Happy Birthday to the Littlest Offering! who turned three yesterday, which occasion has taken time that might otherwise have been spent blogging.

A Fanboy's Public Service Announcements - Remember how burned you felt by the Planetary/JLA story a few months ago? Six bucks and an hour of your life down the drain. How the only good thing about it was that picture of Clark Kent in a trench coat hovering over Bruce Wayne's balcony. How it wasn't really Planetary in the story at all, but just some people who looked like them? Remember how you couldn't figure out what the hell was happening at the end of the story - like, for instance, how Diana Prince ever beat Jakita Wagner? How - horrors! - it wasn't John Cassiday drawing it? I feel your pain because it was my own. However.

Do not not not not NOT let that experience stop you from picking up the new Planetary/Batman crossover, "Night on Earth," which rocks every conceivable way there is to rock. None of the baleful qualities of Planetary/JLA attach to this story. John Cassiday draws it. It's a real Planetary story. Heck, if DC hadn't bought Wildstorm they'd probably have done it anyway with the usual serial-number effacing on the Batman homage. It's a real Batman story - in fact, it's a lot them . . . Most of all, it's a real good story. Heck, Mrs. Offering ripped right through it, with pleasure, despite never having read Planetary before nor having thought much about Batman since that awful third movie.

UPDATE: Also, Marvel has released teaser art and actual information about Neil Gaiman's upcoming miniseries, 1602, at a joint Gaiman/Marvel press conference. (Thanks to Jesse Walker for the head's up.)

Also, Dirk Deppey has part two of his response to my response, including his response to my response to his response of yesterday. He talks a lot about the Francine Pascal model, distinguishing "original creator farms out work-for-hire to contractors/employees" from "corporation farms out work-for-hire to contractors/employees," his theory being that

I would assume that she has provided a "writer's bible" explaining the core concepts of the series and oversees the writing process, offering quality control to ensure that the end result stays harmoniously in line with what has come before. In short, as the ultimate owner of the work in question, I would hazard to guess that she has an obvious stake in maintaining the intergity of the line, and exercises it out of a desire to maintain the momentum generated by prior works. While there may be other fingers hired to write some (or many) of her stories for her, in the end, the buck surely stops with Francine Pascal.

I, uh, never expected to encounter the words "Sweet Valley High" and "integrity" in such close proximity, so this colloquy has already proved its merit.

The fact remains, however, that even in the case of Francine Pascal, there is an original mind behind the project, one motivated by the self-interest of a creator who wishes to see her creation continue to bear fruit, and who understands that what her readers want is a continuation and fruition of the core concept. I would argue that this is not only a powerful motivation, but also a better mechanism for success than the pure work-for-hire system as demonstrated by Marvel. A company like Marvel, with its rotating editors and many-thumbs-in-the-pudding creative model, is simply less adept at maintaining such a creative engine than a single driving mind.

And he may be right. It seems pretty easy to me to imagine all the things that could go wrong with the "Francine model" - including creator loses all but fiduciary interest in her work; creator feels the call of other projects and leaves her baby in the care of "rotating editors and many-thumbs-in-the-pudding creative model." This may have happened with Sweet Valley High, if you believe this former ghost writer's account in the Baltimore City Paper:

Without getting into the loftier question of how much freedom any writer has--unless I'm being annoying--I always answer that everything save the actual writing of the book is done by committee. The plot is decided by meeting; the title gets brainstormed at meetings (I liked Surface Tension, which justly lost to Say It to My Face); and new and old characters spring to life over jelly beans around the office. What the writer gets is a skeletal plot line--anything from a Zen-koan-like list of actions to a Jamesian exegeses detailing each chapter--which he or she (mostly she, as far as I know) then returns, suitably fleshed out, pruned, or padded, to the packager for approval.

The author of the article, Lizzie Skurnick, describes a " creator, Francine Pascal (please don't sue me), who lives it up in Paris off the skin of all of our typing fingers." (Speaking of pitfalls in the "creator-owned/production-farmed" model, at one point in his item, Dirk refers to Howard Chaykin's creation, American Flagg. But we all remember how the quality of Flagg fell off when Chaykin turned his series over to Steven Grant and Joe Staton.)

Also, concentrating completely on the actual existence of Francine Pascal, however peripheral she may now be to SVH and its spinoffs, leaves Dirk Deppey little room to discuss purer instances of the "house name/packager" phenomenon. For instance, this discussion thread has a reprint of a Writer's Digest article on packaging that notes that, while Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were long the property of the Stratemeyer Syndicate and under the direction of Edward Stratemeyer, who came up with the series ideas, for at least some of that time, "Packager Mega-Books was responsible for the new Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books from 1986-1997." All those Franklin W. Dixons and Carolyn Keenes had plenty of rotating editors and clueless corporate masters to report to also. Bill Sherman also noted the prevalence of work-for-hire in men's series adventure books. We can add textbooks and many popular lifestyle and reference works to the list. (Sunset, Time-Life, Ortho etc.)

And there's Roswell High. Author Melinda Metz notes

That probably sounds confusing, and the way I ended up writing the Roswell High books is a little unusual. First of all, the initial concept for the series came from the publisher--Pocket Books. They asked a book packager--17th Street Productions--to develop the idea further. Probably now you're wondering what a book packager is. It's a company that supplies edited manuscripts and sometimes covers to a book publisher. Packagers are mainly used for book series. 17th Street Productions, for example, also handles the Sweet Valley High series, the Thoroughbreds series, the Countdown series, and the Fearless series, among others.

So anyway, once the people at 17th Street Productions came up with the character descriptions and basic plot arcs for the series, they started looking for a writer. All of us hoping to be considered wrote a sample. I was actually the second choice. The first choice writer dropped out to pursue another project.

That's the pure form of the corporate ownership model. I suspect that the creator-run apprentice shop may actually be a surer road to quality, but it's not the only publishing model out there and it has its own pitfalls. I believe my original claim, "publishing is rife with work-for-hire," still stands.

Finally, apologies to Dirk for misinterpreting his point about the growth of the manga business.

The Trouble with the Trouble with the Tr - Ah, Forget It - Dirk Deppey responds to the critics of his essay, "The Trouble with Marvel." I want to stress that I have no quibble with this part:

The most thoughtful and on-target response to the article came from weblogger Jim Henley, who turns out to have had prior experience in the bookstore trade himself.

Hey, right on, Dirk! Say it with me, True Believers, MAKE MINE UNQUALIFIED OFFERINGS!

Anyway, here was my item.

Now where were we? Oh yeah - Dirk's item is just part one, mostly covering Marvel's bookstore market share. It's actually hard to find any areas of genuine mutual disagreement in this part, though I think I have a minor math bone to pick with him on a side issue. To wit, I noted Marvel's six-fold bookstore sales increase in one year and, in the course of calling that very good, averred that it was unlikely that "the more mature manga bookstore business increased sixfold between 2001-2002." Dirk basically says it's likely that it did. But I think, mathematically, we can demonstrate its impossibility.

Say you have a massive, $100 graphic novel market. In Year One, The Stodgy Superhero Company gets $3 of those hundred dollars, and Big Manga, by Dirk's own estimate, gets $50.

In Year Two, The SSC's sales increase six-fold, to $18.

If Big Manga's sales increase six-fold, they are now at $300. That means the graphic novel market must now be at least $318. That's a jump of 318% for the market as a whole in one year, minimum. For it to be only 318%, every other purveyor of graphic novels must disappear from every shelf in America. If we assume that Everybody Else has flat sales, then their $47 in Year One is $47 in Year Two. $318 + $47 = $365. So now the market has increased 365% (Aren't round numbers wonderful?)

But we know from Dirk's original article that the graphic novel market as a whole grew "only" 33% from Year One to Year Two. (And by the way, that is damned impressive growth. That is the kind of jump that makes book retailer eyes light up. It jumps right out at you when you're paging through your sales-by-subject report, believe me.)

So it's just plain impossible for Big Manga's sales to have increased sixfold. Damned if I can remember what that does to my original point, though. I took my nighttime pill for my back trouble already. So let me just say that if you have any interest in the comics biz at all, and Marvel Comics in particular, that Dirk Deppey's response item is well worth your time. If you don't have any interest, you might develop some if you read it. The series will continue tomorrow, with a promised discussion of "the connection between creator-ownership and bookstore sales."

By the way: I note that on the Amazon Top 25 Graphic Novel Bestseller list, that DC's Kingdom Come ranks higher than two X-men books, Watchmen is at number 4 after all these years and one of the "graphic novels" ahead of it doesn't count, and the only Daredevil book on the list is the legendary Miller-Mazzuchelli story arc, Born Again. It looks like Quality Will Out after all, maybe.

Also, 10 of the Top 25 are superhero-related. 3 are reallly collections of newspaper cartoons and one, by Alice McDermott, seems to be one of those novels with no graphics at all. (And - ahem - one of the titles is by Fantagraphics.)

That said, it's striking that the top title is a (topical) memoir, and two of Slave Labor's books are outperforming most of the superhero titles.

Taking One for the Team - Of all the justly-pleased bloggers writing about the Supreme Court decision to strike down Texas' anti-sodomy law, John Cole seems to be having the best time.

Isn't it Funny How Power Drifts to the Same Places - New entries from Salam Pax. I'll have more to say in the next day or two. Everything Salam writes is vital and has been for some time. Scroll up from the linked item for more. On the "what did I tell you people?" front, this:

From that incident and until today things have been moving in a downward spiral. The “coalition forces” don’t feel safe and we don’t feel safe either. You can see the distrust in their eyes and the way they hold these big guns towards you when you move close to a check point. And if you ever drive beside a convoy don’t look out your window they would be having their guns pointed at you, aimed right between your eyes.

We are looking at a genuine tragedy in the making. More on that too.

In a Newspaper Hat Franklin Harris reviews the Hulk movie in his weekly Pulp Culture column.

Reading Around - Tacitus gets blogger fatigue syndrome - with a bonus fanboy reference in the title. I wish, unironically, I could be as unsure as he describes himself.

Arthur Silber indicts pro-intervention Objectivists and libertarians for abetting a program that must lead to the opposite of liberty, or justice for all, for that matter. Excerpt:

I will modify my earlier comments only to the extent of this minor change . . . : these "compassionate conservatives," with their calls for "sacrifice" for the "greater good," and their demands that your money and your property and your life be used for their schemes, which now include curing every problem over the breadth of the entire globe, do not represent specifically "the leading edge of Nazism" -- but they do represent the leading edge of fascism. We are headed, and have been headed for quite some time, toward a mongrel fascist-socialist state -- but the major emphasis is on the fascist element.

My only quibble with this is that fascism is already mongrel-socialism.

And on Planet Swank, Gregory Harris finds one more practical problem with Remote Control War Against Individual Enemies:

And it's funny that the Administration was sooooooo concerned about tipping "sources and methods" during the runup to its coveted war, but is perfectly willing to do so in near-miss attacks. Every time Saddam or bin Laden survive one of these, it not only enhances their reputation among forces unfriendly to the US, but also gives them valuable experience in eluding capture in the future.

This is true if any of these attacks are actual near-misses. The other theory, that they are publicity stunts timed to buck up homefront morale, becomes harder to dismiss as the pattern continues. Just last week two things happened: 1) the "Trailers of Mass Destruction" story went sour; 2) days later, it was announced that troops found Mukhbarat files that may pertain to Iraqi special weapons programs. How? From what period? Army spokesmen didn't say. But they were calling in people who could actually understand the documents to figure that stuff out.

Then of course we had the latest "we may have killed Saddam story a few days after that.

Of course, if the various publicised "we think we got hims" are not near misses - if they bear no geographical or temporal relation to the actual physical presence of Saddam or Osama or Fu Manchu, that too tells our antagonists something valuable - we have no idea where the hell they are.

Irony is not Dead - I just got unsolicited mass e-mail promoting an anti-spam program.

Convoy - From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Some U.S. officials described the attack as having been in the same category as the March 19 and April 7 attacks on compounds where Saddam and his sons were believed to be hiding. U.S. intelligence analysts now believe Saddam and his sons probably survived both those attacks.

A senior administration official described the intelligence that led to Wednesday's attack as a good lead. But another administration official said, "I have no information that leads us to believe we got Saddam." And one military officer said intelligence reports that Saddam or his sons might have been in the convoy may have been based more on hope than evidence.

Said one military official: "There might be people crossing their fingers, but it's just like a year ago, when they were crossing their fingers" in the hopes of capturing Osama bin Laden, who still is believed alive after 21 months in which he has been the target of an intense U.S. manhunt.

Have We Met the Enemy? - For months I've rued the practical problems of what we might call the American Way of Remote Control War Against Individual Enemies - here in the context of various strikes in the general vicinity (possibly) of Osama bin Laden, and here in the matter of various strikes more or less on the same country last known to harbor Ali Hassan al-Majid:

f we're going to make war on individuals, as we increasingly seem to do, we ought to consider doing it in such a way that we know whether or not we actually got them.

In the wake of the "desert caravan" story, it's no longer just the practical problems that bother me.

U.S. officials backed away from their initial assessments of whether the attack early Thursday near the village of Dhib killed top officials in the former Iraqi government, saying they had picked up no indications since the attack that Saddam Hussein or his sons, Uday and Qusay, had been in the convoy.

says the Washington Post. The attack was the usual missile strike from a distance on a convoy of trucks in a village along a smuggling route to Syria. (What do they smuggle? Cattle that they'll admit to, and who knows whatever else.) Okay, we don't know if Saddam or the beast children were anywhere near the place. So what do we know?

At about 1:30 a.m., as the four trucks burned, the first of about five missiles struck Hamad's brick house, he said. Although everyone was sleeping outside, debris killed his sister-in-law, 20-year-old Hakima Khalil, and her daughter, Maha. Khalil's husband, Mohammed, was wounded in the foot. Hamad, his 24-year-old brother Mahmoud and his mother, Rasmiya Mishaal, 62, were also hurt. Mahmoud suffered the severest injuries, with deep cuts to his back and face.

After the attack began, villagers said cries pierced the air. Some contended that cluster bombs were used. Other villagers insisted that was wrong, that it was heavy machine-gun fire. They said they were saved by fleeing their homes. "When they hit Ahmed's house, it was like an alarm," said a neighbor, Mohammed Naim, 29. "Everybody ran away from their homes."

By the time the barrage ended, four houses were destroyed, along with two storage shacks, residents said. Villagers sitting in the hospital listed their losses like an insurance claim: three pickups, three tractors, one truck and 13 heads of sheep.

Maha was one year old.

MSNBC reports

A senior Pentagon official told NBC News on Sunday that there were indications that Saddam or his sons, Odai or Qusai, were in the convoy, but defense officials said Monday that they had no specifics on who was in the convoy and that they had no evidence it included Saddam or his sons. U.S. forces planned to conduct DNA testing on remains of some of the dead, the officials said.

Bruce Rolston suspects that the Pentagon got taken in by rivals of this particular group of smugglers or this village, as has happened many times in Afghanistan. MSNBC says that the US was "Working partly on information from the highest Iraqi captured so far, Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti." I don't know which explanation is how true.

But I do know that we're doing too much of this. Blow it up first, then see if the corpses are the specific people you were aiming for.

The special commando team, known as Task Force 20, was joined in the convoy operation by an AC-130 gunship and other air support that attacked the vehicles along a known escape and smuggling route near the western city of Qaim, an official told the Associated Press.

The New York Times says it was a Predator drone firing a Hellfire missile. Bomb first, swab later. It reduces the risk to American infantrymen at a known cost in lives of innocent foreigners. No surrounding the convoy and demanding surrender, no up close and personal. Hit them with a Hellfire or a helicopter autocannon. Act on "intelligence" that you lack the knowledge and experience to vet. Pick through the cinders to see how you did.

This is wrong. It is the callous policy of an evil government. This was not a wartime operation to capture a strategic crossroads. This was, supposedly, an effort to detain specific fugitives in a country where "major combat operations have ended." In that context it is not moral to kill strangers because one or two of them might be in your deck of cards. Too often now our government behaves as if what we can do and what we are justified in doing are the same thing. They are not.

Bad Blogger, No Biscuit - Sorry! The weekend will be held over another day while I get around to Southern Cone Mail. And everything else. But my grilled spicy-crust tuna steaks turned out pretty darn well!

On the Other Hand - Hulk movie-wise, Bill Sherman has the case against. Do I agree? Nah. But he writes from a clueful perspective.

On the other other hand, Peter David, who knows from the Hulk, likes it.

. . . A Mighty Raging Fury - I liked the Hulk movie. (I ducked out to see it last night.) I wondered before seeing it if various complaints from mainstream reviewers weren't wrongheaded, and came away convinced that they were. For instance, Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post mutters that "later, in a strangely tone-deaf sequence, he fights the U.S. military." Ann, two things:

1. If we're going to insist as a nation on having new wars every couple of years until the end of time, these coincidences are going to happen.

2. Hulk stories have involved him fighting the US military for 40 years now, and that military was involved in a war, Vietnam, for much of the Hulk's first decade as a character.

The whole "Hulk versus the military" angle may be the part that the movie gets most right. Along with Iron Man, the Hulk was the Silver Age Marvel hero most caught up in the ethos of the Cold War. Many of Hulk's early foes were monstrous Soviet agents. Nuclear testing, the military-industrial complex, love versus duty, Child of the Atom, all that stuff was as Hulk as Hulk gets. It's to Ang Lee and writer James Schamus's credit that they figure out a way to get that era into a 2003 Hulk's story somehow. The movie is full of striking shots of a military base abandoned after a nuclear mishap instigated by Bruce "Hulk" Banner's father, the location from which the four principle characters spring.

Ah yes, Banner's father. He's very much not canon. But he completes a symmetry the movie needs - Bruce Banner; his father David; Betty Ross, Bruce's quondam love; and her father, General "Thunderbolt" Ross. Of these characters, we might say that Betty is not a monster, her father is but a sometime monster, Bruce's father a monster in human form (at first) and Bruce - well, we know about him.

The writers and Sam Elliott do wonders for the General. He's very much the ramrod, and a cog in a dark, dark machine. ("I know you people think you've got a weapon on your hands," Betty tells him after Bruce has been captured, "or he'd be dead already.") But he's got shading. There are things he doesn't get and can't express, but you can see him, on some level, realizing this. Elliott is easily the best antagonist in the recent run of Marvel movies.

The movie creators greatly improve Betty Ross over the comics version by making her a scientist alongside Banner - I'm darned if I can remember what Betty did exactly, in the early comics, aside from worry about Bruce - and his long-lost neighbor from that abandoned base. (Abandoned above-ground, I mean . . . ) They, smartly, cast her to strongly resemble the woman who plays Bruce's also long-lost mother.

Then there's Nick Nolte as Bruce's - here we go again - long-lost father, David Banner. Note to the uncultured: THE Hulk was always Bruce Banner. I have no idea why the producers of that TV show changed his name. But my purist sensibilities were so offended that I never watched it.

Oh, we have to talk about purism too. But first Bruce's dad. He's a mad scientist, the mirror image of Betty's too-sane father. This mad scientist lives in a shotgun shack where he experiments on what he has to hand, which is how Hulk comes to battle a ferocious mutated poodle. Not a miniature poodle. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. The freelancing Nolte provides a saving complication of what might otherwise be a too-neat-even-for-me dichotomy between "good" anarchy, represented by the Hulk, and "bad" order, represented by General Ross and the people who give him his orders, whom Eisenhower warned us about in his Farewell Address. Nolte gets some good lines, some functional lines and some not-so-good lines. I've been a Nolte fan for decades and decades now so maybe I'm the wrong person to ask, but I think he does a pretty good job with the part. (Sam Elliott gets the edge, though.)

Purism, comics and movies. Things are different these days than they might have been. Those of us who love comics have a necessarily different relation to continuity than we had a couple of decades ago. After all the major-company restarts and Ultimizing and Year Zeroes and Year Ones and Elseworlds and Kingdom Come and Earth X and Homages and adventures in pastiche and everything else, we pretty much realize that new eras and new media are going to mean new details on our old stories. If we're lucky, as we largely have been lately, a movie will get the essence of beloved characters right and even fix the things we ourselves would want to fix. There's not a frame of Spider-man that doesn't utterly partake of the spirit of the comics character. The movie X-men are THE X-men, for all that the details of their history have been cut up and re-pasted. The later Batman movies screw the pooch on fidelity to spirit, but everyone agrees the first one was true to the vision of Bob Kane, Bill Finger and even Frank Miller. The second film has its detractors, but I consider it a perfect melding of Batman's Expressionist roots and the early-90s preoccupation with family dysfunction. Even Daredevil, a movie which had its problems, captured much of the character's essence.

The thing that sets apart even the faithful superhero movie adaptations from their comic-book sources is the movies' concern with the dramatic unities. A movie, even one the producers expect to generate sequels, is a thing entire in a way that one installment of an ongoing monthly periodical is not. So the movies tighten things up. The movie Kingpin turns out to have killed Matt Murdock's dad, while the comic book Kingpin simply got hijacked by Frank Miller from Spiderman because Daredevil lacked any good villains of his own. The movie Spiderman and Green Goblin come into being practically the same day. "You made me, I made you," complains the movie Joker to the movie Batman.

Thus Bruce Banner's father. He completes a set of parents and children, and answers the question, "So why would there dwell, within Bruce Banner in particular, a mighty raging fury?" The answer is a bit 90s, but it'll do. And thus the movie's version of the old Marvel villain, the Absorbing Man (never named). Thus Betty and Bruce and David and Thunderbolt Ross all growing up on that desert base, the one we keep returning to.

The other big change is making Hulk - big. Like 15 feet tall. Fanboys, superannuated, lapsed or otherwise, know Hulk to be somewhere between 7 and 8 feet tall. Fifteen feet is a lot. It takes a little getting used to. But it made sense when it came time for Hulk to pick up a tank - had I been watching a smaller figure I'd have had uncomfortable thoughts about leverage and such.

So purism-wise, let's run down the checklist:

o Military-industrial complex - check.
o Smashing up tanks and stuff - check.
o Spawn of the Cold War - check.
o Tortured romance - check.
o Because of the military-industrial complex - check.
o Betty's family problems - check.
o Because of the military-industrial complex - check.
o "Shockwave strikes" by Hulk against the ground - check.
o Military firepower vividly fearsome but not unambiguously evil - check.
o Nuclear explosions - check, twice.
o Huge leaps across western desert - check.
o Hulk says "Puny Human" - check, once.

I don't class Hulk with the superhero-film masterpieces (Batman and Unbreakable if you're wondering, with Spider-man a near-masterpiece). But I liked it. And the stuff I didn't like so much while I was watching it faded almost as soon as I left the theater, leaving a fuller satisfaction.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 173 pounds, waist just south of 34", to the extent I know where my waist is. Darn it, I feel thinner! This despite the prednisone and not one, but two lunches (one on the company dime) at the legendary Jerry's Seafood in Lanham this week. (The first was a my Father's Day meal with Mrs. Offering. Don't let anyone tell you that two people can't get a good lunch for eighty dollars!)

I'm inclined to put this week's zero net change in weight down to some muscle gain, since the waist shrank - even with the limits of fuzzy measurements - and I just subjectively look more muscular. Still, I'm disappointed to have hit another weight plateau. Maybe the last ten pounds really are the hardest.

My mother formally gave up SuperSlow weight training this week. I'm not altogether happy with the decision, but am refraining from second-guessing. She has neuropathy in her feet and says the leg press in particular has given her terrible pain. My sister continues her program at the same facility. For my part, I find that slow-cadence dumbbell squats particularly give me almost debilitating DOMS (delayed-onset muscle soreness) for as many as four days after my workout. On the other hand, I have, and I say this with a certain amount of reluctant, unabashed smug self-satisfaction, pretty darn good legs for a 42-year-old man now. Tomorrow is weight training day, then I'll be back to Heavyhands for the two weeks beginning next Sunday - we're off on vacation the week after Independence Day and it's a lot easier to pack one set of five-pound dumbbells than five sets ranging from 20 to 40 pounds.

After vacation, I may switch weight-training protocols as an experiment, going to a more traditional program so I can work out twice a week and do cardio every week instead of every other week. Then again, I may not. This was a Heavyhands week, using both three and five-pound dumbbells. I was able to do an entire forty-minute session with the five-pounders yesterday, pumping high. I never got to the five-pounders in my previous incarnations as a Heavyhands devotee. I suspect this shows the value of mixing in traditional weight training with Heavyhands. I should admit that I work in intervals of pump&run now, despite my previously dismissive comments about running. I do 120 paces at a time, pumping the dumbbells, to get my heart rate up and work my hamstrings and buttockals. As of yesterday, my routine mixes

o 480 paces of pump&run in 120-pace increments
o 480 paces of duckwalking with side raises in 120-pace increments
o pump&walk to level III (head-high) in 120-pace increments
o pump&walk long lever (arms extended) in 120-pace increments
o overhead presses in 120-pace increments
o chest flyes in 120-pace increments

These last two become hard toward the end and I switch to 60-pace increments. The hardest things on the list aerobically are pump&run and duckwallking with side-raises. So I cycle through the other things to warm up and come down from those two, e.g.

1. Pump&walk
2. Overhead presses
3. Pump&walk long lever
4. Chest flyes
5. Pump&run
6. Pump&walk
7. Overhead presses
8. Pump&walk long lever
9. Chest flyes
10. Duckwalk with side raises
o repeat

Two to four of those is a workout. The other thing one would add is double ski-poling, but I've avoided it while my back heals.

Politics of food department. Liberal blogger Seth D. Michaels picked up the discussion and made some interesting points about the connection between obesity and poverty:

See, people who are in poverty are subject to a number of factors that contrbute to obesity:
-inconsistent eating schedules, including periods of feast and famine that lead the body to adapt by storing fat. This is especially true of people on food stamps or other food aid, who frequently run low on food at different times during the month.
-a lack of exercise, particularly for people who live in urban environments or crowded trailers.
-a lack of regular preventative medical attention, including information of maintaing proper diet and exercise.
-and most importantly, healthy food is more expensive and time-consuming to prepare.

These are some excellent points, though I would note, having gone to the mall yesterday, that this nation's obesity problem extends well beyond the poor. Seth, by the way, gets major points for using the original Unqualified Offerings Blogger template.

In other fitness blogs. Jeremy Scharlack has indeed caught up with me, weight-wise. But hey, he's shorter than I am! (I deduce this based on his weight at the time of his "before" pictures.) He also makes the best case yet for using exercise machines at health clubs:

I want to add that working out on machines is nice because you can carefully pace yourself and listen to music while you are exercising. It is also where most of the truly attractive women are.

Via the same item, I learn that for $2.95 I could read a New York Times article arguing that " people on Atkins tend to gain their weight back quickly. But then it goes on to say how people on any diet tend to gain their weight back, so who knows." I've gotten the oral version of this claim before, once from someone who had lost dozens and dozens of pounds on Weight Watchers and then gained them all back and more when she went off it. Yes, if you go back to drinking quarts worth of soda every day, making french fries and baked goods a staple, consuming multiple pizzas and just generally not being on Atkins or whatever diet, and give up exercise, you'll get fat again. It's how you got fat the first time, after all. Why shouldn't it work twice? That's why Atkins and other diets have a lifetime maintenance phase.

Jonathan Hendry e-mails that if you're interested in joining a gym, ask at work to see if they have discount arrangements with anyone. A lot of companies have them, but they won't necessarily be in published Human Resources material. As for home exercise equipment, he allows that

they seem to get dated really quickly, and eventually they look kinda goofy and tacky sitting in the den. There's a fad or trend aspect, where a particular machine is the popular gadget at one point, but a few years later it's as dated and ignored as an old Mr. Microphone or infinity light from Spencers.

Plus, they get laundry draped all over them.

Avram Grumer continues to push his Heavyhands effort with longer sets of each calesthenic. I believe that sports columnist/king-of-all-media Tony Kornheiser may be doing Heavyhands now too, since in the segments I hear lately the e-mailers keep ribbing him about "working out with one-pound weights." Hey, e-mailers, it works, you know?

Mary Kay Kare e-mails that "research" indicates that Type II diabetes may not be caused by obesity but rather that both may be caused by insulin resistance. She's trying to get more details for me. That still leaves the question of what causes insulin resistance, though.

And that's all for this week.