My United States

Ran into the video for Liam Lynch's "United States of Whatever" via one of the YouTube chains where people lip-synch to it. Lynch was the director of Sarah Silverman's brilliant "Jesus is Magic" concert movie and is a pretty funny songwriter in his own right.



I checked out his "Hard Being God" song on the basis of the title alone, and it should be called "It's Hard Pleasing God." The man upstairs is disillusioned with His creation and disappointed in human evolution ("You guys aren't what I was really aiming for"). So he plans to wipe us out ("Sometimes I'm hardcore") to be eaten and replaced by a new master race of insects. In my opinion He rhapsodizes a little too much about what an improvement they'll be. Whatever.

Birthday Pull-ups

Consistent practice (the Evil Russian's 5 sets of 5 heavy reps) finally increased my pull-ups to the magic number of 5. I've even been adding 10 or 20 pounds using a dip belt. My goal was to be able to do 10 bodyweight wide-grip pull-ups in a row by my birthday, June 6, so this morning my sons and I hit the bar in the park near our place. Ideally I would have taken a week off my back training before attempting a PR (personal record) but I've been working consistently since April. I managed eight fairly strict reps, then a couple of reps that didn't quite make it over the bar. One good thing about recording the attempt was I got to see some of my bad form: my shoulders are raised and I move my legs too much. We'll try it again in another month.

Here's the Pistols!

In my continuing quest to challenge my muscles using increasingly difficult bodyweight exercises, I've been building up to doing Pistols, tricky one-legged deep squats. After weeks of doing negatives (meaning descending slowly then falling on my ass) I've finally gotten the hang of balancing, and my legs and knees have gotten strong enough to push me back up. They're hard! I hold a 10 pound dumbbell (meaning one leg is lifting 182 pounds) and I tucker out at about 4 per leg.

Update 6/15: Here's me doing 5 Pistols on my right leg holding 20 pounds.

Mexican Guitarristas Rule

A few months ago I saw Roderigo y Gabriela on the Lopez show and they rocked the house. Gabriela's rhythm guitar work is even more jaw-dropping in this clip, especially around 1:20 in. The fact that a technique has a name (like triplets) doesn't mean it's not impossible. Personally, I think playing with your knuckles is cheating, as is knowing more than 3 chords.

Body by The Evil Russian

When the holiday weight did not come off as easily as in past years, I knew I had to do more than walk around the block. According to the scale at the mall I was the heaviest I could remember: 190 pounds in February 2010. Not quite a contender for the Biggest Loser show, and most of the visible fat was conveniently located in my spare tire, but it was time for a weight-loss regimen suitable for somebody in his 40s.

I was teaching a nutrition topic to my Chemistry class; defining carbs, fat, protein and so on. Whatever my shortcomings, when I get interested in something I dive in and don't come up for air until I get my answers. I took out stacks of books from the libraries in my area, and scoured the internet for up-to-date info on nutrition. Books like Eat This, Not That helped my students and me do the math and figure out which restaurants to avoid. Dr. Michael Eades' blog is a chemistry class in itself, but it (and Eades' books) taught me what really makes you fat and convinced me to try the "slow carb" regimen. Handy nutritional tips can be found all over, like Men's Health magazine and its website. I decided to cut way back on my intake, eat small meals and healthy snacks more often and to listen to my body to see what it really needs. I have a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal every morning, quinoa with all my other meals, lean meat, lots of legumes, very little sugar, bread and pasta and no soda. I snack on Greek yogurt, nuts and popcorn, and I have an avocado every day. I find as long as I'm getting all my nutrients I'm not hungry. I give myself a "splurge day" on Saturdays, ostensibly to keep my metabolism from slowing down to adjust to the famine conditions, but mostly so I don't feel completely deprived.

So I was reducing the caloric intake, but I knew I could improve the weight loss by increasing the output, namely exercising. I like walking, hate running and loved riding my bike until it got stolen last year. I hadn't worked out since 1998 when my wife and I joined a gym together and got in great shape. I read Tim Ferriss' blog entry in which he built the "four hour body": he worked out for 30 minutes, twice a week for a month. Whether or not he really got in a full-body workout in a half hour doing such slow reps, there's no arguing with his results. I took it as a suggestion that I could get in shape without dropping hundreds of dollars and spending two hours a day in a gym.

But which exercises would be the most effective in terms of time and energy? For a few weeks I did quick circuits with various exercises, lunging, squatting, curling and pressing with dumbells, getting my heart rate up and burning off a bunch of calories. It was great for my ADD, switching exercises every 30 seconds or so, but it felt aimless. Then I read Power to the People by Pavel "The Evil Russian" Tsatsouline, who doesn't hide his contempt for "booby-builders" in favor of those training for strength, like powerlifters. In Power to the People Tsatsouline recommends only two exercises for full-body strength development. For the lower body, he prescribes the deadlift, and for the upper body the side press, an archaic lift seemingly resurrected from the circus strongmen of the early 1900s. Could a strong, fit body be built from such a meager diet of movements? Where are the seated calf raises? The reverse curls? Not having a weight set or circus nearby, I searched for my own short list of exercises.

In the basement of our building there are a variety of dusty old stationary bikes and a decent weight bench lacking decent weights. But there's also a seemingly brand-new pull-up tower with handles for dips. What did the Evil Russian say about pull-ups? "Knock off your silly seated rows and

lat pull-downs. Focus all your energy into pull-ups." I decided to do pull-ups for my back, shoulders and biceps, and dips for my chest, shoulders

and triceps. Concentrating on these two bodyweight exercises, I could build my upper body better than getting lost among the 900 machines at the 24-Hour Fitness.

Speaking of bodyweight exercises, in another of Pavel's books, The Naked Warrior, there's a one-legged squat variation called the Pistol. I decided the

conventional one-legged squat would meet the weight needs of my leg muscles, since doing the Pistol bends the lifting leg too far for my 43-year old knees (my left knee disliked the Pistol from the first rep). I've concentrated on performing one-legged squats with perfect form (it takes pretty good balance) and I've definitely felt it in my quads, hams and glutes.

My first day in the basement was not promising. I couldn't do a single pull-up. How was I going to do the standard 8 to 12 reps I used to do on the lat pulldown machine? The Evil Russian favors heavy, low rep training, five reps being the ideal. According to his experience, this promotes myofibrillar hypertrophy (dense, strong muscle). High rep training promotes the more cosmetic but weaker sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, which Pavel calls "bloated, soft and useless muscle." If you can't lift the weight, he and others recommend using negatives (the lowering of the weight) to build strength. I used a chair to help myself up to the top of the pull-up, then let go of my legs and lowered my weight using only my lats. The dips went better, and before long I was holding a 10-pound dumbell between my legs to increase the weight. And so it went, day after day, for the month of April. Pull-ups, dips, squats (all following Pavel's up-fast, down-slow instructions), and whatever core exercises I liked. I walked almost every day, even sprinted a few intervals once, and rode my new bike once a week or so. Soon the pool in our complex should be open for the season.

The results so far, after around 2 months on the program: At the end of February I weighed just over 190 pounds, my spare tire spilling over my 34 inch waist pants. On April 27, at 173 pounds, I was fitting comfortably in 32 inch waist pants. The picture on the left was taken March 7, on the right, May 11th. I can now do 5 unassisted pull-ups, and I do dips holding 40 extra pounds. Let's just say my wife is very appreciative of all the effort.

The True King of Rock and Roll

Why oh why don't we get performances like this on TV anymore? Little Richard, self-professed King of Rock and Roll, covers the Killer and, well, kills it. I can't believe he has enough energy to get through this song, let alone a concert full of woos and yeahs.

Wild Cultures

Since learning to bake bread 5 or 6 years ago I've always held sourdough to be the ultimate achievement in bread baking. In that time I perfected my pizza dough recipe (using instant yeast), and could use the same dough to make a pretty good loaf of white bread. While the exploits of Adam-real-last-name-unknown in Tony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential might have been exaggerated, it at least went along with what I had read about the use of pre-ferments (poolish, biga) to improve the taste and texture of bread. My preferred method is to mix the dough and leave it for a long, long proof in a cold fridge. Fermenting dough before baking, however, is really just an attempt to partake of a bit of the sourdough process without adopting it completely.

Part of the problem with the whole topic of sourdough is the name. The bread baked from a "sourdough" starter doesn't have to be sour. Peter Reinhart prefers to call it "wild yeast" to be more exact. For thousands of years bakers had to rely on the single-celled fungi that are in the air, in the flour, even on our skin, to leaven dough. But this process was (and remains) as much an art as a science. Some bakers learned how to cut corners by borrowing the foam from beer brewers for its yeast. In the 1860s the Fleischmanns figured out how to cultivate and dry "brewers yeast" and revolutionized the baking industry.

But, convenient as commercial yeast makes baking, it's not the same animal (ok, plant) as wild yeast, and there are purists out there who claim this shift was the beginning of the decline of bread. There are studies to suggest that they have a point: one indicates people with Celiac disease can safely eat wild-yeast bread, and another suggests that because of the increase of lactic acid and the reduction of simple carbohydrates produced by the sourdough process,wild-yeast bread could be of benefit to diabetics. Accomplished bakers like Ed Wood, a scientist living in Idaho, recommend using wild yeast exclusively and avoiding "contaminating" your bread with commercial yeast. Dr. Wood worked with National Geographic on a project concerning a bakery on the building site of the pyramids in Egypt. He successfully captured the still-abundant yeasts from the site, and they are among the international cultures you can buy from his company, Sourdoughs International. His book, Classic Sourdoughs, is a classic of its own for its straightforward and sensible approach to this seemingly complicated field.

A few weeks ago I was bitten by the sourdough bug again, and borrowed every book available through my library system on the topic. There's plenty of contradictory advice from writers on just about every step in the process, from starting the culture and keeping it active, to making the dough. Everybody has their own opinion concerning the proper method of capturing wild yeast for your own culture, with some authors complicating the process with grapes or pineapple juice. I don't doubt these procedures work, but I followed the method that had worked for me before. I simply combined a little flour and water into a ball of dough the size of a golf ball, put it into a jar, covered it with plastic wrap and left it on my counter for a few days. After "feeding" it with a little more flour and water and leaving it for a few more days I could tell from the air bubbles that my yeast colony was active. 

From there I had to find out how much starter I needed to have in order to make a loaf of bread. Some bakers use only a tablespoon or two and build it up from there, others use as much as two cups. Again, I don't doubt this or that recipe, but I just needed an easy template to work from. Classic Sourdoughs seemed to have the easiest: every recipe starts off with wild-yeast culture in liquid or sponge form (thinner or thicker consistency, respectively), to which you add a little flour and water and let it proof for 12 hours. You "build" it up again with more flour and water, and let it proof for 8 more hours. Then you add the rest of the ingredients (salt, other flours, sometimes oil or eggs), form your loaves and let them rise for another 1 - 4 hours until fully proofed. Bake, cool and eat. There is nothing difficult about any step in the process, but it takes a bit of planning ahead.

With small alterations, this is the formula for everything from San Francisco sourdough and rye bread to sourdough pancakes and cinnamon rolls. I've made the San Francisco recipe (great, but not sour), pizza dough (the crust came out nice and soft, but my wife thought it was bland compared to my usual recipe), and Middle Eastern pitas (I used whole wheat flour - delicious with a little tang). Wood's method doesn't require thrice-daily feedings like some authors, making me think some people don't trust their starters to get the job done. I would only add to his method what I learned from Peter Reinhart: the finished dough can be put in the refrigerator to build more flavor or simply to wait until you're ready to bake it! I did this with the wild-yeast pizza dough and it worked fine. Now I'm looking forward to trying his rye bread and pancake recipes, too.