My friend Mark, whose battle with off-roaders on his land and RS 2477 I’ve discussed here previously, pointed me to another good site, the Property Owners for Sensible Road Policy.
Exercise and Depression
Back in February, I posed the question of whether stopping exercise triggers depression in a regular exerciser.
Comes a blog commenter two months later with a citation:
? Mondin, G,. Morgan, W., Piering, P. Stegner, A, Stotesbery, C., Trine, M. Wu, M. (1996), Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, Williams & Wilkins, 28, 1199-1203
The consequences of exercise deprivation for regular exercisers was studied over a 3 days, with ten volunteers. Regular was defined as at least 45 minutes 6 or 7 times a week. State and Trait Anxiety (STAI) was assessed, plus tension, depression, mood, anger, vigor, fatigue and confusion. Increases in state anxiety, mood disturbance, tension confusion and depression were reported at significant levels.
The Car Show
Lissa and I went to a car show Saturday. This was an unexpected pleasure.
We went because the article in the newspaper mentioned restored travel trailers, which are a hoot. It’s always been a fantasy of Lissa’s to buy a little old ’50s or early ’60s trailer and restore it. So we drove on over to Rio Rancho to see the car show that had the trailers. And the trailers were nice, for sure, six of ’em lovingly restored. But the car show – that was the attraction.
As we walked up and down the rows of impeccable autos, it occurred to me that this was some sort of quintessential American art form – the perfect upholstery, the shiny lacquered paint. The aesthetic is rich and complex – why a load of old ’60s Mustangs, but no Astin Martins? Why a Dodge Challenger (“the last American hero, the electric sintar, the demi-god, the super driver of the golden west”) rather than a Jaguar? And the wheels, almost always mags, rather than the stock? And one of these.
Why Boycott CVS?
Jeff’s post on the urchin with the “Boycott CVS sign” sent me googling to find out who was boycotting CVS and why.
For our European readres, CVS, in addition to representing a state-of-the-old-art software version control tool, also is the name of a chain of drugists in the U.S. It’s a rather large chain, and as such it seems at one time or another to have offended all sides of the cultural spectrum here in the United States.
At some point (the date is unclear and I’m having to rely on google’s cache to resurrect the history), some fundamentalist Christians launched a boycott after CVS cut off its funding for the Boy Scouts. According to the fundamentalists, CVS was reacting to the Boy Scouts’ stand on homosexuality:
For the past several years, various businesses have ended their support of the Boy Scouts of America by cutting off their funding. CVS Pharmacy is one of them. The reason was because of the Boy Scout’s stance on not allowing homosexuals into the organization as scout leaders or scouts. We are encouraging all Christians to boycott any business that does this. This is not only an attack against the Scouts. It is also a direct attack on conservative Christians, the authority of the Bible, and our Lord.
More recently, the opposite side of our great cultural divide launched a boycott of their own after a CVS pharmacist refused to fill a woman’s prescription for birth control pills.
One imagines that, the chain having apparently offended everyone, no one now shops at CVS.
Art Spam
A new variation on comment spam. Rather than the usual porn or prescription meds, today I got one from an artist using comment spam to help peddle her paintings. I almost left it. Almost.
The Sprint
Dano –
Remember where I said it was a good sign when Armstrong led out Max van Heeswijk’s sprint at the Tour of Murcia? This is even better news – when the Texan wins the sprint himself:
Who knew the boy could sprint?
Does Sadie Like to Run?
If you saw my dog, Sadie, as she scopes me out in the morning when I put on my shoes, you’d think the answer to the question is obvious. She’s always checking for the running shoes. When it’s clear we’re going running, she goes ballistic.
But does she really have “fun?” Or is this just a result of evolution, a dance between her genes and mine in which her ancestors enjoyed some benefit (my ancestors fed them?) when they exhibited what looked like enthusiasm for going hunting, or out into the fields for the work day.
It’s a question I think about a lot, so I was totally intrigued by a piece in the April 8 Nature by Clive D. L. Wynne, from the University of Florida.
Continue reading ‘Does Sadie Like to Run?’ »
Hummer
The bird, that is, silhouetted against the fading light of dusk while it sipped from the feeder at my back window. Lissa saw one at our front window where the feeder goes over the weekend, but this is the first I’ve seen this year.
Running Shoes
Murray: I don’t know how you’ll duplicate this in Munich, but there’s a wonderful running shoe store here in Albuquerque, Heart and Sole (sorry, ignore the pun) that offers a good solution to your problem. They’ve got a treadmill in store with a video camera at foot level. The guy talks to you, guesses about a pair of shoes that might address your biomechanical issues, then has you run while he videotapes your foot fall. Then he plays it back, freeze-framing and stepping slowly through your entire stride to figure out if the shoe is addressing your problem. (And we all have problems.)
It resulted in the best running shoe fit I’ve ever had. Obviously, a plane ticket to Albuquerque is probably out of the question, but there must be someone in a great city like Munich that’s doing this.
Purple Pansies
Bought a pot of purple pansies. That is a fine, fine sentence – a sentence worthy of carving in something, or perhaps accompanying on a bongo.