of Cat dealers nationwide (doesn’t say 25% of what–sales, profits, etc. Anyway…), and wanted to improve. So the boss read a few books and then hired the Gallup folks to come in and administer a survey asking how “engaged” the ~600 employees were with their various jobs. Result: not good; only 16% were “engaged.”

The consultants charged the Cat dealer $half a million, threw around some PowerPoint slides, told the managers to do stuff, and three years later, fully 45% of the dealer’s employees reported they were “engaged” by their jobs.  Cat dealer reports a Win, Gallup writes a case study, all go home happy. “In 2005, Fabick CAT invested about $500,000 in Gallup programs. During this same time, Fabick CAT’s profit increased by 100%, while revenues only increased by 15%.”

Great! Um, wait. Great…? $500,000 thrown at consultants and 55% of my employees still don’t give a crap? If I’m your customer, how is that a win?

Don’t pay attention to the numbers people want you to swallow, unless you look at the picture from as many different angles as you sensibly can.

Also, consultants suck. Thank you & good night.

Careful

An easy post, this frosty Saturday, on antioxidants and vitamins. I came across a link to the abstract of an older study (1996) on the safety of antioxidant vitamins. Back then, when Bill Clinton was gettin him some in the Oval Office, and our country hadn’t yet pauperized itself and destroyed its reputation, the best that could be said about these supplements wasn’t that they were even mildly effective. It was “Despite a lack of clinical trial data, it seems that antioxidant vitamins are safe.”

So, with that ringing endorsement fresh in my ears, I tried to find some more recent studies that would show antioxidant supplements have some kind of beneficial effect on the human body. After all, 1996–so long ago! The Macarena was #1 and they made a movie out of Mission: Impossible!

My hurdle–that the studies be credible–pretty much disqualified all the results. Instead I came up with a very recent piece that tends towards damning these vitamins. Some doctor from Johns Hopkins is highly skeptical of the claims being made. Here’s the first few sentences of the abstract:

“The overwhelming preponderance of the lay and scientific literature speculates that so-called antioxidants are allegedly the cure-all for purported oxygen free radical induced human pathophysiologies, inclusive of aging.”

In other words, you’re being told, a lot, that antioxidants can cure a myriad of problems, even to the point of alleviating the effects of old age. Okay…

“For the free radical theory, as applied to oxidative stress and aging to be correct, antioxidant usage should prevent, reverse or eliminate these scourges of mankind.”

Translation: for those beliefs to be correct, antioxidants must be able to “prevent, reverse or eliminate” some or all of the problems the marketeers say they’ll help.

“To the contrary, large, randomized, controlled, double blind studies in man have repeatedly failed to confirm the predictions of the free radical theory as it relates to possible disease prevention or reversal.”

Translation: actually, properly done science has never once shown antioxidants can do any of these things!

“Actually, meta-analysis studies have shown that some antioxidants appear to increase the incidence of cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke and overall mortality.”

In fact, when you really take the numbers apart, it looks like they make things worse.

“As a consequence of their lack of effectiveness, many major health-related organizations do not recommend the use of antioxidant vitamins A, C and E.”

So don’t fucking take them.

Expose!

I love the people at PETA. I have this notion that they’re these dedicated young girls who are big into healthful lifestyles and taking care of themselves. Reality, of course, is likely more skewed to the mid-20s male hipsters with too many body piercings and oddly scented vegansexual women…but a boy can dream, can’t he? Anyway, I noted PETA’s new beef with the California Milk Processor Board with interest. Apparently PETA’s newest is “Got Pus? Milk Does.”

Now, yours truly puts away about half a gallon of milk every three days. If we were to include yogurt that would be…well, that would be even more dairy in less time. While I’m aware of the fat content (0g) and protein content (9-11g, depending on brand) of each serving, I don’t really think too much about the pus content. PETA contends that mastitis, which moo cows do get in their breastosas, both produces pus and is controlled by antibiotics–neither of which are desirable, necessarily, in human persons. I have to agree. But this goes under the category of Habits I Would Change If I Could Afford To.

The Milk Processors, though, would seem to have taken exactly the wrong tack in dealing with PETA. I mean, I’d never even heard of the Got Pus? Milk Does thing until the Milk folks started protesting it. Which gave it exactly the exposure and visibility PETA wanted. PETA person Lindsay Rajt, who I have a certain mental image of, observed “The more they talk about it, the more exposure it gives to our stance. They pretty much handed this one to us on a silver platter.” The Milk Processor guy (mental image) fired back, “We were hoping that PETA would be reasonable, but I have doubts. Reasonable is not a word usually used in the same sentence with PETA.”

Yeah, but…So what? They get exposure. Marketing is about getting people to pay attention.

Inspired

At the very bottom of a mind-numbingly dull Advertising Age article titled “Stop Dishing Out the Phoniness, Marketers” I found something that struck a nerve: reference to the increasingly visible “Inspired by” message–or is it a disclaimer?–on things we consume. Now, before you go any further, I have to warn you: unless you totally don’t trust me, don’t read that article. You have much better things to do. It’s broken up into five PowerPoint maxims (e.g., “Declared Motivations = Ideals + Incentives”) intended to impart wisdom. They all break down to a single point: stop bullshitting so much.

The authors run an Ohio-based “thinking studio.” Having pioneered the concept of Mass Customization, they now want us to understand our place in the Experience Economy. But all that would be material for a different post…

Anyway, the article’s last point, “Displayed Appearances = Representations + Perceptions”, says that instead of using the word “real” as a descriptor, marketers should use visual and textual cues that represent the product as an authentic. The example given is Kraft Food’s Blueberry Morning Cereal, whose packaging now says, “Inspired by the taste of home-baked blueberry almond muffins” with a picture of the muffins next to a bowl of the cereal. Naturally this caused me to smile and reach for the scalpel.

Every single Contact Us link on the KraftFoods pages is busted (!!), so I had to wind up e-mailing Kraft corporate to find out how I can ask about the inspirational process. I’ll post whatever I learn here. We’ll see if anything comes of it; if I were Kraft, I’d spend considerable resources on devising ways not to talk to people like me.

But to return to Inspiration. When we say something is inspired, we mean it’s an exceptional act, usually of creation. Role models can inspire us to do great things. Inspiration is an elevation. Now, though, marketing has cheapened the word to mean “based loosely on.” Think about the last movie you saw that was “inspired by a true story.” It might have been a pretty good movie, I don’t know, but was it inspired? Is Blueberry Morning a work of creation that has used actual muffins as a springboard for creative excellence?

Positive

The ironic thing about today’s post is that I was actually going to write something positive. Something that wasn’t sharp or critical; something motivational. I was thinking about it in the car while returning some books.

But when I got home and checked the mail, I found proof positive 2007 isn’t done sucking dog cock quite yet. I received a collection notice from the State of Virginia’s collection filth for $4,122.81. From 2003. Due Friday. Why didn’t I hear about this sooner? I asked them on the phone. We’ve been trying to contact you at your last Virginia address, they said. I haven’t lived there since 2003, I said, when did you send notice? Well, the IRS takes a while to get to these things, they said, looks like we sent your first notice February 27th, 2007. Well, I told them, we had our mail forwarded, but you know the Post Office won’t forward mail five years after the fact, don’t you? Well sir, you can start sending partial payments, but you’re out of time.

So now there’s a lot of phone calling and faxing with the ex, who has our tax returns and W-2s and shit from that time. And on Friday they’re going to attach liens to all the crap I don’t own and garnish the wages of the job I don’t have.

Fuck. I hate this fucking year so much. I just, fucking, hate it.