Best Gonzo gone headline I've seen: Gonzalez dug his own grave, and many are happy to dance on it.

US Police running out of bullets.

Engineering a better cow feed to reduce green house gases by lowering the methane content of cow belches

Book review of What makes a terrorist?

Take your dog to the ball game?

Ohioans drinking more and better hard liquor

I stayed up late to watch this movie last night. I quite enjoyed it for a number of reasons. It's rare to see a movie, especially an action/adventure film, filled with such strong women characters. It was also quite nice to see the main players (Chun Yow-Fat and Michelle Yeoh) looking natural instead of prettified to look fifteen years younger. You could see the tiredness and exhaustion in their eyes.

The film had quite a few interesting themes. The overarching theme, though, was the conflict between tradition and personal freedom. All of the characters in the film were in one fashion or the other made prisoner by social expectations and traditional moral codes. I take director Ang Lee's message to be that the struggle against these traditions is painful but necessary. In each case, the quest for freedom resulted in tragedy. Yet the suggestion remains that this tragedy has brought about a greater good. Which is probably my one complaint with the film. This suggestion, by the end, seems far too one sided. The willingness of one of the characters to sacrifice enlightenment for ephemeral romance seems comes across to me as being a bit too anachronistically humanist. I see it as the triumph of western style romanticism over traditional Chinese moral philosophy.

But what do I know?

For some reason this past week I was reminded of a Berdyaev quote that I used for a tag line for a bit back in the bad old K5 days, Nothing can be more pitiful and absurd than to pride oneself on one's genius. I don't recall the context that this quote occurred in. I think it may have been an article he wrote on aesthetics.

But I love the sentiment. Whatever art we create pales in consideration of the art that we are.

I've got two initiatives presently going on for my health. The first is paying attention to what I eat. The second is performing a moderate amount of exercise every day.

The first of these isn't going so well. I seem to have pretty much plateaued at just a hair over 12 stones. This isn't all that bad as it puts my BMI at 24.3 which is under the official cut off (25) for being fat. On the other hand, it isn't that much under the cut off and I could certainly stand to lose a bit more of my gut. Ideally, I'd like to see my weight fluctuating between eleven and half to twelve stones. I need to go back to eating more fresh fruit at work and fewer potato chips.

The other front, the exercise, is progressing quite nicely. Of my two mile daily course, I'm up to running just about three quarters of one mile. But I'm considering canning the Charles Atlas exercises for my upper body, or at reducing the frequency. The Charles Atlas system is great for slowly building muscles, but the exercises do get repetitive and I suspect now that I've built up a fair amount of strength, I'm posing a bit of risk to myself by doing the same exercises every day. Unfortunately, it's only the first set of upper body exercises from the system that are conducive to doing while walking.

My progress on the 5BX system also goes well. I don't do it exactly right. For starters, I don't time myself. Secondly, I tend to round the numbers because I'm a bit weak minded with regards to remembering 5 different sets of un-rounded numbers. I'm presently on the A bracket of chart 3. If my progress goes as expected, I'll be starting chart 4 the week after next. Chart 4 is where I intend to move into maintenance mode and cut down to three times per week.