Moar Words!

I've got quite a backlog of these. To keep it interesting, I think I'll go with a theme this time. See if you can guess!

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Senescence(Noun): The state of being old : the process of becoming old.

Senescence was not kind to William Shatner.

Somnambulist (Noun): Someone who walks about in their sleep.

Leonard Nemoy often used the excuse of being a somnambulist to explain why he sometimes appeared in William Shatner's home to viciously kick him in the "navigational array."

Catechism (Noun): A manual giving basic instruction in a subject, usually by rote or repetition.

Dr. McCoy had an entire wall lined with vintage medical catechisms. Every one of them, with the exception of the of Dr. House novelizations, was hollowed out and bulging with bourbon.


Loupe (Noun): A small magnifying glass usually set in an eyepieces.

"Fascinating," Spock said. He removed his loupe. "It appears we have finally found Mr. Sulu's heterosexuality."

Defenestrate (Verb): To throw through or out of the window.

Dispatching your opponents through defenestration is not recommended on a starship.

Abstruse (Adjective): Not easy to understand.

Chekov's abstruse accent becomes much easier to understand after four shots of vodka.

Quotidian (Adjective): Daily.

Scotty's quotidian exercise seemed to consist of bench pressing four pallets of donuts directly into his gullet.

Prosody (Noun): The study of poetic metre and techniques.

Kirk was in the habit of flicking Spock's ears whenever he looked like he might settle down and relax with some prosody.

100 Update

Why hello there! You might remember me from such posts as "I will totally update this blog once a week as I complete The Challenge." That was about a month ago, but hear me out!

See, it turns out I severely underestimated the lingering effects my sickness would have. Even after getting over the worst symptoms, I was forced to sit on my ass while the detritus was cleared. In the past, descending into disease has spelled the end of routine exercise, because it knocks me out for so long I lose the exercise habit. I didn't want that to happen again, so instead of the Challenge I focused on doing exercise every day. It didn't matter if I was just having a walk or doing real cardio; I knew I had to keep momentum or I'd slump.

It's worked out pretty well, I think; while I can't say that my fitness shot up by leaps and bounds, I can say it hasn't deteriorated. Now that I'm safely past the danger of petering out, it's time to restart strength training and resume The Challenge!

Today was my first day back, and I picked up where I left off: Day 3 of the First Week. Here are the numbers from the final exhaustion phase of the workout:

*Push-Ups: 20

Sit-Ups: 39

Certainly better off now then when I started. Oh, right, you may notice I don't have squats listed anymore; I decided to stop doing them for the time being since all the walking and cardio give me plenty of lower body activity.

Give me a few days of getting back into the groove and I'll see about setting a day for proper weekly updates again.



*Still doing knee push-ups.

One Small Post For Me

The big news is that it's the anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. True, I'm a day late blogging about it, but I was stuck at work most of yesterday.

Actually, no, scratch that; it doesn't sound nearly sophisticated enough.

Okay. So yesterday I couldn't blog because I was struck with heavy melancholia. As I lounged in my study, idly running my fingers over my first edition Voltaire's, I was thinking to myself how sad it was that I wasn't currently on the moon. I mean, here it's been 40 years since we landed there, a feat that, itself, only took 60 years from the first powered human flight--nearly two-thirds of the same time span, and what have we got to show for it?

No moon colonies. No major orbital presence.

Yes, we've sent out some neat robots and taken great pictures, but humankind still remains hopelessly mired to this mudball.

Okay, sinking a bit here; gotta throw on a life vest. At least there still are space programs, right? And they're making strides--small ones, yes, but strides nonetheless. I guess that will have to be good enough for now.

Daily Word

For someone aspiring to spew verbiage onto the public for a living, vocabulary is important. The larger it is, the better you're able to tailor your writing to an audience. Although I can usually guess a word's meaning from context, I've made it a habit to write down any word down whose meaning I don't know for sure.

Of course, it's not enough to just know a word; you've got to use it.

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Ascetic: (Noun) A person who renounces material comforts and leads a life of austere self-discipline, especially as an act of religious devotion.

"It's a curious thing that the woman who ran, simultaneously, the Hampland's largest brothel and its premiere demolitions company was herself an ascetic."

Caltrop: (Noun) A metal device with four projecting spikes so arranged that when three of the spikes are on the ground, the fourth points upward, used as a hazard to pneumatic tires or to the hooves of horses.

"Lord Penderscrumb laugh manically as he galloped out of the preserve on his iron horse, already planning on how best to use the Device for his own profit. Little did he suspect that Dansworth had taken the precaution of littering the grounds with magnetic explosive-tipped caltrops."

Interpolate: (Verb) To insert or introduce between other elements or parts.

"The entire fair was thrown into chaos when a careless journalist interpolated a bananna into Professor Magbies' baboon powered autoplane."

End of Week One

So, here we are at the end of the week. How'd I do?

Well, both good and bad.

The good news is that I definitely saw improvement over the course of the week. I was able to stretch myself just a little bit farther each time during the exhaustion portion of the workouts.

The bad news is that I caught some sort of flu, and it's kept me on my butt for the past couple days, so I've only been able to finish 2/3 of Week One.

My gut feeling is that the worst is over and given just one more solid day of rest I'll be able to start up with the program again. It won't require any exercise "binging" to catch up, just normal every-other-day progression.

Next update will be on Saturday again, only I plan to have some hard numbers to share by then.

Pot(ter) Heads

I don't have a lot of strong memories surrounding most Half-Blood Prince. Even in book form, the whole "who is the Half-Blood prince?" sub-plot didn't strike me as very thrilling. It's overshadowed by the spectacle of Snape putting a glowing green cap in Dumbledore's ass. In a way, that's still true for the film; perhaps moreso.

Now, regarding the movie, I wasn't giddy with anticipation over it. I believed that, since I'd read the whole Potter series, the movies couldn't add much more to the "Potter Experience." But VikingGoddess secured tickets to a midnight showing on a hunch, and so off we went. We arrived about 40 minutes before showtime, which it turned out was three hours too late.




The line in those pictures looped around the entire theater, and was four or five people wide on average. People in costumes chatted, mostly about the size of the turnout, while those poor suckers who hadn't purchased tickets on-line wondered what would become of them.

Half-Blood Prince was worth the wait, although it suffers from trying to summarize a thick book with interconnected subplots. If you aren't already a fan of the series, it will be difficult to pick up on what's going on. For the most part, I liked the cuts made for the sake of fitting book to big screen. It caused some gaps, but these were filled by excellent performances from all the actors.

Visually, I like where the series is going. Just as Rowling darkened the story, the movies have been getting less Christmas-y elf magic and more Lord of the Rings gritty magic. I definitely underestimated what adding a visual element does to the story.

So, yeah, looks like I was wrong. If you can get a ticket, and you're a Potter fan, give it a whirl.

Brb, Falling in Hole

You all know about cities, right? They're like jungles--full of fun and games. They've got everything you want--like honey, yeah, they know the names.

Many times you're just going to find manholes though. Tastefully covered, of course; it wouldn't do to scare away all the tourists. There are times, however, when city workers need to brave the pooey depths, which requires uncovering these holes. So, if you find yourself in a place where this can occur, it's probably a good idea to, you know, watch where you're going instead of putting your head so far up someone's Twitter you don't even see the yawning chasm right in front of you.

Thankfully, the victim in this instance was not seriously injured, although the family still intends to sue. Apparently, losing a shoe after taking a dip in a river of human waste (but made in the USA, baby!) caused some mental injury. Or maybe there was a mental injury before and the city workers failed to accommodate--the reports aren't entirely clear. If you're so absorbed in texting that you don't notice a hole in front of you, would the addition of traffic cones really have made a difference?

h/t to Gizmodo.