matthearn.com

It’s still Monday in Guam or somewhere, right? Good enough.

You may or may not (probably not) be curious about what’s been going on with my fitness program. Well, here’s the low diggity down. Since mid-November I’ve been what’s called “bulking,” which means deliberately putting on weight to add muscle. You’re probably thinking, “Dude, uh, you weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 pounds, I’m not sure that ADDING weight is what you want to be doing. Why don’t you diet and just turn that fat into muscle?”

I laugh at you. Har! Hardy har!

A common misconception, popularized by almost every fitness or health magazine in every single issue, is that turning yourself into Chris Evans is merely a matter of craploads of cardio and occasional weight-lifting. I believe we’ve talked about this previously, but in case you missed it: it don’t work that way. The human body has three modes: gaining fat and muscle, losing fat and muscle, or staying pretty much exactly the same, depending entirely on caloric intake. If you eat less than you burn, you lose fat and muscle, and if you eat more, you gain it. The proportion of muscle to fat lost or gained depends on whether or not you stress your existing musculature with weight training, signalling it to divert calories to muscle gain in an effort to adapt to that stress.

Short version: if you want to add muscle, you have to gain weight. If you want to lose fat, you have to lose weight. Those two processes cannot happen simultaneously.

So, I decided that over the winter I would do a “bulk,” which means eating more than I burn, and lifting weights in sufficient volume to stress my muscles and signal them to grow. The decision was based solely on the fact that I’d been “cutting” (losing weight and fat) for 3 months and my lifts were not progressing in weight, for the simple reason that in order to get strong past a certain point your muscles have to get bigger, and mine couldn’t get bigger because I wasn’t eating enough for them to do so. And it was pissing me off to be bench pressing 180-190 for 5 reps over and over with no gains.

So in mid-November, my stats looked like this:

Weight: 242 pounds

Bodyfat Percentage: 20% (estimated)

Squat: 280x3x5 (280 pounds, three sets, five reps per set)

Bench press: 190x3x5 (and badly stalled)

Deadlift: 370x1x5

After 3 months of hardcore bulking (eating like a pig, and lifting like a beast):

Weight: 271 pounds

Bodyfat: 24%

Squat: 345x3x5

Bench press: 217.5x3x5

Deadlift: 395x1x5

Now, you’ll probably say, “Man, your deadlift didn’t go up, are you a wuss?” The problem there was that I actually ran out of weights, and was stuck DLing 390 for about 4 straight weeks before I got a bunch more 45 pound plates and rocked 395×5 yesterday like Paul Bunyan. You may also say “271 pounds? Holy crap you’re fat!” Here’s the thing, though: my BF% (estimated, but measured using the same function each time, so accurate relative to itself) only went up 4%. If you do the math, my “lean body mass” went from 194 pounds to 206; LBM includes bone, muscle, and most importantly water, so don’t think for a second I actually gained 12 pounds of actual muscle in 12 weeks. Still: if even HALF of that LBM gain is muscle (and I bet it’s more), that’s 6 pounds of muscle. That doesn’t seem like much, but believe me, pro bodybuilders would sell a kidney to gain 6 pounds of lean muscle in 3 months.

It’s also worth noting that the squat and bench press lifts went up 23% and 14% in 3 months, which are significant gains.

So, what now? Well, I won’t lie, I have a pretty significant gut going on. Oddly enough, though, I’m still fitting in most of my regular 38×34 pants, although I have in issue in that my thighs have gotten so large that I’m in constant danger of hulking through them if I bend over, twist awkwardly, try to walk, etc. I could continue bulking, really get my lifts up to the “advanced” level, but frankly I’m in this to look rad, and being able to lift heavy crap is a secondary goal, so I think it’s time to lean out a bit and see if I can get myself reasonably svelte for summer so the ladies be all “wooooo” and the dudes be mad jelly. With that in mind, I’m going to start a low-carb diet, as well as switch routines from “Starting Strength” to “Madcow 5×5.”

Why low-carb? Well, one of the problems of cutting fat is that, as mentioned above, you tend to lose muscle as you lose weight. You combat this by making sure you have a LOT of protein in your system (your body is less likely to start tearing down muscles to get protein if you have plenty of it available via food), and continuing to lift heavy so your muscles are signalled to maintain as much size as possible. Well, there is no more protein-heavy diet than one that consists mostly of meat. Yesterday, my first day on the diet, I managed to get 365 grams of protein, a pretty staggering amount. I believe the RDA recommendation for someone my size is 80 grams. And today’s lunch consisted of an entire rotisserie chicken. So from a protein perspective, I should be A-OK. Some folks also say that the reduction of insulin production from eating so few carbohydrates also contributes to the body losing fat, although I think it’s more that after a while you just naturally start eating less because the protein and fat sit in your belly and make you feel full. The downside of this diet is that until my body gets used to burning fat for energy, my workouts will suuuuuuu-uuuuuck, and I will likely be missing a lot of reps.

I combat this by switching to a routine that incorporates a 4 week “deload” period, namely Bill Starr’s Madcow 5×5 program. This gives me time to rest my body (which has been taking a beating over the last 5-6 months, and I can feel it) and also give it time to learn how to burn fat instead of carbohydrates so that when I got back to setting PRs in a month my body’s all “Yeah word.” It’s also a slightly lower volume program than Starting Strength, but still features plenty of intensity and aggressive weekly progression, and includes 2 weeks of “deload” out of every 6 to keep me from burning out. So instead of squatting heavy 3 times a week and hitting a new PR each time, I get a “rest” day on Wednesday with fewer, and lighter, sets. It also includes curls on Fridays so I can get crazy big arms, so don’t you worry, ladies.

My lifts will undoubtedly stall as the cut goes on, so I’ll just try and stay about where I am strength-wise until the end of the summer, at which time hopefully I’ll be down to a slim 235 with a 15% body fat and I’ll just be wearing a speedo everywhere including work and church.

Look forward to that.

I know I said last week that I’d be doing updates every Monday, but yesterday was a holiday, so I’m not counting it. Today’s my Monday. Take that.

I don’t know if you subscribe to the “Albuquerque Journal of Grease” (the, and I mean THE, paper of record on everything pertaining to fast food, and let me tell you it’s worth getting just for the “Chronicle of Incidents” pages; last month a guy managed to drop a lit Newport cigarette into hot fry oil and the resulting explosion killed 5 Bulgarian immigrants), but you may have nevertheless heard that Burger King, long the Jay Leno to McDonalds’s David Letterman, has recently changed its french fries. The following statements are not hyperbole:

This is a more important event than than the 2012 Presidential election. I daresay it may be more momentous than the American Civil War. Make no mistake: there is nothing more vital than for you to get your ass over to a BK to try these fries, as quickly as you possibly can, unless it’s 3am and you don’t have a 24 hour BK where you live, in which case you should probably move to civilization you bloody savage.

After years of BK producing french fries that were over-seasoned, over-spiced, and over-cooked into a rock-hard potato rod that tasted vaguely of rancid canola, they have finally seen the light and produced a fry that is not only a 3 million percent improvement over the old one, but also makes the McDonalds product look like a flaccid noodle. Burger King has improved the cut; the fries are thicker all around, leading to a nice crispy exterior and hot soft potato interior. They’ve also improved the seasoning, which is now mostly salt and pepper and possibly some other flavors that I don’t notice because I’m busy keeping my eyes from rolling back in my head with glee and bliss. They are, and this is high praise, on par with the fries at Red Robin, but available right now in fast food form probably 3 minutes from you.

If you couple this with the fact that BK’s burgers are FAR better than McD’s (which has always been the case), I think we all know where I’ll be getting my delicious fast food snacks for the immediate future, which unfortunately amounts to about 6 days because I’m going back on a low-carb diet next week and won’t be having any fries in any form and will probably have to devote myself to McD’s because I can get 6 double cheeseburgers for 6 bucks and inhale them like a chubby kid on the way home from fat camp. My life is pretty sad.

I hope you all had a blissful, gift-filled, alcohol-fueled holiday season, which of course doesn’t FULLY conclude until my birthday later in the month. Like most Americans, I have made resolutions. Unlike most Americans, they don’t have much to do with fitness, because I am already in the middle of my lifelong fitness resolution (more on this later), which is to get crazy jacked and look vaguely like Daniel Craig but without the haunting blue eyes and luscious, pouty lips (my own lips are quite full and luscious but I cannot maintain the same extruded pout without looking like a fish and/or duckface, aka duckfish).

My resolution is to attempt to produce, on time and without exception, a new update to this website every Monday that is insightful, enjoyable, and full of both fun witticisms AND as many pictures of Daniel Craig as I can fit given current intellectual property law.

What will it be? Who knows. It’s a Presidential election year, so I’ll probably make fun of the GOP. It doesn’t appear that Sarah Palin is running, as of this writing, so sadly that eliminates some easy humor, although Rick Perry is doing his darnedest to be equally stupid in public, and then there’s good ol’ butt juice Rick Santorum, and it’s only a matter of time before Ron Paul says something hilariously racist, which is a shame because in a past life I probably would have been a big Paul supporter, at least until the realization some time ago that the Libertarian ethos of “everybody get yours before I gotta get mine” is not really an effective way to govern society.

I may also do the occasional movie review, although I should warn you the movies will not be recent as I don’t like going to movie theaters, and I’m certainly not going to beg my wife for 2 hours away from her and the roughly 7 million children I appear to have at home to do something I’m largely indifferent to doing, with the obviously exception of any James Bond movie. So there’s a strong chance that any movies I’ll write about will be along the lines of “Street Kings,” a film from 2008 that I watched about 75% of the other night. (I can report that Keanu spends the entire time being Keanu, and Forrest Whitaker chewed so much scenery that I suspect he pooped drywall for a month, although at least a lot of people get shot, so it’s really the perfect thing to watch while rocking your infant son to sleep.)

I’m sure I’ll have lots to say about my fitness progress as well. A short update: I’ve been lifting hard and eating like a pig since just before Thanksgiving, and have gained a rather significant amount of weight. The gut has come back a little, but I see a big difference in my shoulders, my butt has become extremely Kardashian, and my thighs are getting so thick that 1) I’m having a very hard time fitting into pants, even though the waist and inseam fit fine, and 2) there’s not much room left for my testicles and I keep sitting on them. My back squat has gone to 327.5lbs, and my bench press is up to 212.5, although my deadlift is hampered by the fact that I only have 390 pounds of weights so I’m stuck there until I can buy more. I’ve been pretty strict about the Starting Strength program (not adding or replacing any exercises), but yesterday I decided it would be extremely nice if I had big ol’ swole-up guns so I’ve started adding a few curls and tricep extensions to the end Friday’s workout so the ladies will look at my arms and go DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN.

I was planning to start dieting again around my birthday, but I may push it off until later in the winter. I’d like to cut down to a trim 230 by summer and see how close I can get to having visible abs (something I’ve never had, EVER), but I hate, hate, HATE cutting because my lifts stall, and squatting over 300 pounds makes me feel like a real man.

So, uh, that’s what you have to look forward to. It’s gonna be real. Really real.

Number 1: The Charmin commercials with the large brown bears who are greatly concerned about whether or not the TP will leave what appears to be dandruff on their butts. I appreciate them using anthropomorphic bears so that we can pretend it’s all cute and that they aren’t talking about, essentially, dingleberries, but I’m still greatly grossed out by it. I don’t know about you, but the bogroll at our house doesn’t leave any kind of detritus behind, possibly because my wife buys single-ply in bulk from some kind of Russian mob outfit and it’s like wiping with burlap, except that burlap might be preferable because my fingers wouldn’t go straight through it.

I’m just tired of my fingers smelling like shrimp, I guess.

Number 2: The car commercial, I think it’s for a Buick, in which a family celebrates a new car for Christmas, complete with big red bow atop, and then another car drives by and the husband (who ostensibly made the purchase) realizes he made a big mistake and should have bought the other car. As in, “I know we just got a brand-ass new automobile, but I can’t be happy because the one that just drove down the street is so much NICER.” I’m no anti-materialist, but every time this commercial comes on, I think of a family of four living in a 1983 Ford Econoline.

It’s also worth noting that a dude I know bought his wife a Lexus for Christmas once, just like in the commercials, and the Lexus people would not give him a big red bow to put on it. FALSE ADVERTISING.

Number 3: The Target commercials, which are thankfully pretty much done now that Black Friday is past, featuring the crazy lady preparing for huge sales and cackling like a maniac. She doesn’t appear to have enough skin for her head.

(The actress in question is actually Maria Bamford, a funny comedienne, but for her participation in these commercials she’s earned a lifetime sentence as an elf in a David Sedaris story.)

What weirds y’all out? Other than Chuck Testa, of course.

Been hell of busy. Three kids, man. Three.

That being said, there’s been much going on. Our good friends Sarah and Zak got married over the weekend; my own personal Sarah was the matron of honor, and I did me some singing and guitar strummin’, and also got a small group together to sing an arrangement I did of “Seasons of Love” from “Rent,” a show that I have not seen and will endeavour to avoid seeing forever because I figure if I want to see La Boheme I’ll go damn well see La Boheme, but I shall admit that the song I arranged is catchy and fun.

The wedding took place at Sweetwater Farm, which I cannot recommend highly enough and which I hope to visit again at some later date and stay at the bed and breakfast. Grace Winery is on site, and the wedding actually happened in a renovated barn that also contains most of the vintnering equipment. There are little cottages and several acres of extremely pretty land to admire, ideally while drinking a nice glass of pinot noir and/or Scotch.

And now, we find ourselves in the holiday season. Thanksgiving is, in case you haven’t recently checked a calendar, merely 2 days away, and Advent starts on Sunday, even if most commercially made Advent calendars will not recognize this fact until December 1st because Advent calendar-makers are bloody HEATHENS! As usual, my holiday season is spent either singing in concerts and services or rehearsing for concerts and services, so my wife will spend most of the month single-handedly trying to corral all three of our semi-truculent children. This means that I had better come up with one hell of a spectacular Christmas present for my wife, because no matter what it costs, the inevitable divorce will be more expensive.

Since I’m all over the place anyway, might as well throw in a little fitness update. As of a few weeks ago, I’ve switched over to “bulking” mode, which I like to pretend is “clean” but which consists of large amounts of meat and the occasional Twix bar. As a result of deliberate weight gain, my lifts have been progressing nicely. Today’s workout I squatted 290 pounds for three sets of 5, failed spectacularly to overhead press 137.5 pounds (5 reps, 4, and 3), and successfully power cleaned 155 pounds for 3 sets of 5 (all this with warmup sets, obviously). The other day I also bench pressed 192.5 pounds (I expect to get to 200 next week, woooooo) and deadlifted 370 pounds, which is 1) really bloody heavy and 2) not far from what’s going to be the maximum for a while because I only have 390 pounds of weights.

Another pair of 45 plates will be needed, but my options there are either to spend $100 on a set of brand new plates, or to call the guy I know downstate and go get a used set for $50. I’m leaning towards the latter, but don’t have the 3 hours to get down and back. Plus, if I do that I’m leaning towards getting TWO sets so I’m never likely to run out of weight (I’ll keep progressing as long as I can, but I highly doubt I’m ever going to need 570 pounds). Maybe the next time we go to the beach I can stop en route, but we probably aren’t doing anything like that until January, so I suspect I’ll just get to 390 and then keep adding reps and/or sets so at least I make progression in volume if not weight per rep.

I hope that your Thanksgiving is chock-full of tryptophan and red wine, and that you enjoy parades and football all the live-long day.

I present you, first, with a clucking chicken:



I then present you with the entire Hearn crew, post-trick-or-treating:



Hope your Halloween was rad, and devoid of horrible peanut-allergy reactions!

I haven’t been sick in almost a year (I attribute this to clean livin’ and sweatin’ to the Oldies, and also making sure I get my weekly ration of medicinal alcohol), but then I get a little sleep-deprived and BOOM I’ve come down with a cold almost instantly. It suuuuuuuuucks. Josephine’s sick too, which has led to her waking up in the middle of the night and refusing to go back to sleep. Last night’s activities:

• 3:30am – William woke up to be fed, and Josephine woke up simultaneously, demanding…well, who knows. She just cried. Mommy got her some water, and I attempted to console her. Got her calmed down, and went back to bed, at which point she started moaning again.


• 4am – She started screaming again, so I went back in to try and calm her. Sarah came in shortly thereafter, and convinced her to lie down and cover up with her blanket. We left, and she immediately started whining again.


• 4:30am – Screaming once again, so I went in, ask her what’s wrong, offer some water, lay her down, but she doesn’t respond well to this so I close the door so maybe the rest of us can get some sleep. She commenced shrilly screaming, but screw it I’m exhausted so I’m going back to bed. I walked back in our bedroom and Sarah said, “Why is she screaming?”

  
  “Because I closed her door.”

  
  “SHE’S SICK, MATT!” Sarah yelled. At that hour, I didn’t see any connection between her being sick and me closing her door so the rest of us could possibly sleep, but I also don’t want Sarah to smother me with a Boppy while I’m sleeping, so I went back in, got Josephine, and sat with her while in the rocking chair.

  
  After 10 minutes or so, she calmed, and crawled out of my arms to stand on the floor. She said something I couldn’t understand, but pointed to the changing table, so I put her on their and changed her diaper, which was dry. When I tried to put her pajama pants back on, she cried “No! No!”

  
  “You don’t want your pajama pants?”

  
  “No!”

  
  “Okay.” She started pulling on her shirt, so I figured “She’s overheated” and pulled that off too. Then she said,

  
  “Thomas shirt!”

  
  She is a HUGE Thomas the Tank Engine fan, and recently was given a couple shirts with Thomas and some of his friends on the front, and wants to wear them at every opportunity. At 5am, actual parenting becomes useless and you do whatever you think will get the child to go back to bed, so I put her Thomas shirt on, and then, at her request, her jeans. I drew the line at socks and shoes, and rocked her a bit more, at which point Sarah came in and took over so I could try and get some sleep.

  
  After 90 minutes of fitful sleep, I showered, and when I came back to the bedroom Sarah was feeding William and Josephine was once again just whining, standing in the doorway.

  
  “Josephine, are you hungry?”

  
  “Mmmm….uh-huh..mmmmmnnnn”

  
  “Stop whining. Let’s go downstairs and get breakfast.” I put my shoes on, and then Josephine did one of her super cute things, which is to simply grab my forefinger and lead me off to the kitchen, where I gave her a cereal bar and some Froot Loops.

  
  I have no idea how much sleep Sarah got, but I think I got 4.5 non-contiguous hours, so if you’re thinking “Wow this post really sucks,” that’d be why. I would like a nap. Forgive the crappiness. I ain’t even gonna proofreed this.

Last week, Tuesday to be precise, was the anniversary of the day I finally decided that I’d better start taking my health seriously before I hit three bills and had a heart attack climbing up to the third floor of my house, if only because that staircase is really narrow and I’d probably get stuck and they’d have to either cut away pieces of the house, or pieces of me, to get me out, and my corpse is worth less than the house, so we know what HW would be advising.

If you need help parsing that sentence, shoot me a comment and I’ll break it down for you.

Anyway, I know I’ve already done a post listing some of the things I’ve learned about diet and exercise, but I wanted to offer one more bit of handy advice, then talk a bit about my current workout routine(s), and then, the pièce de résistance, a few before-and-after shots of my husky torso.

Advice: if you are currently out of shape, do not listen much to advice from someone who has never been out of shape. The reason for this is that they simply do not understand how difficult it is to get from “fairly chubby” to “crazy ripped,” and they will say “It’s easy! Just make a few dietary changes, add some simple exercises, you’ll be there before you know it!”

Horsecrap. If it was easy, the average American BMI would be 20, not 30. Admittedly, it is easy to start the process. If your current diet consists primarily of Whopper Juniors, Mr. Pibb, and Devil Dogs, simply replacing one meal a day with a light salad is going to lose you some pounds. If you also start walking a mile a day, that’ll also lose you some pounds. But after you lose 10, maybe even 20 pounds, the weight will level off. 20 pounds is no mean accomplishment, but if you went from 280 to 260, and you’re 5’3″, you’re going to be irritated when you can’t get further without making bigger sacrifices.

Eating right to lose weight is really, really hard. I really only manage to do it about half the time; weekends are a REAL challenge. I’m trying to limit myself to about 2300 calories a day, while getting 250 grams of protein, which means I get to have 1300 calories of carbs and fat. That ain’t much. When I eat what I want to, I can reach 4000 calories a day without thinking (something that will come in handy later in the year when I switch to bulking). Taking myself from 265 to 245 was easy; going from 245 to 225 has been really hard, and I’ve barely gotten started (although the creatine I take throws off the weight measurements).

The problem is that guys who look like this:

have never been seriously overweight. They’ve been making good food choices and working out for so long it’s not really an effort anymore; the idea of having a large McDonald’s extra value meal revolts them. These are people who ENJOY eating salads. If they have spare time, they go running, instead of watching TV or surfing the internet.

Ideally, if you need some weight coaching, you need to find someone who can show you a picture like this one:

That young woman had an ass the size of a Renault and it is GONE. She knows what it takes to get this done, and won’t sugar coat her advice.

Here are the important facts: don’t expect to lose more than, say, 40 pounds of fat in a year. That’s basically the top, and accounts for holidays and other weeks where you just can’t meet your goals, along with other minor setbacks. If you’re six feet tall and weigh 260, you’re looking at a two-year process of remodelling yourself. If you’re a lazy turd like me, it’ll take even longer. I don’t say this to discourage you, but to make you aware of what you’re in for.

What’s my diet and exercise routine, you ask? Well, I eat a lot of chicken, and I go through a lot of protein powder because it’s super convenient. 4 scoops a day, usually, which is about 96 grams of protein. I was drinking it with milk, but the extra carbs in the morning meant I’d be hungry at night and couldn’t eat more without going over the calorie limit. Those big bags of frozen veggies are the bomb; usually about 4-5 cups of broccoli in each, totalling maybe 120 calories. I pretty much eat one of those at every meal, or a big ol’ mixed salad, but to be honest raw vegetables suck without ranch dressing. I was eating a lot of pretzels for a mid-day snack, but cut that out too. I still do usually have a banana and a granola bar in the late morning, particularly if I plan to do some cardio over lunch.

As far as workout, I do:

• Cardio: a couple times a week, I’ll go for a run, or do some “speedwork” (short sprints with walking in between). If my legs are sore I’ll stick with the exercise bike to limit impact on my knees and feet. If I have time, which is not frequent, I like to bring my road bike and do a short ride over lunch. To be honest, I don’t really like the cardio; I just do it so I can eat a little more. If I set a limit of 2300 calories, but I run 3 miles and burn 400-ish calories, guess who has two thumbs and can now eat 2700 calories that day? MATT HEARN.


• Weights: I do standard “Starting Strength,” which looks like this:

  
  Workout A: Back squat 3×5, bench press 3×5, deadlift 1×5.

  
  Workout B: Back squat 3×5, overhead press 3×5, powerclean 3×5.

  
  “3×5” means 3 sets, with 5 reps in each set. I also do warmups of each exercise, usually a set of 5, then a set of 3, then 2, then 1, with weights increasing up to the work weight. I increment the work weights every workout, unless I miss reps. My current maxes are:

  
  Back squat: 250×5
  
  Bench press: 175×5 (was up to 190, but my arms are really starting to suffer from the caloric deficit and I just couldn’t handle the weight anymore)
  
  Deadlift: 340×5
  
  Overhead press: 125×5 (Probably my max until I start eating more to gain mass)
  
  Powerclean: 115×5

  
  I workout three times a week, MWF, and the workouts simply alternate.



• Bodyweight: I’ve started adding a simple workout called “PLP,” which stands for Pullups, Lunges, Pushups (although technically I do chinups, not pullups; the former have the palms facing you, the latter, away). On the first day of the month, I do one of each (one lunge with each leg). Second day, I do 2. Et cetera. I find it’s a nice way to get a little pump in the arms and legs, even on days when I don’t lift weights, and also I just like that I can actually do chinups now. Obviously the reps get broken up into sets, I can’t do that many chins in a row.

And now, with no further ado, you can look at pictures demonstrating how I am somewhat less fat than a year ago. Try not to get too excited, ladies.

I don’t know what the hell is wrong with people. Okay, I get it, there’s no iPhone 5 this October. I guess if you’re a complete idiot who knows nothing more about technology than “5 is a bigger number than 4,” this is a serious disappointment. But let’s go over a few important facts:

	iPhone 4	iPhone 4S
Processor	Apple A4	Dual-core Apple A5
Still camera	5MP	8MP
Video	720p HD	1080p HD
Incredible AI-Voice Recognition application	none	Siri

I’ve left out memory comparisons (because we don’t know what the memory in the 4S is, yet) and the new dual-antenna wireless connection (because I’m not sure how big a grain of salt to take with the prediction of doubling cellular data speeds). Still: in what ridiculous crack-den world are folks living in that this is anything less than a major upgrade? They could call it “iPhone Zero” and it would be completely awesome. Sure, if I already had an iPhone 4, I wouldn’t feel the need to upgrade. But if you have to upgrade your smartphone every single year, I’m going to predict that you’re a major douchekabibble anyway. Like, you know, this guy:

There’s nothing really notable, physically, about the iPhone 4S in comparison to the iPhone 4. Do you have an iPhone 4? Pick it up. Look at it. Turn it over. There, you’ve just done an iPhone 4S hands-on. Congratulations!

Seriously? Your initial reaction to the release of a new phone with twice the CPU is “Sigh, it’s the same shape!” I wonder if this idiot refuses to buy DVDs or BlueRays because they’re the same form-factor as a CD.

This phone is obviously an upgrade over the iPhone 4, and if you’re like me and still floundering along on an old 3G, it’s like going from an IBM XT to an Alienware scream machine. I’m not sure when Apple will actually open the store to get this phone, but I plan to stay up until midnight in case they’ll take my order at 12:01 on October 7th. A few other notes on the subject:

The “back” (or primary) camera went from 5 to 8 megapixels, but that may be the least of its improvements. They’ve opened the aperture to f/2.4 for better low-light shooting (I prefer using a fast aperture over using a flash), and the new lens has 5 elements to sharpen the photos. Plus, image stabilization in the video mode, which is now 1080p (better HD resolution than my Flip).

Siri looks totally rad, although I need to use it to really see if it’s useful. I’ve had other phones with voice recognition, and it was little more than a gimmick. I also don’t fully trust AI after being boned so many times over by that damned paperclip.

I’m largely indifferent to this iCloud thing as well; we’ll see how well it works. Having only 5GB of free storage makes it next to useless, really, although I guess being able to use it to back up your phone before doing a PC-less upgrade is pretty win.

Mostly, frankly, I’m just excited to have a phone that can background apps, do Facetime, and not have things constantly crash because 128MB of DRAM doesn’t cut it with iOS4 apps.