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Morbi orci magna, tincidunt vitae molestie nec, molestie at mi. Nulla nulla lorem,
suscipit in posuere in, interdum non magna.
Okay, say the Yankees and the Orioles are tied in the bottom of the ninth inning, but the Yanks have the bases loaded with nobody out, and the count on the batter is three balls, no strikes. The O’s are facing imminent defeat, but their pitcher is a wily veteran. He just stands on the mound, fidgeting and spitting and scratching himself for 22 hours and 34 minutes, refusing to throw the ball, until the umpires call the game a draw.
On the other hand, forcing the Senate to require 60 votes to do anything does probably have the effect of keeping the Senate from doing anything. That’s a win, in my book.
I lost 6 pounds in one day! Of course, it was water-weight, whatever that is, so I still don’t fit properly into pants. Still, if you ever find yourself needing to lose 2% of your body mass in 24 hours, here is how you do it:
0630 – Wake up and step on the scale. Realize that you have become a small, lesser-fang’d walrus. Curse under your breath, and vow to fix the problem.
0800 – Eat your first “meal” of the day: a bagel with a small amount of butter. Fill your water bottle.
0900 – Fill your water bottle again. (I should probably point out that you must drink the water, not just pour it out before refilling it.)
1000 – Eat a banana. Look longingly at your boss’s bag of candy, but will yourself to merely fill your water bottle again, and maybe cry a little inside.
1130 – Go to the cafeteria for a salad; discover that they have “curry cauliflower,” which consists of, get ready for this: cauliflower with curry powder on it. Ice-cold. Purchase a pint of it and inhale it in under 45 seconds, along with a 20oz Diet Coke.
1200 – Go for an hour-long walk outside in the sweltering weather, get a sunburn, and saturate your clothing with disgusting sweat.
1300-1500 – Eat a large garden salad consisting of a crapload of vegetables, one egg, and a drizzle of olive oil and vinegar.
1500 – Eat a cheese stick. It’s the heaviest thing to hit your stomach in hours, and will feel like a moist brick.
1600 – Reward yourself with exactly 16 wheat thin crackers. It will be the worst reward since Keyser Soze thanked Dean Keaton for his help by shooting him in the face.
1700 – Leave work, pick up your offspring. He will demand that you go to “Red Robin.” Mutter a few lesser oaths.
1800 – Go to Red Robin. Get a California Chicken “Burger” with fries, totalling approximately 1400 calories. Eat half of the sandwich, and half the fries. Get really snippy because your stomach is digesting itself.
2100 – Eat the remainder of the sandwich and fries.
0000 – Go to bed, hungry as if you hadn’t eaten a thing all day. Do as many pushups as you can manage (11) to try and get your mind off of the debilitating lust for food. (Fail.)
That’s all you have to do! Warning: it really sucks.
As I believe this gentleman would say: “Things are about to be unpleasant for you.” I’d like to show you a picture of the sky, which is currently as black as my wife’s zombie heart, but I’m far too lazy to go downstairs and do it. Instead:
Yesterday was the last day of church choir for the summer, so we had to make sure to dress up in our official finery, including khaki slacks and a blazer. The blazer was removed for the rehearsal and service, but we all put on our heavy polyester cassocks, which caused a great deal of sweat to build up in…um…The Area. If you catch my drift. The end result was that I sat down on the pew, and attempted to stretch my legs a bit, but the sweat caused the pantlegs to stick to my thighs, and I tore a big ol’ hole in my crotch.
I’d like to say this is an uncommon event, but no, it happens to me about once a month.
Before the afternoon service, I ran to the mall and bought new pants that better fit my prodigious bulk, but it was clear: I needed to lose some weight. I didn’t know how bad it had gotten until I weighed myself on my digital scale this morning and saw a number I’d never seen it display before: 271. This is roughly 10 pounds heavier than my last peak, in early 2004.
Unacceptable.
So far today, I’ve eaten a bagel, a banana, and about a pint of cauliflower (liberally coated with curry powder). Additionally, I went out over lunch and walked a solid hour at a “brisk pace,” probably totalling over three miles, and producing roughly a gallon of crotch sweat that has me concerned about the status of my current pants. (I’m sitting very gingerly and resisting the temptation to stretch my legs.)
One of the problems with podcasting (something I am VERY in favor of, in general) is that since it’s usually produced by amateurs with inexpensive equipment, the sound quality is frequently bad. It’s not something you notice a lot of the time because they’re talking, not making music, but if you are trying to listen in circumstances where fidelity is otherwise affected, you’ll pick up on it.
For example, I enjoy listening to podcasts when I mow the lawn. It makes the time fairly fly by, I really enjoy it. The podcast I’m most likely to listen to is “The BS Report,” by the inimitable Bill Simmons; he produces 2-4 of them a week, averaging 45 minutes, and since it takes me about 45 minutes to mow my lawn, it’s ideal. The problem is, I’m walking behind what is essentially an unmuffled internal combustion engine. It’s loud. Even with headphones on, I often have to turn the volume on the podcast all the way up. It’s probably not good for my ears, but I justify it by saying my eardrums have already stiffened to protect themselves from the noise of the lawnmower. (Didn’t know they did that, did you? They do. When faced with a barrage of noise, your ears will adjust to prevent damage. It’s why someone surprising you by yelling in your ear hurts, but someone yelling in your ear to be heard over top of a Justin Timberlake concert is fine.)
The problem comes in the fact that whoever is in charge of mixing Bill’s podcasts down sets the EQ such that sibilants, specifically S, are insanely loud. This is not something that’s difficult to fix, even if Bill is using a headset to record instead of, say, a quality microphone with a pop filter. Just pull down a specific frequency, and boom. Done.
Another of my favorite podcasts, “On The DL with Dan Levy,” suffers from a bizarre growl problem. Dan always sounds a bit like a chainsaw. The worst, however, is “Real Time with Bill Maher,” a podcast made from the regular HBO show. There, the problems aren’t EQ, but levels: Bill is always audible, but frequently his guests are not, and invariably the ambient mics they set up to get audience reactions are ear-blowing loud. Not just when I’ve the volume cranked to hear over my lawnmower, but also when I’m in my car, aka the most common place that people listen to podcasts. This is just laziness, really.
Excuses abound: Bill Maher’s techs are undoubtedly setting the fidelity for TV broadcast, not podcasting; the others are limited by the settings they use to try and get the size of the podcast under 10MB, the limit imposed by Apple and AT&T for downloading items over the 3G network.
Bull.
First of all, most of these podcasts aren’t under 10MB. Simmons has actually split some longer podcasts in two, supposedly to get under the limit, and they’re still 15MB chunks that I can’t enjoy until I go somewhere that has a wifi connection for my phone to access. The Bill Maher podcasts are routinely 15MB.
Second: somehow, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow‘s podcasts of their live MSNBC shows (each about 45 minutes long) somehow manage to get quality EQ and proper levelling of mics for hosts and guests, achieve a decent audio fidelity (no scratchiness), get the filesizes at around 9.8MB, and have them online by the morning after (unlike Bill Maher’s show, which is on 4 days later at the earliest, and often goes weeks without posting anything and then throws 3 or 4 shows up at once).
Sure, Maddow and Olbermann have quality recording equipment and professional engineers on staff to handle it, but I guarantee Maher does as well. And as a further counterpoint, James Lileks’s “Diner” podcasts always had fantastic sound, with what I assume to be a “prosumer”-level setup run by the journalist himself. (Lileks’s biggest problem at the moment is that, if he’s still doing diners [he may have stopped when he got busy being the all-media journalist for the Star-Tribune], they aren’t available on iTunes, and haven’t been for years.)
C’mon, guys, put a little effort into your podcasts. None of them need to be longer than 45 minutes, the perfect size to get a nicely adjusted recording under 10MB. Get on it.
