Cargo

0 - An organic farm that you operate yourself

1 - Food you foraged yourself (not hunted)

2 - Food Co-Op that has been operating since the hippie days and has strict membership requirements (ie Park Slope Co-Op)

3 - CSA - a subscription farm where you pay an annual fee of a couple hundred bucks and get a box of seasonal produce once a week for the growing season.

4 - Other food co-op

5 - Farmer's market

6 - "Authentic" ethnic/Asian market (you're the only white person buying things in there)

7 - Small independently-run hippie grocery/health-food store (the kind that doesn't just sell vitamins)

8 - Small chain hippie grocery store, like Trader Joes

9 - Whole Foods

10 - Costco or restaurant supply wholesalers

11 - Local bodega

12 - The hippie section at the normal supermarket, or FreshDirect

13 - The normal part of the normal supermarket

14 - Target's food section

15 - Wal*Mart's food section

16 - Food you hunted yourself

17 - Convenience store/7-eleven

Naturally everyone gets stuff from various places on the hierarchy. But the more you buy from the upper reaches, the snobbier you are about food! Further down, you're probably more redneck, or poor. Note the foraging/hunting distinction: a basket of morels you gathered: very yuppie. A deer you shot and skinned: not so much.

Note that yuppie icon Whole Foods Market is really only in the middle of the hierarchy. It's a notch above Walmart, but it's the Walmart of organic produce so it's not so great. If you truly aspire to food snobbery you can do better!

Also cost is a factor but not as much as you'd think. Dollar for dollar, the convenience store is the most expensive by far! Costco is not too expensive, but it is used by restaurant people and chefs so it's better. And foraging food yourself is incredibly cheap, but you gotta know what you are doing.

If you ask me, the best year was 1972, followed by 1980. HOT.

( all the graphics in one big jpg )

My faves, strictly based on aesthetics not politics:

Vilsack 2008 (holy ingsoc batman).
Lamar! 1996
Clinton for President 1992 (Bodoni is an unusual choice)
Dick Gephardt 1988 looks like a Dodge car ad
Gary Hart 1984 is all futuristic
Bob Dole. President. 1980.
Anderson 1980

The 70s are all about the Helvetica.

Ford/Dole 1976 (Helvetica! Yay)
Sanford 76 is all Battlestar Galactica style
Nixon 1972, beautiful signage.
Lindsay 72
McGovern 1972
Hughes 72
Ashbrook 72, LOVE it.
Kennedy 68

Earlier than that you're stuck in the 50s and it's all Franklin Gothic block letters. But all the 72 ones speak of sideburns and wide lapels and huge kleig-lit auditoriums in that slightly grainy 16mm film stock. 1972 was such a good year for presidential signage.

So it's been almost a month since I switched things up, measuring bodyfat at home instead of at the doctor's, changed up the diet and ramped up the training intensity. My weight has been more or less stuck around the 195-200 mark but I'm still pretty happy as I'm converting more bodyfat to muscle. I still have a ways to go though, it's amazing how tenaciously the body holds on to the last ten or twelve pounds or so. Measured on the new scale, my BF has gone from 19-20 to 17-18 in the last four weeks, but I'm changing some stuff up to hopefully speed that up a little down to 10-12% in the next little while. My goal is still 180-185 with bodyfat in the 8-12% range.

I am now avoiding carbohydrates EXCEPT immediately before and after workouts. Carbs help with glycogen for muscle performance and recovery and so during and after long runs/rides, simple carbs (such as fruit or energy gels) are not just okay but actually beneficial. But when I'm not actually running or biking, I am eating fibrous carbs (such as green leafy vegetables, asparagus etc) only, and lots of lean protein (whey protein, and chicken/salmon/fish). In general, no carbs after noon. I still get about 25-30% of my intake from carbs, 40% protein, and 30% healthy fats (olive oil, flax, omega 3s).

If anything my caloric intake is a little high. I am averaging around 24-2500 cals/day instead of 2000. So cutting has been slow, but my performance has not suffered. I am easily burning enough to compensate on heavy workout days but I need to rope things in on non-workout days.

Last week's workout schedule:

Mon: Rest
Tues: Swimming 45 min (AM), Yoga 1 hour (PM)
Wednesday: Spin class 1 hr
Thursday: Hill repeats, running, 1 hr (AM), Yoga 1 hour (PM)
Friday: nothing, blew off weights
Saturday: Brick, 2 hrs bike, 45 min run (AM)
Sunday: Biked 42 miles, 3 hours and change, AM (Five Boro Bike Tour)

So I am doing well on the biking and swimming and running but my lifting is lackadaisical. I just don't feel at home in the gym, noodling around on the machines without guidance. I miss my trainer. I know I gotta do some more strength work, but it's too easy to blow off the PM workouts when I gotta go all the way to the Y or monopolize the TV to do yoga. That's an area I need to improve.

Supplements

I'm experimenting with various supplements. There's just sooo much bullshit on the shelves at GNC, but there's a few there that have some effect. The only supplement I really trust is whey protein - it's basically a cheap and easy way to get more protein in your diet. It's just food. Pick the one with lower sugar and filler, I default to Designer Whey. I also have been trying out Endurox which is a post workout drink in a 3:1 carbs/protein ratio to speed recovery. I *seem* to recover better with it than without it, but you know how hard it is to judge this stuff. I was experimenting with NO-Xplode which is a pre-workout energy booster, but further examination reveals that it's basically a bunch of caffiene and creatine, with some amino acids thrown in (that your stomach just metabolizes anyways). It tastes like complete ass, but it did give me pretty good energy and endurance - for about a week when I started using it. Now it has no discernible effect except giving me trouble sleeping if I drink it in the afternoon. And it still tastes like ass. So screw that. A double espresso has about the same effect. I'm trying a different one called Amplify02 that also had good reviews, if it doesn't work, then fuck it. There is so much pseudoscience and untested snake oil in the athletic supplement market that the whole field makes me nervous. Still, whey protein and MRPs are worth it.

Hope everyone is doing well!

The left struggles to understand why so many non-millionaire Americans vote Republican, and yet they rarely ask themselves why so many millionaires, particularly the most beautiful and privileged millionaires in Manhattan and Los Angeles, vote for the Democrats.

I can answer both. Rich, beautiful, coastal types are liberal precisely because their lives are so wonderful. They want to preserve their lives exactly as they are. If I were a rich movie star, I'd vote for peace and poverty relief. War and domestic insurrection are the greatest threats to their already-perfect lives—why mess with it? This rational fear of the peasantry is frequently misinterpreted as rich guilt, but that's not the case. They just want to pay off all the have-nots to keep them from storming their manors and impaling them on stakes.

Republican elites don't set off the spite glands in the same way, and it's not only because of a sinister right-wing propaganda machine. Take a look at a photo of the late billionaire Sam Walton, a dried-out Calvinist in a baseball cap and business suit, and you'll see why. If Republican billionaires enjoy their wealth, they sure as hell hide it well. As far as one can tell, Republican billionaires genuinely like working 18-hour days in offices. Their idea of having fun is a day on the golf green (a game as slow and frustrating as a day in the office) or attending conferences with other sleazy, cheerless Calvinist billionaires. If that's what all their wealth got them, let 'em have it—so says the spite bloc. This explains why the Republican elite—the only true and all-powerful elite in America today—is not considered an "elitist" class in the spleens of the white male have-nots. Elitism as defined today is a synonym for "happy," not "rich" or "powerful." Happiness is the scarcest resource of all, not money. And the happy supply has been cornered by the beautiful, famous and wealthy coastal elite, the ones who never age, and who are just so damned concerned for the have-nots' well-being. In that sense, you can see how the Republicans were able to successfully manipulate the meaning of "elitism" to suit their needs. They weren't just selling dogshit to the credulous masses; they were selling pancreatic balm to the needy.

At the other end of the economic spectrum, non-millionaires who vote Republican, the so-called "Reagan Democrats," know that the country is not theirs. They are mere wage-slave fodder, so their only hope is to vote for someone who makes the very happiest people's lives a little less happy. If I'm an obese 40-something white male living in Ohio or Nevada, locked into a permanent struggle with foreclosure, child support payments and outsourcing threats, then I'm going to vote for the guy who delivers a big greasy portion of misery to the Sarandon-Robbins dining room table, then brags about it on FoxNews. Even if it means hurting myself in the process.

This explains the mystery of why Bush still has a chance of winning in November, even though most Americans acknowledge that his presidency is little more than a series of slapstick fuck-ups with apocalyptic consequences. Inspector Clouseau meets the Book of Revelations. Close to half of this country will support Bush simply to spite that part of America that it sees as most threatened by the Iraq debacle. If the empire ends up collapsing into that filthy, sizzling hellhole in the desert, if more terrorists are created to help set off dirty bombs in Manhattan or Los Angeles, our spiteful voter has a real chance of finally achieving some empowerment.

It's simple mathematics: Bring down the coastal elite and the single 40-something Ohio salesman might actually matter. And if they're not brought down, but instead remain in a constant state of indigestion over policies that could ruin them at any time? Well, that's still better than nothing.

This is why all the talk about "personal interests" is a sham. Spite voters don't care solely about their own interests, nor are they bothered by how "the left talks as if they know what everyone's best interests are," an argument you often hear from the whiney right. What bothers spiters is that the left really does know what's in their interests. If you're miserable, you don't want to be told what's best for you by someone who's correct—it's sort of like being occupied by a foreign army with good intentions. You'd rather fuck things up on your own, something you're quite good at, and bring others down with you.

Spite voting is mostly a white male phenomenon, which is why a majority of white males vote Republican. It comes from a toxic mix of thwarted expectations, cowardice and anomie that is unique to the white American male experience.

By Mark Ames

For awhile Obama looked like he was going to rise above it, but then came "elitist" and "bittergate", which are direct attempts to tap into this very phenomenon. Time will tell if they work or not this time around, but I'm pretty confident they will work BETTER the worse things get for the economy, environment etc.

I want to say that the Democrats fail with a focus and intensity normally seen only in champions. It's really quite astonishing. Even after eight years of BushCo, for god's sakes, they still can't get their shit together. But it's a little worse than that. What we are seeing is a concerted, full court smackdown of the one candidate who offered something a little bit, just a tiny bit, outside the axis of corporate rule that has defined American governance for thirty years. The Clinton-Lieberman "Republican Lite" Democrats, the real Republicans, and the media are crushing Obama with nonstop attacks and bullshit swiftboating. And it's only freakin' APRIL. He will not win. Wright was a convenient weapon, but if it wasn't that it would be something else. Jesse Jackson at one point looked like he had a real shot at the white house too.

Ha ha, says the real rulers of the world. It was fun to imagine a black JFK, wasn't it? We even put him on a few magazine covers and played some speeches. It was right out of "West Wing" or something for awhile there! But the fun's over. BushCo has been extremely profitable for one group of Americans, and among them happens to be the ones that decide almost everything you see and hear. Bush-style policies, regardless of if Hillary Clinton or John McCain sits behind a desk and signs them, will continue. Anything that comes along that even sniffs of being slightly outside that path will be mercilessly destroyed, and we're seeing it now. And Obama wasn't even that different. But he was different enough to be crushed hard. It's been true for thousands of years: Saying the truth gets you crucified.

Oh, and here's why 'elitist' and 'bittergate', not Wright, lost Obama Pennsylvania.

Preliminary thoughts: It's a GTA game. It's not the second coming of Jesus and Mohammed Ali rolled into one. If you didn't like the 3-series games you're probably not going to suddenly like this one. The graphics are better, the city is more detailed, and it feels less cartoony than SA and Vice. Liberty City is grimier and dirtier than NYC, it's like a hybrid of 1970s NY and the current era stylistically.

First thing I did was go to Liberty City's DUMBO analogue (my neighborhood) and check out the parallels. Our apartment isn't in it, but the one across the street from us is, as is the Clock Tower building and Brooklyn Bridge Park with the curving amphitheater thing at the beach front. The bridges are spot-on. Various intersections and streets are duplicated with uncanny accuracy. But the whole thing is compressed together so 'interesting' streets are next to one another, there isn't a lot of filler of samey-looking streets. So the bridge is next to Coney Island, etc. The result captures the essence of the city without the immense size, much like the previous GTA games. After tootling around for awhile it only feels a little bigger than the GTA3 liberty city, even though I know it's MUCH bigger. But it looks spectacular - the rain on the streets looks like rainy streets with blurred headlights from oncoming traffic coming towards you.. it is verging on photoreal in spots. Gorgeous. And the physics engine is outstanding - people fall and go sprawling in painful-looking ways.

Much has been said about the new combat and driving. Long story short it's less arcadey and the cars are harder to control. That is going to piss a lot of veteran players off until they get used to the new system. A shitbox old car will handle accordingly, and sports cars are twitchy and hard to steer. My favorite car so far is the Feltzer, which was the Mercedes-style convertible in SA and is more like a SLK Mercedes now. It's pretty sweet. Combat is not that different from the old one, you still auto target but can free aim if you want. Hand to hand reminds me a little of Bully or Max Payne but it's still mostly button mashing - I avoid hand to hand anyways and prefer to do my work at long range. Shooting from the drivers seat of a car is a loong overdue improvement.

I haven't unlocked much beyond the first few missions, although they've integrated the 'social' missions more into the main stream of the game, so dating girls and even going to shoot pool with your friends can unlock various features. They reduced the customization of Niko and streamlined some of the side missions - doesn't seem to be any taxi or firetruck missions, the hidden packages (200 pigeons to shoot) don't have incremental rewards (just a spawning helicopter in one of your bases apparently, when you get all 200) and as has been noted, no bicycles, aircraft, jetpacks etc.

Uh, what else. I took my car through the car wash and of course it immediately started raining afterwards. Lol. The soundtrack is varied, the radio stations are goofy as ever, and they really put in a lot of gratuitous profanity. Niko Bellic, your character, has a more interesting personality than at first appears, and the whole game feels like less of a cartoon and more of, say, a rather dark graphic novel with enough of the trademark GTA satirical tone to keep it from getting too heavy.

I like it a lot so far, and am looking forward to playing it all the way through, but the hype around it is getting deafening. Again, it's a GTA game. An improvement over the 3-series, but not a quantum jump.