Bear f*#%ing Grylls at work

My dearest beloved Pushupyogi readers,

I came in to work this morning, and found this staring right back at me.



For those of you who don't know what this is about, I freaking LOATHE Bear f*#%ing Grylls. There is evidence of this deep-seated hatred in this blog post, and this one. So I find this little gift, strategically placed, first thing on a fine spring morning, especially diabolical.

And for the one amongst you who went through the pains of obtaining a giant autographed poster of Bear f*#%ing Grylls staring right back at me with his mud-spattered mug (strategically placed by make-up artists, no doubt) and his shit-eating grimace, and then steal into my workplace first thing in the morning to adorn my desk with it, I just have one thing to tell you.

Marry me. We are truly kindred spirits. :) :) :)

Rihanna's gun tattoo - your moment of Zen

The economy is tanking, GM and Chrysler are probably going to go bankrupt, global warming predictions get more dire by the minute, but this is something we absolutely HAVE to spend time talking about. At 3:55 long, its a long moment, but the thing about Zen-like moments is that they make time irrelevant. Especially when there's a big fat white tattoo artist called Bang-Bang around...

Almond Butter tastes like ass

So, some of you may have already read, I've been trying to eat raw these days. Not all three meals, because I don't have enough discipline and I love cooked food too much to give it up yet. Plus, as my friend reminded me, I am not dying of pancreatic cancer either, so why make it tougher than it needs to be. Its breakfast (fruits, nuts) and lunch (salads - I'll have to start cooking fancy stuff at some point, but my taste buds haven't been protesting yet). Though I have to tell you, the cheese that I had bought - one of the few unpasteurized cheeses available - smelled like a horse's scrotum. It tasted great, but apparently smelled bad enough that somebody who also stores food in the communal fridge at work threw it out. Philistines.

Anyways, today the lady at the local whole foods told me my skin looks good; I must admit I was quite kicked at that. It was probably a result of two weeks of ~60% raw. Or it may have been because I donated some money to the orphan's fund a second before that. Either way, or someone who has constantly been called crater-face, or some equivalent epithet all his life, not too bad. Now if only all those goodies from the sprouts I've been downing could transform the fat in my gut to muscle and magically go to straight to my biceps...


ANYWAY.... the point of this post was to tell you how much Almond Butter tastes like ass. I think the Lord had intended only a few things to be allowed to be made into butter:
1. Milk, and then on second thoughts
2. Peanuts.
Pretty good second thoughts.

And then some dude comes along and says "hey, almonds are nuts too, lets make some butter out of it and sell it for 6.99. And then let's make some butter out of raw organic almonds and price it at 17.99. Surely, there's got to be some jackass out there who will try this expensive condiment without having the slightest freaking idea what to expect."

And sure enough, every once in a while, an idiot like that will show up. In this case, it happened to be Pushupyogi. Man, I tell you, Almond butter does not taste pleasant. Now I'm sure some of you will be all incensed and wave your hands and shake you heads and tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. Well, more power to you. I'm just telling you what my reasonably discerning palette experienced today.

Naked Almond Butter : Ass

Naked Almond Butter + Whole wheat bread : Ass diluted with whole wheat bread

Naked Almond Butter + Ezekiel bread : Ass diluted with sprouts

Naked Almond Butter + Whole wheat bread + Jelly : Sweet Ass diluted with whole wheat bread

Naked Almond Butter + Whole wheat bread + A WHOLE LOAD of Jelly: Palatable snack.

Update: As reader JC rightly points out, the fact that it swims in oil (and you've to churn it up every time) also sucks balls. And yes, I did try adding some sugar and a bit of salt to it. Makes it better, but still, its a lousy way to spend the kind of money that could've bought you a couple beers at happy hour.

Back to Reality

1. Concussion during ultimate frisbee game

2. 180 degree spin-out on a highway

3. Burn from toaster oven

4. Scooped by rival team on scientific project

Hello, reality.

Thank you and more thoughts

For those of you who have expressed your condolences here, by email, and by person, I thank you. Little words of support, or a hug here or there, or even a beer drunk in silence, really do mean quite a bit. They did for me.

I'm spending some time with family. The pushupcousins are coping, but I have to say it has hit them harder than it hit me, probably because they actually grew up with my granddad when they were kids, whereas I only used to go to my grandparents' during vacations. Of course we did live in the same house when I was a little older, but by then I was no longer the little kid being pampered by doting grandparents...

Pushupdad and mum had to go back to do the many rituals that we Indian people have to perform in circumstances such as these. In our community, we have rituals that go on for a full two weeks after the death - every day is filled with specified things to be done for the soul of the departed, things that often force one to be excruciatingly intimate with the person that was and no longer is. It is gut-wrenching, and by the time it's all done, everyone involved is physically, mentally, and emotionally spent - perhaps that is one of the ideas behind it all, so we can completely, fully immerse ourselves in the grieving process, and come out of it stronger and with some sense of closure. It was harrowing even to read what my parents had to go through; I couldn't help but think that some day, it is entirely possible that these duties will fall on my shoulders. I just hope that I will have the strength that my parents have now to fulfil what duties they fulfil now...

Pushupdad wrote to me yesterday, and the crux of his email was this:

There have been so many who came personally/telephonically to offer their condolences, and it became apparent that over the years appappa has influenced or touched lives more than i knew, or even imagined. it brought home to me the fact that we tend to view persons --- however close --- through the prism of our own experiences, and can never fully grasp the extent of their personality. all were unanimous that appappas demise, at the end of a contented healthy and positive life, could only be atttained by an evolved soul.

How true.

We all knew a bit of Appappa. Some of us knew a lot, some of us, a little. But what he was was more that what any of us had seen. He was more than what we thought he was. He was even more that the sum of all of the little pieces that he revealed to all of us. The full extent of what he was, we will never know. No one will. But what is truly amazing and wonderful and deeply touching is how everyone loved their little piece of Appappa.

Hundreds of people have streamed through our doors in the past few days, and while they struggle to cope with the fact that he is no longer with us, they look back at their little piece of Appappa, and you know what? They all loved what they had. What they knew of him, their piece of him, touched their lives, made them happy in some way, large or small.

I reflect on this, and I can't help but wonder at what a great, wonderful man my grandad was. He was so happy, so easy to please, so simple. In the many, many years that I knew of him, I don't recall him ever bing mad. And no, I'm not saying this just because his death has somehow made everything about him saintly. No, he was truly incapable of anger. He was the pillar of strength in our family. He was the quiet force that propelled our family to where we are now, it was he who, with my grandmum, made the sacrifices that eventually got us to where we are now. And he did all of this with nary a whisper of resentment, of self-pity, of complaint one way or the other.

Appappa did the best anyone could with the cards that life had dealt him. And while that alone is more than could be said of many, he also did his duty, his karma, with a quiet dignity, pride, love and almost child-like happiness that filled his being throughout his life, a happiness and love that we were truly blessed to experience.

I love you Appappa, and I will miss you.

Appappa

He died day before yesterday.

I don't know what to write. Maybe the words will come, some day. But for today, this is all I have.

This is my grandfather, and I loved him.

Dhani is one giant muay thai fraud.

Have you seen this show? It's called Dhani tackles the globe on the Travel Channel, where this ex-footballer dude goes around the world and does manly things. Mostly getting beat in wrestling matches and banging local prostitutes.

Well anyway, I watched a show for a bit, and in this one, this guy goes to Thailand to fight Muay Thai. Muay Thai, for those you who don't know, is a pretty brutal form of martial arts; skinny thai kids beat the crap out of each other, especially with the trademark (and pretty devastating) knee kicks to the ribs and elbows to the face.

Exhibit A (with apologies for the bad music):



Now, here's the promo for what Dhani did:



I bet you're thinking: Hey, not too bad, the guy is getting trained and is breaking a sweat. Hm, maybe I'll watch him in a real fight...

IN REALITY, what happens is that Dhani lands in Bangkok, shops around for some bikini briefs and fake handbags, watches some fish fight in a tank, and promptly hits the red light district, where he is mobbed by multiple prostitutes, some of who are clearly she-males. He rebuffs their advances (at least to the extent we know of), has a drink with a couple of really ugly ones that professed their undying love to him (I swear one ACTUALLY said "me love you long time"), and plays football with a baby elephant. No, I am not kidding. All this while being a typical American tourist and remarking about how crazy/crowded/polluted the city was to his tuk-tuk driver, who clearly didn't understand a damn thing he said.

In the meanwhile, he does do a few crunches and practice kicks. Mostly what you see on the promo clip. He then gets oiled up, gets taught a few prayers (which he faithfully recreates in the ring), and then gets to fight with THE MOST OUT OF SHAPE THAI DUDE I HAVE SEEN IN MY LIFE.

I mean, this guy, I wish I had a clip to show you. It looked like they went out to the bars (in the red light district for all you know), picked up the fattest, most out of shape drunk dude, slapped on a ceremonial head gear on his head and a few Bahts into his hand, and ushered him in the ring to fight Dhani (who is quite a fit brute, actually).

That the guy lasted two rounds itself was a miracle. I mean, the guy was passing out on his feet BEFORE they even started exchanging punches. It sucked balls. I think there were a few half-hearted punches and kicks, and then Dhani kicked him in the gut and it was all over. I mean, I don't think he knocked him out. I think the dude just wanted to go back to the bar with his new found wealth and drink some more, so at the first hint of contact with his flabby beer belly - which was really sizable, he toppled over and passed out (somewhat unconvincingly) in the ring.

And then as the guy gets carried away so he can drink away his ignominy, Dhani talks to the camera about how he felt good that he learned something from Thailand, and how he was proud that he won. Yeah, you know what dude, I was walking to work today and I stepped on an earthworm. He tried fighting back, he did, that crafty worm. But I showed him who was boss. I won. I feel proud. Plus I didn't wear a helmet like you did, you wuss.

Fight a real man.

And for God's sake, learn to bargain when you're buying a pack of colored briefs.

Jackass.

yogi <-> girl attraction graph

Yeah, I know, that's a confusing title. But what I'm trying to say is that there are usually only two reasons for gaps in the writing

1. I'm curing cancer
2. I'm having a hectic time socially
(well, technically there's also 3. I'm being lazy. But we're going to pretend that doesn't exist)

SO.

Yes, I've been busy, but also, yes, I've been drinking. And it was during my 11th (or thereabouts) Guinness last night that I realized that I have an interesting relationship with women. The more I thought about it, the more it rang true.

So here it is dear friends, the PUSHUPYOGI <-> GIRL ATTRACTION GRAPH

Oh yes, of course there's a story. Later though. Have to go back cure cancer.

The hole in the retina story

So I slept with my lenses in last night, and when I got up this morning one of them had crept up and had gone way up in my eye socket. I kept trying to get it back, but all it did was to push it back farther and farther, and before you knew it, I had a contact lens in the back of my eye, out of reach. It’s an incredibly uncomfortable feeling, when its *just* out of reach, but you know its there, your eyeball is all bloody and bruised from your attempts at retrieving the damn piece of plastic... Well, anyway, it floated back on its own a few hours later, but all this reminded me of a little eye incident I had last year. Here it is.


It happened when I was playing indoor soccer – it was one of those league games where you got a bunch of teams with hugely varying skill levels. The good ones would sniff each other out during pick-up games, get each others’ numbers, and form a team which would annihilate the opposition by an average score of 22-0, and so they’d be happy. The really crappy teams were full of dumb blondes and hippy kids who didn’t care what the result of the game was. “Aw, we’re just here to have fun! (joyous clapping of hands).” “ Oooo, Emma, what pretty pink socks you have on today!” and so they were happy because they didn’t give a flying fuck. In between were teams like us, which had reasonably good players and a bunch of deadweights who scored every once in a while by pure chance. Like me. We were the perennially unhappy ones, because we’d lose to the good teams, and we’d only beat the lousy ones 5-2. We were also the only ones that actually showed up on non-league games to discuss strategy and try out set pieces. Yeah, we were that team.

Anyway, this one time, we were playing with a team of pansies, and this grossly overweight dude was flapping around like a beached whale during the entire game, flitting around the ball like a fifth-grader. This dude had the danger trifecta down - hugely obese, badly coordinated, and extraordinarily enthusiastic. I should’ve stayed away from him, but we ended up chasing the same ball, he got in ahead of me, and with a mighty hip heave, kicked the ball with all the force he could.

Right. Into. My. Eye.

It happened so quickly, I didn’t have time to blink, let alone avoid the projectile heading right toward my face. The thing hit my eyeball directly, and I was blinded for a good hour in one eye; Some of the vision came back and the pain went away, but by next morning, I knew something was wrong; I couldn’t see out of the bottom of my right eye. (I would later learn that the jackass blew a hole through my retina). The doctor took one look at it and told me tersely that I needed to get surgery to prevent the whole retina from coming detached. So they wheeled me into the Operating Room right away.

Which is when it got painful.

They asked me if I'd want anesthesia delivered intra-ocularly. Which basically means they inject the anesthetic directly into your eyeball. I did a Sarah Palin (“Thaynks, but no Thaynks.”) because just the thought of an injection into my eyeball made me want to vomit. They said "Well, OK. No worries, its only going to be a little uncomfortable", so I said “Go ahead.” And gave them a cheerful thumbs-up. They turned the lights off, except for the surgeon’s lamp, a nurse wordlessly wheeled in a tray of instruments, and the doctor quietly started counting them off. All of a sudden, the OR took on the look of a cold torture chamber, but hey, these guys were here to help, right? So I took a deep breath, tried to take my mind away from my massively bunched up shorts, and attempted to relax. But it got worse.

First, they forced my eye open (like they did to Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange) so I couldn’t blink. And then they put q-tips and spatulas in the gap between my eyeball and socket, and leveraged my eyeball partially out of the socket to expose it. By this time, my sphincter was going into spasms, but I soldiered on. Surely this was almost over by now. But no, they then prodded it, poked at it, shone lights at it, and just when I was ready to pass out, they asked me "So, shall we start?" Oh, Jesus, no.

Which is when, dear friends, they turned on the laser (Giant exaggerated quotes). Now, this wasn’t some dinky ass light that you can use as a pointer, or to check out groceries, or use as a trip alarm. No, no, no. This thing could burn holes through paper held half a mile away. This is what they use to beam signals in binary code to extraterrestrial beings. This is what they used on Khaled Shiekh Mohammed’s ass when he was down at Gitmo. This thing was the Guns of Navarone of lasers. They turned it on (it was green. The 488nm kind) and shot it at my dilated pupil. Of course, since my eyes were forced open, I had no choice but to stare right at the damn thing as it annihilated my pupil, cornea, retina, optic nerve and the half of my brain that happened to be in the wrong half of my skull. Plus the damned thing came in these short pulses, each of which felt like someone was trying to nail gun my eye to the back of my skull.

The laser was bad enough that along with the left half of my face it also destroyed the manly ego that was my steadfast companion when I was wheeled into the OR. I had to tell them to stop after about 10 pulses. I asked (well, pleaded) for anesthesia, intra-ocular or otherwise. I was ready to take up a giant shot of morphine up the ass to stop the pain. “Too bad, yogi”, they said. “We've started this thing, we’ve got to finish this now. Sorry buddy. Well, here’s a wooden spoon. Bite on it, it might help.”

And then they go on to give me TWO HUNDRED AND NINETY MORE LASER PULSES. TWO. HUNDRED. AND. NINETY. By the end I had lost all sense of sight and sound (but not sense of pain, sadly), I was watering from every orifice in my body, and was pretty much ready to admit to being a North Korean spy, Mexican drug lord and Osama bin Laden’s man-whore all rolled into one. I mean, I was in some serious pain, while the jackass eye-surgeon was probably laser-etching his signature on the back of my eyeball… traumatic.

Anyway, all that stuff rolled through my head this morning as I was trying to grope around my eyeball to get to me lens, and I thought I should tell you all about it.

ps : Recovery only took a couple days. My other eye learned to compensate, and I really can’t tell anything's wrong except if I'm trying to read out of the bottom right of my left eye as I'm winking in the dark.

pps : When given the choice, don’t be a hero. Ask for anesthesia.

Big day for Unions tomorrow...

They're voting on the Employees Free Choice Act. For those of you who want to read up about it (and it is well worth your time learning about EFCA), go here. Its an important step in empowering workers. No wonder the Repubs are crazy against it. Its right up there with same sex marriages and healthcare reform.

Easier option, listen to Rachel:



Why, oh why, Rachel, did you have to be lesbian? I'dve married you in a tick...

Before/After giving up cooking pics

So, there are success stories of raw foodists, who went on the raw diet and went from looking like the girl on the left (who isn't too bad looking to start off with) to the REALLY pretty thing on the right.



Just a note of caution, not everyone who gives up cooking has the same results. My brother-in-law gave up cooking after marriage (my sister dutifully took on that job) and look what it did to him.



HAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA!!!!

I'm flirting with raw food

I do eat reasonably healthy, I do. But I snack like a maniac, and I don't snack on sprouted almonds. So any good I do with all my organic quasi-vegetarian diet, I undo with my daily dose of candy, cookies, chips and coke. (Hm. Notice something? They all start with "C". Therefore food names that start with C must be bad. This is pretty how Science works. n=4 is good enough and I'm all fatigued and I can't think of good foods that start with C)

Anyways, so I decided to dabble with eating raw. I'm off to a slow start (I'm not a cold turkey kinda guy). Breakfast is only fruits and nuts soaked overnight. Plus some flax and dates and honey. The two midmorning snacks are soy-yogurt and more fruit.

No real changes, at least after 4 days. My skin still looks like crap, and I don't have a golden aura around me (I asked). My tinnitus hasn't gone away (I still listen to death metal and industrial music on my Sennheisers, but you'd think...), and my breath still smells like a rodent died in my upper esophagus. Plus on top of all this I'm feeling a bit bloated. My friend told me it was probably because my body was getting rid of toxins, but I caught him snickering as he turned away, so I'm going to discount that opinion. I think it's because of this high-fiber barely-baked multi-sprouted-grain bread that I've started eating.

Of course it could also be that my body is confused, because for lunch and after for the rest of theday its back to the usual artery-annihilating hedonism.

But at least I'm trying...

Update: Yes, yes, Celery, Carrots, Cabbage... yum yum bloody yum.

Also, yes, I know, you have to heat water to make beer... I guess it just means I'll have to super chill my beer to nullify all that heating. And then consume twice as much so I would care less about whether my beverage was raw, and more about whether I can walk home without falling into a ditch.

Confusing Sign on I-95

I couldn't take a pic obviously. I was driving. But here is what a huge electronic sign on I-95 said yesterday:

ADJUST CLOCKS

CHECK BATTERIES

SMOKE ALARMS

SAVE LIVES

You want me to smoke alarms?

Sure sign you are at a good party.

Out cold at 4am.

We tried lifting this guy to get him to his buddy's car, but our technique wasn't quite right. Four of us grabbed him - one to each limb - and lifted. But instead of holding his ankles and wrists, we held his pants and shirt, by mistake (well, we were also a little gone by then, and we were laughing so hard we didn't concentrate on the task at hand). And we lifted. He stayed down, and we had his clothing in our hands. So instead of having one passed out dude on my friends basement floor, we now had one passed out naked dude on my friends basement floor...

Update: Apparently there was some Indian dude who passed out in the dog bed too... (h/t JC. Go read his blog!)

WATCHMEN

Verdict: Definite watch.



Quick thoughts:

1. Wow, I have never seen such a faithful adaptation of a book. Ever. I usually get disappointed because the transition invariably screws up, but this was bloody good. I love the book, and I have to say that the reviewers who call the movie boring don't know what the hell they're talking about. Perhaps a little *too* faithful to the book, but no complaints from me. The parallel story is missing, obviously (but it makes an appearance in the director's cut apparently).

1a. Zach Snyder is also the director of 300, so I don't really have to tell you about the visuals.

1b. You probably will need to see the movie twice to catch all the little things in it, especially the real characters from history.

2. Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach is RIDICULOUSLY good.

3. Jon is better endowed in the movie than in the book. Sorry, there's nothing that you can do about it. Speaking of which, I was NOT a fan of that sex scene at all. M-m.

4. Unhappy with Veidt. Without giving too much away, he is portrayed as a villain from scene one. Why? Also unhappy with the music. Jarring/Distracting. Silk Spectre's character - as a bit of a departure from the book, comes across as very strong. She is super hot though. She's Freak show's wife in Harold and Kumar in case you were wondering. And one last thing - some of they key lines in the movie fall flat.

4a. Hm, lot of things that I was unhappy with apparently, for a movie I gave a "must watch"... Well, it was adapted from an iconic comic book story (some people have said that the book is impossible to make into a movie), so you're starting off at an enormous disadvantage. Given that, pretty good job.

5. Matt Yglesias and *maybe* Spencer Ackerman were two rows in front of us.

What I spent hours today watching. Over and Over.

Seriously, I watched some of this over and over today. If you aren't laughing out loud at some of this...

Basically its a couple guys who have this prank war, and its pretty funny. Here's a tip, watch it backward, i.e. latest prank - the basketball game - first.

Also, the very first prank? Look at Amir; that's pretty much me at work every day. Except I listen to KMFDM and Skiny Puppy. Rawr.

SlumDog Millionaire. Finally.

Verdict: Watch.

Yeah, I finally got to see the movie, after all this time. You know, I had heard SO much about the movie, I was absolutely SURE I was heading in for a massive let-down. But I was pleasantly surprised - this is a very very good movie. I still think MILK deserved best movie, but no real qualms; this was pretty darn good.

1. Fantastic job acting by those kids - all age groups.
2. Unvarnished shot of Bombay. For those of you haven't been there, this is a pretty close description. Very authentic
3. Great performances by Irfan Khan (especially) and Saurav Shukla, the inspector/constable duo.
4. I like the Bollywood plot-line. Leeetle stereotypical towards the end, but all good.
5. Welcome to the big leagues, Dev Patel. Both he and Freida Pinto (who IS Indian) are pretty, pretty people. (Anil Kapoor? meh...)

Also, great job with the English/Hindi when required. I thought it was pretty well done; there were some times when it jarred, but I guess it can't be perfect in a bilingual movie. None of the cuss-words were translated though :)

One last thing: That kid reminds me of myself. A little.

Another small dog. And this one's perpetually horny...

Oh Jesus, why do you torment me so? You all know I've had run ins with small dogs. To say that I do not find small dogs cute would be like saying Rush Limbaugh may perhaps have slightly conservative views. I hate everything about them. Hate. I have spent substantial amounts of time dreaming of ways to kill them. (I think I finally settled on feeding them into a blender. It seemed reasonably convenient, and might have worked, except that I realized I'd have to do a lot of cleaning up between dogs...)

Anyway, so when another of these dogs landed up in my house, I was not pleased. At all. Its bad enough that the thing yips and tries to grab food off of my plate and tries to lick my face with its filthy tongue, but then this happened last night when I was trying to watch TV.



See that look on the dumb mutt's face? What does it say? Well, low IQ obviously. Extraordinary ugliness, of course. But you see guilt? Just a wee bit? Well, I do. You want to know why? Because this was what was happening 30 seconds before.



That flurry of activity is the stupid dog trying to impregnate the hapless cushion. A sound kick to the behind stopped the mad pelvic thrusting, but now I'm wondering what other articles around my house have been propositioned by the damn dog.

Man, I got to go bleach my room...

Destroyed in Seconds - rapidfire thoughts (mostly those of annoyance)

I'm sure you've seen this show on Discovery, where things of various sizes, shapes, and colors, and usually traveling at some speed get obliterated. Or just broken up less spectacularly. The few transient but mostly deep thoughts that flashed through my mind immediately, I present to you in list form:

5. There is no end to the stupidity of people who try stunts. I just saw a guy who tried to jump a steamboat on an ATV. The guy had a 30 foot ramp, and was going at about 40 mph. He needed 80 feet and 70mph to clear the boat. He clipped the top and got tossed a good 70 feet (so he *did* clear the boat, but the landing left much to be desired...). Not to be cowed down by epic failure, he went at it again, this time presumably consulting someone who had passed high school physics. To be safe, they had the boat safely tucked under the ramp, so all he really had to do was stick the landing. For some reason, three-quarters of the way, after having crossed the boat, but still in mid-air, our resident hero decides to let go of his footrests and the handlebars. Gravity is not kind to stupidity. I forget exactly what he broke, but he isn't riding anything again.

4. What about the poor cameraman? This one was about a BASE jumper who floats into a 300ft waterfall and gets his ass savaged by 12,000 gallons of water a minute. You should've heard the guy doing the voice-over talk about the jackass. BASE jumping legend, daredevil, all that stuff. But I kept thinking: what about the other dude who also jumped with this guy? In my opinion, he's the real hero. I mean, you've got a damn camera strapped to your helmet so you look like a jackass, and you've to keep looking at the jumper to make sure that all of it (success or painful failure) gets captured. And you still have to make the damn jump! And yet, the other dude gets all the glory. That's just wrong. Well, to be fair, the dude probably *did* make some money by selling tape to Destroyed in Seconds...

3. I thought Discovery was supposed to be about, you know, DISCOVERY. We've got environmental issues we can talk about, scientific inventions, docmentaries about the Earth and Space, so much other cool stuff. Why the hell are you reducing yourself to playing tape of things getting blown up and boob jobs? (Not all is bad - Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs are truly enjoyable) Still, I feel it's been watered down recently. I guess talking about environmental problems gets you labeled as a dirty hippie channel...

2. Ron Pitts, you have one lousy agent. I feel bad for this guy, have you seen him? To be fair, it's not like he's a superstar; I think he had a below-average football career for a few years and they sent him packing. Point is, you see him only twice during the show; at the start where he says "Welcome to Destroyed in Seconds, where you see stuff getting destroyed in seconds" or some crap like that, and then winds down the show with "This has been Destroyed in Seconds, see you next time." That sucks balls. I mean, that's as bad as Pamela Anderson and Debbe Dunning on Home Improvement ("What time is it? Tool Time!!!"), except that Stills, unlike Ms. Anderson, got those boobs by benching 350 and then stopping 5 years back...

1. Why do we love watching things getting destroyed? I don't get it, I really don't. For 30 minutes, no matter what, we're all reduced to grunting and puntuating explosions on TV with "Aw Jeez" or "What the F**K!!??" or "did you SEE THAT?!?!" even though we're all alone in front of the TV. Well, being male and drinking beer exacerbates this, but being male and drinking beer exacerbates a lot of things, so that might not be a factor. So why do we find something so inane, so vacuous, so breathtakingly POINTLESS, entertaining? Does this say something about our race? About society? About today's media and how it has conditioned us?

I don't know. You tell me.

Stuart Scott's eye

You know, I know that this isn't your fault, you're born with it, but can't they correct this with surgery these days? I was watching Stu today, and his eye, man, I tell you, it isn't just lazy. It's sitting-in-your-mum's-basement-eating-cheetos-on-the-couch-wearing-a-wifebeater-watching-football-all-day-long-when-you-should-be-finding-a-job-because-you're-thirty comatose. Actually his whole visage was swimming a bit because I was a little drunk, but that's beside the point. At one point I wanted to duck because he looked away (well, one eye did) and the other one swung in place to stare at me. It felt like a tank turret had just swung around and I was staring down the barrel of its 120mm gun.

I like the guy though. He's a solid sportscaster, and he's battling cancer. Or at least he had a brush with it in late 2007, and was fortunate enough to get it treated at the right time. Its just his wandering eyeball that distracts me a bit, that's all.