This is really cool. A compilation of wonderful and beautiful astronomical photos from the previous year. We get to see the face on Mars, and how unlike a face it is from the perspective of a rover on the surface, we get to see the man who actually paints the moon, and we get to see things that are REALLY far away.

I met up with a bunch of people to play trivia at a bar tonight. We did ok as a team. Personally I got a few answers no one else seemed to know, but also messed up a couple I should have known.

A couple of interesting ones I got, answers at the bottom.
Q1. Which pianist started his career with the stagename "Buster Keys?"
Q2. What was The Beatles first American hit?

And a couple I messed up on....
Q3. What as Ronald Reagan's first wife's name?
Q4. In 1997, there were only 15 veterans of which war still alive?

And the final question:
Q5. Put in order the following events: the polio vaccine, the invention of pong, Apollo 13, and the discovery of the former planet Pluto






A1. Liberace. My thought process was that he was one of the few pianists I had heard of, and the only one with a stage name. I figured if this pianist had a stage name at one point, he probably found a better one to use later, as opposed to going back to his real name. So Liberace was the only possibility of anyone I had ever heard of.

A2. "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" I'm a Beatles nut, so this one I just knew. "Please Please Me" was the first #1 hit in Europe, if I remember correctly. Or was it "P.S. I Love You?"

A3. Jane Wyman. I knew that at some point in my life, but did not recall tonight.

A4. Spanish-American War. I pulled for WWI, because I figured people would have to be 115 or so in 1997 to have been in that Spanish-American War, and I just didn't think there would be that many 115 year old veterans running around. I was wrong.

A5. Pluto, polio, Apollo, pong, we got Pluto and polio reversed, which in retrospect seems moronic.

There were some other interesting ones, but I don't feel like typing them.

I was wondering earlier why JFK is so revered. Is it just because he was assassinated? Several comparisons make him seem not so great. We'll use Bush II. One complaint is that he was only elected because he has lots of money and connections from his oilman/former President father. JFK was elected because he looks good on TV and had lots of money and connections his father made as a criminal.

Bush got us in to a not ill-advised war which was executed badly, and has lost 3000 men over 3 years. That's so far, who knows what will happen in the future. Of course a larger war could break out that is connected, but inevitable even in the absence of an Iraq invasion. JFK got us into Vietnam. Don't forget that. That was all his doing at the start, future Presidents had to play with the cards JFK left them.

JFK had some other boo boos, as well. I can't speak for political realities from more than a decade before I was born, but from 2006, the Bay of Pigs deal seems ludicrous. And the Cuban Missile Crisis? A pissing match with the Russians where we both backed down. And didn't JFK put our missiles on the Russian border first, anyway? So while it's nice that we didn't end up lobbing nukes at each other, whose fault is it that things got that close?

I'm not trying to praise Bush here, or necessarily trash JFK, I'm just really curious what was so wonderful about the man as President, or if it was only his charisma and death which have made him such a legend.

Test

I know I don't talk about video games much, and I don't really play them that much unless you count online poker, but I'm still a fanboy at heart. I did get the Wii, right? Anyway, it's the end of the year and people are starting come out with various 2006 video game awards. It's gotta be tough since there are so many systems now. Surely you can't ignore the older systems, the PS2, Xbox, and Gamecube, nor can you leave out the PS3, Xbox360, or Wii. Then you have to consider computers, handheld systems, etc. Within each system, there are the different genres, RPG (role playing game, a la Final Fantasy), MMORPG (massively multi-player online role playing game; World of Warcraft), FPS (first person shooter, Doom), sports, strategy, and so on.

And of course you've got to have overall games of the year for each system and each genre, and your overall overall game of the year, the best thing to come out in 2006. I have a feeling Zelda: Twilight Princess will be at the top or near the top of most peoples' lists.

I'm going to stop the blow-by-blow recap of my training sessions, and stick with the highlights here and there. Today I woke up with knee pain when I squatted bodyweight, but I decided to go anyway. Once I got there and squatted with a little weight on me, the knee felt perfect. Just needed a warmup.

Happy birthday to my sister, Courtney, who is currently in Yosemite, where the cell phone reception is surprisingly good.

In case I forgot to mention it before, Courtney made her first major sale, adding to her bank account, and relieving her of the need to find storage for her beautiful, and mind-boggling difficult to craft, canopy bed.

The AP had a nice wire article today about new research on smelling and how the human nose works. Some researchers had college students sniff their way to chocolate through 30 feet of grass while blindfolded. Then they had them try it with one nostril plugged up, and with a tube over the nose so that both nostrils are getting the exact same airflow. The evidence revealed that the brain does actually treat signals from the nostrils separately, something that was thought to be impossible with our nostrils so close together, but the people using two nostrils did better than those with one.

Check this out. Also look for part 1. I linked to part 2 because I find it more visually stunning.

I haven't played a lot of poker lately, mostly due to finals and such. Yesterday, wiped out from weightlifting, I was too tired to go out with friends following the disappointed loss by the Falcons, so I stayed in and signed up for a $5 HORSE tournament. Four hours or so later, I earned a cool $200 profit. Not bad after the layoff, hopefully it will continue this evening. Tomorrow I have other things to do.

There were two other guys in the o-lifting room when I got there. Guy #1 was doing what looked like the top half of a romanian deadlift off a rack, so maybe it was just the top half of a regular deadlift, and another guy was doing really heavy power cleans (he just pulled it up to a shrug but didn't get under it or anything). Then he did a bunch of heavy jerks off a rack. Turns out he had some elbow pain that only bothered him during the arm flipping portion on the clean. He's long-time powerlifter who made the switch to o-lifting one month ago.

I got started with hang cleans from various positions, and was doing ok until I started below the knee. I was really starting to frustrate Mr. Coffee, and finally he told me to try it from the ground. That I did almost perfect on my first try. Surprising he barely gave me any coaching on the jerk, just told me to push it up over my head. I split my legs out like I saw other people doing, but the weight was so light for me, especially after having done a bunch of thrusters over the last month or two, that I wasn't really having to put much effort in. Just thrust it up overhead and lock out, didn't need to bother with the lunge and such. My final set I did two reps with 60kg.

Then he had me do a bunch of back squats with whatever weight I felt like, so I worked my way up to 70kg, which isn't too much, but I was damn tired already. The cardio workout from doing 3 and 4 set reps of o-lifts is phenomonal.

To add to the day's glory, this 15 year old girl came in with her father. She's a volleyball player and is learning snatch and c&j to improve her game. She was wearing the tightest, shortest shorts I have ever seen. Granted, at 15 she's way too young, but I can look, right? Plus she had great form, so I learned a lot watching her.

Overall I'd say my biggest problem today was dropping the weight. I'm just not used to dropping weight from overhead like that, I kept wanting to bring it down in a controlled fashion. Once I almost busted me shin doing that, John was getting ticked off. "The only thing wrong with your lifting today is the way you drop the damn weights. Just drop it and move out of the way!"

Today I took my first trip to Coffee's Gym for a workout. I decided to write about my experiences, though I will avoid giving away any training secrets. I don't think there will be any big secrets, though, just hard work and lots of it.

Background:
Started bodybuilding at 21. Kept it up off and on through 25 or so, when I benched 225, squatted about the same, and didn't deadlift at all. Took a few years off, joined a Gold's a few months ago and got back to about 75% of my peak strength. Decided I was going to get bored with bodybuilding/powerlifting stuff, so I started trying other things like one leg squats and handstand pushups. Then I discovered a real gym nearby, Coffee's Gym, where they would teach me the olympic lifts.

Day One:
Went in and was told to wait a few minutes so Kelly could finish. Kelly is a very cute, very petite woman with a 1 year old child, and she competes nationally in the o-lifts. Today she was working on the snatch. Once she finished a couple of reps, John, the owner/trainer, had me grab an empty bad, hold it in a partial dead position just over my knees, and shrug it up> Doing various partial movements, we worked our way up to doing full power snatches (just like a snatch, but without the squat part) with weights on each end, though they were practically weightless, and only there so the bar would sit on the ground at the proper height. And at the end of each set of 4 or so reps, I would do 4 or so overhead squats. I had been working on those on my own, and John Coffee seemed impressed at my base level of skill, if not strength. Then he had me move on to front squats with ever increasing weight. I usually use a fold over grip, but he made me use the correct grip where your forearms bend over backwards and your fingers are holding the bar. Hurt my wrist, but he says that will go away soon enough. This whole time between my sets, Kelly and this big black dude named Larry were also trading off sets of front squats and clean and jerks.

Coffee started asking me how I heard about the gym, which is when Kelly and I came up with a new slogan for their t-shirts: "Coffee's Gym, A Gym That Doesn't Suck." And he was asking me about my lifting background and seemed to approve that I've read Rippitoe and shocked (but impressed) that I have "Essentials of Weightlifing" by El-Hewie. I was surprised that he hadn't heard of Dan John, but he definitely approved once I mentioned that Dan John is why I started overhead squatting.

After the front squats he told me to do whatever I felt like doing, so I did some pullups, one arm overhead press, and then just felt wiped out. Said my goodbyes with plans to be back tomorrow. And I need to order some weightlifting shoes.

BTW, I haven't sweated so much lifting weights in a long time. And it wasn't even much weight. I should take a before pic and see how I look after a couple months of this training.

The thing about exercise is that people tend to have disdain for people who train in forms other than their own. Powerlifters make fun of bodybuilders, people who want to be as big as possible make fun of marathoners, blah blah blah. Here's the thing... No exercise is bad exercise. And the ideal routine would borrow from the best of all worlds. Most importantly, it would be designed around a person's goals and interests.

There are a lot of ways to skin a cat, and most advice only looks at one of those ways. Say someone wants a big back. I could tell them to deadlift, or do lots of pullups, and they may do it. But what if they try and really don't like it and lose motivation? Ever seen a frequent swimmer? Those people have big backs. Just an added benefit to the fantastic endurance workout swimming gives you.


For myself, I love working out, but at the same time, I happy with my size. I don't want to get gigantic, plus bodybuilding stuff bores me. So I started looking at other options. Thus my recent foray into one legged squats, one arm pullups, and eventually killer gymnastics stuff like the planche and the front lever. And I can't forget the olympic lifting I am going to be embarking on soon. All of these will serve to increase my strength and fitness without creating incredibly bulky muscles. There will be some gain, of course. But all of the things I listed depend on lower bodyweight. It's a lot easier to pullup a lighter body, for instance, and olympic lifting is done by weight class, so you are look for strength per bodyweight.

What are your goals? Lose weight? Gain muscle? Gain endurance? Just find something to do to get off the couch?

What do you enjoy? Being outdoors and seeing the countryside? Playing teams sports? Demonstrating feats of strength?

Think about all of these things, find an activity that fits, and get to it.

I know very little about Chile and about Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator who died a few days ago, but I read an interesting comparison. They both killed thousands of their enemies and detractors, and jailed many more. Castro made Cuba communist at gunpoint, whereas Pinochet instituted free market policies at gunpoint. Pinochet stepped down voluntarily in 1990 after losing a referendum (I want to read more about that, sounds crazy), whereas Castro has clung to power even as an old man in a sickbed. Pinochet left behind a country poised to become the most economically viable in South America, with free market policies still in place. Castro will leave behind a country crippled by poverty, with citizens frequently trying to escape by pretty desperate measures, like water sealing a car and floating away.

After all this, the most mind boggling difference between the two. You can find Castro defenders all over the place, but Pinochet defenders are few and far between. Possibly neither one deserves defense, but if you look at their actions and results, as opposed to propaganda, Pinochet might be the dictator of choice. I'm going to have to read more about him now. I gots the curiosity bug.

I forgot to mentioned that I got all this from Instapundit and from The Washington Post.

I've been working on one armed pullups while studying for finals. I have a ways to go, but I'm making some progress. The path starts with being able to do a normal pullup. Get to where you can do ten or so, being sure to use a variety of grips in your training. Overhand, underhand, neutral, do 'em all. If you find you are better at one type, train the others a bit harder. And don't do wide-grip. Shoulder width gives you a longer range of motion. There's no point in doing this sort of thing if you aren't going to do a full ROM. Anyway, once you get to this point, hang a towel off one end of your bar, and do a pullup with one hand gripping the towel lower than the bar, and the other on the bar. Work towards lowering your grip on that towel, taking turns with hands, of course, and eventually you'll be pulling almost entirely with the high arm. Then you can drop the towel and try a one handed pullup. This the real thing, no gripping your wrist with your opposite hand. A bonus to this exercise is that the towel method will add a lot of grip strength, too.

I'm really looking forward to finals being over. I decided not to go join the gym with the olympic lifting until Friday when I'm done. I have two finals left, one will be fairly pedestrian, the sort of thing I could have gotten a 50 on before I ever signed up for the class, and will get a very good grade easily now. The other will be a bit tougher, which is why I'm delaying the gym move. I have a feeling my new workouts will be longer and more exhausting. I can't wait to get started!

I just found a nifty website covering lots of the bodyweight exercises I want to learn. In fact the goal of the site's creator was to make information on these sort of things available to people googling for them.

Now you can add Russian President Putin to the list of people in this world that you cannot criticize. If you criticize a Muslim, you are racist and they will riot, and maybe even put a death fatwa on you. And if you criticize Putin, you end up dead.

As Glenn Reynolds pointed out, no wonder people spend their efforts criticizing Bush. They know he won't kill them for it. Too bad he gets no respect for that :)

December 7. Remember Pearl Harbor. And try to remember what it was like when this country faced its enemies till we won instead of hiding behind the U.N., or calling for troop withdrawals before it's over.

I just learned something very interesting. Today a number of news outlets are reporting a new study that claims that the richest 2% of people in the world own 50% of the world's assets. It turns out that this is bullshit. It does not take in to account the assets owned by governments. As rich as Bill Gates may be, he's a drop in the bucket compared to the resources owned by the U.S. government. Add in the wealth owned by governments, and I bet the richest 2% of people own a whole heck of a lot less.

I currently work out at Gold's Gym. It's ok, but there's nowhere to even think about trying olympic lifts there, and you can forget about a trainer there being able to help you with that sort of thing. So I looked up Marietta gyms online and found a place called Coffee's Gym. I went to check it out today. It's got some issues. For one, it's very small, very cramped in the room with most of the equipment. A bench/squat/press workout would be difficult, although I may switch to dumbells for bench, and that would solve the space problem. And any issues I saw were vastly outweighed by the positives. I'm getting a tour, the guy is showing me the weights and such, I guess what he figures a guy like me wants to see, and I say, "Where's the real work get done?" So he takes me to the side room. Wood flooring with pads on top. Two large black dudes watching from the side. One petite, and very cute, white girl with her hands on a barbell which is laying on the floor with two bumper plates on either side. I don't know bumper plate standards yet, so I have no clue how much weight it was. She clean and jerks it, locks out, and drops it bam to the ground. Impressive!! And that's when I chat with the owner, John Coffee. Chat with him for minute, start getting excited about a new gym. I'm finally going to learn olympic lifts from some who knows what they are doing!!! Turns out petite girl competes nationally (and is married, too bad). Anyway, right as I was leaving, Coffee asks me to turn to the side, put my feet in a squat position, hands out straight ahead, and squat down. I do so, and he is pleased to see a nice form, upright without back bend. I suppose that means he has less to reteach me. I imagine most people new to o-lifting have to unlearn bad habits, but as I have related in this blog before, I've been putting a lot of effort into increasing my flexibility and achieving perfect form.

I'm going to have to quit Gold's Gym, which means I have to write the billing company a letter. Isn't that ridiculous? I can't just cancel, I have to write a damn letter.

Now that the mid-term elections are over and the Dems one, left-wingers everywhere are rushing to write books and articles which claim that Bush is the worst President in our history. Let's look at the facts on this one...

The economy has been roaring from the low following the 9/11 attacks, which were not in any way caused by Bush, and if you have to blame them on a President, it would be the one before, Clinton, but that's not really fair either. You need to blame years of ignoring the rising problem in the Middle East from all of our leaders for decades back for this one. Anyway, the economy has been on a slow rise since then, and doing quite well. Historically low unemployment and all that. And Bush had little to do with that, too, because Presidents just don't have the ability to affect the economy much. But he didn't destroy it, either.

As far as the Middle East.... No matter how ill-advised you feel the Iraq invasion was in the first place, or how bad you think the execution following the initial invasion has been, there have only been 3000 American deaths over there. This is not Vietnam, where one of our most celebrated Presidents, JFK, got us into a much longer war with a lot more dead Americans. So you can't use that point to say Bush is the worst ever, because other Presidents did the same thing with far worse results.

Corruption? The Bush administration, for all it's problems, has shown little evidence of corruption. People like to point to no-bid contracts with Halliburton, but they ignore the fact that Halliburton was about the only company with the infrastructure and experience for these sort of jobs, and already had a strong connection with the military, which made implementation much easier. And people want to point out the Plame leak scandal, but they then forget to mention that in the end, Bush and Rove were found innocent, with a State Department staffer that was not tied to the administration being the source of the leak.

Despite predictions of civil liberties violations from the Patriot Act, there haven't really been any. And Guantanamo? Give me a break, water boarding may or may not be torture, but it's a far cry from cutting someone's fingers off (or beheading someone on international TV), and whatever the talking heads may say, if someone is water-boarding me, I'm probably going to tell them what they want to know. Maybe it's not even very effective, but it's not exactly an Iron Maiden or some other hardcore torture method.

So really there are very few reasons to back up calling Bush the worst President ever. You may not love the guy, but for every fault with his administration that you point out, I can find five Presidents that have done worse and are counted as heroes for it.

The other day I mentioned the 6 "Flying Imams" who were kicked off a US Airways flight for suspicious behavior. Initially many were saying it was profiling and racially insensitive and they were being punished for flying while Muslim. Turns out, that's not the case at all.

Reading through various reports from witnesses and such, one sees that the Imams were going out of their way to act suspicious. Either they wanted a controversy to weaken security, or they wanted to test how far they could push security so that people with bad intentions will know what they can and can't do to avoid being kicked off a flight they plan to hijack. At any rate, the things they did that were suspicious.... They prayed loudly to Allah both before and after entering the plane, but Muslims are supposed to pray only once at sunset. Only one had a 1st class ticket, but they all entered with the 1st class passengers, then spread out through the plane, in much the same way the 9/11 hijackers did. An arabic speaker overheard them praising Allah and condemning America for the whole Saddam/Iraq thing. One of them, a thin one, requested a seatbelt extender which he never used. He placed it on the ground, presumably to later use as a weapon. It's basically a strap with a heavy metal object at the end, easy to swing and bash someone's head in. Oh, and other Muslims on the flight were not only not disturbed by the airline or kicked off the flight, but they cheered the decision, also being made neervous by the "Flying Imams."

Anyone who has a problem with the actions US Airways took is either an enemy of our country, or extremely naive. I consider someone who thinks being politically correct is more important than trying to save American lives as enemy of our country, BTW. Because if this turns in to a war of Western Civilization versus Islam, it will be because those PC people took way too long to acknowledge any threat, and might as well ahve killed Americans themselves.

So my little thing about the MPAA wanting to charge license fees for people to watch movies on their home theatres turned out to be a joke, but it's not so far fetched considering some of the MPAA's other crap.

I just read about a guy that submitted his movie to the MPAA ratings board. The MPAA states that even one copy of copywrited material is a breach of law, and they also state that they will not infringe upon filmmaker's rights. But to rate the movie, they made a copy. When the film's owner called to inquire about this breach of the law, the lawyer for the MPAA said, "Don't worry, it was an illegal copy, but it's locked up in my vault." Somehow I don't think that same lawyer would accept that excuse from me.

They also had a proposed law blocked in California. The law was to outlaw pretexting. An example of pretexting would be if I called my boss's insurance company, said I was my boss, and then say I lost my records and could they send a copy to such and such... It's typical social engineering, used by hackers for years to get passwords and such. Anyway, the MPAA blocked this law, because they use it themselves. They call people they suspect of movie-sharing, lie about their identity to get information, and then use that information to sue the person. Sounds pretty dishonest and unethical to me. Par for the course for the MPAA.

Obviously I like to point out stupid things that Democrats do. I know plenty of Republicans do stupid things, but there are a lot more people discussing those online, so I like to concentrate on Democrats. Anyway, Nancy Pelosi just bashed the President for saying that Al Queada is involved in the insurgency in Iraq. She did this two weeks after Al Queda released a video stating they had 12,000 fighters in Iraq. Somehow that smacks me as involved, but not Pelosi.

And John Edwards, former VP candidate, is on an anti-Wal-Mart rage. Wal-Mart, according to him, does not pay its workers enough. So he's doing a book signing at a Barnes and Noble, and there's a Wal-Mart in the same shopping center, so a reporter decided to do a little looking around. Turns out that the Wal-Mart in that shopping center pays higher starting wages than the Barnes and Noble. A little hypocrisy for ya? Not deliberate, I am sure, but bad nonetheless. People are so out to get Wal-Mart for doing what every company either does, or wishes they could do.