I have a lot of goals related to various things and I’ll never enumerate or detail all of them because:
A. No one cares; B. They’re my business.
I felt like mentioning two in this post, though, because they’re relevant. Really, a better word is project, more than goals. Resolutions is a terrible word and should be shot. It implies imminent failure. Anyway.
One of my projects for this year involves updating this blog a lot. The other is exercise. I went on (and on and on) about that yesterday in this post. I also noted the “daily” workout may not be so daily. Yet.
The reason for this post is I realized in order to meet the easier of the two goals in question, which involves the act of writing, I’ll have to update this blog with stuff I hesitated to tackle upon making the first few posts over the last couple of days. Which is stupid, considering I gave this site the name HuffWire, therefore stating I intend to make newsy blog posts about stuff that interests me, sometimes.
So this is an announcement of sorts: these posts will be more mixed between personal stuff, sometimes (I consider the workouts under a personal post umbrella) and newsy things of interest.
Maybe that doesn’t even need explanation. I don’t know. I’ve been blogging both for the hell of it and for money since 2000 and I still haven’t figured this shit out.
I’ve already botched one project I planned for 2014–some kind of workout, no matter how brief, every day–barring injury or illness. I skipped yesterday because, well, New Year’s. I mean, come on.
That said, if applying myself like crazy to fitness has taught me one thing in the last 3 years it’s that I am fully capable of not giving up when I want, and starting all over again the next day. So today I started the project as if today was the first day of the year, or something. Here’s the damned workout. Skip this post all together if this is not the kind of thing you like. That seems like it should be a given, but people are weird and the Internet is awful.
(Disclaimer: I’m not any kind of fitness expert and you should never try my workouts. This is for, uh, “entertainment purposes” only and in no way intended to be authoritative or instructional. Also, most workouts I post here will be some variation on something I’ve learned elsewhere. If I think a workout is constructed in an original way, I’ll say so. Otherwise, assume it’s a variation, a cover version. The following is similar to a workout described here.)
Warmup
(I believe in warming up before a workout but am a little lazy about cooling down. Also don’t stretch before runs, if running is all I’m doing. I also eat donut holes at every opportunity. I’m a rebel, Dottie.) Two minutes of mountain climbers and burpees, 20 seconds on, 10 seconds rest. Living in a cold region with nasty winter weather, I’ve developed a masochist’s love for burpees for cardio when a run is just a dumb idea due to ice, cold and snow. I will work them into a workout whenever I can. I was a fit teen, had a strong upper body and did a lot of running, but I’m pretty convinced my legs have never been as strong as they are now and burpees have at least a little to do with that.
Workout (each exercise done with two 53-lb kettlebells)
8 double kettlebell swings. Embedded above is a video of one of the trustworthy masters of kettlebell use and form, Mike Mahler. I can’t find an online fitness type who doesn’t occasionally say something that strikes me as a bit over the top or strange or extreme, but Mahler seems sane and his workouts well-considered. He’s clearly strong as a damned ox, which seems to prove he knows his shit when it comes to strength training. (Every online fitness instructor/guru says nutty stuff related to nutrition sometimes, but that’s for another blog post.)
4 double KB cleans and jerks. Or clean and jerks? I don’t know. Whatever, above is a shaky video of a woman who nails the form for these, based on what I’ve learned. These are my favorite kettlebell exercise, as they hit so many points and if you construct your workouts right, they can put on some muscle mass. You’d get a reasonable workout just doing several sets of cleans and presses. Or jerks. Agh.
4 double KB squats. I hate squats, but that’s because I never knew how to do them right. Since I finally made them a regular part of my workouts, I’ve learned they’re one of the best strength-building exercises you can do for any reason. Learn squat form. Do them. Do a bunch without weight if you have to. But do them. They are, as long as you have no mitigating issues like hip socket problems or bad knees (my right hip is sometimes dicey, so I am very careful with squats), insanely good for you. This video is of Pat Flynn, another guy who’s staked out an online presence as a kettlebell-focused fitness authority.
I did the above five times through, for a total 40 swings and 20 of the other two exercises. It took 27 minutes. I rested for up to 2 minutes between sets.
If my kettlebell weights sound large, that’s only because the way kettlebells have been promoted to a general American audience is as a cardio aid, not so much a strength-building thing. The moment you start investigating online resources for kettlebell workout knowledge, you learn a five pound kettlebell is not a kettlebell, it’s a paperweight. Guys like Mike Mahler recommend women work with up to 35 lbs and 53 lbs is a good starting weight for a reasonably healthy man. Real humans, however, should consider starting with 20-25 for a woman and 25-35 for a guy, and maybe lay off some of the more complex, aerobicise-style shenanigans with the weight and aim for basic stuff like this.
Like I said, though, I’m no expert. It may be I’m just a lucky idiot that I haven’t had more than mild muscle strain since I started using them, and I’ve begun doing test workouts with a pair of 70-lb kettlebells, which I affectionately think of at the moment as my eventual death-in-waiting.
The next post like this is going to be a lot shorter, because, I mean, damn.
I don’t know why, but I frequently watch Morning Joe. On the positive side, the show is often a group of smart people, close to my age or older, talking about interesting subjects. It isn’t the same old soul-dead gaze of the infotainment abyss staring back at middle America–you know, like the Today Show.
The MSNBC show is ridiculous and embarrassing, though, whenever the conversation touches on technology use and the Internet. Smart phone use. Twitter. Facebook. These things come up and Morning Joe goes to hell (the political discussions are for a totally different blog post, okay? And I probably won’t write that one), and I sprain my eyeballs from all the rolling. I could pick on all cable news for this kind of discussion. I simply watch Morning Joe so it’s my most familiar example of people in my age group talking about tech in the spirit of those ape men in 2001: A Space Odyssey fearfully hooting and slapping at the Monolith at the beginning of the film.
Look, I thought I was late to tech things. I did.
In 1986 one of my best friends, John, was trolling dial-up bulletin boards and downloading scans of of naked women and I thought it was ridiculous.
“Okay, let’s go.”
“Dude, your computer is still on.”
“Yeah, I’m downloading a centerfold.”
“For real? Boobs? How long does that take?”
“Wow, it’s fast now–about 6 hours.”
In the 90s an ex-girlfriend’s use of AOL chat utterly confounded me. She spoke of meeting interesting people and also weirdos and it was terrifying. Another friend’s computer graphic art seemed like magic, the way he could twist and contort a photograph into a cartoon.
Around late 1998 I began to catch up. By 2001 or so I was off and running with tech use, for better or worse, and happily hooting and slapping the heck out of all sorts of Monoliths.
I don’t learn new tech stuff as easily as my wife (it’s become a large and crucial part of her career as an educator), but I’m more likely than she is to want new gadgets and once I have them, use the hell out of them. My point is, I’m not afraid of any of it. While I admit that I have tough learning curve with certain elements of tech use (I mean things like light coding–HTML, CSS), I ascribe that to having ADD, not fear or even age.
After all, it’s the future. There are plenty of things about the future worth fearing–and many of those things are certainly tech related (hi, NSA, how you doing?)–but it’s always been that way and let’s deal with it. Suck it up and handle the future, it’s here.
I’m sick as I can be of most debates over technology use. Hand-wringing and pearl-clutching like “We’re a depersonalized society!” or “E-readers are evil, book and literature killing machines!” or “The devil will come and take your child to hell via Tumblr !” (I don’t know, this last I might buy). I’m tired of all that and intensely tired of other, related discussions, like ostentatious bullshit about “unplugging” or going on “digital diets.”
No, really, shut the fuck up about this stuff. Or, to be polite, please shut the fuck up.
Use your phone or don’t. Have only one app on it, whatever. Buy a damned flip phone, they still work fine. And are tougher than most smart phones. Reject it all and be a fully analog human if you want–much as I love tech I confess I sometimes like that idea, as well. I’m not evangelizing for the use of any tablet, computer, phone, smart watch, etc. I am evangelizing for the power of rejecting bullshit debates over settled questions, and rejecting them wholesale. The exact sort of debate I see every time a technology-related issue comes up on Morning Joe.
This stuff is here and you can use it or not. I’m going to, and I expect to still be using it when I’m 70, should I be lucky enough to live that long.
Humanity’s adaptability is one of our greatest super powers. Shut the fuck up and click or tap away, it’s more natural to do so than you may want to admit. Either way, let’s talk about something else, or something new.
Running is fun for everyone, even little sign guys.
To make this blog what I want it to be I have to admit a desire to occasionally write about things that may be of little interest to some. Any blog is going to have that but I’m in the process of changing my mindset about this kind of endeavor. It’s called Writing Whatever the Hell I Want to Write and You Can Read it or Not.
In this case, the subject is physical fitness. I’ve battled my weight since I can remember. When I backed away from just blogging about crime in 2009, a few years spent parked at a computer seemingly nonstop had assisted me in ballooning to almost 300 pounds, with a 46-48 inch waistline. Since 2011, when I finally got truly sick of the situation (my insanely high blood pressure helped me get there) I’ve lost over 100 pounds of fat, dropped 16 or so inches from my waist and gained about 20 pounds of muscle. I did that by making diet and exercise a vital, central part of my daily life. I’ll never go back, either. I know that because every time I skip a day running or working out–or both–I get a junkie’s knee-shake and have trouble sleeping. Exercise feels good, it’s a habit, and I love it.
What I really discovered, which I didn’t know as a kid (I thought I’d conquered childhood weight issues in my teens, when I ran and worked out almost daily, but back then I did not do it in the wisest or safest way), is that it’s easy to, I don’t know, turn into kind of a geek about fitness. There is much more to just about any fitness pursuit as well as to nutrition and dieting than I’d ever dreamed of. Realizing how deep and complex the subject was, realizing that I could nerd out about it–this may have contributed heavily to me sticking with everything until certain good practices became habitual.
So–I’m gonna write about it. What I write may be–especially if you’re the increasingly rare reader who liked and followed my crime writing (which I haven’t totally abandoned, don’t worry)–boring as hell to you. If so, skip it.
And I wrote this post tonight because my plan was to write about my workout and I ended up concluding I wouldn’t work out because I’ve had some muscle strain that I should be a little careful with.
Honestly, the workout would’ve been more interesting. Either way, I’m gonna talk about jock-y stuff and if you see the fitness tag and that’s not your thing, just skip the post and weight for the “crime” tag to pop up.
Over a year ago I briefly had Snapchat on my phone and here’s what I concluded before deleting it a day later: Snapchat is idiotic. It’s objectively a dumb thing, but a perfect example of how if an app developer kind of knows what they’re doing and develops an idea for an app that will–at the very least–function pretty well, they may have some success. Or even a huge hit, like Snapchat.
I admit, my thinking Snapchat is dumb may be an Old Fart Thing. I’m 46 now and have developed a few of those. But if you were sitting around 5 years ago, when smart phones with touch screens and apps like the iPhone were still fairly new, and someone said, “I know, a visual messaging app wherein the message vanishes in 10 seconds! Whaddya say?” wouldn’t you twist your lips into a furious snarl then preemptively beat the snot of the idea-haver to try and prevent them from ever sharing such idiocy with you again?
I would.
Doesn’t matter what I think about Snapchat, in the end, because it has been a hit. A lot of people have downloaded it and began immediately dispatching supposedly short-lived pics of their genitals and pets (hopefully never in the same shot) to friends and loved ones and generally having all sorts of dumb fun. I guess.
So of course it turns out the app is fucked. Those 10-second duration images are eminently and easily screengrabbable, for one thing. There have been a host of issues since the app’s debut that I could list. The worst, probably, is the most recent–the damned thing was pretty hackable, all along:
A site called SnapchatDB.info has saved usernames and phone numbers for 4.6 million accounts and made the information available for download. In a statement to us, SnapchatDB says that it got the information through a recently identified and patched Snapchat exploit and that it is making the data available in an effort to convince the messaging app to beef up its security.
If you’re concerned that your own info has been compromised because you have Snapchat (because the temptation to send short-lived shots of your junk or mutt was just too damned irresistible, admit it) you can search for info here, at Snapcheck.org.
Once you do, whether you find your info or not, delete the stupid thing (if you think about it, you could essentially use any other visually-oriented messaging app to do just as stupid stuff as you do on Snapchat) and go sit and think about your life. I mean, really.
I’ve read recently (honestly too lazy to look up the link, but I swear I’ve read stuff like this) that blogs are, in their way, passé. I halfway think that’s why I decided I’d start 2014 with a brand new one, clean, squeaky, shiny, dumb. I mean, I have a Tumblr, but at 46 I feel comfortable with being too old–or maybe too vain, perhaps both–for Tumblr, anymore. Not abandoning my Tumblr, of course–I have a few reasons not worth enumerating to keep it–but I doubt I’ll use it to post much beyond links or quotes after today.
So–why this site? I mean, caveat lector: I’ve started a shit-ton of blogs over the last 4 years in particular. They’ve rarely come to anything. This may be some weird and stubborn effort to re-capture some idea I once had that I’d seized a low-level form of lightning in a bottle when I started a blog geared toward crime in 2004 and almost overnight doubled my blog traffic, therefore sealing my fate of eventually going into professional journalism and blogging, writing for the likes of the Crime Library, Radar Magazine and the New York Observer, to name a few.
What I think I’m doing here, though, is starting from scratch. If there’s any intent in this blog, it’s in the name, HuffWire. In this context, “wire” still carries the journalistic flavor of that word. The fact that I’m a news junkie and at this point have been paid to commit acts of journalism is inescapable. I don’t really want to escape it. I’m too curious and too weird and maybe even too easily bored to shut down the part of me that reads this news blurb or that and says, “there has to be more to this.”
However, I also find the definition of “wire” so broad that perhaps HuffWire is the best possible name for the kind of blog I meant to keep all along–one that melded sheer stupidity, personal, diary-like entries and straight-up independent journalism, sometimes all on the same day.
Another reason for this blog, perhaps the most important–the practice of doing it. I was blogging professionally off and on for various outfits from 2005 onward. I quit at the beginning of 2013. I kept tweeting, sometimes tumbling something that just wouldn’t fit in a tweet. But I wasn’t really doing shit, in general. At some point, I concluded that I didn’t have writer’s block (all my tweeting would seem to disprove that alone) as I was making some kind of semi-conscious attempt to, for lack of a better phrase, reboot my shit.
You see, “pro” blogging practices are often (to me) horrible. They can be antithetical to decent writing. You’re having to worry about selling your shit to the casual reader. To the search engine. To the maniac who hates you based on the headline you didn’t even edit yourself alone. I sometimes think one reason I eventually accepted backing so far out of blogging/writing/whatever for a year was that I, at some point, concluded I needed some kind of change. A respite, to be precise.
Okay, I know I did.
The change was time away from that game. I had had enough.
Which is not to say I’m going to abandon everything I learned about blogging or my interest in certain news stories that also interest everyone else. I’m human. If there is a single purpose to this blog post it may be that–to evade predictions or expectations of what I’m going to post here for the rest of the year.
I’m just here to write about shit. This won’t even be the only writing I do on a daily basis.
Past that, I’m going to see if I can do what I want as a blogger without giving in to some of the grosser aspects of the “training” I’ve learned over the last few years, about search engine optimization, what’s viral-worthy, etc. You know, all that bullshit that kind of makes the internet intolerable today.
Mainly… this is part of a larger effort to do the one thing a writer is supposed to do. You know. Um, write.
So. Here goes.
This is a demo store for testing purposes — no orders shall be fulfilled. Dismiss
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