firehose

by Fabian

Guantanamo Bay prisoner Ammar al-Baluchi says his guards are messing with him. Al-Baluchi, who was allegedly involved in the 9/11 attacks, has been attending pretrial hearings this week, during which his lawyer has claimed that guards gave him a copy of E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey on a break as a "practical joke" — or even some "sort of disinformation campaign."

Identical twins in the UK have both been charged with raping a teenage girl, even though forensic tests cannot prove which one carried out the attack.

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hot-dog-legs:

Hot dogs or legs?  You decide

The player can also restore lives by asking Facebook friends for help, by paying Facebook credits or by paying money (or, on iOS and Android, by setting the clock/date forward, although this will result in the clock being wrong).

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OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

I’ve gone to the gym straight from chemo when I’d have to go sit in the changing room for half an hour between each exercise, and other times when I’d go home after an hour, having completed no more than two sets of the first exercise on my list. I’ve sat on a recumbent exercise bike pedaling so slowly, on the lowest setting, that it barely looked like I was moving at all. I certainly wasn’t raising a sweat. Every time I see somebody make fun of the fatty they saw doing that the other night at their gym, I want to tell them exactly what it feels like to be that person, knowing the amount of effort it took just to stay upright and moving those pedals for half an hour, knowing nobody else could see that effort. Through it all, I’ve had to restrain myself from either telling strangers my entire life story or simply punching them to the ground when they ask if I’ve ever considered working out, because I’d look SO GOOD if I just had a little bit of self-discipline.

I have been into powerlifting for about five years now. Most of the stuff I want to say about strength training has been said better by other people (usually Henry Rollins), but I’m going to say a few things anyway. Most of all, this:

The amount of discipline, time, and effort that a person has put into their physical training does not always show.

When you see someone whose efforts show, it’s easy to respect the amount of work that went into it. But here’s the thing: the exact same amount of work may have been done by the fat girl on the bench to the left of that person, or by the scrawny guy in the squat rack to the right. The exact same amount. We see only the body a person has today. Do we know where they started from? Do we know how long it’s taken them to get where they are now, and what it took to do that?

There is no absolute success in lifting and fitness. It is a progression. Success means continuing to move toward a continually moving target.

Even though most of us in the lifting community know this from personal experience, there seems to be less tendency to apply it to others. It doesn’t help that motivation comes easiest through visual success stories. That’s natural. A picture of a stunning physique goes straight from our bugged-out eyes to the most primitive part of our yearning brain. The non-visual success stories also inspire us, but they don’t have the same impact. There’s a reason why ads for the latest stupid fitness scam don’t show two identical pictures of the same pasty dude with the slogan “Find out how Nigel got back a full range of motion in his knee while still looking exactly the same!”

We’re programmed to believe we know what hard work and inevitable glorious victory look like, and that ain’t it.

I saw a picture on Facebook recently: a smoking hot woman, all abs and skintight shorts and straining bra, deadlifting multiple plates over the slogan “STRONG IS SEXY.” And inspiring as that visual might be, I couldn’t help asking myself … okay, if strong is sexy, why do all the people making “strong is sexy” images make sure to only show people who look like that? Why not, say, Sarah Robles? Holley Mangold? I’m pretty sure either of them could put any 20 randomly chosen Facebook commenters into a basket together and overhead-press them. Or getting away from international-class strength, there’s the ordinary schmuck like me who is certainly much stronger than the average woman who doesn’t lift, but also knows damn well what I’d get from the caring folks of the Internet if I put up a picture of my middle-aged ass deadlifting in spandex panties. No, Internet, we know what you mean when you tell us strong is sexy. You mean “looking like this is sexy.” And we’ve heard that one before, for any given value of “this.”

I have been lucky with my lifting. I never had to overcome the cultural or psychological problems a lot of women have with just picking up a weight at all. All my lifter friends completely accept and expect that women train pretty much exactly like men, and we all laugh at the magazines showing a woman doing curls with a tiny pink dumbbell that weighs approximately a tenth of the handbag she carries every day, or a hundredth of the child she picks up without a second thought. Too often, though, experienced lifters forget that the challenge is not intrinsic to the weight, but to the person using it. One person’s tiny pink dumbbell is another person’s Atlas stone.

I’ve been the fat chick at the gym who doesn’t look like she’s making any effort. I lifted through years of chemotherapy. I lifted after radiation treatments. I lifted after surgery that came as close to sawing a person in half as modern medicine is willing to get. I have one scar that cuts right through my lats on one side and up the middle of my back, which even now, years later, sometimes rubs raw against my clothing and has a troublesome section that sometimes splits if I pull too hard on a lift. I’ve stuffed wads of toilet paper into it and gone back for another set. I lifted at times when just driving to the gym wiped me out so bad that I had to rest for 15 minutes before I was physically able to walk the 25 feet from my car to the gym door. I’ve gone to the gym straight from chemo when I’d have to go sit in the changing room for half an hour between each exercise, and other times when I’d go home after an hour, having completed no more than two sets of the first exercise on my list. I’ve sat on a recumbent exercise bike pedaling so slowly, on the lowest setting, that it barely looked like I was moving at all. I certainly wasn’t raising a sweat. Every time I see somebody make fun of the fatty they saw doing that the other night at their gym, I want to tell them exactly what it feels like to be that person, knowing the amount of effort it took just to stay upright and moving those pedals for half an hour, knowing nobody else could see that effort.

Through it all, I’ve had to restrain myself from either telling strangers my entire life story or simply punching them to the ground when they ask if I’ve ever considered working out, because I’d look SO GOOD if I just had a little bit of self-discipline.

And then a few years later, when I had beaten my theoretically terminal cancer and was finally getting some decent strength gains again, a completely unrelated injury put me in hospital for three months and left me so far below my original starting point it scared the hell out of me when I thought about the road back. I had to relearn to walk. I now had a chronic heart condition, induced by my time in a coma, to add to the list of things to try and fix. I couldn’t move any of the fingers of my left hand, grip a tiny pink dumbbell (or even a pencil), extend my left arm or rotate the shoulder more than a tiny bit. I was in my late 30s, I’d been incredibly proud of my bench, squat, and deadlift PRs, and now here I was. It had just taken me a year of physical therapy to claw my way back up to the point where I had the equivalent strength and functionality of a non-physically-active elderly person.

I’ll never forget going back into the gym with my two new long-term goals in mind: one, to be able to extend my left arm above my head again, and two, to be able to bench the empty bar. I did negatives on the lat pulldown machine for months, setting it to the very first plate, pulling the bar all the way down with my good hand, then sitting down and slowly, ever so slowly and carefully, letting the bar drift upward again pulling my left arm with it. Actually pulling weight down with that arm was so far from being possible that I was not actually sure at this time whether I would ever be able to do it.

The day I could sit at the lat pulldown machine with both arms over my head in the “ready to begin” position was the end of a six-month road of blood, sweat, and tears I cannot even describe.

Relearning to bench press was worse. I started with a half-pound dumbbell. I didn’t have enough strength in my fingers to grip it tightly enough to stop it falling out of my hand. My method was to lie down on my back, put my left arm up, and put the little thing into my left hand with the other hand. Then I had to try and bring the elbow down, then up again. I was happy if I managed to do five reps. It hurt so much I wanted to cry. When I progressed to a one-pound dumbbell, it was so hard to keep it extended above me I had to keep holding one end of the dumbbell with the other hand for the first few workouts.

The day I benched an empty bar again for the first time since my injury, I asked a guy at the gym to spot me. I explained to him that I had been rehabbing from an injury and was not sure if I would be able to get the bar up off my chest again, but was aiming to at least hold it in the start position and lower it as far as possible. I have to bench with a narrow grip now, because some of the bones in my wrist and thumb are permanently damaged and I can’t get a good grip if my hands are further out along the bar. When he let go of the bar and I realized I was holding it all by myself, a 45lb empty bar, out at arm’s length above my chest, I felt like I had just set a goddamn Olympic world record. I couldn’t lower it, not even a quarter of an inch, let alone raise it again. I couldn’t move it at all. I couldn’t do a damn thing except hold that bar, and I was so happy I think the guy thought I was drunk or insane. I lay there laughing like a psycho, holding my beautiful, beautiful, empty bar, reveling in a feeling of physical power that was better than anything back in the old days when I wouldn’t even ask for a spot unless I had more than 140 pounds up. I held it there for a while, then asked the guy to take it again. I told him that was all I was going to do that day, thanked him, and went home.

That is success. It isn’t the kind you can see by looking at me.

Other people have their own stories. You don’t know. You can’t tell by looking. You can’t see the effort, the past, the obstacles. Maybe they’re overjoyed to be 150lbs overweight because two years ago they were 300lbs overweight. Maybe they’ve looked exactly the same in the year they’ve been at your gym because their hard work is keeping them on top of a condition that’s working overtime to make them even skinnier or fatter; for a lot of people, staying right where they are is success beyond your wildest dreams. Maybe they’re achieving different results than the ones you think they’re going for. Maybe it took them six months to steel themselves to walk into a gym at all; you have no idea what led to that fear or what it took to overcome it, or maybe what it still takes to overcome it on a daily basis.

Your own definition of effort is not everybody’s.

Your own definition of success is not everybody’s.

Original Source

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

gonna try this soon

There are also two flat screens set up with old school video game emulators, meaning you can play Sega Genesis games with your dinner partner while waiting for food.

Original Source

Local shelters say they are forced to euthanize about 70 percent of the dogs that are brought in, and their facilities are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of abandoned and stray animals.

10 rules for writers

San Francisco Chronicle

Amid pending court battles, New Mexico county begins issuing same-sex ... Washington Post LAS CRUCES, N.M. — Linda Montoya asked her partner to get married when they were vacationing in Hawaii in 2008, but said Catherine Martinez refused. It was not that after 23 years together this New Mexico woman did not want to spend the rest of her life ... County in NM issues same-sex marriage licensesSan Francisco Chronicle County Clerk in New Mexico Issues Marriage Licenses to Same-Sex CouplesNew York Times NM County Issues Same-Sex Marriage LicensesABC News Houston Chronicle all 129 news articles »

It seems that the coffee revolution has failed to sway most Americans from their habits.

the-ankle-rocker:

The Apollo “Blue Box” for the Atari 2600:

Apollo was another company that had a style of packaging all their own and it was completely rad. Their logo is so simple and elegant yet it grabs your attention right away. And the art was perfect for sparking the imagination. Which… let’s face it, you needed a bit of when dealing with the 2600’s visuals. That was half the wonder behind it all in my opinion though. 

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First time accepted submitter Kevin Lee writes "The maker scene is taking off in Oakland with towering industrial art, that at times stands 70 feet high, and DIY business that made locally created goods by hand. But while this is a flourishing creative environment is popping off with new ideas, there's a battle in Oakland that could pave over this rich community with new residential housing. The Oakland Makers is a new initiative by artists and makers that hopes revitalize Oakland as a new advanced manufacturing hub and city that thrives on the making culture."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

So you heard a great joke at the pub last night but don’t remember the punchline. Was it was a priest or a lumberjack who walked into a bar with a three-legged okapi? Fret no more, because a Cincinnati-based company wants to produce a solution to the problem of lousy memories. No, it’s not a notebook. It’s an always-on audio-recording wristband called Kapture, and it will go live on Kickstarter on next month.

Here’s how it works: The device is always on but stores no more than the last 60 seconds of sound, in much the same way that many CCTV cameras overwrite their recordings after a set period. The point is not to have an exhaustive record of every sound ever encountered (which if you live in urban areas would consist largely of traffic and sirens) but to preserve something immediately after the fact.

What might such a device be used for, other than bar humor? Kapture’s founders suggest several occasions on which it might come in handy:

• The reaction of a child experiencing something for the first time
• The unexpected interactions of daily life
• A humorous anecdote from your family reunion
• The birth of an inside joke with friends
• A solitary epiphany during your drive home

Whether most people talk to themselves while driving, and whether what seemed so amusing at the family reunion remains funny months later, are debatable. But there are believers. Kapture has already raised $300,000 in seed funding. The co-founders hope to raise another $150,000 on Kickstarter to take the device from prototype to production. That is a modest goal by Kickstarter’s standards, and there are probably enough people who like the idea.

“Wearable tech has really come on to the scene recently thanks to the increased compatibility with smartphones and other electronics devices. It’s time to start taking notice,” Kapture’s co-founder Matthew Dooley wrote this week. The technology speaks to a larger trend. Along with the Google Glass face-mounted camera and Dropcam’s ever-streaming wireless webcam, Kapture’s “fashionable” wristband with “a retro-inspired sound grill” brings us ever closer to a society of always-on peer-to-peer surveillance.

perdiddle:

lipstick-and-lightsabers:

denism79.deviantart.com

If Star Wars were a 1980’s High School movie.

180 Billion Candles, Pretty in Dura-Armor, St. Alderaan’s Fire, The Oolas, Fast Times at Jabba’s Palace, Can’t Buy My Ship, Some Kind of Lost, Just One of the Stormtroopers, Back to the Cantina, The Outrimmers, Teen Jedi, Hapan Princess.. 

An anonymous reader writes "Die Zeit has access to leaked documents from the German government warning that Windows 8 is an unacceptable security risk for sensitive workloads. The story is written in German here, but automatic translators (such as Google Translate) do a readable job. Particularly of concern is the inability to opt out of TPM 2.0 usage."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York Times

Obama Says Law School Should Be Two, Not Three, Years New York Times President Obama's suggestion at Binghamton University in New York will most likely be controversial. " Mike Groll/Associated PressPresident Obama's suggestion, made at Binghamton University in New York, will most likely be controversial. “I am in my ... Fracking foes use national spotlightAlbany Times Union Obama touts higher education plan in ScrantonPittsburgh Post Gazette Richard Vedder: The Real Reason College Costs So MuchWall Street Journal FOX43.com -Buffalo News -USA TODAY all 782 news articles »

Archie Co-CEO Nancy Silberkleit claims she was harassed by her liaison to company. A detailed look at Marvel v. Kirby heirs! Tampa Bay Comic Con expects 20,000 attendees! Plus much more!

publicizing important questions about the state of British democracy.