“People thought I was a charlatan and a nut,” he remembered. “The doctors were against me — they said that working out with weights would give people heart attacks and they would lose their sex drive.”
Lots more Jack LaLanne video here. Here's one you probably don't need. And here he is with his dog Happy ("Right in the mouth with the foot he's putting"):
AllenS: Jenn Sterger (the woman) was hired because of some sexy pictures of her in Sports Illustrated mag, that Brent Musberger thought would be a good matchup for the male dominated football sports sceen. Jenn and Brent are just as much at fault here. I'm thinking of sending the woman a picture of my penis also. Could I borrow the fish bowl lens?...
Meade: It's a fish eye lens. Fish eye. It's for taking shots of massive objects or scenes which a normal lens can't take all in. A fish bowl lens would be for taking shots of tiny things. Like Brett Favre's... ability to make good judgments.
AllenS: Ok, ok. Can I borrow the lens that makes stuff look bigger?
But, in fact, the fisheye works really well to make something look large if you get the camera lens right up at it. Lots of other stuff is including in the picture, arrayed all around and looking comparatively small. Frankly — and this is not an offer to AllenS — it would be really interesting to take pictures of naked men and get the extreme closeup on the genitalia with a well-composed and interesting background. I went looking through my old posts with the "fisheye" tag to find some that prove my point.
The second picture here of the fisheye dog makes this point very well. Get right up to the nose. The scenery in the background isn't as interesting as I'd want for my proposed compositions, but you can see how tiny Meade looks in the background (when in fact he was quite close by). Here's another photograph that illustrates the point, albeit with the female body:
That's from the Khmer Dynasty room at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC. Here's the effect of the lens looking at the room from the other side:
Here's some male and female nudity, to be fair:
That's the Museum of Natural History — not Brett and Jenn. You may recognize that couple from the movie "Election" — which is a great cautionary tale about the inadvisability of cheating on... many things (including your spouse).
And then — searching through the fisheye pictures — I found something that was extremely important to me: the purple tree, which had this.
The fight against Four Loko has led many consumers – especially young ones – to defend their favorite party pop – and stock up....
"Every time I drank a Four Loko, something terrible happened," one person told the website Gothamist at a tribute march to the drink in New York City. "And each time I grew from it."
Facebook groups, petitions and even YouTube videos have also sprouted up in support of the drink.
"Get the government out of my Loko!" wrote one petitioner.
It's hard to believe the government gets involved in such matters. It's almost a kind of snobbery. It's not a classy product, by design. It's like Smucker's Goober. Some people think you seem like an idiot not being able to get peanut butter out of one jar and jelly out of another... and why are you eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches anyway? Why don't you make a sandwich with thinly sliced turkey and fresh greens? You... goober!
So, without Four Loko, what will you do? Let alcohol have its effect without the offsetting effect of a cup of coffee? Eh. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that you can drink coffee with your alcohol. I'm sure simpler approaches easily occur even to drunks. You could take a big swig out of a can of Red Bull or DoubleShotEspresso and top it up with vodka. Or you can do what I observed Ohio State fans doing here last month:
They drink beer and guzzle 5-Hour Energy in berry and grape flavors. Run yourself down with alcohol and then pep yourself up again with that awful glop?
See? I'm a snob. "Awful glop." But I'm not the government enacting my snobbery into law. I'm just insulting your taste, exercising my free speech. It seems to me that if I can sip French-press coffee with a single-malt Scotch, you should be able to slug Four Loko.
Oh, good lord, this presentation of sex as a component of a healthy lifestyle is just so completely and annoyingly unsexy.
Your Homework for Today: As you go through your day, think about how each daily activity affects your sexual health and whether it fundamentally helps you or hurts you. Take notes as you go along. For example:
Walked halfway to work before getting on the subway and walked all the way home. (Helped)
Brought a healthy lunch instead of going to the cafeteria. (Helped)
Skipped afternoon cigarette break. (Helped)
Grabbed a handful of candy sitting by the copy machine. (Hurt)
Drank too much coffee. (Hurt)
Canceled a squeezed-in social obligation to make her day less hectic. (Helped)
Shut off computer and went to sleep at a reasonable hour, ignoring work e-mails that could wait until the next day, and slept for eight blessed hours. (Helped)
Once you've gone through your day, take a good look at your list and flesh it out. Are there more hurts than helps? What else could you do that would help? Are there behaviors that could be altered to move them from the hurt to the help category? Tomorrow, do your best to improve the ratio of helps to hurts.
Jeez. How long will it be before some First Lady adopts Good Sex as her pet issue?
Link via Instapundit, who doesn't seem to have found the article ludicrous.
It was actually Mel Taylor who had died, and here's the NYT article I drew myself reading. There was a Don Wilson in The Ventures, as I can figure out now. I mixed up the names. I guess my sketchbooks are full of errors of the kind the internet would save me from today.
... where the nice lady kept the place open for an extra 15 minutes so that Meade could have a smoothie and I could have a peppermint tea with a shot of internet. We were the only customers, and Meade said you must do very well in wintertime, and she said that's what she, a transplanted San Diegan, thought when she moved up here and opened the place. But the truth is, no one comes in the winter. The customers come on the sunny warm days (which are few, up north).
In winter, where does everyone go? Don't they want to be somewhere cozy? We drove quite a ways in the Chequamegon Forest. And what we saw were bars, bars, bars. Bars and bowling alleys. The culture up north isn't so much about coffee and WiFi. It's more about beer and bowling. That was my observation, as I drove by....
... with my vision admittedly blurred... by speed, not beer. I was on peppermint tea...
... and to-go chocolate cake, leftover from lunch.
Good morning, people. Did you get your coffee okay this morning? We went in search of a local café — I won't say exactly where — and after much maneuvering through numbered avenues and streets — let's just say the Mississippi River sets a grid awry — we found the place that seemed right. On inspection it seemed a bit twee — like a theme park recreation of a "café" — but what about WiFi? No! I need my coffee and blogging, even on vacation. This is what I do. Is it too much to ask? A little coffee and WiFi in the morning? So we take the latte to go — back to the hotel lobby, which has WiFi. The lobby also has coffee. Free coffee. But I don't like that coffee. Am I too fussy? I typo'd "fuzzy." Am I too fuzzy? Yes! I am! Without my coffee in the morning. And my WiFi. I am sharpening up now. The latte's half gone, and this post — the first post of the morning — is nearly written.
(The main thing is: I'm learning iMovie. That was: My Very First Voiceover. Look out, dear friends. Now that I can voiceover, I might be saying anything about anything.)
It's the Greyhouse Coffee & Supply Co. in West Lafayette — the site of the momentous second date of Althouse + Meade. We're here now, for our Valentine's Eve anniversary.
Beyond the edgy excitement, it's even more beautiful. Cozily married. A weekend in Indiana. Bliss!
... maybe it's getting light earlier. Spring is coming, perhaps. Or at least Spring Semester. It arrives on Tuesday. I'm caught up in syllabi. Syllabi in lieu of lullabies. I make coffee with the Meadhouse Aeropress and heat the milk in the microwave instead of using that machine that makes cappuccino/latte at the push of a button.
It's still winter here but "Summer Samba" plays in my head. It was one of the songs that played softly in the common room at our hotel in Austin, Texas, where we ate breakfast every morning from January 4th to January 13th. But we're not in Austin anymore, and it's not summer or even spring. It's the middle of winter in Madison, Wisconsin, and there's no morning light that has me up at this hour. I'm nearly through my first glass of coffee, and there's no reason to be up now except that I've slept enough.
***
The name of our Austin hotel? The Kimber Modern. Here's a NYT article about it. And here's one of those "36 Hours In" articles about Austin.
It's been a rough decade at the national and international level, but at a personal level, I've really enjoyed it, especially this completely anomalous last year.
