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For the most part, it hasn’t affected it much. There have been a couple of situations—a trip to a bar to watch the game last Sunday, or a group outing to Steak & Shake, for example—that I’ve either had to think hard about going to, or decide to ditch altogether. I get some of the typical yank-my-crank style humor from my friends, but that’s largely died down after the first few days. My wife has actually been very happy with it due to the fact that she loves salad, soup, and avocados, and we’ve been eating a lot more of all three of those recently.
The Vegan Experience, Day 13: The Halfway Mark | Serious Eats
I’ve been following J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s “The Vegan Experience” series closely, as it mirrors my own experience changing my diet. Whatever your eating persuasion, do go read his writing. It’s a really thoughtful, even-handed and honest look at nutrition, eating habits and the morale of eating regimens. Usually, I skip the reader comments, but the ones for “The Vegan Experience” have been worth reading for informational value.
Bonus: meticulously (and nerdily) tested vegan recipes that’s worth having in your arsenal, whatever your eating regimen might be.
Posted on January 30, 2012 with 1 note
Source: seriouseats.com
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It comes in voters’ own words, often registered onto the clipboards of canvassers, during a call-center phone conversation, in an online signup sequence or a stunt like “share your story.” As part of the Dreamcatcher project, Obama campaign officials have already set out to redesign the “notes” field on individual records in the database they use to track voters so that it sits visibly at the top of the screen—encouraging volunteers to gather and enter that information. And they’ve made the field large enough to include the “stories” submitted online. (One story was 60,000 text characters long.)
What can the campaign do with this blizzard of text snippets? Theoretically, Ghani could isolate keywords and context, then use statistical patterns gleaned from the examples of millions of voters to discern meaning. Say someone prattles on about “the auto bailout” to a volunteer canvasser: Is he lauding a signature domestic-policy achievement or is he a Tea Party sympathizer who should be excluded from Obama’s future outreach efforts? An algorithm able to interpret that voter’s actual words and sort them into categories might be able to make an educated guess.
A crazy ambitious data-mining project for the Obama reelection campaign, which they call “microlistening.” Can algorithms read into voters’ stories and find the puppet string that seems to draw the flock one way or the other?
Source:
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We have one main ski mask. We have a couple decent backup masks, but the one you see in the show is 99 percent one mask. It’s a little scary. I don’t remember where I got it. I think I bought it in L.A. There’s no tag on it. We wanted to call the company and get, like, 20 of them, but it’s a one-of-a-kind mask. We’ve tried to make duplicates, but it’s hard. It’s a really thick fabric. We just have to handle it with extreme care. When the mask falls apart, it’s probably time not to do the show anymore.
Jon Glaser | TV | Interview | The A.V. Club
You haven’t watched Delocated? Why not?!?!?! Jon Glaser is absolutely an underrated comedy genius.
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you see Smith spitting, cursing, and telling an early audience: “Don’t be afraid of me. I’m just a nice little girl.
The Mother Courage of Rock by Luc Sante | The New York Review of Books
An overview of Patti Smith’s career as poet, musician and irresistible animal of a woman.
Posted on January 24, 2012 with 2 notes
Source: nybooks.com
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The Best Time I Doped by Accident
This morning, in the shower, I thought about my easy progress coming back to running since re-injuring my back in November. I began running again early last week. Half mile at first, but quickly adding up to 2 miles, my leg muscles feeling so supple I declared to my chiropractor that I was running even better than before my original back injury that put me out.
Then, I remembered I forgot to take a dose of prednisone with breakfast. My brain unconsciously balanced the equation plugging in the missing variable. The reason why I felt fantastic running: I was doping unwittingly with prednisone, a corticosteroid used as an systemic anti-inflammatory, which I’m taking to treat an issue unrelated to my back.
After the initial Dr. House a-ha moment faded, I was devastated. This time, I thought I’d done everything right from the new eating regimen to vigilant, nay, obsessive stretching of hamstrings, quads, inner thighs. I assumed I tamed every muscle cell into executing my will to run and run until I felt exhausted and happy. But I was doping. The good sensations were fake. Prednisone was taming my body, not my diligence and will.
Then, finally, I became worried what it would be like when I finish my course of prednisone. After my original back injury 9 months ago, my first attempt back to running was a herky-jerky procession of elation and disappointment. Sometimes I felt on top; most times, I felt like a gasping mess of a goldfish swatted out of its bowl by a mischievous cat. I had to space my runs by at least two days lest I felt like my rickety body was unraveling, leaving a trail of appendages and limbs. This time, I could run consecutive days. This time, I ran consecutive days feeling better on the second day—a testament to the power of the systemic anti-inflammatory.
Because I follow professional cycling closely, I do think about doping more than the average person. Now, I was an accidental doper. It doesn’t matter if the act was unwitting or that I’m not competing because the disappointment in not having achieved the result on my own is crushing. When did my efforts reach their futile end and prednisone take over? I’ll never know. If you spend a good 20 minutes stretching your legs in every conceivable direction before and after every run, you need it to have worked.
It’s strange to be in a doper’s shoes. I suddenly understand, at least on a very small scale, why it’s hard for some athletes who test positive and serve bans to admit to doping. Dopers cheat to win, not to slack off on training. When you train, eat right, and dope on top of that, it’s going to be impossible to allocate how much of your success was due to ingesting banned substances. The need to believe it was your discipline, your effort, your sacrifice is enormous. The need to believe it wasn’t the dope is even greater. I still want, so much, the pure joy I felt when my muscles were moving correctly and effortlessly that I wonder “Well, is 30mg of prednisone from that day really enough to have made so much difference?”
What bothers me most about the doping discourse in cycling are the fans who take the moral high ground without having experienced the enormous pressure of, for example, racing or coming back from a debilitating injury—one had to have felt cornered if doping seemed like a viable option. I hate the way it’s too easy for these armchair moralists to deride athletes and demand that we toss them away in a lifetime ban. When we all agree doping is wrong, why be so unbendingly righteous? And where does this righteousness come from if not from having lost a race or turned oneself inside out training?
I was never Manichaean in my views on doping. I’m more comfortable with a nuanced, empathetic approach. And empathy I now have because I am an accidental doper. I can assure anti-doping fundamentalists that dopers aren’t at peace with their offense. I’ll never forget the pure ease and joy of running doped. Whether I’m coasting effortlessly or choking on my seared lungs, every run from now on will be measured against the artificially enhanced performance. I will stretch obsessively, drop a few pounds, do anything to assure myself I can replicate it on my own. We dopers will always chase the asymptote of our perfect doped day. There is no peace of mind.
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Thinking about vintage Destiny’s Child, I remembered the “Bug A Boo” video had a marching band coda. Upon rewatching, the drumline coda wasn’t as awesome as I remembered, but the plot for the video is so fucking weird. They run into a men’s locker room that has an entrance on the street? And then in the end, everything is somehow better with the bug a boos they’ve been avoiding all day? This story needs to go backwards like Memento.
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SpareOne is an emergecy cell phone that runs off a single AA battery. 10 hours talk time, supposedly. BYO AT&T or TMobile SIM card. Now, you can call me when you’re buried ‘neath the avalanche and I’ll dig you out.
(Photo via laptopmag.com)
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I am delighted and thoroughly approve of David Cross’s ensemble for his Kimmel appearance.
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For starters, whatever camera phone she was using had a piercing, distracting light on it which she merrily aimed right into my eye. Worse, here’s when she started taping: halfway through a new, longer joke that I’m working on — a very embarrassing recollection from my younger years that I’m very nervous about performing and still very unsure of how to unspool. This was only the fourth time I’ve ever performed it, as well as the fourth time I’ve ever admitted this incident in public. So it still feels like a very nervy high wire walk for me. There’s times when I lose the audience and have to get them back, freeze up, and wonder if I shouldn’t have just kept this whole incident to myself. I’m walking into new territory with this one, and it’s scary and I feel very raw and dry-mouthed when I do it.
Patton Oswalt | IT WAS THAT GODDAMNED EYE-ROLL
This incident is getting some attention. Never understood camera phone people at shows, comedy or music, who are hell bent on preserving rather than living the moment. Does a performance not feel real unless you see a shittily lit version of it on your LCD when it’s happening live in front of you?
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REO Speedwagon “I Can’t Fight This Feeling” has been my headsong for a few days so I decided to listen to it. I never realized how the video was so fucking bizarre, inspired by Magritte even. Also: neckties.
I was laid off 2 days before my birthday in 2009, a dismal blessing. I miss health insurance and payroll, but I haven't bought bread since the pink slip because I have time to bake.
Sometimes I'm a serious job hunter, sometimes a serious slacker, but mostly, I'm an underemployed, freelance Jaqueline of many trades including writing and dogsitting. Either way, I scrapbook my finds and activities here for your benefit and amusement.
Follow me on Twitter if tv/movie/pro-cycling spoilers and unplanned live tweets won't hail on your parade. And yes, I do work blue so don't be huffy with me if you don't like cursing or merciless roasting of public figures.
You can look at my other blog Fashion Corpuscle if you like fashion. The ruins of my crumbling Tumblr blog empire awaits internet archaeologists.
Gainful Unemployment is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
