Punk

Punk penguin

So the wife’s doing a game of blog tag over at her blog. You have to go to photobucket.com, and type in the answers to various questions, in the search form. Since I’m lazy, and not really into this kind of stuff, I just took the answer to my favorite kind of music, and you can see the result right here (it’s also cool, because the penguin is the mascot of my favorite OS–Linux). Check out Jen’s answers on her blog, there’s quite a few.

Does Weight Lifting Make a Better Athlete?

It seems that not everyone thinks so, and it may not help so much in certain sports like the marathon.

Several pithy quotes from the article:

And don’t worry about becoming too muscular, Dr. Kraemer said. “The
fear of getting really big is not plausible for most people,” he said.
Competitive distance runners and cyclists, who are naturally slender
and light, “don’t have the muscle fiber number to get really big,” Dr.
Kraemer said. “I can train them until the cows come home and they are
not going to have big muscles.”

The main problem with weight lifting is that many people do it all
wrong, said Kent Adams, the director of the exercise physiology
laboratory at California State University
at Monterey Bay. They don’t have a program or a goal. Technique may be
sloppy. Or, Dr. Adams said, they use weights that are too light.
Muscles need to be stressed if they are to respond, he said. Dr.
Kraemer is on the same page. One study, he said, found that women tend
to lift half or less of what they could lift. And this happened even
when women were working with personal trainers, he said. “There
is so much misinformation,” Dr. Kraemer said. “It’s a quagmire out
there.” He recommends trainers certified by the National Strength and
Conditioning Association, which also supplies educational information.
Dr. Kraemer is a past president of the organization.

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Health Spending to Double by 2017

from webmd.com comes this article.
The headline really bugs me, because it’s such a misnomer. “Healthcare” and “health spending” is so untrue, it’s illness, or medical care, and spending.
Health spending would be on stuff like good, clean foods, exercise equipment, gym memberships, etc–stuff that keeps you healthy in other words, not spending on things to help us when we become unhealthy/sick.
I just wish that otherwise great sites, like webmd, would realize this, and stop using these euphemisms, so that people might realize that except for checkups, going to a doctor isn’t about health, but rather about sickness.

WikiLeaks

Article on WikiLeaks

Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but because conscience tells one it is right.

Martin Luther King Jr.

http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks
http://wikileaks.be/wiki/Wikileaks
http://wikileaks.in/wiki/Wikileaks
Check it out, decide for yourself.

Used Wood, passion materialized in vintage reclaimed wood…

Oud Hout

Diederick Kraaijeveld (Oudhout/Oldwood, The Netherlands, 1963) builds classic and modern icons in vintage reclaimed wood; an Airstream trailer, a Porsche 911 or a pair of Chuck Taylors (All Star sneakers)…With sometimes century-old painted planks, salvaged during intensive trips along dumpsters, old Amsterdam canal mansions, run down farms and faraway coasts, Kraaijeveld “paints” photo-realistic images… His palette is not filled with paint in all its different colors: a huge warehouse full of old wooden planks forms the base of each work of art.

This is the ultimate in recycling/collage. Check out his gallery.

Here’s his Red All Stars:
Red All Stars–Diederick Kraaijeveld
Over a meter wide. He, also has done a blue version and is planning a black version.

Via Juxtapoz