Another Strange Easter Tradition at Nogglestead

Brian J. Noggle

I have already told you the story of the Easter Chewbacca (which Chimera successfully knocked behind the clock, so it resides there to this very day, and the Easter tie (which I did wear to church this morning).

Now, the story of the Easter bucket.

I got some stuff for Easter for the boys this year. Last year, Easter fell right after the lockdown, and I was still limiting my trips out of Nogglestead, so I didn’t get anything for the boys. And the gap gave me time to forget that we had discarded the old Easter baskets from years before because my boys had beat each other with them between the holidays.

So when I went out to look for the baskets in the garage last night, I only found one that had been part of another Easter disbursement of some sort.

So I used a decorative bucket instead for the oldest.

They’re old enough to buy their own candy year-round, which they do whenever they have money in their pockets and the weather allows. So they only got a couple peeps and a couple of chocolate eggs, a magazine or two each, a tin of Altoids, and a yo-yo. Most of the candy is likely eaten except for a tin of Altoids which has already been spilled.

And the Easter Bucket might just become a tradition. I mean, the oldest only has three more Easters, so it doesn’t make sense to spend a couple of dollars on one at this late date.

So another, albeit brief, strange tradition is born.

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Meanwhile, In The Powerline Week In Pictures, We Get My Area

Brian J. Noggle

This weeks Week in Pictures at Powerline features a meme from my area:

If I am not mistaken, that is Kearney facing east. North of Kearney, there’s only Interstate 44 and then non-overpass intersections north.

Of course, I hardly ever see the intersection going that way–when I’m going to ABC Books, I take US 65 north to Kearney and then turn west on Kearney to get to Glenstone and my favorite bookstore.

I have seen the sign on rare occasions when I have wanted to catch the highway from Kearney or when I have gone east on Kearney to a sports facility formerly known as The Courts, where my boys had a basketball camp and my youngest briefly played in a basketball league.

Not as weird as seeing a known intersection in a CAPTCHA.

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Brian J. Avoids The Big Mistake (Barely)

Brian J. Noggle

So my boys were both off of school on Good Friday, and since it was two weeks out from our adventures on spring break, I wanted to take them somewhere if I could think of it. I mean, we have the Springfield places that we’ve either gone often, doesn’t interest them, or is priced for tourists.

So I thought about a road trip.

I thought about going out to Poplar Bluff to have lunch with my brother or nephew, but it’s six hours round trip, and we had church service in the evening. So I looked around for used book stores or places to go that might have interesting things to do. Bolivar apparently has a used book store that is a seamstress’s sideline and a couple parks. But I saw the It’s a Mystery book store down in Berryville, Arkansas. It’s only about an hour and a half away, and it looks like Berryville has plenty of places to eat and a town square to walk around. So I piled the boys into the car with their old road trip Game Boys and, when everyone asked our destination, told them, “It’s a Mystery.” That was about the best part of it.

So they’re guessing as we start down Highway 160. Is it Branson? Is it a museum? And then the youngest, still at the private school, asks, “Is it out of the state?”

“Do you want to go out of the state?” I asked, playing coy.

“If I go to another state, I have to quarantine for two weeks from school,” he said.

Oh, yes, now I remembered that edict from the school. Of course, I hadn’t thought of it because we weren’t “traveling” in the vacation sense; we were taking a day trip on a lark. So I screeched the brakes as we approached the Welcome to Arkansas sign, barely averting the disaster of having him home for two weeks.

Well, it wasn’t quite that dramatic, but I did have to abort the mission and curse the arbitrary PANDEMIC!!!!! protocols which determined that a small town seventy miles away was more dangerous than big cities three hours away on other states’ borders.

So we ended up driving an hour and a half taking the long way around to a diner thirty minutes from our home in Marionville, which did not impress us, and then driving to run a couple of errands in town.

So I basically spent four hours in the car yesterday going nowhere.

It’s not the adventure we’d hoped for, but at least the goal and the result will have been memorable.

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Good Album Hunting, April 1, 2021: Relics Antique Mall

Brian J. Noggle

I got two $25 gift certificates to Relics Antique Mall for Christmas. Relics’ gift certificates are unique in two ways to Relics’ favor: They expire in a mere six months, and you have to spend the total amount on the gift certificate as they give no change and they’re not gift cards that can carry a balance.

I had a couple of minutes between picking up the oldest from his after school activity and picking up the youngest from his after school activity, so I stopped by to see if I could find anything. When I was in during the Christmas season, I had spotted a set of fencing equipment which I believe had two vests, two helmets, four gloves, and two foils, and I would have been all over that if I saw it again. I mistakenly thought I had two $30 gift certificates, so I thought I would almost afford the fencing set which was $75 if memory serves. But I didn’t see it. I started browsing records though, thinking if I could find $30 in records in fifteen minutes, I would spend one of the certificates, and if I only found a couple bucks’ worth of records, I’d pay.

Well, as I have lamented before, record prices have been rising. Not so fast for the old and the obscure stuff I like as much as for more popular fare, but where records would have been a couple bucks a couple years ago, now they’re five dollars and way, way up.

Still, I was playing with house money. And in about twenty minutes, I found enough to spend both certificates.

I got:

  • Torch Songs for Trumpet by Doc Severinson and His Orchestra.
  • Catching the Sun by Spyro Gyra.
  • All Access, a two record live album it looks like, by Spyro Gyra.
  • Hollywood Byrd by Charlie Byrd. A jazz musician who the people who price records for antique malls don’t seem to have heard of as both his records were on the low end of the price scale.
  • The Touch of Gold by Charlie Byrd. Of course, both records are ‘pops’ more than jazz maybe.
  • One of Those Songs by the Fluegel Knights. It looks to be a compilation; the name would seem to indicate a fluegelhorn somewhere, ainna?
  • Here’s Jody by Jody Miller. She looks very country, but she’s PWOC (Pretty Woman On Cover), and the record has a version of “Won’t You Stay (Just A Little Bit Longer)” that I want to hear.
  • Organ Moods in Hi-Fi with Buddy Cole at the Pipe Organ. C’mon, man, can you have too many organ records? I mean, I have bought Klaus Wunderlich new on CD. You know how I would answer. Plus, this record was fifty cents.
  • The Best of Tim Weisberg by Tim Weisberg. Two bucks; on the low end of the price scale, and I already have several Tim Weisberg albums. Again, I guess this is the obscure stuff I accumulate.
  • Impressions for Flute by Ransom Wilson. He looks much more serious than Tim Weisberg.
  • A Nonesuch record with works by Francis Poulenc. I have no idea who he is, but I know Nonesuch records.
  • Around the World by Frankie Carle.
  • Feels So Good by Chuck Mangione. Because it has a better cover than the other one that I recently bought at another antique mall.
  • Golden Classics by Ace Cannon.

I carefully estimated and thought I’d picked out about $65 in records (profligately). It was only when I got to the register that I re-discovered my gift certificates were for $50 total. But with the discounts applied, the total came to $53 something.

Which means that the records I got only cost me $4. Many of them came with their own mylar sleeves, which is further savings.

However, as my recent tidying of my record shelving has indicated, I really need to build more shelving. Especially with the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale coming up later this month with its fifty cent records on the Saturday. Ay, if only I had a pickup truck to easily haul lumber.

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Unclear On The Concept

Brian J. Noggle

I picked at the margins of cleaning up my garage last weekend, getting rid of a couple of bins of glass in various forms (jars, bottles, broken), and I discovered that at some point in the past, I had stored a stepping stool by putting it on the top shelf.

In my defense, I think the then-immediate impulse was to get it off of the floor, and I did. Besides, everyone who would want to get something from the top shelves in the garage these days is tall enough to reach the top shelf (my oldest is about to be taller than I am–what?) or is married to/begat someone tall enough to reach it. This particular stool doesn’t see much use at Nogglestead aside from maybe some painting duty (I’d have to check the colors of paint spattered on it to see if this is actually the case).

As it’s not actually blocking the garage door from opening, I shall keep it there, likely for years. Like so many things these days.

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Recklessly, I Picked Up….

Brian J. Noggle

So, I finished reading Supercarrier, and I then picked up Supership. When I bought it in 2007, I thought it was a novel set on a supertanker, but I have since learned it is actually a nonfiction account, sort of like Supercarrier on a tanker.

I started reading this, and the cargo ship got stuck in the Suez Canal.

So I picked up The Last Picture Show, and Larry McMurtry died.

I told my beautiful wife these two events, and although she laughed, I feared my reading selections might have more power than providing me several nights’ worth of reading leading to eventual, or sometimes sudden, disappointment.

Maybe what I decide to read dictates world events.

Keeping with my reading of novelizations or sources for movies in paperback, I picked up True Lies.

I am sorry; if that happens, it’s all on me.

Meanwhile, reading of David Copperfield continues a couple chapters every couple of nights. So far, no major mining disasters. So maybe it really is a coincidence.

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Book Report: The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry (1966, 1979)

Brian J. Noggle

Book coverWell, as I mentioned, Larry McMurtry died while I was reading this book. I read Books: A Memoir in February, and I knew I had a couple of his novels on the shelves. I came across this one while I was looking for something to read before picking up Hud, the movie version of Horseman, Pass By.

And I came here to bury McMurtry, not to praise him.

This book, which the cover calls the precursor to Texasville even though this book and its movie came before the second book in what would eventually be known as the Thalia Trilogy and its movie. Published in 1966, the book is set a decade or so earlier in a small Texas town. It’s the sort of literary novel favored by serious artists and those who love them: The novel of pissing on where you came from, your home town where everyone is pitiable. So I did not like the book at all, and that’s before nine teenaged boys ran a train on a blind heifer and the novelist assured us that all the small town boys have sex with farm animals, if not cows and horses then dogs and chickens. Whatever is available. It’s not often that I call a book depraved, but here you go.

I mean, the main character or protagonist, such as it is, is a high school kid estranged from his father and lives in a rooming house with another high school friend. The friend is dating the daughter of one of the rich families in town, a girl who wants to be a legend in town and is a climber, always plotting her next move and/or boyfriend. The book is chock full of characters–the local coach, who might be a latent homosexual; his wife, Mrs. Robinson Ruth, who is turning forty and discovers orgasm with the protagonist; the owner of the pool hall/picture show/diner who is like a father figure to the town boys; and so on. You don’t really like any of them. Mostly, you pity them. The story, such as it is, follows a winter/spring/summer of the boys’ senior year, including football season, a trip to Mexico to score with some prostitutes, sexual escapades/adultery/sociosexual climbing and more prostitutes, it’s all pitiable and games until someone loses an eye, and then…. Well, it ends. To be taken up thirty years later in Texasville if you’re so inclined. I am not.

So this is why I like genre fiction. Because it has heroes and adventures, not normalish-but-quiet-desperation-amid-meaningless-sex vignettes.

I did flag a couple things to comment on, but I have decided not to bother except to bring up two points below the fold.
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Someone Forgot One

Brian J. Noggle

I am so something that I saw something else.

I saw Hewlett Packard mainly because I just ordered a new laptop. No, scratch that: Some months ago, I ordered a new laptop, and Hewlett Packard sat on my money for a couple of months and then sent me a laptop directly from its factory in China which I just received. And rather don’t trust now that I’ve seen where it shipped from.

You know what else marks one kind of a person from another? Getting a new computer/laptop/device and immediately thinking, “Eh, what a chore to set it up” instead of “Cool! I can’t wait to try the new version of Civilization/other game that I bought this computer to run.” I mean, it marks me old that I still run computers for the most part and don’t get excited–or even get the latest mobile devices until the battery on my current one cannot take a charge. But it marks me older yet that I don’t jump right on the new computer, either.

Also, I am not much into gaming on the computer these days, so I don’t need the gee-whizzery of the latest modest improvement.

And even though I saw Hewlett Packard first, I think the other two are more fun.

(Image via Ms. K.)

UPDATE: I am not alone.

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Local Debacle Makes The News In England For Some Reason

Brian J. Noggle

Inside the $1.6bn ghost town abandoned in 2008 – before anyone moved in:

The Ozarks region of Missouri was set to become home to a prosperous town featuring a shopping mall, a 390-room hotel, the country’s second-largest indoor water park – and dozens of castle-like townhouses.

But the $1.6bn investment went to waste as the town remains uninhabited almost 15 years later.

The Indian Ridge Resort was hit hard by the 2008 financial crisis hit; resulting in defaulted loans and a halt in the construction work.

As someone who watches the bankruptcy auctions from time to time, I still see a lot of those lots coming available for only the past taxes due.

I am not sure why this is news in England today for some reason. Perhaps the new deadly COVID variants are not as bad as advertised. Like COVID itself.

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Book Report: Supercarrier by George C. Wilson (1986, 1989)

Brian J. Noggle

Book coverI started this book because I’m on a novelization/source of movies kick to begin the year, and I remember the short-lived television series from the 1980s. This book is not a novelization of it or a novel that’s the source: It is a non-fiction book that was purportedly source material for the television show, but I don’t think they had much to do with one another aside from the name and the type of boat.

The author is a Washington Post reporter and a former pilot who embeds before embedding was a thing with the crew of the USS John F. Kennedy as it deploys for a seven month cruise in 1983-1984. Originally scheduled to steam out to the Indian Ocean, it gets put on point off of Lebanon after the attack that killed the Marines in their barracks. The posting climaxes early in an ill-conceived bombing raid that results in the loss of two planes and the deaths of two aviators.

Initially, I thought the author was playing it pretty straight, but in gestalt, not so much. He proffers some respect for the people on the ship–and he gets around, so he gets to know people in every position from the captain down to the boiler tenders–but, really, he’s kinda for the guys who are in the Navy because they had no other prospects in their slums or backward small towns. And when we get to the bombing raid, he really takes some time to call out the civilian leadership of the military (Reagan and the Republicans) for attempting a limited retaliation for a missile strike. Which is weird because he mentions Operation Eagle Claw which was launched in an election year by Carter, but he doesn’t call that a political operation.

So, basically, the author tries to be for the troops while pissing on the military and the political leadership.

However, the left-leaning subtext is fairly subtle compared by modern standards, and in between its blushes we get some good stories and insight into various occupations and life on a deployed aircraft carrier. The cover says it was a controversial book, and I bet it was, as a lot of people who would have liked a straight narrative got a Political Message in it. But, as I said, by the standards of today, it’s relatively subtle and mild. Although books like this likely led us to where we are now.

I can’t give it a completely unalloyed recommendation, but it was insightful in spots.

Quibbles and targeted snark below the fold.
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It Must Have Been One Of Them Assault BB Guns

Brian J. Noggle

Bullet strikes window of Dollar General store in northwest Springfield, Mo.:

bullet struck a front window of the Dollar General store at 2535 W. Kearney Street in Springfield, Mo. Monday night.

The bullet did not penetrate the window, right by the front door. Police say the bullet came from a low powered weapon, possibly a BB gun, fired from someone driving by the store.

BB guns fire small round balls powered by compressed air. Not bullets. But one would not expect journalists to know that.

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Book Report: More Book Lust by Nancy Pearl (2005)

Brian J. Noggle

Book coverAfter I read Book Lust in January for the Winter 2021 Reading Challenge, I was surprised/not surprised to find I had the sequel on my bookshelves. I didn’t buy them at the same time–I bought the first at the Friends of the Christian County Library Book Sale in autumn 2015 and this volume, signed by the author but not inscribed but with the recipient’s name, in autumn 2018 at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. So of course they were not really anywhere near each other on the bookshelves, and any time I saw one, I probably saw the other.

At any rate, it’s much like the first volume: A collection of topics and books for that topic. Really, one, and by “one,” I mean I is not so much looking for books to read about a topic–one has a disorganized library full of books on many topics (books on boomerang and whip making, for example) and actual book sales this year to fill the few gaps one creates by reading these smallish paperbacks. So it’s more about keeping score on books I have already read.

Which is not a lot, actually–the bulk of the topical book listings list relatively recent books for the most part and avoid poetry, read: grandmother poetry and chapbooks, and classical literature. The book also dodges overtly political content, but the leftist bent is in evidence, more acutely in this book than in the previous one as she explicitly says about some older books that it’s hard to read because contemporaenous views on race were not contemporaenous to this book and because a lot of the selections are on the Race question–pretty much the whole state-by-state selection of Southern fiction deals with racial matters.

Still, I flagged a number of books she mentioned that I have read:

  • Killing Floor by Lee Child (see below)
  • The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
  • The Deep Blue Goodbye by John D. MacDonald
  • Stormy Weather by Carl Hiaasen
  • The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (although I do not have a book report on it, I did ask my boys to read it last year)
  • Hamlet by William Shakespeare
  • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard.
  • Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich
  • Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray (this year)
  • “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe (I read it most recently in Selected Tales and Poems in 2017)
  • I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (apparently, I cleaned up on the books listed in the “Horror for Sissies” section)
  • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  • David Copperfield (in progress)
  • Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
  • The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain
  • Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
  • “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot. It’s not a whole book, but I haven’t brought up that I used to go to poetry open mic nights and recite the whole thing from memory in almost a year
  • The Dive from Clausen’s Pier by Ann Packer (ugh)
  • The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
  • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
  • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
  • By The Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder, in the section on South Dakota, as are
  • The Long Winter
  • Little Town on the Prairie
  • and These Happy Golden Years
  • True Grit by Clinton Portis
  • The Princess Bride by William Goldman
  • A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
  • Millennium by John Varley
  • Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
  • The Awakening by Kate Chopin
  • To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Those are the ones I flagged as having read, anyway. To be honest, in the week or so where I read the book off and on, I might have stopped flagging the ones I’d read if I felt like I was flagging too much and then started after a couple of pages without flagging anything.

Most of the books that I read are mentioned in passing and are not actually the subject of the entry. Also, note that only, what, three of them that I have read are from within the last fifty years.

I also flagged a couple of passages for snark, but I’ll tuck them below the fold to keep this book report from completely consuming the front page here.
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Chores You Didn’t Know Existed

Brian J. Noggle

Today, I will have spent over an hour aligning the mylar covers on my record sleeves.

As you know, gentle reader, I have a burgeoning record collection. Not one that goes all the way to the ceiling–yet!–but it does fill the record shelving I made in 2019 pretty tightly.

And, in the process of taking them out and putting stacks of them back into the shelves, the sleeves slide a little out on the record sleeves, so they extend in varying lengths out of the shelving.

So today I decided I would reshelve recent listenings and align the sleeves on all of the LPs. It would also give me a chance to find the sleeve for Brahms’ Fourth Symphony which had been shelved with the record still on the record player and thus was lost in the disarray. And maybe find the record for one of my copies of The Lonely Bull which somehow got shelved without its sleeve–more likely, one of the boys put it into another sleeve when we asked one of them to pick a record (and they probably picked John Denver).

I took a quick snap to show you it wasn’t a complete waste of time:

You can see that I’ve done the top two shelves; they all looked like that bottom shelf when I started.

What makes it a partial waste of time is that they will probably look like that again soon. But that’s what chores are: A revolving door of tidy and needing to tidy.

And, hopefully, I will find the Swedish Gospel Singers LP that has been a Sunday morning tradition at Nogglestead for eight years now, I guess, except for when I lose it in rearranging the Christmas albums and whatnot.

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Literary World -2

Brian J. Noggle

Beverly Cleary, author of children’s book ‘Henry Huggins,’ dead at 104

Larry McMurtry, Novelist And Screenwriter Of The West, Has Died At Age 84

I can’t help but notice that the former article is in the New York Post and features a picture of Beverly Cleary with George W. Bush and the latter article is from NPR, which tops the article with a picture of McMurtry with President Obama. So I guess we know how to feel about the death.

I actually have been reading The Last Picture Show for a couple of days, and I absolutely hate it. McMurtry’s death is only one of the coincidences with my reading of the book. I’ll mention the other in the book report.

Cleary was 104, and McMurtry was 84.

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Someone Knows Their Audience

Brian J. Noggle

‘Dad bods’ are the biggest turn-on for singles in the pandemic sex era:

Embrace the bulge: Scales have once again been tipped in favor of the common man.

Nearly 75% of singles are more turned on by a “dad bod” over any other body type — including a mate with rock-hard washboard abs, according to a sexy new survey of 2,000 people by Dating.com.

Wait a minute, who is the most likely to use a dating site and not go to the latest high-end club to pick up models?

People with normal bodies.

So when they, the dating site, says that “single” especially the ones on their dating sites think a little paunch is sexy, don’t you think the paunchy would be more likely to sign up for their dating site?

Could I be more skeptical and cynical if I tried? I shall try!

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The New Shows of 1984 Quiz

Brian J. Noggle

I just can’t quit turning a viewing of the New Shows Of…. video compilations that Ace links to into personal reminiscences and quizzes.

Yesterday, he linked to the new shows of 1984.

How many do I remember/did I watch?

As always, I’ve bolded the ones I remember and added a link to references to the show on this blog.

  • Punky Brewster. C’mon, man. Although, to be honest, it was a bit a little girl, so I probably only watched it reluctantly. I understand Soleil Moon Frye has a new documentary about being a kid celebrity in the 1980s out. Which I will bold in the future, for although I will remember she did it, I won’t watch it.
  • It’s Your Move. Short lived, to be sure. I remember when Jason Bateman tweeted about a show getting a second life in 2011, and I responded I hoped it was this show (It was Arrested Development. Man, that was ten years ago.)
  • Charles in Charge. I think I wanted to be Scott Baioish when I grew up.
  • Who’s the Boss?. Kind of like Mr. Belvedere if Mr. Belvedere were a former boxer. Or like Charles in Charge if Charles were a former boxer. Also, Alyssa Milano.
  • The Cosby Show. Wow, those kids were young in 1984. So was Cosby. So were we all, except for you damn kids who weren’t born yet.
  • Three’s a Crowd, the follow-up to Three’s Company. I didn’t see this as much as the original because I saw the original more in syndication.
  • Dreams.
  • E/R. But not that ER. The first note in each Wikipedia entry is that this is not that.
  • People Do The Craziest Things. I mean, I think I remember this. The middle 80s were full of these humor segment shows.
  • Highway to Heaven, which I mentioned just last year in Know Your Frenches.
  • Finder of Lost Loves.
  • Glitter. Although by the title, I can tell what it’s about.
  • Paper Dolls.
  • Call to Glory. I thought this was a miniseries, actually.
  • V. Which was a mini-series. The television series came several years later, after V: The Final Battle. I most recently referred to it only last year.
  • Murder, She Wrote. I know I have mentioned that my mother loved this show, and that I read one of the paperback novels based on it that I had given to her in 2010, not long after she passed–and I still have plenty of them floating around yet to be read.
  • Jessie. I want to say I remember the Bionic Woman’s later show, but I am not sure. It wasn’t around long enough for syndication, though.
  • Partners in Crime, a detective show starring Lynda Carter and Loni Anderson. I want to say I remember Wonder Woman’s later show, but, again, I am not sure. Note that both Jessie and this program have similar titles with a puzzle motif. Were they related?
  • Hot Pursuit. I wasn’t sure I remembered it until we got to the point of the intro where the woman says, “Find her, or find them before they find her,” and the guy raises his eyes and one is another color. I didn’t watch it, though.
  • Cover Up. I did watch this one which was far too short, and it’s a shame about Jon-Erik Hexum.
  • Hunter. I also watched this, and I referred to it in 2006. I might even say, “Works for me,” and try to sound like Hunter from time to time.
  • Hawaiian Heat. What if Magnum, P.I. were a buddy show?
  • Miami Vice. I referred to it when I published my earlier essay Name That Muzak on this blog, and I did buy the soundtrack on CD a couple years back for some reason.

That must be my high score, ainna? 15 of 23?

You can see previous results and musings on the years 1982, 1983, and 1987. Which means I have more than half of the decade to go whenever Ace posts them. Or, in case he already has before I paid attention, when I think of it.

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Just One?

Brian J. Noggle

A strong coffee half an hour before exercising increases fat-burning

You know, by the time I hit the YMCA in the mornings, I have already had three or four cups of coffee. And I have been known to dope up before a triathlon with a lot of coffee. As a matter of fact, before my second Y Not Tri, I was sitting in the lounge of the YMCA before my heat, pounding styrofoam cups of coffee, when my personal physician walked through. Not to participate that year–to watch his daughter play basketball. But I was afraid he would rat me out for using Performance Enhancing Drugs.

Coffee, metal, and Advil: The basics of my exercise routine.

(Link via Instapundit.)

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