I think it is so damn funny how many bloggers put ads on their blogs. To me this is the equivalent of putting ads on your band’s CD. Blogs are art. Why do these people litter their art with ads?

I realize some bloggers are actually trying (and some perhaps succeeding) in making a living by blogging and in those cases I guess I will concede the point. It just seems to be that every blogger with more than a few thousand hits start getting dollar signs in their eyes.

What a bunch of shameless marketers we’ve become. I can’t even find the funnies in the Sunday paper anymore because some brilliant ass decided they have to smother them in ads. I can’t listen to commercial radio because of how hideous local radio ads are. Even when I buy a DVD I get mandatory previews I have to watch. Now here in the relative integrity of the blogsphere every jackass with a blog about their cat/lover/job is hawking wares for Google.

I think we need a cease fire.

I’ve really enjoyed the Carnival Of The Godless. I’ve been meaning to write something for it, ’cause it is all right up my alley, but, alas, I haven’t. Perhaps the next one. If you are interested in issues like the separation of chuch and state, the evolution vs. religious insanity debate or other issues of the secular movement, check it out.

I don’t usually write about silly stuff like this but…

Last night I had some microwave popcorn from Pop Secret. I was disgusted by how sweet it was. I couldn’t believe someone would put sugar in popcorn. I looked at the ingredients and it had fucking sucralose in it.

I just disgusts me how these food companies think we want everything to be sweet. You can buy orange juice with high fructose corn syrup in it. Who the hell needs high fructose corn syrup in fucking orange juice?

I think these idiots get fooled by taste tests where people taste things side by side. I’m guessing your average dumb ass always prefers the sweeter one. Thus we head down this road where everything gets sweeter and sweeter and sweeter and we all get fatter and fatter and fatter.

Not to mention how fucking horrible sucralose is. It tastes like shit and it is made out of shit.

I shan’t be buying Pop Secret ever again in my life.

Let me start at the end — I don’t believe it is possible to lose weight without significantly increasing the amount of exercise you get. When I say exercise I mean the kind of exercise that feels like work. Our bodies were designed for hard work. Most of us, me included, do not have jobs where we have to physically work hard. That means we have to make our own work, which is called working out. If you want to lose weight you have to work out, hard and often.

Second, losing weight is a math thing. You need to burn more calories than you consume. There is no way around this. All the stupid diets that you see are selling you something. If you burn more than you eat, you lose weight. If you don’t, you don’t.

The reason I bring this up is I have a goal to lose somewhere around 20 pounds. I started out trying to change my diet. I was miserable and it didn’t work — I actually gained weight. But days after I started working out, I started losing weight. I’ve lost about 12 pounds so far. The other great thing about working out is that you can be a little less concerned about your diet. I am still trying to eat less and eat better but I don’t worry about the occasional meal at McDonalds.

My plan has been to work out every day. I go to the YMCA and lift weights and do 30 minutes on a cardio machine every other day. The other days I go for a run or a bike ride or do some other cardio work out. I don’t do it everyday. I’m busy and things come up. But by planning on working out everyday, I guarantee that I get at least 4 or 5 days per week. If I planned on doing 4 or 5 days per week, things would come up and I’d end up doing 1 or 2 days per week.

The other great thing about working out, as opposed to trying to simply eat less and better, is that you are getting healthy in other ways, too. You improve your cardiovascular health and your bone density. Your digestion is better and stress levels are reduced. It is also good psychologically because it is hard and it takes discipline and you feel like you have accomplished something when you are done.

So there it is. Work out in a way that makes you sweat. Challenge your self and push yourself. Start now and do it forever. I hope I do.

I updated my blog to MovableType 3.0 which requires you to register to comment. This is because of super lame ass spammers who spam blogs and discussion areas trying to get search engine ratings. I hope you will take the time to register if you feel like commenting. They’ve made it pretty simple and straightforward.

Thought for the day: When people say things like “peace is the answer” it is always true. The usual response is “well, what about Hitler? Should we have not gone to war with Nazi Germany?” The answer is that it was the German people that needed to insist that their country was peaceful. They could have stopped it. Just like we can stop our government when they go overboard. Which they are doing, under the leadership of the miserable failure known as George W. Bush.

One night I was up late, sitting in the little sun room at the front of my house. I had some candles lit and I think I was playing guitar. I saw someone walk in through the back door of my house. I lived with 3 or 4 people so I was not alarmed but when he got close I could see that it was not someone I knew. I said something like “hey, man, what are you doing walking into my house.” It became clear very quickly that he was way fucked up on drugs or something. He was fairly incoherent. He started saying stuff like “It doesn’t matter ’cause we’re all gonna die anyway.” I felt this could turn into a dangerous situation. I noticed a large kitchen knife clearly in view. To try to diffuse the situation, I offered him a beer. Again he went on about how I was going to die. I was not very confrontational — I was calm and rational and acted like I was trying to understand what the hell he was talking about. One of my roommates was asleep downstairs. I yelled down, “Mark, come up here.” He sounded pissed and said “What?!?” I said, “Get up here.” He must have understood from the tone of my voice that something was up. He came up the stairs in his tightie whities. The guy said again something about how it doesn’t matter and we’re all gonna die. He then swept his arm across the bar and knocked a bunch of plants on the ground, shattering them. Mark acted disinterested and walked back downstairs. Within about 3 minutes I saw a flashlight in the back yard and it was the police. Mark had called 911. The woman officer asked if she could come in. I said yes. The guy reached into his pocket and pulled out a bag of weed and stepped on it. The police officer cuffed him. She asked what happened and I told her. She said, “You gave him a beer? That’s an interesting tactic.” I did not point out the bag of weed on the floor and she didn’t see it.

Apparently the guy had entered someone else’s house across the street, too, which is why the cops were so nearby. I was asked if I wanted to press charges and I declined. I smoked the weed.

The reason I titled this post the way I did was because one of my roomates had a handgun that he kept loaded in the house, which pissed us off. If it had been him and not me, the situation would have turned violent. By staying calm and non-threatening, I was able to diffuse the situation. Now maybe I was lucky and maybe I could have been attacked and killed. Maybe I would have wished I had a gun in that case. I can’t say. I do know that being focused on a peaceful resolution paid off by creating a peaceful resolution. Violence begets violence.

I am not an atheist. I think it is irrational to say that there is definitely not a god. I also think it is irrational to say there definitely is a god. I don’t think there is anything at all irrational with believing in god. Faith does not need proof. I am a dictionary definition agnostic. I believe this issue is unknowable. In that way, I intend to leave myself open to anything being possible. I enjoy reading about and discussing spirituality. I enjoy practicing it, in a sense. I think this is the quest into which we are all born — figure it out, this big question in life. Never stop looking.

I make this point as a prelude — I consider myself a moral and patriotic person but I am entirely, wholeheartedly a secularist. I believe that our government should be entirely impartial on matters of religion. I’ve addressed this issue here before. I want to point out that I finally have someone lobbying Washington on my behalf. Check out http://www.godlessamericans.org/. This is a good thing. While I fully support the rights of religious people to express themselves it is nuts how politicians pander to them. Our government is secular, it should be secular and it is odd that we need groups like this to emphasize this.

…and take back your country:

Independent Media In A Time Of War

What are you standing on? What’s it standing on? What’s that thing standing on. Eventually you get to the earth. How did that get here? How did we get on it? How long will it be here? How long will it be hospitable to human life?

These are the questions of astronomy. Whether fortunately or unfortunately, our lives are not long enough to notice what is really going on in the universe. In the scale of the universe we almost don’t exist. There is something really big going on over an extremely long period of time but in the blur of our lives the universe appears to be virtually static. Astronomers are working on a lot of really “boring stuff” but it is all ultimately related to this same question that all of us have wondered about. Where is here?

To the best of my knowledge, the answer is this:

The Big Bang happened and spacetime started expanding and matter began condensing and (ultimately) clumping together. Some of the clumps condensed to the point that they started nuclear fusion and became stars. Before our Sun there was at least one other star that made us — the one that went supernova. We suspect we are born of supernova because of all the heavy elements around us, like the earth, the moon, pancakes, Mars, bowling pins, etc., are not produced in quantity by any other processes we know of. There was no mud in the Big Bang. Stars turn Hydrogen into Helium and Helium into Carbon but heavier elements are fairly scarce in stars. Anyway, so the Big Bang happened, a star was formed (among trillions of others), it went supernova and created a bunch of junk. Our solar system condensed out of this junk. The planets, including earth, condensed out of a big accretion disk that sort of swirled around the newborn Sun. This was roughly 4 billion years ago. The universe they say is roughly 13 billion years old. So the earth has been around for roughly 1/3 of the age of the universe.

Sometime I’ll talk about how the earth is ultimately doomed.

Michael