It Ain’t Modest If I Humblebrag About It

From an article entitled How Exercise Shapes You, Far Beyond the Gym:

A study published in the British Journal of Health Psychology found that college students who went from not exercising at all to even a modest program (just two to three gym visits per week) reported a decrease in stress, smoking, alcohol and caffeine consumption, an increase in healthy eating and maintenance of household chores, and better spending and study habits.

WHAT? Here, I thought I was a gym rat, and I’m only doing a modest program? Ay, me.

It’s enough to make a man turn to doughnuts for solace. Not that I need much guidance in the doughnut direction, mind you.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

iPhones without Headphones: A Long View

And some of you think that Tim Cook is not an innovator!

Full disclosure: I hold some Apple stock, but half of what I once did. When the value of the stock doubled, I sold half, right at its peak because I wondered if the aura of Steve Jobs was much of the brand. It might well have been, but my remaining holdings are all house money now. Once in a while, I make a wise investment decision, unlike then I bought National Lampoon Media Partners, IPIX, or Salon New Media, or when I didn’t dump my SIRI immediately when they signed Howard Stern. Ah, well, live and live. I never learn.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Book Report: Wolverine: Weapon X by Marc Cerasini (2004)

Book coverThis book is a novelization of the Weapon X storyline from the Marvel Comics that tells the origin of Wolverine’s metal skeleton. I was most familiar with it because a spin of it was part of the material covered in the first Wolverine movie. But I’ve never been a real fan of the mutant titles, to be honest. Which is why we’re a couple or three behind in the film series as well.

At any rate: The book follows two tracks. One is Logan getting captured, which is told from his point of view until he’s rendered a test subject, at which point it becomes a story of the scientists working with him. It shifts to the point of view of some of the employees at the facility, including some almost sympathetic looks at the guards and scientists. Then it comes to the ending where, if you don’t know, gentle reader, let me tell you: Wolverine awakens and kills everyone, and the desperate fight is told in great detail, and the scientists–even the ones with the backstories that make them somewhat sympathetic–die! But, wait, there’s a twist: it’s an induced mental part of his conditioning and didn’t happen! But wait, there’s another twist: A scientist pipes up that this mental induction technique was no longer used because it was sometimes predictive of the future! Then Wolverine wakes up, and everyone is killed quickly.

Oh, yeah, the second part of the story is Logan as a special ops man going into North Korea to stop something or other, and Logan dreams the memory of it as he’s being experimented on, so that’s how it crosses over into the main plotline. One of the helicopter pilots at the end turns out to be one of the security team at the facility, and he recognizes Logan ultimately right before Logan kills him.

So I thought the ending of the story was mangled. The whole double-twist thing was stupid. And, unfortunately, the excellent work humanizing the scientists in the novelization made the ending unsatisfactory because I didn’t want them dead. Most of the book is from their point of view, as I said, so the culmination of a revenge story at the end doesn’t seem congruous. But that’s a problem of the story, not the novelization.

At any rate, Marvel did a couple books around this time of that ilk, but I’m leery of them. I’ve got some other comic book novelizations around here, and I’ll probably get to them sooner rather than later, but I’m disappointed in this story.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Book Report: Kilroy Was Here by Charles Osgood (2001)

Book coverThis book collects some humor from several World War II era sources, such as Stars and Stripes, a book called Yank, and a couple of other works. It’s grouped by topic, which allows Osgood, the editor, to shuffle material from the same sources. It includes jokes, poems, humorous anecdotes, and whatnot.

As such, it is more easily approachable, prolly, to people of a certain age who grew up with Beetle Bailey and Sad Sack cartoons or who actually served. It’s not a bad read, but it’s from a time before cell phones, Twitter, and the Internet, which probably means that kids today won’t get much of the humor.

So not a bad read, but probably not something that’s going to sell a bunch more these days.

The KC Kid saw me reading this book out in public and asked if he was going to read the review for it sometime. Well, yes, but it won’t be much of a review.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories