Yeah, inspirational in the "Who Moved My Cheese" be-perpetually-scared vein.
2: We did it to help you get a job, fatty.
Mmm, pretty.
No one at my gym looks like that.
I like cheese.
re: 4
The people at my gym -- male and female -- run to the fairly attractive. Student town, though, I suppose. The bulk of the gym users seem to be reasonably fit 20-somethings.
Not so great if you aren't a fit looking 20-something, though.
6. Nuffin wrong with a bit of eye-candy at the gym.
4: my first thought was "Not just fit people, good looking people are more likely to be hired. In fact, I wonder if anyone has tried to disentangle the two effects."
What they mean is thin people are presumed to be fit and virtuous and fat people are presumed to be sedentary, greedy leviathans.
I think of all of my booze swilling, junk food eating naturally thin friends and just grimace.
8: I'm not sure the effects are so different. Or rather, the overlap is so large that it would be hard to disentangle.
IMO most fit* people will present as "good looking;" first of all, fitness is usually going to get you past the first screening of "decent body;" secondly, fit, active people usually have higher energy levels, which is generally attractive; last, fitness usually comes with at least some self-confidence, which is always attractive.
IOW, while there are plenty of attractive people who aren't fit, I suspect that relatively few fit people don't present as good looking, even if a close examination revealed them to be no more than plain. Some of this is objective (insofar as aesthetic judgments can be) and some of it is acculturated, but I think it's pretty ubiquitous.
Not to defend the ad, which is annoying.
* Using fit here to mean fit-looking; 300 pounders with extraordinary cardiovascular systems are outliers
You certainly don't pal. 'Cause the good news is -- you're fat. The bad news is you've got, all you got, just one week to regain your shape, starting tonight. Starting with tonight's workout. Oh, have I got your attention now? Good. 'Cause we're adding a little something to this month's fitness contest. As you all know, first prize is a Stairmaster. Anyone want to see second prize? Second prize's a set of earplugs. Third prize is you're fucked. You get the picture? You're laughing now? You got the equipment. Mitch and Murray paid good money. Come to the gym and use them! You can't finish the workouts you're given, you can't finish shit, you ARE shit, hit the bricks pal and beat it 'cause you are a total loser!!!
Stay away from my baby, Mr. Stormcrow.
You could use facial symmetry as a measure of attractiveness that is not connected to fitness.
If, for instance, you found that the correlation between facial symmetry and getting a job was close to the correlation between general attractiveness and getting a job, you could infer that facial symmetry, and not fitness is doing the work. That sort of clearcut case is unlikely, though.
The gym I went to was used mostly by medical, dental, and nursing students whose average fitness and attractiveness was far above the mean. I loved to go there but showered at home (which was very near). I didn't want to be the poster child for old fat men, and I wasn't even very old or fat.
15: Thanks, all I could come up with was Always Be (doing) Cardio.
5:
She hopes to be able to set the editor's work life at the New York Times by name, but details are still being finalized.
I've never really understood this. Does she actually need the Times' permission, or is it that she just doesn't want to piss them off? Is there a potential slander suit there?
I get it on the product placement side, of course. Last night I was watching Bones and there was an incredibly unsubtle plug for a Toyota Matrix.
"Dammit, Jim, it's a Toyota Matrix, not the Enterprise!"
I feel OK about making that dorky joke because 18 is in the wrong freaking thread.
Every day I walk past the ads for the loathsome David Barton Gym. Like this one. Or this one: which, hey, what could possibly un-awesome about that? NSFW -- even though it takes up entire windows on Astor Place.
Anybody else read the NYMag piece Yglesias linked about the Wall Street crowd bitching and moaning about how dreadfully unfair they're being treated? It's something to behold.
No, it's not -- look at the link in 5. But I brought up a dorky TV show, so your dorkiness still fits in.
I really liked my schlubby gym near my last office -- there was a spiffy gym that attracted fit young office workers, and my schlubby gym (a Ballys) that attracted random slobs. It was nice not being self-conscious about what I was wearing.
21: I think some of those people owe Tom Wolfe "behavioral" royalties. (I'm not the biggest fan of his, but he did pick up the zeitgeist pretty damn early; Bonfire started coming out in Rolling Stone in 1984.)
My only encounter with Who Moved My Cheese? was some audiobook version that was being passed around the office. "You must listen to it" gushed a co-worker. I made it about ten minutes or so before I started mocking it.
Now I am imagining a poster series for all sorts of groups that do well in hiring. "FACT: YOU'D BE BETTER OFF BEING A WHILE MALE." (My sense is that "fit" here is a proxy for class and education.)
28: You misspelled "awhile", Cala.
20: That David Barton thing is gross. It's offensive because of its content, i.e. the scantily clad bodies, but the coloring was jarring too. I can't imagine working out there if the place is painted in those colors.
20: But the David Barton ones are camp. I dunno, that kind of thing doesn't bother me much (and god knows, lots of things bother me a lot). Partly because it's making fun of physical perfection and sexuality; partly because in my experience people who really think campy images are all the go tend to be a lot more body-accepting than people who like AA-style market realism.
Relatedly, I went to a really awesome cabaret/drag/radical performance thing last weekend and it was so pleasant and soothing--funny how mixing in the freakishly beautiful and the merely freakish tends to blur the bounds between the two.
From the article Megan linked to first
"No offense to Middle America, but if someone went to Columbia or Wharton, [even if] their company is a fumbling, mismanaged bank, why should they all of a sudden be paid the same as the guy down the block who delivers restaurant supplies for Sysco out of a huge, shiny truck?" e-mails an irate Citigroup executive to a colleague.Don't worry, no offense was taken. We'll just be sure to put your head on a pike when the revolution comes.
but if someone went to Columbia or Wharton
Like anybody should give a fuck where your parents paid for you to go to school. These d-bags make me think America could use a few years of the Khmer Rouge.
A friend of mine is about 25 and mentioned a couple of months ago that he was getting out of shape, "but that's no big deal because I can just go back to the gym for a couple of weeks and be okay again." Wait till you hit 30, pal, I thought.
So yesterday, after a beautifully sunny weekend, I noticed all these 20-something hotties at the gym -- guys who, if I looked like them, I wouldn't bother working out. I realized it was all the analogues of my 25-year-old friend, putting in their annual 2 weeks to get ready for the beach. I cursed them but was happy to have the eye candy.
36: And you know, hitting 30 is different still from nearing 40. It's not so much that getting in shape is that much harder, it's that I snap back to my unexercised condition so much faster and more completely than I used to.
I snap back to my unexercised condition
While I never left it in the first place. Nothing ventured, nothing lost.
Wow, I had read 5 and just instantly assumed that there was a post about it. How could there not be?
I still like my dorky joke.
For the legal types: if anyone has a sense, how this case (girl got strip-searched by school) is going to go, please comment. I'm really afraid that Roberts and Alito might be enough to tip it on this one.
I want to find one of these investment bankers and say "You know, pal, for a decade you've convinced the villagers villagers to give you the nicest hut and the best food because you and only you knew the special magic that would please the harvest gods. Now that we've had two years of failed crops, its time to face up to the fact that you haven't delivered what you said you could."
the David Barton ones are camp.
They look like the cover to the great, lost Fatback album.
41: So now the villagers get to throw the investment bankers into a volcano, right?
35: True, you shouldn't care, except, I will say that the people I know who got engineering degrees (except for that annoying guy in the article--and maybe even him) are smarter than the people who go to Wharton.
There's a blog by a venture capitalist that I used to read who went to MIT and Wharton. He put up a post summarizing in 3 points the things he learned that really mattered in business school. He said that he learned so much at MIT that wasn't simple that there was no way he could do that post about his undergraduate degree.
So maybe, I'm a worse snob, but all I want to say is, "what are your standards if you think that having an MBA from Columbia or Wharton is a big deal?" I probably am a snob. (Well, definitely in general, and this is very likely an example of my snobbishness.)
35: Like anybody should give a fuck where your parents paid for you to go to school.
But if they weren't ggoing to make a lot more money, why would their parents have paid a lot for their education? Don't you understand logic, apo?
BTW, I had never ever heard of this cheese thing. Thank god.
Don't you understand logic, apo?
You could hardly expect me to. I went to a state school.
These d-bags make me think America could use a few years of the Khmer Rouge.
Read? I can't even see without my gla--I mean, I can barely see!
44: I'm an econ grad student with a fancy pedigree, so people constantly ask me to explain this whole mess. The best explanation I've come up with is "remember all those tools in college, the ones that were dumb but had good handshakes, so they went to Wall Street? Yeah, they run things."
21 et seq: I got into my first big political argument with my girlfriend over that resignation letter in the New York Times. Her point was that, you know, these guys really do work very hard and have worked very hard for their money, which is broadly true. My point was, who gives a fuck?
The analogy I wanted to use, but didn't dare to on a woman who actually lived in the Soviet Union for a while, was that there were a lot of people who worked very hard and conscientiously to make a life for themselves in the Communist Party as well, and damn wasn't it unfair for all that work to be annulled by the events of 1989?
33: Eh, they're campy insofar as DBG is something of NYC's "gay status gym" and its customer base is largely gay and male. So they're deploying a historically gay aesthetic to exhort people to, as they say in their ads, "look better naked." This isn't any old gay subculture, this is the NYC gym bunny subculture more generally known for its extremely rigid standards for the physical form. I don't much care about the ads, really, but could do without the two-storey black woman on all-fours. (No white women on all-fours, I see.)
Bostoniangirl: think of it as evidence-based snobbery.
The idea that you went to a good school, and therefore you deserve to make money, is a vile, vile thing. And I say this as someone who went to a good school.
I mean, yes, I would like to make more money. But that's mostly because the goddamn school cost so much that I can't even come close to making the monthly loan payments on a median-type salary.
But I don't think I deserve the money. I mean, shit, being a junior lawyer is just like being a really, really awesome secretary.
53: You know that guy actually didn't resign, right?
I snap back to my unexercised condition so much faster and more completely than I used to.
I notice this at 35. A week or two without the gym leaves me in noticeably worse shape. I've been doing that 100-pushup thing, and skipping days really causes problems. Also, it took me a month to get through Week 4, and I honestly don't know if I'll ever get to the 100.
57: Also, if any of you missed Matt Taibbi's response to DeSantis, you should read it.
57: (Johnny Carson voice): I did not know that.
The truth about Scarlett Johansson.
I'm heart broken, of course, and I also might be physically endangered, since obviously the lethal Scarlett clone is targetted at me personally.
57: I hadn't heard that either. What's the story? Did the NYTimes print something about it?
http://www.businessinsider.com/aig-exec-who-wrote-i-quit-letter-hasnt-actually-quit-yet-2009-4
61.---Emerson, I'm speechless. This must be a tremendous blow.
61: Could this be what Glenn Beck knows?
Apparently it's old news, at least 5 months. Why was I not warned?
Physically fit people are more likely to be hired.
Except when they're not.
59 is very good. A shame it wasn't published in the NYT alongside DeSantis' original letter.
Again, I find it hard to look past Taibbi's writing style, even though I almost always agree with him and find interesting things hidden between the wince-inducing bits.
54: Oo-er. Didn't see that one. But on consideration, I think I could do without it too.
36/37: I experienced noticeable change in this direction around 25. (Which was also (coincidentally?) around the time my hair started greying.) I think this means I'm destined to age very poorly.
72: This is an advantage of having been a complete slug at an earlier age: I have no particular basis for comparison, so I'm very pleased with any positive results of working out now. (Mind you, I'm now setting the benchmark against which my future getting-into-shape related program activities will be measured).
73: That was me in my twenties -- I was a complete non-athlete as a child and teen, and got into shape for the first time in college, where I discovered that I'm a fairly large strong person and was delighted by it in an easy-to-impress kind of way. But I now approach sluggish middle age.
I was seriously athletic until I hit about 24, but even though I barely exercise at all now, I still mostly look the same. I would probably feel very different inside my body if I took up an exercise regime, but not very much is going to change on the outside. I assume this stasis will eventually end with aging--or perhaps when I start earning enough money to afford regular steak meals.
Also, I wonder if the sign on the gym isn't supposed to have a weirdly reassuring aspect. "Well, I may be unemployed or underemployed, but at least I look good! Therefore I am better than those employed schlubs whom I otherwise envy with all my being." Plausible?
34: Sentiments such as those expressed in 34 make me wonder how much a simplistic "understanding" of Econ 101 contributed to the current crisis. Drawing the supply/demand curve for Colonel Cargills left as an exercise for the reader.
I have a spreadsheet (with chart) of my weight measured somewhat regularly since I was 20. (I pull it out when I need to knock back some irrational exuberance.) The inexorable march upward begins almost exactly at age 30.
I've gotta say that a spreadsheet like that would plunge me instantly back into eating-disorder-land.
80: This is not to be interpreted as anything resembling "anorexics are so lucky," but I can't imagine an eating disorder. I have decent self-control - I can leave food uneaten, and things like candy last indefinitely in my pantry - but, ultimately, I can't stop myself eating enough to actually impact my weight. If I overindulge - say on vacation or at holidays - I can counterbalance and return to status quo ex ante, but the ~10 pounds I've put on over the last 5 years are more or less impervious to the level of self control I can muster.
I typed this between bites of a corned beef sandwich. One I made myself, and it's not huge. But it's not exactly going to send my body looking for fat reserves to burn, either.
Also, I wish I'd put on more mustard. I don't think I've ever put too much mustard on a corned beef sandwich, yet I always err on the low side.
81: Certainly you can go put more mustard on it now. Sandwiches can be corrected halfway through. It's not a building, after all.
I gained 10 pounds in about 5 weeks this fall, and I've been trying to lose at least 5, and I may have lost one. I was exercising more for a bit, but then I injured myself. I have been much better about eating than I was for about 7 weeks or so, but I'm not budging.
I'm not sure whether I can blame this on the Pill (it happened right after I started on it) or Prozac.
My PCP maintains, and I'm sure she's right (cue apo), that the research shows that OCPs do not cause weight gain.
1,2: I keep snacks in the fridge at work, which often includes individually-wrapped cheddar bricks. I went looking for a snack a few days ago, and couldn't find them anywhere in the fridge.
Someone had, in fact, moved my cheese.
84: Probably by the time you discovered the transgression, they'd bowel moved it.
And speaking of which, those who steal food from communal fridges suck.
My PCP maintains, and I'm sure she's right (cue apo), that the research shows that OCPs do not cause weight gain.
can anyone translate this?
87 to 86. Jean can do it into French for you, but if you want it translated into some other language, you'll have to find a different person.
More on-topic, there are a substantial number of people at my gym who look like that poster, and not all (or even the majority) of them are in their mid-20s. It's one of the things I really appreciate about my gym; it's not just eye-candy, it triggers the same reaction as watching professional athletes. Plus it's motivational: I'd much rather be the schlub in the group than the jock.
85: No, nobody actually ate my food. They just moved it.
90: Then count yourself lucky, young man.
86: primary care physician, oral contraceptive pill
And speaking of which, those who steal food from communal fridges suck.
My mother spent a week or two in the ICU this past fall. I put (with permission) a hippie yogurt and an Odwalla shake in the nurses' refrigerator and duly wrote my mother's name and room number on both items in large block lettering. Yogurt and shake were gone within two hours. The nurses steal from their ICU patients!
(cue apo)
Of course, it's possible that any given person's chemistry will react differently to any given medication. But this has been studied to death, and women *not* on BCPs gain more weight than women on BCPs in pretty much every study. Injectable contraceptives do show a strong correlation with significant weight gain, though.
The inexorable march upward begins almost exactly at age 30.
I always relied on strenuous exercise for weight control, and once I hit 35 I started to increasingly get more and more crippling injuries, until I had to back off. I often wonder if I sacrificed joints and tendons to staying in shape early in life, perhaps I should have preserved them for later. But it's an awesome feeling to run fast in the prime of your youth. Sigh.
The analogy I wanted to use, but didn't dare to on a woman who actually lived in the Soviet Union for a while, was that there were a lot of people who worked very hard and conscientiously to make a life for themselves in the Communist Party as well, and damn wasn't it unfair for all that work to be annulled by the events of 1989?
Actually, it was unfair -- as the new Russian government followed the advice of Western economists, a lot of perfectly ordinary middle class professionals who had built careers under the old Russian system saw their life savings vanish, their pensions disappear. The census evidence indicates many died younger as a result.
Fortunately, in America the new Democratic majority will institute universal health care, rescue Social Security, and provide decent unemployment benefits so that will not happen here. Assuming we choke off the banking bailouts before they cause hyperinflation.
93: The nurses steal from their ICU patients!
No, they're re-distributors.
81: Certainly you can go put more mustard on it now. Sandwiches can be corrected halfway through. It's not a building, after all.
Office: 3rd floor
Mustard: 1st floor
It's not like there was no mustard.
Hmm. I may have detected another culprit in the weight situation (actually, not at all true; I'm up and down the steps 4-8 times a day. Sunday I was doing some wiring up here, and had to make no fewer than 10 basement trips to the circuit breaker. And still the lights aren't working).
93: The nurses steal from their ICU patients!
Maybe it was the daughter of another patient.
You can't tell who does it, but leave the rings and jewelry at home just in case.
My PCP maintains, and I'm sure she's right (cue apo), that the research shows that OCPs do not cause weight gain.
I just saw a study recently, though, that women on OCPs have a much harder time gaining muscle mass with training. So maybe "weight" remains constant, but how that is distributed between the six-pack and the spare tire is affected?
||
Re-posting this 'cause I don't think anyone saw it yesterday...:
Any of the Chicagoland crew up for a Memorial Day weekend meetup?
|>
I don't have much muscle mass. I weighed 112/113 for a long time, and then I jumped quite quickly to 123. I last weighed 122.
Could be the Prozac which I might like to give up anyway.
101: Didn't see it; definitively up for it, depending on the level of kid-friendliness.
I believe there is a correlation between Prozac and weight gain. There is also a correlation between grad school and weight gain, but I suspect that's not applicable in this particular case.
The biggest thing I've noticed w.r.t. keeping in shape is that five years ago it was much easier to jump back into an activity that I'd ignored for a while. Now, two weeks off means a more serious setback, and recovery time between workouts is more important.
hospitals, birth control, eating, weight issues: It's the Un-Oprah'd show
Nah, that would be this show.
81:80: This is not to be interpreted as anything resembling "anorexics are so lucky," but I can't imagine an eating disorder. I have decent self-control - I can leave food uneaten, and things like candy last indefinitely in my pantry - but, ultimately, I can't stop myself eating enough to actually impact my weight. If I overindulge - say on vacation or at holidays - I can counterbalance and return to status quo ex ante, but the ~10 pounds I've put on over the last 5 years are more or less impervious to the level of self control I can muster.
What you are not wrapping your head around is the concept of looking the mirror at the way you were looked when you were say, 20, and going I'M FAT FAT FAT! I can do that because I listened to the ex-person going on (for a decade) about how she fat; first when she was rail-thin and then when she was normal thin, and when she was just normal, and when she was chunky and so on.
I'm think, but I never looked at the mirror and went, 'Damn, I am a big fat bastard!' because I don't have an ED.
max
['It isn't about compulsive eating or not eating, it's about self-concept.']
All antidepressants slow your metabolism and inhibit certain liver enzymes that regulate metabolism. That's a more likely culprit.
Russians: Many of them got to go to Israel and become snipers.
Gym-bunnies: There don't seem to be nearly as many around MPLS nowadays, compared to the mid-1990s.
David Barton Gym: How about a David Bowie Gym? Lots of blow, lots of hott bi-sex and lots and lots of dancing!
GGGR: "PUT! THAT! COFFEE! DOWN! Coffee is for crunchers!"
Fitness & Me: I think I just need to build more and more muscle mass, without losing any fat, then I can dress up as Juggernaut for Hallowe'en every year. And maybe alternate with Lord Jaganath if my face gets sufficiently flattened out.
Minneapolitan and the ToS seem to be on convergent trajectories w/r/t commenting style.
103: Of course we have to meet Rory too. Who else is around?
because I don't have an ED
Nevertheless, it's good to know that products like Viagra and Cialis are out there in case you ever need them.
110: I declare! You suh are a base flatterer.
Yogurt and shake were gone within two hours.
I guess you're lucky you weren't billed for them.
Former Miss North Dakota being held by Islamofascists.
One of my Fargo nieces was in school with her, though she didn't know her oersonally.
All antidepressants slow your metabolism and inhibit certain liver enzymes that regulate metabolism. That's a more likely culprit.
Hmm, I knew that, but I'd been on the Prozac for about a year before the precipitous jump. Didn't happen on Zoloft, but that wound up making me more anxious after several years. Wellbutrin would probably be a bad idea. I'll have to talk to my shrink about it.
101: I'm pretty certain I'll be in town that weekend. I'd be up for the meet-up in that case, provided it's remotely accessible by mass transit.
I started smoking cigarettes and lost a few pounds, which was cool. My parents are overweight but were slender/athletic types until their 30s (until they became my parents), so I've always got that over my head. The less you eat, the better you feel when you do! Also, it's easier to get drunk and such if you aren't constantly full of food. Gyms are lame; there's nothing less punk rock than exercise, I think. I went to the college that I did, in part, to avoid the gym-rat types (not because of that precisely, but because of other properties that seem to be correlated with being a gym-rat).
117: Yeah, we're gonna be restricted to public transit/cabs, so that's a requirement for us too. Maybe we can beg one of the mods for a meetup planning post.
115: I had no idea she was Miss North Dakota. NPR, how could you leave out that crucial detail? I also didn't know that she's Iranian-Japanese.
That she was arrested for buying a bottle of wine has made me reassess my position on bombing the place.
She even looks vaguely like my niece -- the impassive, expressionless look must be a ND specialty.
As I've said before, several of the beauty queens I've known have been unusually interesting people.
THe final depressing thing about the first ad is that the woman isn't obviously fit (or even attractive, in my eyes). It's selling bare conformity with fear in the guise of health. Ew.
sexist
118: The less you eat, the better you feel when you do!
When you do eat? No doubt, no doubt.
Currence is trolling funnily.
One of my aunts was a beauty queen, back in the day and way up north (yes, Emerson, she competed against bears, but: she won). Then she married and had a large family, but even with seven children, and without botox or personal trainers or colonoscopies or whatever, she remained an exceptionally good-looking woman.
I now objectively realize that my prolific mom retained her good looks to the end, though you don't usually think of your mom that way one way or another.
I felt that my mom was quite beautiful to the end, but friends, let us remember that being judged beautiful is not the be all and end all. Just sayin'.
No, housekeeping is also important.
Also the pedicure. Don't neglect your toes, people.
I knew a guy who got everybody to call his cousin 'nine toes'. It was pretty funny, but I always thought it was a bit mean, especially since he was the guy who took old #10 out of the picture.
Moby, obviously we'll need to know how #10 was removed.
It got between the bucket of a Bobcat and the ground. Bobcat: So hard to drive, it'll always look like an accident.
While cleaning shit out of an animal pen. On guy in the bobcat and one guy with a shovel (for the corners). The guy with the shovel has to be careful.
135: The kind of accident tetanus shots were made for.
132: Sharpen that up a bit, and it's Jack Handey.
133-4: At least it wasn't just a drunken prank.
Don't neglect your toes, people.
I do neglect my toes, I'm (almost) ashamed to admit. But at what cost, eh, I ask you?
128: I now objectively realize that my maternal grandmother, who gave birth to six children (including her daughter the beauty queen) at home, and who died at the age of 97, was a real looker. But I'm pretty sure her looks were not a primary, nor even a secondary, source of her identity. She was devout, League of Mary and such, and she saw herself as the wife and mother of a family, and was proud to have always had a good meal on the table (and she was a good cook, too). Which, by today's lights, probably seems small and contemptible, but is it really any more contemptible than working in PR or selling widgets?
In her younger days, Nana played hockey, and actually travelled around Ontario and Québec in some sort of organized league. I remember she told me she met my grandfather at a hockey game, and it took me a while to figure out that she had been the hockey player, and my grandda the spectator who came to watch her play. Prior to World War II, women played hockey in Canada in actual organized leagues, but that all got lost until very recently indeed. She also had some curling trophies, and was no mean hand at lawn bowling.
Huh. I would never have guessed which members of the Unfoggedtariat would be the ones to go down the Robert-Heinlein-slash-fiction-about-sleeping-with-your-ancestors road.
But at what cost, eh, I ask you?
Only you and your toes can answer that.
My aunts and great-aunts were all very nice looking in their day. Perhaps Walt is jealous.
Lawn bowling is even quainter than screwing bears, if you ask me.
I once asked my MD dad what good toes were, since they don't do anything and put you at risk of frostbite. He claimed that you needed them to walk.
143: I thought you just needed the big toe to walk.
That's what I said, but he still wouldn't amputate the other ones.
I once got frostbite on my left big toe. It hurts like hell when the feeling comes back.
On the paternal side of my family, one of my great-aunts, who lived to be 100 hundred years old and my father was a pall-bearer at her funeral, once described my great-great-grandmother as "very stout, but very beautiful, and a lovely person." Well, the standards for female beauty were a bit different back then, of course. They had wood to chop, and children to feed, and squirrels to skin, and so on. And the men saw things differently, too, no doubt: it was something just to have access to a woman, and never mind whether she had had a pedicure.
Why would I be jealous? My fantasizing about your aunts and great-aunts is perfectly healthy.
MC, don't worry about your toes, okay!? I realize you don't chop wood on a regular basis, but you have other qualities.
Yeah? Well I won't even tell you what I'm fantasizing about your great-aunt, Walt? Don't even ask.
I never have gotten frostbit toes, but I doubt that is it much more painful than amputation. I have frozen the skin off my ear and a small part of my wrist. I'm, not sure if that counts as actual frostbite or not. A layer of skin just peeled away.
Apparently, Leo Kottke almost lost his feet to frostbite ( I suspect when he was either in St. Cloud or the Twin Cities area).
BTW 100 hundred is 10,000, and I don't believe you.
This may not be relevant, but I love Leo Kottke. Thank god he didn't lose his fingers.
John Fahey had an even more gnarly story. He was homeless for a considerable period.
I've never gotten any frostbites, but I remember sticking my tongue to the metal bar in the kindergarden, very painful, everybody my friends and sisters seem have experienced that too
A fine figure of a woman?
Indeed. And whilst everyone in my immediate family circle was of course loyal to the Crown, my great-aunt, who lived to be 100 and who told me about my great-great-grandmother, was married to someone whose father had been taken in by the authorities for questioning in connection with that unfortunate business with the raiders. Not that she knew anything about any so-called Fenians, of course, if you know what I mean.
154: Just saw him in January, he was very, very good (where I heard him tell the story). Whole family enjoyed him. I saw him live once before, 30 years earlier, he was good then as well. (He did have to change his playing style many years ago due to tendinitis and nerve damage.)
157: Were those raids a big deal in Canada? I never heard of anyone else who knew about them.
159: As distinct from the rest of Canadian history?
156: Read, it must be ritualistic, because I've done that and I think everyone I know here has. I know that older kids encourage younger kids to do it, but I don't remember if that's what happened to me.
Were those raids a big deal in Canada?
A pretty big deal, yeah. We stand on guard for thee. Canadians were already deeply suspicious of reputed American designs on their territory; rumours of possibly American-backed plans to raid the British provinces in the name of Irish independence brought the Orangemen out in full force, and the assassination of Thomas D'Arcy McGee (apparently, but only apparently, at the hands of a tailor from Galway named Patrick James Whelan) didn't help matters. Set back efforts to domesticate the Irish in Canada by a couple of generations, I'd say.
I give up, lost two comments typing, should have brought my notebook
162: The raids were commemorated on the courthouse lawn where I grew-up, but I'd always had sort of thought of it as a violent version of the world's largest ball of twine. It isn't like there was a bunch of stuff competing for plaque space.
158: Oh, man. I have to be more attentive to Kottke when he's in the vicinity. I saw him 20 years ago, and, yeah, continue to adore the guy. I knew about the change in style of playing. Sadness.
165: If I understand where you live, this one might be doable: 6/12/2009 Alexandria, VA Birchmere. Only one in the Mid-Atlantic that I saw.
166: Noted!
I missed Jeff Beck in Philadelphia recently, apparently. I'm getting too old for this shit. I think Beck was on a Thursday. In Philly? That's 2 hours away.