The Left Coast Biased

Let's be honest. Break-ups are unpleasant. Relationships by nature don't end well; if things were that amicable between the two of you then things wouldn't have ended in the first place. This, however, is not the travesty that popular teen magazines and soap operas would make it out to be. Too many of us shy away from sensational experiences, even good ones, out of fear or a lack of imagination. To shelve a philosophical conversation for a later date, let me just assert that the experience of real, intense emotion is one of the most rare and valuable experiences granted to those of us on this mortal coil and should be treasured, regardless of the polarity of the experience. So with no further ado, here are some tips to help you maximize the emotional experience of your next break up, both for yourself and everyone around you:

Engage Emotionally in the Relationship

This is the first and scariest necessity for having an absolute screamer of a break-up. It is difficult to give yourself over emotionally to another person, but without you investing the trust and vulnerability into the relationship your partner will not give themselves over to it, which will result in a relationship that neither one of you really cares about. That means neither one of you will really be that upset when it ends. Here is some advice for taking steps to engage yourself emotionally in a relationship:

• Imagine a life filled with all of the things that you like about your partner. Picture yourself living that life and try to mentally equate that image to living with the other person.
• Share experiences with them that you have never had before and enjoy, because then that feeling of joy will forever be psychologically tied to that person (e.g. - your first kiss, first marriage, first monster truck rally...)
• Give them gifts that you really want to keep for yourself, as this will tie you emotionally to this item which will transfer to the person you gave it to ( e.g. - jewelry, poems that you wrote, or the Liverpool scarf that you bought the first time you went overseas)

Get it Right the First Time (in person)

Nothing is more annoying to your loved ones than having to hear all about your break-up with John Soandso for the eighth time this year. The First Time is a seminal experience that evokes sympathy and pity and in some cases retributive anger. Every time after that your cousin, sister, best friend, or rebound guy is going to be bored with the same story and annoyed at your stupidity for falling into the same story when everyone already knew how this one ends.

In a related note, cowboy up and do the deed in person. We live in a time when you can have entire relationships via IM, text, email, etc., in fact several websites make quite a lot of money based precisely upon that proposition, but if you really want to dig into the emotional landmark that is the break up, put yourself in a chair and say it to their face, even if it is the only time in the relationship when you actually meet face to face. If you can get her to scream at you amidst a crowded coffee shop that you were the worst thing that ever happened to her and she wishes that she had never met you, all the better, but more on that to come.

The guideline of getting it right the first time is the one that comes with the biggest caveat, which is this: if you are going to put everyone around you through the sequel of an already tired story then you better step up the quality, the way that Chronicles of Riddick seriously upped the ante on Pitch Black. The best way to do that is to have a relatively tame initial break up and then incorporate one or more of the following tips into the subsequent iterations. to be clear, though, our recommendation is still that you go for gold and get it all in the first time around. The counter argument to this theory is that if you can get the same person to lower all their considerable emotional defenses after crushing them a first time then the fallout is so much greater as to be worth the redundancies. I think we have made our position clear, but the final choice is up to you.

Involve as Many Other People as Possible

This is the Multiplication Theory of Emotional Distress, expounded in several famous maxims. C.S. Lewis put a positive spin on the theory when he claimed that a joy was not complete until you shared or explained it to someone else, as teenage girls around the world have since proved, ad nauseum. The negative corollary is that misery loves company.

The most straightforward means of accomplishing this, and the least rewarding is to simply bitch to all your friends incessantly for the four months immediately following the break up. A much more satisfying modus operandi is to actually force your loved ones into having an emotional stake of their own in the relationship. The most productive means of accomplishing this are as follows:

• Tightly intertwine your social circles so that in the aftermath you get to enjoy the debacle of sorting out which friends go with whom. I would suggest an arbitrary system of division, such as lining them up tallest to shortest and assigning them to alternate teams like when you would divide up teams for the elementerary tether ball tournaments.
  
• Spend a lot of time with each respective family. This will ensure that every time that you show up at a family gathering, after the requisite integration about your current love life you will get the "You never should have let go of that one girl. What was her name? She was so nice" In addition to this, if the significant other's family happens to be a major player in any noteworthy field of work then you can ensure yourself reduced employment opportunities for the rest of your life.
• The hands down best method of maximizing the emotional trauma is to procreate, because then you get a permanent physical reminder of what a terrible decision dating this person in the first place was. The emotion fallout has the potential to reverberate for decades if the guy turns out to be a complete douche bag who would rather waste his life playing World of Warcraft than getting up off his pathetic ass to get a job and support his child, resulting in an abandonment where he doesn't even have the stones to run away from the problem, he just lounges about in impotent laziness waiting for a deity or his parents to take care of the problem (as he sees the child) for him. Needless to say this can also get complete strangers emotionally engaged in your break up as a bonus.

Move on as Quickly as Possible

Unlike the rest of these points, this one really works only if one of you follows it. If you both move on then it completely nullifies any possible trauma, kind of indicating that the initial relationship never really meant anything after all. I mean, just like every other aspect of life we can take our cue from Hollywood here. How much less interesting would Brad and Jennifer's break up be if they both would have immediately moved on to a ridiculously happy, popular and procreative (both physiologically and professionally) relationship? instead we get to deal with Jennifer's jealousy, inadequacy, and insecurities for the next 5 years. This is so very much more emotionally ripe than an immediate recovery on both ends.

For maximum emotional damage try to overlap the rebound relationship with the current relationship. This will heighten the feelings of worthlessness on their part and betrayal on yours. These feelings can be further amplified if the subsequent relationship is a mutual acquaintance, or better yet friend, of the both of you. Then the former future Mrs. Soandso can be reminded of her failure every time she sees the two of you at the frequent shared social engagements, and whenever another mutual friend mentions either one of you. If you really want to salt the wound, switch gender preferences altogether. "My girlfriend left me for another guy" - painful. "Because I am such an incompetent representation of the entire gender, my girlfriend has given up on men altogether" - debilitating.

Go for Glory

This is the final, and easily the most critical, of the tips we have for getting the most emotional mileage out of your break up. go for the movie scene quality moment. Look for a story, experience, anecdote, line, or moment that embodies all of the frustrations and excitements of the relationship and its ending. Rehearse this moment over and again so you can share it with ease. be sure that it is a moment that forces the conflict on the listener: make them confront their desire to cheer you on and despise you at the same time. The essence of any break up is the polarizing nature of the two viewpoints. Yours should be an example which allows the listener the opportunity to engage in both sides of the issue. this will enable you to continue telling the story and stretching and spreading the emotional distress of the break up for years and years. Here are some examples of types of moments to look for:

• The public disturbance: the bigger the better. Everyone can share in the monstrosity that is a person screaming obscenities in a Starbucks at the top of their lungs, and the more of your friends that are there for the moment, the more of a group experience the storytelling actually becomes.
• In a related note, the more physical, the better: if you can incite her to attack you, running screaming across the room in a Braveheart charge, threatening the kind of physical violence that can only be responded to by a side volley into the wall, a threat of immenent death and her arrest, then you have succesfully birthed a story of infinite retale value.
  
• The epic one liner. Scene: she stands crying in the rain, clinging to you, going on about how she knows it won't change anything but she just wants to hold on to every last moment she can have with you and you grab her, hold her at arm's length and say, "Shh. Stop it. You're embarassing yourself." And you turn and walk away without looking back. This is the kind of moment that lives on in retelling.

Addendum 1 (the Disclaimer): All the illustrations above are drawn from real life, solely for the purpose of entertaining, not for that of wounding the participants, with the exception of the jibe at the douche bag abandoning his child. You are a Captian of douche bags and deserve to be wounded, emotionally and physically, but if an obscure henchman-looking individual should accost you in an alley and beat you within an inch of your life in the near future, then I would like to state for the record that said individual is not known to me, nor did I procure the entirely illicit services of said individual, and niether do I condone such behavior. The poison oak sent to your hospital room? That was me.

Addendum 2: If, in the event that you are a coward, and you would like to have as painless of a break up as possible simply pursue the inverse of the steps listed above, though whether you could really call it a relationship if you did not engage emotionally, didn't introduce them to your family and friends, and come out without a single story of note is an entirely different story. You would have to take that up with my high school 'Girlfriend'.

Addendum 3: This post was brought to you by Coheed and Cambria, and by GENESIS, an excellent 2004 Merlot by Hogue Cellars out of Washington state.

Labels: personal, relationships

In 1990 the two best players in the World were Lothar Matthaus and Diego Maradona. In the ’90 World Cup West Germany, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia all advanced to the quarter finals, with With Germany taking home the cup. International superstars David Beckham and Ronaldo had yet to make their entrance on the senior stage, but a young Welshman named Ryan Giggs made was introduced to the world in his debut for Manchester United.

In the 19 years that have passed since then, Matthaus and Maradona have either faded into obscurity or flamed into infamy. West Germany, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia no longer exist, and Beckham and Ronaldo are languishing on mediocre teams in second or third tier leagues. Giggs, on the other hand, is still starting for arguably the best team on the planet and is on the short list for the World Player of the Year.

The chips are stacked against a player being able to play at a high level for this long, now more than ever. The game is faster, the players are larger and more athletic, top players will end up playing many more games over the course of a season, what with international duty, the league cup, charity tournaments and European competitions, as Giggs has turned in over 800 senior level appearances, almost 200 more than another famous Welshman Ian Rush and his renowned mustache, and all of Giggs’ have been at the highest level. Rush, whose senior career spanned two more years than Giggs’ has to date, included spells at such illustrious clubs as Chester City, Wrexham, and Sydney Olympic.

In addition to growing into perhaps the finest left winger in the history of the game with his tremendous work rate, technical ability and raw speed, Giggs has also spent the last 19 years gathering more awards and honors than another player in United history. This last year he has smoothly transitioned from the position he has practically defined out on the wing to a central role directing the attack from behind the strikers. In fact, just about the only thing that Ryan Giggs hasn’t done is answer the question of why some players age with such grace and others, and the list is long, disappear behind the haze of injury, revelry, and most inevitably, age itself (see: Michael Owen, Ronaldinho, and Alan Shearer).

On behalf of the footballing public, I would like to offer thanks to Ryan Giggs for all that he has done for the sport, for his selfless loyalty to his club, for his dazzling runs down the wing, for never making headlines for off the field antics, and for giving the rest of us a reason to watch United, despite however we may feel towards the team on the whole. Thank you, Ryan Giggs. It has been a pleasure.

Labels: sports

There is a famous saying of Aristotle which I'll paraphrase: call no life successful until it is over. The idea is that you cannot fully appreciate a life until it is complete, and you can look at the whole thing. Standing here at the end of my grandfather's life, I know that every person in this room, all of his beloved brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, and his children and grandchildren have all had the same the same thought about this life, which we all express in different ways. I have heard it a thousand different ways over these last weeks: I hope in I have the kind of life that he had. He led a full life. He was ready. He was so proud of his family. This is what I think Aristotle had in mind when he thought about a successful life.
Our grandfather was the kind of man that when he decided to do something, he did it with a passion and excellence that had left him no option but success. When he decided to serve his country he gave them everything that he had and it was recognized with the list of awards sitting here before you. He decided to have a family. I think the evaluation of how he and my grandmother did on that score can be measured in my cousins, and my siblings. They did such a tremendous job with their children that those kids could not help but raise a terrific collection of grandchildren, which brought a shine to grandpa's eye that I swear could have lit this whole room whenever he thought about his grand kids. Which is a direct reflection on the job he and my grandmother did, and as he sat there in the hospital last week this is the thought that he kept coming back to, thinking about his kids and his grand kids, as he'd say to my grandma, "I did good, didn't I?" To which she'd respond, "Well, I think I helped."
We loved watching the two of them together. I don't want to go on to long, I'll let us go so we can all go tell more stories about him to each other, but what we always admired the most about my grandfather was the complete, passionate and absolutely shameless love that he had for my grandmother. He decided to love a woman, and just like he did with every other part of his life, he did it with such energy and excellence that it was an absolute joy to witness. My grandfather didn't have any regrets at the end of his life, because when he put his mind to something, he did it, and well. This is what a great life looks like.
We should be so blessed as to live as he lived, to love as he loved, and to be loved as he has and will continue to be loved. We all should be so blessed.

This was supposed to be finished and posted last night, but due to artistic differences with my editor we couldn't get it out before the release of the selections. As a result, there will be a short addendum at the end addressing the selection.



First and foremost, I would like to relate that the illustrious and
redoubtable Bill Simmons , that paragon of virtue and humor, the height
of internet sports writing, has made it very clear that he has never
been to our blog, that he has no intention of going to our blog, that
he has been writing his stories such as the Super Bowl Diary for over a
decade, that he would not deign steal such puerile and trivial ideas as
may be portrayed in such a blog, and that the suggestion that any of
the above should not be the case is neither absurdly humorous, nor
grounds for interrupting his precious work hours with a facetious email
in that vein. I would at this point apologize, but given his avowal of
non-readership it would seem to be supererogatory. Plus, I seem to have
gotten my tongue stuck in my cheek. On to the thoughts of the hour.



The University of Arizona's basketball program sits balanced on the edge of a quarter. Quarter? As in 25? As in consecutive tournament appearances? Just wanted to make sure everyone at home was playing along. For the last few years the program has been mired in mediocrity, making headlines only when a coach got divorced, had a stroke, was announced as the successor, was fired from being the successor, retired, came out of retirement or was filmed naked running through the campus. Ok, maybe that last one didn't happen. In any event, almost all of the news coming from Tucson has been underscoring the demise of a truly great basketball program. I have already gone over what that feels like for us fans, here. One of the things that I think is sad about this slow and painful descent into obscurity is that we forget exactly how great the Wildcats have been.



So I bundled up in my favorite UA sweats and forayed into the World Wide Web to quantify our greatness. 600 wins over the 24 seasons, more than UCLA, less than Duke... Why doesn't UNLV have their record posted anywhere in the whole of the internet? 14 All-Americans, more than UNLV and UCLA added together, double what UConn had... How did both Richard Jefferson and Gilbert Arenas not make even a third team? Only the one title... Blast it all, this confounded interweb is like the mother of all haystacks and I'm trying to find a whole bunch of needles to compare thier lengths. Why couldn't someone just bundle all the information I'm looking for together in a neat and tidy package?



Oh wait, they did. ESPN has given us an accounting of the relative brilliance of all of college basketball by counting down the most prestigious programs in the country since the 84-85 season. They picked that year because it was the first season that the NCAA tournament field expanded to 64 teams, but by happy coincidence it is also the year that the Wildcats began their Streak of tournament appearances. Behind such gaudy numbers as 21 conference titles, 22 20-win seasons, 24 NCAA berths (the only school to make it every year since the expansion), 5 No. 1 seeds, 11 Sweet 16s, 4 Final Fours, 1997 national title, 39 NCAA tourney wins,
14 All-Americans, 7 NBA top-10 picks, with 0 losing seasons ESPN rates UA as the 5th most prestigious school in the country. Ahhh, that's about right. We are far enough behind Kentucky that even if the refferees weren't wearing Devil Blue in '01 and if the '05 Elite Eight game had been played on a nuetral court we would still be sitting at 5.

While such hypoteticals as exactly how much Duke boosters paid the referees, or how many generations of their descendents were promised tuition waivers, are academic and fruitless, There are some hypothetical conversations that serve to nurture the memory of these great teams, of all of those years that everyone in Tucson eagerly awaited the printing of the brackets every March so they could write ARIZONA in the center box and then fill out the rest of the minutiae. I had one such conversation while sitting in a bar with a friend of mine over a year ago. The gist of the conversation was a spin on the classic question of which of these teams was 'The Best' to wear the red and blue, but more particularly, in a single elimination tournament which team would win, as head to head is always the standard for true comparison. How would the the brilliant backcourt of the '97 team fare against the size we brought to the court in '03? The buddy I was having this conversation with happened to be with one Steve Rivera, sports writer for the now defunct Tucson Citizen paper. He put the idea together in a brilliant, interactive online article which everyone enjoyed and for reasons that escape me is no longer on their website. Kinda like the way that Fox cancels only their most popular shows. Given that I can't redirect you to his more thouroughly researched and professoinally written article, I am going to attempt to not recreate it, but rather creat it anew here for you, in the spirit of celebrating the fading light of the Wildcats as we stand on the brink of the end of an era, with Selection Sunday looming ominously on the morrow.

The seeding of this Streak Tourney was established first by NCAA finish, making the '97 team the first overall seed, and then by record making the '87 team the bottom 6 seed. as 24 doesn't break as evenly into a tournament bracket as you might hope, 1 and 2 seeds got a first round bye, with 3-6 and 4-5 being the opening matchups. We will deal with the line up that played in the most games, so Gilbert Arenas would be in for the '01 team, but Steve Kerr would still be out for the team in '87 after blowing his knee in the summer. So, with no further ado:


1 Seeds -

1997 - The team that failed to string together 6 consecutive victories all year burned through the tournament, famously being the only team in the tournament's history to best three 1 seeds en route to the title. Mike Bibby and Miles Simon, All-Americans and future NBA and Euroleague stars, respectively, featured prominently in the team's success, and Michael Dickerson led the scoring, averaging almost 19 points a game.

2001 - We got robbed. I refuse to accept anything other than horrendous bribing, blackmail, or dark satanic magic as the explanation for the officiating in the final 3 minutes of this game. This is the roster we put on the court that year: Loren Woods (All-American), Richard Jefferson (NBA All-Star), Gilbert Arenas (NBA All-Star), Michael Wright (All-American), Jason Gardener (All-American), with future All-American and likely NBA champion Luke Walton coming off the bench.

1988 - The class that thrust the Wildcats into the national conversation for the next 20 years built around Sean Elliott, with a supporting cast that included future NBA players Steve Kerr and Tom Tolbert, breaking the 30 win mark for the first time in program history.

1994 - Before becoming NBA Rookie of the Year Damon Stoudamire and All-American Khalid Reeves highlighted the second team from Tucson to make it to the Final Four.


2 Seeds -


2005 - The last great Wildcat team featuring Salim Stoudamire and Channing Frye broke the 30 win mark and played in one of the most painful games in UA sports history. Would have been a great game against UNC for the championship had this game been played anywhere outside of the state of Illinois.

1998 - Mike Bibby returned to lead the Cats to thier 2nd 30 win season and a 1 seed in the tournament before getting bounced in the Eilite Eight.

2003 - On the back of the Tucson Citizen there was a full page color photo of All-Americans Walton and Gardner with fellow senior Rick Anderson lounging in the back of a convertible under a caption reading big and bold: NATIONAL TITLE OR BUST. Kirk Heinrich's block of Gardner's three point attempt in the last seconds of the Elite Eight matchup with Kansas meant bust.

1989 - In his senior year, sans Kerr, Elliott won the Wooden Award for being the nation's best player, taking the Wildcats with him to the Sweet Sixteen.


ROUND 1 -


(3) 1991 v (6) 1987 - With Kerr out for the year, a young Elliott and the only tourney team of Lute's to not make it to 20 wins face Brian Williams, Sean Rooks and Chris Mills.

(4) 1990 v (5) 1999 - This iteration of the Williams/Rooks combo take on a senior All-American Jason Terry accompanied by Michael Dickerson and a young Jefferson.

(3) 2002 v (6) 2006 - Following the devastating crash of the Illinois game in '05 and the loss of Frye and Stoudamire to the NBA, Hassan Adams leads a young team against the equally draft drained core of Walton, Gardener and Anderson.

(4) 1995 v (5) 2007 - Lute's final team with Chase Budinger and Marcus Williams (affectionately known as the Cancer) meet senior All-American and Pac10 Player of the Year Damon Stoudamire.

(3) 2000 v (6) 2004 - Andre Igoudala and Hassan Adams spent most of the year fighting for who would be higher on Sports Center's Top 10, and with Stoudamire and Frye learning the inside out game the '04 Cats go up against Arenas, Jefferson, Wright and Woods in a match up of two of the most athletic teams we have seen come through Tucson.

(4) 1993 v (5) 1985 - Lute's first Pac10 title saw the welcoming of a young man named Sean Elliott to McHale, joining Tolbert and Kerr here to challenge Stoudamire, Reeves, and Mills.

(3) 1996 v (6) 2008 - Kevin O'Neil's lone entry into the foray featuring freshman sensation Jarryd Bayless and an unrefined Jordan Hill take on freshman Jason Terry and Miles Simon.

(4) 1986 v (5) 1992 - Elliott, Kerr and Tolbert win Lute his first conference title and here meet up with Rooks, Mills and Reeves as a freshman.





So that's the first round. Who do you like? Leave your picks in the comments, and check back to see how the tourney goes. Here are my 3 quick thoughts on this year's tournament selection:

1- We earned it, with wins over quality teams like Gonzaga, Kansas, Washington, and UCLA to put us over the edge.

2- As long as we let you put us in, you put us in. To break the Streak we have to make it definitive, like UNC did by going 8-20 in '02, or when Duke went 13-18 in '95, or when Kansas went on probation in '89, or when Kentucky went 13-19 before their 2 year probation from '90-92. And yes, I did just call out the 4 programs ranked higher than us according to ESPN.

3- Here is your 12-5 upset, all wrapped up in a neat little bow. Don't say I never gave you anything.

Labels: sports

First of all, for all of you who had any doubts, the movie was fantastic. Not a kids movie, by any stretch of the imagination, but fantastic. I encourage all of you to go see it as soon as you have finished reading the comic, this weekend. Don't get caught up trying to find inconsistencies, and just enjoy the movie. And the comic.

All of the midnight showings here in Tucson sold out, which is perfectly appropriate. If this movie does even half of Spiderman's opening weekend then it will be a testament, in this economy, of the greatness of this movie. Especially given that Spidey opened on a Wednesday and Watchmen respectfully opened on the traditional Friday. I can not encourage you strongly enough to go see this movie. And when you do, I pray your experience does not immitate the following:

We get there, fortunate to secure seats together because the courtesy of squeezing to the middle during a sold out movie does not seem to overcome to unwillingness to sit in the seat directly adjacent to a total stranger. The previews took a while to get started as the highly skilled and probably not at all impaired laborer running tprogector needed seven tries to get the sound, screen alignment and focus all working simultaneously. Which makes sense, because if you have a movie that is selling out, a completely common occurance these days, you would want to make sure your least competant employees are in charge of that sort of thing. Can any of you even remember the last movie you went to see that was completely sold out? Lord of the Rings? Way to put your best foot forward El Con. I am totally not going to go the Foothills theater for the next movie I am excited about seeing.

On the bright side, when the previews did get running they were in danger of batting a thousand until they threw the newer and dumber Seth Rogan movie in at the end. Public Enemies, the John Dillinger story with Depp and Bale, Star Trek, which looks great despite J.J. Abrams' involvement, Xmen Origins: Wolrverine where we finally get Gambit, Bale in Terminator: Salvation, and the Hangover which looks like we might actually get the Vegas movie we always wanted, and Pixar's UP, having finally seen a preview thatconvinced me to go see it. Well done there. That's how we get people back into the theaters.

Another pleasure in going to the midnight release is the joy of sharing a theater with all the super cool kids who pregame at the bar and then are incapable of following the plot so ask questions to each other loudly during the course of the movie, offering a pleasing running commentary that helps keep the rest of us engaged. Then there were the two Rhodes Scholars who couldn't find their seats so seated themselves on the step next to me and proceeded to make phone calls during the movie until passing out in the ailse. Literally.

None of that was enough to overshadow the film, which was everything I could hope it would be. Let me know what you think.

*This post was sent from my Blackberry Mobile device.

Labels: Movies

Here is the update on our Biggest Loser Coaches Challenge. I began the competition at 210 pounds with a 27% body fat percentage. At our half way point I am Now 190 pounds with a 19.5% body fat percentage. The math on that works out like so: 27% of my 210 pounds was fat, which is about 57 pounds of fat; currently 19.5% of 190 pounds is fat, which is about 37 pounds of fat. That means that in four weeks I lost 20 pounds, all of which was fat. Kind of like this guy. I am going to tell you what I did, so you can have the fun of losing too!! Sorry, I was reading one of those self help books, and they always get real excitable. But I am going to tell you.

On the dietary front I kept things pretty simple, followed a few simple rules which are not earth shattering. It was easy to keep, so easy in fact that for the next month I am going to ratchet up the strictness of the diet to see if I can be more efficient about losing. These are the rules:

1 – Don’t be American. By this I mean get rid of the steak and potatoes and your hard earned beer. Red meat is loaded with saturated fat, having 20 times that of a chicken breast. In addition to that the grains they feed cows lead to a higher, hidden caloric/carb content and sucking down the antibiotic cesspool they toss in to keep them from exploding cannot be all that good for you. The potatoes are a fast carb that that is harder to use in exercise, turning more easily into fat. There are potatoes that when eaten with their skins provide a slow burning carb, but I generally don’t pay attention to my potato types, so I just got rid of them. Which was hard for me, as I would eat potatoes for every single meal if I could. I also threw out these All American foods: mayo, white bread, and any breading that you fry. Seriously, it is just an already sketchy food that is used to soak up fat, directly. What are we doing eating it anyway? Why not just get a high fructose I.V.? This is easier than it might seem at first. Almost any real restaurant has a chicken and veggies, or fish option. And whole grain bread is easy to find, and in my opinion tastier anyway. Alcohol of any sort by nature is an empty calorie, as in your body will not use it. I’ve heard rumor that red wine has some fat burning qualities, but not from anyone with letters after their name.

2 – Eat more. Don’t skip meals. I know that at this point it is no great secret that having six to eight meals a day is a better food processing system than doing the one meal a day plan, but it always struck me as kind of annoying. I don’t always have the kind of schedule that allows me to eat that often. This was the one more difficult aspect of the plan, but I managed by convincing myself that things like smoothies, a handful of almonds, or a sizable piece of fruit counted as a meal. I’d go to work after breakfast with some almonds, a turkey sandwich, and a banana and bingo. Three meals down. And skipping meals can either lead you to over snacking, which isn’t a real big issue if you snack the right way, or it can trick your body into starvation mode which will lead to a counterproductive storage of fat.

3 – Take a night off. When I was settling myself into this challenge I was taking advice from any number of sources. I was standing on my head for 5 minutes a day, bathing in salt water, eating only raw meat… Well, while I decided to limit my sources of advice, one thing that kept popping up is the benefit of giving yourself a night off, relaxing and eating and drinking as you like. I have heard plenty of reasons for this that are sometimes scientific, sometimes ephemeral, sometimes metaphorical, and in one case ecumenical, but I think the brunt of it comes down to most of us just not being able to deprive ourselves on a truly dedicated basis. With which I agree. At the end of the week I want to sit down with my friends and enjoy a taste beverage or 12. So I took a night off.

That really is about it. I did exercise, but I don’t really like running, so I didn’t do much of that. I worked out at a gym 4 days a week, doing ridiculously light weights, as in the kind that get girls looking at you sideways because you are lifting less than they are, and did 3 sets of 20 reps for everything. That means that I would lift the weight 20 times, take a 30 second break, and then repeat twice for those of you not fluent in gymgeek. The point of this was to be burning more weight while not putting on the pounds or bulk that comes with muscle. Which has worked out fairly well.

Which brings me to Phase 2. I have currently 37 pounds of fat hanging on my frame. That means that if I jack up the number and intensity of my workouts, and buckle down on the diet, I should have plenty of fat left to work with. My ambition is to cut another 20 pounds of fat in the next month, which would leave me at 170, with 10% body fat. I promise to let you know how it goes. For any of you who took up my challenge a month ago, I am currently winning our coaches challenge, so whomsoever of our readership wins the readers challenge will have our prize money to give away to a charity of their choosing. Best of luck!!

I didn’t read comic books as a child. Chalk it up as a number of things that I didn’t really do that seem to be a bit out of the norm. I didn’t go to many movies, or watch TV, play video games, listen to music… My idle recreational pursuits we limited to petty acts of violence, burning, breaking, blowing up and killing just about whatever I could get my hands on. I balanced this latent sociopathy with a heavy diet of the written word. Given that I grew up in that now archaic age before the profusion of cell phones to any 10 year old with opposable thumbs, that Dark Age before the glorious wings of the internet lifted us all up into shared illumination this meant that I read actual books. For those of you unfamiliar with the media a book is a collection of paper covered with words on each side and bound together at one end. This bound end is called the spine, as it is usually hardened by the glue or the stitching that is holding the paper together. The individual pieces of paper are called pages and are protected by a thicker piece of paper, sometimes a piece of leather, which is called a cover. The height of popular book making as an art form was reached toward the end of the 1800’s where the stitched spine was covered leather with the title embossed in gold leaf, and the front and back covers a piece of marbleized wood with leather again protecting the corners and all the pages were trimmed in gold leaf. You can see some of these marvelous books if you watch period pieces like Pride and Prejudice. Or you can Google it. Since then we have economized our books into paltry things that are printed on cheap paper and bound together with whichever glue is cheapest at the moment, scarcely worth reading let alone keeping in a prominent position in your house. All the better, though, as it creates more room for your DVD collection.

As I was saying, I did not read comic books as a child. While my peers were enjoying the wonders of Superman, Spawn, the X-Men and the like I was burning through every western ever written, Hopalong Cassidy, the Sackets, Zane Grey, Max Brand… You name it, I read it. Middle school saw the introduction of Tolkien and the marvelous world of all things scientific and fantastic. Intermittent sprinklings of historical texts popped up and then it was everything Shakespeare which led into the romantic poets and so on. I disdained comics as juvenile. The point of reading was the writing, not some goofy pictures of scantily clad women who were serving as much as anything else to ease the sexual tension of pre-adolescence, post-adolescence, and all those beautiful years in between.

A series of interactions, none of which had to do with the scantily clad women, opened my eyes to the value of comics as a legitimate genre of literature. The first of these was a graphic novel by Craig Thompson called Blankets. I am not being a nerdy elitist, well I guess I am, but not about calling it a graphic novel instead of a comic. There is a difference. The same way that there is a difference between Saturday morning cartoons and Toy Story. So when reading this graphic novel I was struck by the depth of the story, the occasionally florid prose and the constantly florid drawings. I went out and bought his next book, which was a graphic diary of his trip to Morocco. I was hooked. I started reading all sorts of comics and graphic novels and quickly discerned that the ratio of quality to drivel in the genre was much the same as in literature in general. For every Tolkien you have to suffer through Harry Potter, Twilight, Dragonlance, and the rest. For every Robert Bolano you have to put up with Grisham, Clancy, King, and on down the list.

Just as I was beginning to despair I ran into two authors who saved comics for me. The First was Neil Gaiman, in the Sandman series. The stories of the God of Dreams, and his travails conveyed so much of the power of dreaming, of hope, of stories that it carried me away, bringing me into their world in a way that only literature had ever been able to. The second was Frank Miller, but not the Miller of 300, and Sin City. His graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns was a landmark of emotional commitment for me. If you have ever idly wondered what happens when Batman fights Superman, one of the possible answers is put forth here. Better is the question of why would they fight. After this I more frequently came across the quality work, the Alan Moore, Brian Bendis, and I realized why they had managed to cross the line from sheer pulp to literature.

I know that comics are becoming trendy and cool in pop culture. I mean, there was an entire plot arc of the now defunct OC given over to the creation of a graphic novel. I would caution you against letting that color your opinion of the genre. As one who regularly dismisses things for no reason other than that they are popular, I understand the desire completely. But you would be missing out on one of the most creative and versatile means of literature our society as come up with.

Joseph Campbell has a theory that every hero’s story is the same story, that it goes through the same path, the same challenges, to the same end. Each new hero is but his particular society’s understanding of a different face of this same hero. Comics have been the face of that hero through the development of America’s modernity. We don’t have a predominant religion, mythology, no meta-narrative that we carry with us. We are too broad, too diverse for any common story. So we have born a thousand smaller stories, our own American mythology. For those of you who have never deigned lift a comic, here is a list of the cream of the crop. Most of them are available in a single collected form, but you can get them in the original single issues if you prefer, but please. Read the comic. Don’t let a movie maker steal your right to enjoy your own mythos.

- Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. For reasons listed above, and the fact that one of the true modern instantiations of the ancient hallowed vocation of the storyteller expresses himself best in this media.



- Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Moore does the best job of anyone in the business of letting the superheroes be human, have doubts and conflictions. Before going to see the movie, read this epic retake on the classic American superhero.







- Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. For the reasons above, and because Miller’s vision of Batman is the foundation for the rebuilding of the Batman movie series. And because, seriously, Batman fights Superman.





- The Death of Superman. For all the obvious reasons. Because people would stalk the writers threatening to kill them if they didn’t bring him back. Because The death of the hero is the most central fulcrum of the plot of the hero. Because it isn’t just a clever name.





Now I am not saying that any of these make it into the Canon, the sacred collection of texts that are an imperative read for their quality and importance. Tolkien alone of the fantasy genre has made it in, over the frequent and vehement objections of the literati. Eventually the art form might produce a work that will be granted admittance to that hallowed hall, but for now, it is at least in the yard. If not knocking at the door.