See a Man about a Horse

"This is my happy face."

The BBC series "Sherlock Holmes" is finally on Hulu.  Last night I had the pleasure of watching the "Hound of the Baskervilles" episode and Hulu didn't freeze until there were about two minutes left.  So Benedict Cumberbatch, who recently played Kahn in "Star Trek: Into Darkness," is seen above in the movie "Atonement."  The movie was a WWII era drama, with no happy ending.  It was basically one big ball of rape, separation and sadness.  Apparently, both Roger Ebert and Wikipedia gave it rave reviews.  In any event, Keira Knightly is creepy skinny and here's a look at other creepy roles BC has had.

"Bloody hell, why does my mustache smell like horse dung?"

Tonight I finished my bench press; 1 rep at 245lbs.  That went up so easily I tried for 255 and then 250, but couldn't do it.  Friday I'll squat, probably at 345 or 350lbs.  If I am feeling sonsy, I'll give deadlift another shot.

I ate four pieces of steak, a pile of veggies and some eggs today.

I did some laundry and thought I'd get some clean sheets for my last week here.  After careful deliberation, the clerk at the laundry gave me this pillow case:

The pink really brings out the auburn in my 'stache.

Last night Sherlock told Watson, "I've got to see a man about a dog."  I initially assumed this was a singular quote from something way back, but found out it means "I need to leave now and want to politely say something before leaving, without telling you specifically where I am going.  I'm probably going to the toilet.  After that I'll probably meet a man in a back alley and commit a crime."  I'll give Hulu another try at Sherlock Holmes tonight and see if he uses any catchy phrases.

Quadruple Earl Grey

Bergamot orange

When I'm not at work, I've been abstaining from coffee and filling the caffeine void with Earl Grey tea.  The coffee at the DFAC tastes burnt and too hot, the coffee at the 24 hour coffee shop is better but expensive and I know I have quality coffee at the office so I wait.  Ten years ago I was content to drink Lipton tea, thinking that was the height of tea drinking.  When I got to San Antonio, a fellow lieutenant's future wife was excited when I said I liked tea and then fell on the floor crying when I admitted to drinking Lipton.  After smelling salts brought her back to consciousness, she advised me to drink Earl Grey tea.  I've never looked back.

I revisited the 2002 film adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo starring Jim Caviezel.  For some reason I thought the sword fighting was a large part of the film, but it really only lasts a few minutes.  Richard Harris (of pre-Michael Gambon Dumbledore fame) steals the show as the imprisoned priest who educates, trains and mentors Edmond Dantes.  This sets the stage for the soon-to-be-escaping Dantes to claim the supposedly hidden treasure, destroy those who falsely imprisoned him and become his own man.

Even though it isn't necessarily classified as such, I see the film as a Bildungsroman or coming of age story.  Dantes was naive, uneducated and clumsy prior to his imprisonment.  Harris' character changed all that, using Dantes' revenge as fuel for the change.  However, this theme of "guy gets imprisoned-trains while in prison-seeks revenge" is used frequently and audiences buy it.  Films such as "Con Air" and "The Dark Knight Rises" show bare-chested, lean, bearded Nicolas Cage and Christian Bale preparing to return to greatness, while eating prison food and getting little sunlight.  How is your body going to build itself without proper nutrition and vitamin D?  Anyway, without taking too much thunder from Wikipedia's entry on the subject, the Dune, Harry Potter, Andrew Wiggin and The Dark is Rising novels are also treated as coming of age stories, but on a much more "messiah saving the world" scale.  They all give us regular folks the hope that, assuming you are the product of a millennial long breeding program, born into a wizarding family, third or seventh son (of a seventh son), you too, can save the world.

In addition to Earl Grey tea, I supped on breakfast that was an homage to Irish food and a dinner that was eggs on top of beef stew.  Oh, and I demolished a bag of macadamia nuts while watching Guy Pearce get trounced, as mentioned above.

That's cod liver oil on the right.

Butter

Till tomorrow, au revoir.

Woden's Day

Too bad Huginn and Muginn couldn't make the pic.

Yeah, Odin has a beard not a mustache, but today is/was (depending on where you are right now) Wednesday which originally was Woden's Tag or Odin's Day, Woden being Odin in Old English (not this old English).  Gandalf was based off of Odin, me appears as the main character in Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods and he plays a role in The Dresden Files series of books.  In the The Wheel of Time novels, the character Mat Cauthon is based on Odin: both characters are associated with ravens, have a spear and lose an eye.  One of Odin's nicknames was Rauðgrani, translated as "Red Mustache."  It is interesting to think how the days of our week are named after Norse deities, whereas the structure of our calendar comes from the Roman Catholic Church.

Two weeks left here.  Made some progress on my out-processing items.  Guess I'll have to read a lot soon or take my borrowed books back to the library.

Had meals of steak tonight, one with veggies and one with a baked potato and three fried eggs.

Kelly Klein, the owner of Groennfell Meadery in Cochester, VT, posted today about the archaic legislation that affects professional mazers.  (If the "Beer Wars" documentary is true, then the same can definitely be said regarding the craft beer industry.)  Essentially, the definition of mead is pretty loose, which puts meadmakers into situations where they can't bottle their mead in certain bottles, must use or not use certain verbs on their bottles or can't call their products mead based on the volume of fruit used.  In the hopes that one day I might call myself a professional and not simply an obsessed, amateur meadmaker, take a look below at what I sent to The United States House of Representatives, The United States Senate, and President Barack Obama which says:
"Revise current TTB regulations with regard to beverages labelled as "Mead."  The current regulations do not lend themselves to a fair and objective standard for what can be termed "mead" and instead favors producers who use a higher % of fruit concentrate than honey."
Will you sign this petition? Click here.

Twelve hours ago another captain gave credit to my mustache by referencing it to belittle Sam's.  (I see a theme of other captain's giving me credit.)  Funny how something I can't even control is given praise.  It's as if people are saying, "Wow, you really tried to push those strands of dead protein through your pores.  I bet everyone else was just taking it easy while you were concentrating."  On the walk back to my room from breakfast, I could feel the sweat hanging out at the base of my 'stache trunks.  Guess it takes all kinds of mustaches to make the world go round. 

Tyr's Day

One more step closer to home: today I had my outprocessing briefing and it only lasted 22 minutes.  The inprocessing briefting lasted 90.  The general basically told us to keep working hard till the day we leave and ease back into life once we get home.  I took this latter bit to mean three things: don't make any drastic changes to the family routine right when you get home; find your place with your coworkers before making waves; and everyone's just going to have to get used to my mustache.

Workout: Not technically Wednesday, I still did squats, bench and rows and didn't miss a rep.
Squats: 3x5x300
Bench: 5x5x200
Rows: 5x5x185

Meals: Today was beef ribs (smothered in BBQ sauce which sticks to your mustache), gyro and chicken salad and fried eggs on top of corned beef hash.  Oh and 36 ounces of milk, Earl Grey Tea and fennel tea.

That's tzatziki sauce.

If only they served SPAM here.

VHS: Took the opportunity to see "Star Trek: Into Darkness" tonight (hence the workout first).  (TysI really can't believe that the base theater is using VHS tapes to play the movies.)  It was good, but I knew Benedict Cumberbatch plays Khan, so that wasn't a surprise.  Somehow, it feels like it is missing something...like it's a good movie but not a great movie.  Honestly, and this will come as a shock to many people, I've never big a huge Trekkie.  I don't know archaic details about the multitude of TV spinoffs or Uhura's cup size.  The only episode that I found intriguing was the Next Generation episode where they were stuck in a time loop and each start of the loop began with the main characters playing poker.

Sleep: I think not drinking a quart of coffee tonight is helping.  Sleep makes my squats stronger.

So Say we All

Stand and Deliver

Adama's mustache basically equaled weirdness and despair.  The Admiral was a warrior and there was no one to fight for that year.  His son was gone on another ship, the Cylons were gone and he was an old man building ships in bottles on a bigger ship.  When he shaved his 'stache, it meant things were back to normal in the Battlestar universe: fighting Cylons, the main cast back on the ship and men and women showering in the same cramped toilet compartments.  Routine is important, mustache or bare lip.

Out here, I get up, shower, call home and catch the bus to work.  I have four computer monitors I watch everyday, sometimes till my eyes are tired and blurry.  (One night in early July, I experienced double vision for a few hours from the unnatural light blasting at my retinas.)  The first screen is like watching a game of Pac-Man: Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde run around and I see if they turn into fruit.  The second screen is like a BBS game I played in high school: lines like "buy armor for troll army; attack elven horde at dawn" scroll across the screen.  The third screen is Fox News; I think Rupert Murdoch is the Hugh Hefner of network television.  Finally, the fourth screen is where I see emails from my better half with pictures of my kids playing on the beach, tackling large animals and hugging their babysitters (they like older women, too).  Eventually I get the phone call that let's me go home for the night...until I realize the next bus is coming in an hour.  Sometimes old men with dour faces in white vans give me rides back to my room.  They never tell me their names or what they do, but the candy is delicious.

Despite my stiff upper back and neck muscles, I proceeded to optimistically squat, bench and row tonight.  I was disappointed to find out that the lowest weight they have for bench press shirts are for 350lbs (no T-shirt for me).  Pressing my luck, I asked if members of the prestigious Thousand Pound Club get T-shirts. Huckleberry Hound with red hair and freckles did not smile when he told me "No."

So...
Squat: 5-325, 4-325, 2-325
Bench: 5-225, 4-225, 4-225, 4-225, 2-225
Rows: 5x5x180

Breakfast for dinner routine.

Another breakfast hour meal in which I read chapters of When You are Engulfed in Flames while my food digested.  Several non-mustachioed diners gaped as I laughed out loud to David Sedaris sitting in his underwear in a French doctor's office and assisting pathologists inspect a dead body.  If you can't laugh at dead people, well, what kind of a society in which do we live?  It's not easy to write funny sentences while obeying grammatical rules.

Not Much to Say

The Tramp

A sit with mustache in its title wouldn't be complete without Charlie Chaplin's character The Tramp.  Growing up, my dad had a 38 mm projector and we watched Charlie Chaplin and Stan and Ollie silent movies.  Even had a projector screen mounted in the ceiling in his office.  They keep showing commercials on AFN of Chaplin in a movie where a house is spinning, he falls and fixes the chimney and the roof falls onto the ground as Chaplin stands still and doesn't get hit or hurt.

Not much going on today.  Seems the stock market is up and it is getting slightly cooler here.  We actually saw some cumulonimbus clouds today, but no rain.

Scaled back (or up) my workout slightly.  Had another guy running to spot me on my squat.  At this weight, it's probably a good idea if I schedule a spotter.  Maybe I can borrow one of the guys who gets paid to clean the bathrooms.  This week or next week I'll shoot for the 1,000lb club T-shirt.

Squat: 5-320, 5-320, 4-320
Overhead press: 5-160, 4-160, 4-160
Deadlift: 5-395

I think for Christmas I'll ask Santa for chalk.  The last few weeks I've been asking around to borrow chalk when I get to my deadlifts.  Thankfully it's cooling down, so didn't really need it today but I still borrowed a piece.

Mint tea and milk.

Remember, the volume of a sphere is .

One Third of September

Pretty much Chewbacca if he shaved.

Today is Mexican Monday, hence Pancho Villa.  The bandoliers make me think of Chewbacca, although Pancho Villa was only 5' 10" whereas Peter Mayhew is 7' 3".  Other famous bandolier users are Rambo, Animal Mother in "Full Metal Jacket" and the pirate Blackbeard.  Back to the menu...I typically make a taco salad, aka two cups of taco ground meat on top of lettuce, onions, tomatoes, salsa and jalapenos (pain endorphins are fun).  Other options include tamales, enchiladas and make your own tacos.  This is every Monday for the last eleven Mondays.

The other night Sam and I mooched some coffee from another office who broadcast out their desire to share their coffee.  While displaying our skills at verbal banter and witty repartee, I heard the distinct whirr I hadn't heard in many moons: a coffee grinder.  I leaned around the table and lo and behold, coffee grinder.  The past two months I had been taking beans to the coffee shop and being made fun of in Arabic while I could have walked 100 feet away and used this grinder.  So tonight we enjoyed some strong San Francisco Organic Rainforest blend.  The bitterness was high, so maybe I don't need to fill the coffee filter to the top tomorrow night.

Finally met up with the guy I've been paired to tutor (tutee?  tutoree?) and reviewed basic speech giving structure and some math word problems.  The speech part was a fast thirty minutes and we spent a good hour and a half on math.  Most of the word problems were ratios, percentages or a unit conversion problem.  In the end, I provided systems to solve the various types of problems and some formulas and principles for my student to review on his own.  The fun part about being a teach is saying, "Go do your homework and we'll talk later."  Actually, maybe the best part would be seeing the light bulb come on in your student's eyes and then seeing their hands write you a check.

Tonight I learned that it is important to dispose of papers properly or you can get to help sort the trash.  You probably already know about Kevin Mitnick diving into dumpsters for technical manuals that phone companies would throw away and Cary Elwes creepy villain in "Kiss the Girls."  Well, the same can be done today except they look the number of your Facebook friends, the number of times you charge Starbucks on your credit card bill and how many jars of Vaseline you empty per month.  If you throw out the wrong things here (i.e. paperwork with your name on it), you get to help sort the trash.  This all is not to be confused with urban picking or freeganism, where folks will look for recently expired food in dumpsters.

Now that you have yesterday's steak in your head, here's what I ate two hours ago:

I am powered by animals.

My plate is 5 parts beef, 3 parts chicken eggs and 100% delicious.

Under the Scotsman's kilt

This is the next experimental Air Force dress uniform.

I am about halfway through reading Diana Gabaldon's Outlander, which might be more romance novel than fantasy-with-dragons-and-wizards I am used to (pause for laughter...).  Due to the Scottish accents, I feel like I should go watch "Braveheart" and maybe "Quigley Down Under" again.  There are also reminescences of "The 13th Warrior" while the Scots are out on raids and drinking around a fire.  I do find it interesting reading the bits of Gaelic, one of which is sgian dubh, the Scottish sock dagger.  They are functional, ornamental and you can wear them to your own wedding (I'm an Eagle Scout, so this falls under "Be Prepared").  You can even buy your own here.  Maybe I should make my own and sell them!

Tonight was a relatively normal night at work, with the exception that my replacement and I (which always sounds so demeaning...maybe I'll say my wee little helper) got to geek out with Microsoft Excel to display some metadata (not Metatron) about our work.  So now we can say, "Look how green this day was!  This bar chart is BLUE!"  Feels like a good Air Force day when you can turn your work into a 3-D histogram, with multicolored legend.

Had a simple dinner tonight and kept picking at the dried apricots a gentleman and a scholar sent me.

Pukka tea with burgers.  

Thankfully I have no tours, extra appointments or reasons to break my already skewed circadian rhythms so that means I'll probably dream about work. 

Steeler's Stache

I'm not really mean...I'm a deep thinker.

When I was growing up, my dad had an array of collectible soda and beer cans.  Several of the cans lining the shelf in his study (back before the days of laptops and internet bloggers...he had an electric typewriter) were commemorating the Steel Curtain of the 1970's.  Tonight I watched the Ravens and Broncos game and I had no idea going into it who the significant team players are.  Actually I only watched a little past kick-off, as it was 0415 and they barely had one play.  Never cared about professional football, probably never will and, regrettably, only played one season of Fantasy Football (I had no idea what I was doing).  So the best way I can connect to football is to think about the Steelers.

Actually, when I think about football I also think of this:

...or this.

"Al, I think people came here to see some FOOTBALL!"

In case you don't remember, Family Guy premiered after the Super Bowl on January 31, 1999.

Back to the squats, press and deadlift workout:

Squats: 5-315, 5-315, 3-315, 3-315 (third set I basically squatted myself into the floor)
Press: 5-155, 5-155, 5-155, 4-155, 5-155
Deadlift: 4-385

I have videos of me squatting 315 and my set of deadlift but they are still in the pre-processing phase.  More to come.

Slightly different than my typical meal...

Catch you on the flipside.

Swanson

Change that to redheads and call me Ron Swanson.

I've only seen the first season of "Parks and Recreation", but I am anxiously awaiting seeing the bit where Ron is served a salad and tells the waiter, "This is food that my food eats."  Ron is a capitalist libertarian who believes the government should have as few people working for it as possible.  He works for the local government.  

Rest day today, but I did download the Stronglifts 5x5 workout tracker and ebook.  According to the spreadsheet, it appears that the program is generally designed for those who are looking to more slowly increase their strength.  I started my 5 rep sets at ~75% of my one rep max, whereas he suggests starting at about 50% of your 1 rep max.  This would equate to hitting your 1 rep max weight as your final 5x5 set around week 12.  So I either started heavier than he suggests or I am already stronger than most that do the program.  Or both.  Either way, I am eeking out progress and not toiling away at low weights that probably didn't do anything for me.  

So, in honor of Ron Swanson and the once a month T-bone steak and lobster, today I had three T-bone steaks, nuts, some vegetables and coconut.

How many calories does salt have?

Despite the Earl Grey tea, I still fell asleep reading at the library an hour later.  Phew.

Woodwork and pink roses make this guy happy.

Goodnight.

Bibliophilia

I don't often grow a 'stache, but when I do, it's name is Charles.

No, I haven't read Thoreau's Walden yet, but I keep meaning to.  Which probably means I'll read it the week before my son's book report on it is due in 10 years.  His minimalism has inspired many fans over the years, but I still don't get why he didn't just let the lip hair grow.  Maybe a fan of the Amish?  The closest I came to Walden was reading Anne LaBastille's Woodswoman five years ago.  She took inspiration from Thoreau and built a cabin in the Adirondacks, near a lake that I hiked and canoed when I was in high school.  She is certainly inspirational in that she can and did do a lot of building the cabin, hunting her own game and other resourceful skills we don't often see nowawadays (yes, I sound like a 90 year old curmudgeon).  

Graphic Novels
The Massive: Black Pacific - Pretty much combines elements of many post-apocalyptic movies (The Core for one) with a pacificist eco-nonterrorist crew on two ships that loses one of the ships.

Superman/Batman: Public Enemies - Superman and Batman fight, then team up against crazy President Lex Luthor.  Alfred defends the Batcave with a double barrelled, side-by-side shotgun and Superdog defends the Fortress of Solitude.  So pretty much what you see everyday on CNN.

Books
Fragile Things - Great stories, just wow.  Read it in three days.  Neil Gaiman introduces the novel with who asked him or why he decided to write the short story.  One is a mashup between Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft; others are evocative of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim - If nothing else, I appreciate the fact that David Sedaris titled his book based on a cool phrase (slightly reminiscent of Charles Bukowski's Play the Piano...) and none of the short stories/essays in the book were of the same title.

I've started both Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife and Diana Gabaldon's Outlander in the last few days.  I realize I only have 4 weeks left, so the Tan book serves the purpose of small paperback that I can carry around easily and DG's book is a "wow this series looks good; I hope I can finish the first one in four weeks."  So far Amy Tan's novel seems like The Joy Luck Club: "I'm Chinese and live in California, but my parents lived in China.  Life is probably different than yours if you are a typically WASPy American reading this."  Diana Gabaldon's is a Celtic fantasy novel, with time travel and a nerdy academic.  She's been writing about this for 20+ years, so I'm hoping for good things.

Back to squats, bench and rows tonight:
Squats: 5-305, 5-305, 5-305, 5-305, 4-305,
Rows: 5x5x155
Bench: 4-225, 5-225, 4-225, 3-225, 2-225

I dropped off the Superman/Batman book at the library and added the David Sedaris book to the stack of free ones at the library.  I decided to borrow the David Sedaris book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, if for no other reason than the essays are funny and easy to read one or two a day.  The librarian laughed and asked me if I had read all of the comics they had.  I told her that I was trying and that they should reorganize the shelves so it is easier to find them.  She told me I was the only mustachioed adult man she has seen reading comic books.

Gotta love it when you have lamb, burgers, ribs, lobster, eggs and sausages all within nine hours.

I'm going to believe these red beasties came from New England.

...then I ate six more sausages.

Lost in Translation

Flannel

Yeah, yeah, that's not Bill Murray from the movie "Lost in Translation."  Anyway, that movie was strange, sad and not very funny.  The point is, trying to sell whisky to the Japanese is almost as hard as ordering eggs from a wherever-he-came-from cook in the DFAC.

Tonight, Krishna was cooking French Toast, which is white bread dipped in a vat filled with yellow-brownish goo.  I'd like to believe it started out as eggs, maybe eggs and milk, but I think they keep the same container going for 24 hours and it turns the color of camel skin.  I don't eat French Toast, but even if I was a fan, I would think the diners here would reconsider.

Something tells me the workers here have no idea how recognizable the names on the shirts are.  Krishna, Omm and Global are options here.  It's like calling Microsoft support, knowing your phone is answered by a service in Hyderabad and the technician answering with, "Hello this is Steve, how can I help you sir?"

I am reminded of this video:

... or this one:

I forgot today was a rest day, so I got ready to go to the gym and was halfway there when I realized I could give myself another night off.  I did 30 dips and 15 chinups before heading to the DFAC for hash browns, eggs, sausages and Earl Grey tea.

Later, there was hot sauce and salt.

I suppose I should have made it threes all around, but I only had two hash browns to go with my three eggs, three sausages and three butter packets.

This is a hybrid. This is a cross, ah, of Bluegrass, Kentucky Bluegrass, Featherbed Bent, and Northern California Sensemilia.

My trainee has already SWMBO with his future lip hair, so he's got that going for him, which is nice.

If my posts remind you of this, then I'm either doing it very well, very wrong or at least you can console yourself with the fact that I don't have a Facebook page.

Smell

I am down to one remaining can of tuna in my drawer at work.  I've been eating them a good bit lately to use them up.  The only can opener at work is the one on my cheap leatherman, which reminds me of a P-38.  Twenty-nine kah-lunks and sprays of tuna juice to open the can lid.  When I was younger and just started going hunting, we carried one of these and used it to open some C rations (Dad, if you are reading this and I'm wrong, let me know.).  My dad must have bought or saved some old chocolate cakes from his time in the service.  They were very dry, not very sweet but pleasant some how.  I'm sure the combination of the cool fall or early winter air, physically connected with something my dad did 30 years prior and the quiet of the woods made everything better.  Not quite the same with my cans of Starkist and a cheap leatherman I bought at the BX while I watch two computer screens, fans noisily blowing around me and large screen projectors show the New England Patriots playing against the Detroit Tigers.

Last night I added some inglehoffer Sweet Hot Pepper mustard to my can of tuna, which was a bad idea.  This is an example of underreported advertising: sweet is when you eat it; hot comes later.  Had I prepared myself better, I would have read "habenero" on the ingredient list yesterday and avoided it.  Try this at your own peril.

Tonight I added some Chicago Fire mustard, which was okay, but I also went back a few years and added some of Huy Fong Foods Sambal Oelek.  When this hit my tongue, I was taken back eight years when I made Ramen noodles topped with tuna and this hot sauce.  I don't eat ramen any more, but this is some delicious hot sauce, much more flavorful than Texas Pete and not as dangerous as anything with habeneros or ghost peppers.  The IT guys at work (who seem to be the most relaxed group at work, with the internet meme, Star Wars and military jokes posted) are hot sauce aficionados and have a smattering of hot sauces.  I have never tried and (probably never will) their ghost pepper bottles.  According to Wikipedia (I'm told it's okay to cite Wikipedia and it is the best source online), Huy Fong Foods is run by eight family members and doesn't advertise.  It's been around since 1980 and relies on world of mouth for its sales.  Sriracha sauce has an almost cult following and you can find many T-shirts and other swag proclaiming how good Sriracha sauce.

Giving up on the pink antibacterial soap and cold water in the bathroom at work, I decided to break down and buy some Palmolive (which surprisingly is made from palms and olives) to wash my coffee mug.  The smell of the green dish soap makes me think of my grandmother since that is all she used.  I prefer Dawn, probably because their advertising is so well spent they convinced my college roommate that Dawn cuts grease, vis a vis, I buy Dawn.

So I fell asleep while reading at the library during the wash cycle.  The laundry building is very hot and stuffy.  Dryer time means I can go eat.  While in line to get my eggs, another mustachioed gentleman who I recognized said hello and complimented my remarkable mustache and plate of buttery goodness below.

Ginger and turmeric tea.

He recognized me from work, but really recognized my mustache (which smells like egg yolks and butter now).  It is interesting how our eyes fixate on certain physical features.  In June a coworker exclaimed, "You shaved your mustache!"  She was correct, but late by three months.  Ever get a haircut and someone not realize it?  So if you ever need to escape town Jason Bourne style, grow or shave off your mustache.

Enthusiam

I have no mustache, but I was a smart, capable engineer.

"I rate enthusiam even above professional skill." - Edward Appleton

That quote is in my day planner for 22 August and it fits with the discussion we had at work last night.

My old squadron commander used to say that we were looking for the "best athlete for the competition" when recruiting.  He didn't say he/she needs to be an expert in X or have 15 years experience using some database.  We were looking for team players who were willing to learn new things and work hard towards an objective.

Seth Godin, in his book The Dip, talks about putting your energy in whatever it is that you can be "the best in the world at."  The world could mean your neighborhood, your office, your city, your county or whatever domain you define as your "world."  It's easy to spend your energy on multiple projects that won't gain you success.  I enjoy languages (after I saw the movie Stargate I wanted to learn Egyptian...or is it Arabic?), computers (I took two years of C++ in high school and keep dabbling in learning about new languages), crafts (I've made four knives in the last year and have equipment to make a few more) and homebrewing (been doing it four years and I keep acquiring equipment and taking brews to holidays).  I could continue on
with this and be mediocre in all four areas or I could pick one (probably the latter), get rid of the other ideas in my head and the equipment on my work bench in the garage and be the best in my "world" at homebrewing.  I might not be Ken Schramm...or maybe I could be like him, but it will take 15 years and much hard work and study.

Malcolm Gladwell states that "experts" need about 10,000 hours of practice to be an expert in something and that this is what truly separates the experts from the amateurs tinkering in their garage (or maybe he was wrong).  We could argue ad infinitum that the boy down the street shooting hoops with his dad won't be the next Larry Bird, Michael Jordan or LeBron James, but we'll never know until he shoots till he hits that threshold or thereabouts.  Yes, I'm sure we all have a limited amount of ability, talent, attribute, whatever you want to call it, but hard work will take you there.

Tangent to this (but maybe not that unrelated), studies have shown the kids who are praised for their ability (intelligence, athletic ability, musical talent), test (or compete or sing) worse than those who are praised for their hard work.

It's amazing how heavy squats can improve your mood.

Warmup: 10 dips
Workout:
Front Squats 5-135, 5-135, 5-185, 5-205, 5-225
Back Squats 5-225, 5-250, 5-265, 5-275, 5-290
Cooldown:
10 45# plate lifts
7 95# high pulls
5 95# curls

Some fruit made its way onto my plate, along with some Earl Grey tea, hot.

My eggs swim in butter.

If you were coming here hoping for more Batman complaints, sorry.

Nectar

Dry homemade orange melomel

Mead (not only because I haven't had any of my own for two months!) is on my mind.  Over the last three days I've gone over the 180 or so entries on www.gotmead.com for meaderies in the US to see where they are located.  This is out of my own curiosity (TDY/vacation = meadery tour!) but will also fulfill the project for the mapping course I've been taking.  The course lets you use ArcGIS online, too so I got to play with that software.  I wouldn't say I've learned that much and am interested in taking the online versions, but the tuition isn't worth the cost now.  Anyway, based on the data, I see a few things:

• It appears the meaderies are in similar or the same locations as befit wineries.  Some meaderies are colocated with wineries or some wineries also make mead.  For my data, I excluded these and stuck to pure meaderies.
• Many of the meaderies follow mountain chains: Applachians, Rockies, Sierra Nevada and Casacades.
• None of the meaderies has been around for more than 12 years.  

Things like the Society for Creative Ananchronism (SCA, famous for LARPing and this), Renaissance Faires and "Game of Thrones" have brought mead back to the forefront.  Thank you fellow geeks and nerds, for making mead a viable drink in America in addition to light beer.

Saw "The Dark Knight Rises" again tonight.  Thoughts on that tomorrow.

Been discussing the possibility that my workouts might be too brief.  Will rest a few days and try more than one main exercise per workout.

Tonight, however...

Warmup: chinups 8, 5, 3

Workout: Telephone pole cleans 5-115, 5-115, 5-115

Cooldown: 5 55lb kettlebell goblet squats

More eggs and beef...

Three sausages!

Loyal

Brown

I started trying to find a pattern by which it can be determined if Gary Oldman's movie characters are good or evil by his facial hair but that failed.  Let's just hypothesize that J.K. Rowling would have let Sirius Black live if he would have had a mustache and not a goatee.

Commissioner Gordon is loyal to Batman, but more importantly to Gotham (refuses to leave while Gotham is destroying itself) and to his principles, most of the time.

Made headway tonight making a list of meaderies in the USA.  This will be my final project for the Maps and the Geospatial Revolution course.  So far it involves a lot of copy-paste-no no; not that formatting, this formatting.

Watched "Skyfall" tonight, which is not what I expected it to be.  I assumed going in that there would be double and triple and quaternary secret agents lurking about and constantly changing sides.  It was relatively straightforward, but we do get to see James Bond vulnerable, so that was a different approach.  Ponderings:

• MI6 agents don't know how to operate construction equipment.
• Someone trained in computer forensics and encryption should know better than to blithely plug an adversary's computer into your work's network.  Q will probably have to retake security training via CBT...
• Handheld hacksaws are useful, but if you are going to destroy an antique shotgun (not rifle) to look cool while shooting at henchmen, it's going to take a while and you are going to have blisters.
• Turn off your flashlight, Albert Finney.
• If Silva is telling the truth, M gave him to the Chinese in exchange for other prisoners whereupon he was tortured.  Is anyone else uncomfortable realizing that maybe M and Bond are wrong, but we don't care because of Daniel Craig's grin?

So James Bond is loyal to M and to England, Sirius Black is loyal to Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes is loyal to England as well.  Six days ago at work we pondered how such a small isle as the land of the Angles, Jutes, Picti and who knows who else could create an empire that would effectively take over the world.  It could have been due to Guns, Germs and Steel and Earl Grey tea, or maybe it is due to loyal mustaches.  More importantly, when did the sun set on the British Empire?

Took advantage of the kettlebells in the other gym tonight and got creative with some power snatch.
Warmup: 6 chinups, 10 dips
Workout: Five rounds 5-100lb power snatch and 5 55lb kettlebell swings.  Last three sets added overhead squat to the power snatch.
Cooldown: 5 chinups

Same dinner...

No bread was harmed in the eating of this meal.

Smug

That mustache says, "Your opinion is beneath me."

So the pencil thin Clark Gable mustache must take a lot of trimming and a straight razor.  No way CG could end up with a barely-there smoke filter with a Mach 3.  I have not seen the classic "Gone With the Wind," but Rhett Butler has been described as, "a black sheep, who was expelled from West Point and is not received by any family with reputation in the whole of Charleston, and perhaps all of South Carolina."  (This isn't a term paper; I can quote Wikipedia.)  More importantly, Bugs Bunny was based on Clark Gable's performance in "It Happened One Night."  Bugs Bunny basically had a mustache, too.

At work, you pretty much have to follow the news.  That or cricket.  I have no idea what is going on with cricket (Why wear a polo shirt to a sports match?  I guess that shirt got its name from polo...), so CNN, Fox and BBC supply me with ad infinitum "news" coverage.  Recently, I found out that:

• President Obama played spades during the OBL raid.  I guess he couldn't get the White House IT guys to install Minesweeper.
• CNN says artificial sweetener isn't "bad" for you.  
• Fox News: Coffee could lead linked to a premature death.  Hmmm
• First, the word "linked" and the first paragraph's "...it's possible..." means the jury is still out on this one.
• Second, admittedly, 4 cups a day is probably more than most people drink.  The phrase "increase a person's chance of dying by 21%" could mean different things.  Does that mean increase from from a really, really little bitty chance to a really little bitty plus 21%, aka still !@#$ing small?  Or does it mean it was 50%, you drank a quart of Sumatra, now you have a 71% chance of dying today?  Same question for the male increase of 56%.  Wonder why they don't say "increased by 100%" instead of twofold.  Probably because people understand "chances now equal previous chances times two" rather than "Is times 2 50%?  100%  2000%?"
• Over 17 years a lot can happen.  Was the coffee black?  Was there added sugar, nutrasweet, milk, soy milk, almond milk, coconut milk, MCT oil, heavy cream or maybe Grandma's Molasses?
• It was noted that 32% of the deaths (804 of 2512 dead; total subjects were 43,727) were due to cardiovascular reasons.  So, by their findings, you have a 1.83% chance of dying from heart disease if you drink a quart of coffee a day.  The abstract doesn't mention the other 68% of death reasons.  So, did the coffee cause cardiovascular issues (I doubt it) and if so, how?
• This could be a correlation, not a causation, i.e. people who drink 32oz of coffee a day, might be doing other things that lead to an early grave, such as staying up too late, eating too many refined carbohydrates, or preparing for a movie role.
• It appears that Fox News just summarized the abstract, but left out the most important part: "However, this finding should be assessed in future studies of other populations." 

My dad told me to believe half of what I hear and none of what I see.  Thomas Jefferson said, "The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers."  

Purchased some BCAAs from the BX tonight.  We'll see how wise and wonderful my middle name is...

Bench press
Warmup: 10, 6, 4 bodweight chinups
Workout: 5-210, 5-210, 5-210, 5-225, 4-225
Cooldown: 7 bodweight chinups

I am unoriginal with my post workout meal!

Anyone know of a gluten free sausage and gravy recipe?

You are not Mark Wahlberg's brother.

Eccentric

If this guy ain't weird eccentric then nobody is.

Sophomore year of college I was really into Dali.  Watched a movie he made with his wife.  His most famous is of melting pocketwatches, but I had a tiger poster in college.  His dreams must have been amazing.  Anyway, I took a personality test in college based on input from the DSM IV and one of my heavily weighted areas described me as idiosyncratic...which I'm going to use as a synonym for eccentricity.  No, not this eccentricity.

CNN ran a story today about white people being less likely to have "ethnic" friends.  Whatever.  First, no matter how many surveys continue to list is an option, neither white nor Caucasian is an ethnicity.  If these are two options, then black, red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, violet, and brown are options.  Anyway, counter to CNN's poll, I was sitting next to two non-WASPy Americans: a Hispanic and an African American (he don't look it, but was born in Zimbabwe).  Plus, two of my Tier 0 friends are non-whites.  I get to be part of this stereotype.

Maybe this isn't something to brag about knowing: Did you know that Oprah was supposed to be named Orpah but they misspelled it on the birth certificate?

Worked the shoulders tonight:
Warmup: 6 15lb weighted chinups and 6 15lb weighted dips
Workout: Shoulder press: 5-150, 5-155, 4-165, 2-170, 2-170
Cooldown: Standing curls: 6-80, 6-100, 3-120, tricep extensions 6-80, 10 barbell power snatch

And dinner (looks like breakfast?) was five eggs over medium, two links, two patties....pause for digestion and then return in line for scrambled eggs and four more links.

The smug servers deny me piles of breakfast sausage.

Please tell me piles of water bottles exist like this in the states.

Happy 35th Birthday to Joan!  I can't believe we met 15 years ago, under a moonlight night, the crickets chirping and the daffodils swaying in the breeze...

Ponderings

It started with this and continued to night via this.
Positives:

• you might be able to download your consciousness into a robotic brain
• you could ask advice of your deceased relatives
• Steve Martin gets to say "I told you so!"

Negatives:

• Loss of soul?
• How do you really know that is what so-and-so would say in this situation?
• This or this.

Somehow, this turned into how men and women react and think differently about situations.  Not surprisingly, my notes cover the movies this brings to my mind.  On our first date I talked mostly about movies and my wife thought, "This guy is sooooooooooo lame.  He gets two more chances."  So, in popular culture:

• "When Harry Met Sally" - can men and women truly be platonic friends?  How many men (like Harry) think of women as potential mothers of their children, regardless of the status/level of their friendship?
• "I Love you Man" - Is the concept of male friendship different from female friendship?  I don't think I have that many true friends and I am fine with that.  We also discussed the possibility of tiered friends.  Option 1: Tier 0 = you are a brother to me and Tier 1 = every other male on the planet.  Option 2: Tier 0 = you are a brother to me; Tier 1 = close work friends, maybe some neighbors; Tier 2 = acquaintances; Tier 3 = I'll pick up your mail but not you from the airport; Tier 4 = people who say je ne sais quoi, au contraire and other French phrases in their speak to sound smarter than you; Tier 5: everyone else.
• Dune (novels mostly) - The future could mean smarter humans with the memories of their ancestors floating in their head.  Also, the potential for cloning someone and then awakening their past memories.  Spoiler alert: the ending of the series concludes with a merging of humans and machines, similar to the ending of Battlestar Galactica.

We also talked about competing between men and women and if losing to a woman would make you feel less manly.  The areas I presented were telling: I don't care about bowling, wrestling or golf, but am more interested in finally winning in Scrabble.  I initially thought I'd feel embarrassed if my better half was smarter on me.  After thinking about it, I realized I'd be okay with it.  Then I could say, "Have fun helping the boys with their math homework.  I'm going to go see how my mead is doing..."

This is a homemade melomel, hone-wine with blueberries.

Tonight I had a boring bench workout:
Warmup: 7 chinups, just backpack with no plates
Workout: Bench press: 5-205, 5-205, 5-205, 5-215, 5-225
Cooldown: 5 115lb Power snatch

Meal consisted of two burger patties, two over medium eggs and assorted sausages, covered with butter and hot sauce.  The steaming cup is Earl Grey tea, hot.

Let's just hope the burgers are from cow and not horse.

Project for tomorrow: deployed refrigerator Early Grey iced tea:

I'll take oil of Bergamot for $500, Alex.

Not going to Princeton

The mapping course I am taking online discussed analyzing geospatial data this week.  A corollary to the discussion was how not to analyze data.  As you overlay different sets of data, trends can emerge.  It would be too easy to assume that A causes B, rather than A is correlated (associated with, proportional to) B.  The example in the discussion was showing how the highest rates of lung cancer in the US are located in the same parts of the country where the highest rainfall occurs.  This does not mean that lung cancer causes rainfall or vice versa.  Some fun examples:

• Cell phones cause cancer
• Republicans cause sunspots
• Please use Chrome or Firefox not Internet Explorer.

For more learning.

Resting from deadlifts tonight.

I saw Admission, which seemed slightly similar to Baby Mama in that Tina Fey kinda wants a kid in this movie too.  Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 38%, but I think Rotten Tomatoes ratings are inversely proportional to pirates.  It doesn't matter what I thought of it: if you think Paul Rudd is funny, then you will laugh.  I don't eat popcorn so decided to take Bacon Jerky and pork rinds into the theater with me.  Thankfully, the presence of "No Outside Food or Drink" didn't correlate to me not eating delicious pig products.

More eggs, sausage and coleslaw makes an appearance!

Butter, how do I love thee?  Let me count the ways...