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The Girl is also a footling breech. Oy. (Memory jog.)

September 22nd, 2008 | Tags: baby, footling, skiapod, The Girl | Category: Health or the Lack Thereof, The Girl | Leave a comment

Yesterday, I proctored a BJCP exam down in Nashua.

That involved judging the same beers the examinees judged during their test, but using a judging form with a vastly expanded amount of writing real estate, so that the exam graders can have a baseline against which to assess the judging sheets provided by the examinees.  That means that the commentary has to note every little bit of detail in the beer: aroma, flavor, appearance, mouthfeel, finish, EVERYTHING.  You wind up picking apart the style guidelines piece by piece and comparing the beer almost line for line. sip for sip with the guidelines.

I think the result is a more comprehensively judged beer — it helps that there’s no need to focus on possible reasons for flaws, just needed to note the flaws — and a more rewarding judging experience. Especially when compared to the newer, box-oriented, writing-de-emphasized score sheets we used in the Longshot competition in June.

Good group of people, a crew of National types (3 of us), and we turned out to be almost entirely dialled-in on scoring for 3 out of the 4.  For the last beer, 2 ofus gave it a 35, the other guy a 23.  Whoa.  More on that below, though.

Beers judged, with scores; then what they actually were.

1. Bohemian Pilsner :: 37 :: Fresh Pilsner Urquell
2. Belgian Dubbel :: 30 :: Homebrew entered as a Belgian Pale Ale a few weeks previously at another contest; it scored a 21 as a BPA.
3. Oktoberfest :: 40 :: Dos Equis Amber
4. American IPA :: 35 :: 4-year-old homebrewed IPA blended 5:1 with Smuttynose IPA.  This is the one with the discrepancy.

No need to reconcile scores as a proctor, you just need to provide a comprehensive description, so that one is sure to have some variant responses by the examinees.

Fun time, and I hope to do it again, and even get more involved in the examination process (although I highly doubt I’ll ever screw around with taking it again!).

September 21st, 2008 | Tags: beer judging, bjcp, exam, homebrewing | Category: Beer, Brewing | Leave a comment

I’ve kept quiet about the Palin phenomenon, as so many others (more visible than I) have been covering all the bases.  Suffice to say that it’s a complete joke, but it’s a scary one.

The scary part comes from the same reason that I never really laughed all that hard at Bush jokes, because what he wound up doing and putting over on us was so damn nasty … “ha-ha, what a dummy” seemed to sidestep the reality of the effects a bit too much for my comfort.  So with Palin: she’s scary as hell, because it’s like an intensifide version of Bush, with more relentlessness and Cheneyism.  Not.  Good.

Keeping mum for all this time, though, seems to be good, as her popularity slides, and McCain’s excessive flippity-floppiting and outright lying seems to be catching up.  I’m not eager to find out what twist his campaign has in store next, that’s for sure.  Hoping for the intelligence of the electorate to shine through, but that hope has been dashed before.

September 19th, 2008 | Tags: crappy politicians, election, media furor, palin | Category: Politics and Policy, Rant | Leave a comment

Today smells like fall, 100%.  Still summer for a few more days, but you’d be hard-pressed to believe that.

September 18th, 2008 | Tags: seasons weather commentary | Category: Local Interest | Leave a comment

Via the New York Observer.

The coffee, it came close to coating my computer!

This is awesome.

September 17th, 2008 | Tags: awesomeness, comedy, mccain, Politics and Policy | Category: Linkitudinous, Politics and Policy | Leave a comment

So over this summer, I’ve slowly re-dedicated myself to getting fit, and trying more seriously to shed the extra 45 pounds or so that have accumulated since graduate school.

Yeah, that’s right: 45 pounds.  70 if you count the change from college days.

It all started, really, with heading back to another favorite activity, reading Metafilter. I was reading in the Ask MeFi section, and someone else had asked about getting into shape … eventually, the best-formed responses pointed to Starting Strength, a newish book that went into exacting detail on how to perform five basic exercises with barbells.  I liked the perceived simplicity of this approach, and decided to dive in.

The idea is that rather than fart around with a million isolation exercises, it’s far more useful to perform a small number of compound exercises that stress numerous muscle groups at once: the squat, the deadlift, the bench press, the press, and the power clean.

I had bench pressed in the past, of course, and even recently.  Pressing (aka “military press”) had also been a part of my gym routine at various points, but always on a machine.  Starting Strength eschews machines as mostly useless, arguing that real strength stems from the interaction of muscle groups and heavy loads (which is a polite way of saying that machines are essentially goddamn useless).  I started in late June, even taking on the complex and scary-seeming power clean (pull a loaded bar off the ground, and when it gets above your knees, you jump, shrug, and flip the bar onto your shoulders in one coordinated motion).  Here are the weights I started with:

• Squat: 95 lbs.
• Bench Press: 95 lbs.
• Deadlift: 95 lbs.
• Press: 60 lbs.
• Power Clean: 45 lbs. (empty bar)

Now, about 3 months later, here’s where I am:

• Squat: 240 lbs. (3 sets of 5 reps [3x5])
• Bench: 155 lbs. 3×5
• Deadlift: 235 lbs. 1×5
• Press: 100 lbs. 3×5
• Power Clean: 115 lbs. 5×3

Pretty awesome!  My presses are pretty weak, still, but getting slowly better. The goal is to work through this program until the baby is born. That means I should fit in 6-10 more sessions, if I’m lucky.

The tricky part of all this was where it led me once I started. before I knew it, I was peeking more and more over at Crossfit, and their message boards, which slowly turned me around from thinking “that’s some stupid crap right there” to “damn, I really want to try that crazy shit!”  So slowly the plan developed to shift from Starting Strength to Crossfit after I’m back at work following baby leave.  The advantage is one of time — my weightlifting workouts are taking up nearly 2 hours now (from leaving the office to getting back), whereas most Crossfit workouts max out around 30-45 minutes.  That does not include warmup, stretching, skill work, etc., but since most workouts are really in the 10-20-minute range (ideally), the actual gym time will decrease.  Also, they look insanely fun.

But in addition to making me want to do nutty CF workouts, I found myself reading more and more about nutrition (big deal among Crossfitters).  CF is big into the Zone and/or Paleo eating (often a combination thereof), which is interesting, but not for me (the Zone, that is).  Paleo eating has a dumb name — OK, a REALLY dumb name — but the basics are super-easy, and the food meshes nicely with things I really like anyway: meat, fish, and vegetables. But more than that, all this curiosity led me to read Good Calories, Bad Calories, by Gary Taubes, which served to blow up everything I thought I knew about food and nutrition.

Briefly: the low-carb folks were and are right; the science that proves fat is bad for us is barely even science, and inconclusive at that; high carb consumption can be calmly linked to certain cancers, atherosclerosis, high levels of the bad forms of cholesterol, diabetes, etc., etc.; exercise serves primarily to increase strength and fitness while not doing a great job of losing lots of excessive weight.

All that made me shift my eating habits in the late summer to an almost-entirely carb-free mode, the result of which was losing 7 pounds in about 10 days.  Ain’t easy, though, to pull that off with a preganat wife around! Also, I was slowly coming to the understanding that an intensive weightlifting regimen was at complete odds with “clean” eating — the body needs tons and tons of food if you’re lifting tons and tons of weight. The Starting Strength recommendation, in fact, is to add a gallon of milk a day (GOMAD) to your everyday diet, and eat more to boot.  Whole milk.  A gallon.  Daily.

Wow.

I wasn’t doing that.  I have added rather a lot of milk, for me, to my daily diet, and I’m eating more (the see-food plan: see food, eat food); that’s resulted in the lifts being “easier” relatively speaking than they were.  I do intend to slide into a more “Primal” eating plan, as described here, after the baby is born.  I know that even minimal attention to that kind of eating results in quick weight shedding (while I was still building strength!), so I’m not really worried about any untoward fattening in the next three weeks or so. The big takeaway, which I only realized recently, is that different fitness goals require different eating plans.  Paleo/Primal + Crossfit is a great blend, which conveniently works out well long-term for one’s health; heavy lifting and heavy eating aren’t so great for long-term health, but are awesome for building impressive amounts of strength and muscle in a short period of time.  And any negative effects can be addressed after that type of cycle is completed.  There are also plenty of ways to go about heavy lifting cycles without eating the “bad” stuff, it’s just slightly more complex.

So after all this, I stand right now, still 5 pounds less than I was in June, WAY stronger than I probably ever have been, and ready to get even healthier and stronger.  So yeah, that’s what I did over my summer “vacation.”

September 16th, 2008 | Tags: crossfit, diet, health, weightlifting | Category: Health or the Lack Thereof, The Sporting Life | Comments (1)

Another one?  Yeeeesh.

The A.P. covers this, also a better article from the LA Times.

Shine on, you crazy diamond.

September 15th, 2008 | Tags: bands, pink floyd, sad | Category: Mourning, Music | Leave a comment

Woke up Sunday morning to read the news that DFW had hung himself.  Probably my favorite living writer, and a “celebrity” death that hit me pretty hard, rather than the more typical “well, that’s too bad” gloss I tend to have.

Great summary over at Salon.

Sigh.

September 15th, 2008 | Tags: david foster wallace, literature, sad | Category: Bookish, Mourning | Leave a comment

Laura wrote this to a friend in 2001:

Here’s the whole story (it’s kind of theraputic to tell): We felt the second impact and the first collapse in my building — I had gone out to look in Battery Park a little after 9am — after they evacuated us, some of us walked down into Battery Park — it was completely dark and there was ash and concrete dust everywhere — like a blizzard. I know that some people from my office went back upstairs to wait until the air cleared a little more. but a few of us walked down through the park and then up Water Street toward the Seaport, where there was a bar open, giving out water and first aid (which thank God we didn’t need although my eyes were pretty scratchy).

We kept walking north, then somewhere in Chinatown a city bus stopped and the driver just said, get on, I’m taking people up First Avenue, don’t bother to pay. So we rode the bus uptown, and my friend Laura Perez got off in the East Village, where she lives. I stayed on until 23rd St. and then walked to Andy’s office at 36th and Madison. I was completely covered in white dust. So I cleaned up there, and then we left the building around noon — I was surprised how seemingly normal everyone was acting. We tried to get some food in a deli next to the Empire State Bldg but as we were ordering one of the employees started panicking, so we walked east, and went to the Queen-Midtown tunnel, where the cops were lining up pedestrians and stopping drivers to ask them to take people into Queens, and this nice lady dropped us off somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and we flagged down an off-duty cab, which took us close to home, and we walked from there. And then I took a shower and we went to get burritos.

September 11th, 2008 | Tags: 9/11, the past | Category: Anniversaries, Reminiscence | Leave a comment