When I am King: Exexercise

When I am King...

We will exercise less and eat more.

Common wisdom and dull scientific theory say that exercise helps prolong our lives. So the time that we spend in the gym allows us to live longer and enjoy more time on this planet.

But it this actually true? That is, will we actually enjoy that time?

The problem is that we have to spend the time in the gym in the first place. I don’t know about you, but I don’t actually enjoy my time in the gym. I like having worked out, not working out. So that hour and a half spent pushing pieces of metal around and grunting and sweating is worse than a waste of my time; it’s time that I’m actively not enjoying my time.

While it’s nice that that gym time might actually back-end load more time onto the end of my life, I wonder about the tradeoff.

First, let’s look at the numbers.

I figure I spend, on a “good” week, about six hours exercising. This doesn’t include time that I might get exercise while doing something worthwhile, like walking to a donut shop or climbing stairs because there’s no escalator or elevator handy. This six hours is dead time that I’m spending purely in the pursuit of this activity that I hate, just to stay healthy.

Six hours a week adds up to about 300 hours per year. Assuming about 15 hours per day of physically active time, my workout time amounts to about 20 days per year. Let’s assume I keel over at an overripe age of about 80. I started working out when I was about 20 (after a childhood spent developing a damn good impersonation of a sloth), so that’s 60 working-out years. That means that by the time I’m 80, I’ll have spent nearly 5 years of my life exercising (60 years * 20 days/year = 1800 days ~= 5 years). So unless exercising adds more than 5 years to my lifespan, I’ve lost in the bargain – I’ve gained some time, but I’ve lost more than that amount to a pursuit that I thoroughly detest.

Next, let’s look at the time that we'll gain by being healthy. Exercise isn’t adding any lifespan now; it’s adding it to the end of our lives. You know, that time when we’re less mobile, less happy, less mentally aware, and less employable. Our kids have written us off, our friends have died, and our interest in anything except our latest hip operation have waned. And now we get another few years to live? Oh, boy. I can’t wait.

When I am King, we will exercise less. I’m not saying that you can’t exercise if you want to. I mean, if you actually enjoy going to the gym and grunting and sweating and seeing your fellow gym members primp and preen in front of the mirrors and you like grabbing the cardio machine handles that are dripping with someone else’s bodily fluids, then by all means you should keep doing it. Because you’re enjoying it. You nut. But all of the sane people in the world will wake up and realize that we should enjoy our time more by exercising less and by doing other things instead that are actually fun.

I propose that we all take the time that we would have spent in the gym and spend it doing something we enjoy: eating donuts. We all like donuts, so it’s an irrefutable fact that more time spent eating them will lead to a life well-lived. And since donuts probably help stop up our arteries and cause heart problems, they will actually take away years at the end of our lives. This might seem sad at first. But if you think about it, this means that we will have spent more time eating donuts during a shorter life, so the proportion of our time spent enjoying life will be that much greater, and we will all die happy. Besides, they're just taking away time at the end, which doesn't sound like much fun anyway.

So get off that elliptical dreadmill and have a donut. Or three. You’ll thank me when you’re dead.

Little Jokes for Friday

I wonder:

Why are watermelons and bananas so tasty and sweet, but sweets with those flavors so awful?

Why is sandpaper so good at wiping off surfaces, but it makes such terrible toilet paper?

What’s the punishment for being illegally blind?

Sheik, Rattle and Roll

Apparently, one of the clerics in Iran is claiming that that country’s earthquakes are a result of women dressing inappropriately.

I wonder:

• Are these earthquakes caused by under-covered agents?


• Are the tremors more the fault of the women than the faults of the land mass?


• Is this a veiled threat?

When I am King: Celebrating our Differences

When I am King...

Marriage vows aren’t the only things that should be renewed; we should celebrate all of the permanent commitments in life.

Some couples get their marriage vows renewed. I used to think that it was because they were reaffirming their relationship, but now I realize that it’s probably because their marriage was so many years ago, they couldn’t remember whether it had happened or not. Meanwhile, my married gay friends and family members are so lucky. Thanks to the constantly changing laws in our states, they get to renew their marriage vows on a regular basis.

That act of that reconfirmation is so important, remembering each other and the promises you made as the years go by and you each get progressively less attractive in your own, distinctive way. It’s society’s way of telling each other, “I will if you will.”

But other than these vows of marriage and lifelong marital indentured servitude, there are no commitments that we take the time to renew in our lifetime. Of course, there’s the renewal of our driver’s license, but that’s just an affirmation that the DMV is still a place that we’d rather not spend any more time. Which, come to think of it, sounds like a lot of marriages I know.

When I am King, we will renew all of the truly important and permanent commitments to each other. For example:

Prenuptials: What’s the good of having built-in distrust at the beginning of a relationship without, every few years, renewing that legally binding contract of mutual wariness? It would be wonderful if, every five years, the happy couple could take a weekend retreat away, just with each other and their respective lawyers, and hammer out the new clauses to cover life’s evolving circumstances and return with a fresh, new prenuptial contract with both signatures. In blood.

Divorces: The statistics clearly prove that divorce is a more common commitment in any relationship than the marriage itself. What marriages ever go to term anymore? Few things are more sacred than marriage. But nothing is more permanent than divorce.
With that reality, let us celebrate our differences by gathering on neutral ground every 5 years to renew the commitment to staying the Hell out of each others’ lives. This celebration will be a warm, even heated, remembrance of why the couple got into this situation in the first place, from the reading of the respective restraining orders to the final words in the ceremony, “Till death do us be apart.”

Sure, we should remember the good things in relationships. But we should really celebrate our differences.

When I am King: Buy the By

When I am King...

“Best by” dates will become more realistic.

Recently, I listened again to Jerry Seinfeld’s bit about the expiration date on milk cartons. Unlike milk, that routine doesn’t get old and curdled.

I was reminded of the time that I first noticed the “Best by” date on food products. I was about eight years old, and I noticed a stamp on the Grape Nuts box that said “Best” and then a date that was some seven months in the future.

I thought that seemed kind of strange: what would make a cereal better if used on that date? But being the curious, and apparently stupid, child I was, I had to find out. So I stashed the Grape Nuts way in the back of the pantry, so that nobody would find them between now and that magical date in the future when the cereal would suddenly become more tasty.

I guess I learned the meaning of the word “by” in those seven months, because the next time I took the cereal out, I realized that it meant that it would taste better before that date, signified by the word “by” in the phrase “Best by.” Like the child in Joyce’s Araby, I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity, except for me the driver was illiteracy. And my stomach burned with anguish and anger.

I finished the Grape Nuts immediately, anxious to avoid letting even more time pass and making the cereal taste worse, although it’s not obvious how that could happen with a food apparently made from wood chips and gravel.

There’s a basic problem here that’s not solved by that helpful “Best by” date: the products do not, in fact, stay in some holding pattern of goodness until that date and then suddenly fall off the Cliff of Yuck. Instead, they start at some mediocre level and get progressively worse as time, staleness, and insects eat into them. That date is nothing more than a point in time when the company lawyers have decided that the potential of food-decay-related illness lawsuits outweigh the corporate benefits of customers overbuying the product and storing it on their pantry shelves. Cereal is not fine wine: you should eat the stuff as soon as you buy it if you want it to be as fresh as possible. Anytime after that, it’s just worse.

Besides, the current “Best by” approach confuses kids. Or at least it confused me. And I’m pretty sure kids these days are dumber, at least based on their spelling over IM and SMS. (That’s my token “grumpy old man” comment – I need to do that to maintain the kind of dignity that Kingship requires).

When I am King, the “Best by” paradigm will shift and we will adopt a simpler approach: all foods will be stamped with the phrase, “Worse after” plus the date that the product is actually made. We don’t want to know when the lawyers would like us to stop eating it; we want to know how long ago the stuff came off of the assembly line. Then we can decide where the hunger-versus-staleness balance lies.

Oh, and by the way: Grape Nuts after seven months? Tasted about the same. That’s the advantage to food products made from inedible substances. But that’s the subject of another blog.

Ode to a Donut

The problems not solved by a donut are few,

And even those problems are solved by two.

When I am King: No Child Left Behind Left Behind

When I am King...

There will be testing testing.

The U.S. government decided recently that the “No Child Left Behind” policy of the former administration wasn’t working. Perhaps it should have been called “Many Children Left Behind” or “No Child Left Behind, but Many Run Over by the Bus,” because it clearly wasn’t making the grade.

Maybe it was the fact that it was a system designed by America’s favorite C-student president (“I pledgify my allegiance…”). Or perhaps the kids in the failing schools are just plain dumb, and no amount of attention focused on those schools can compensate for their willful thickheadedness. Or maybe it’s just time to try something new because that’s what governments do.

But I think the problem is rooted in testing.

In order to judge whether schools are failing, the children in those schools take standardized tests. Schools with enough children who pass the tests are considered okay, and the teachers can get back to work beating some sense into the children. Schools without enough passing children (a.k.a., “dummies”) are considered failing, and the spotlight of shame is focused on the school to inspire fear and educational prowess.

This system of ritual embarrassment is apparently not succeeding. Of course, anyone that was ever ridiculed in school for doing something unusual could have told you as much; taunting only benefits the ringleader and the laughing onlookers, not the victim.

But how can you successfully test all children on what they’ve learned in a systematic and consistent way across the whole country? What tests will you use? Who will create them? Will they need #2 pencils? Will they test the children’s ability to fill in the circles completely? Will they allow for bathroom breaks? Will there be more “C” answers than “A” because it always seems like cheating to have the first multiple-choice answer be the right one?

When I am King, there will be a focus on testing. In particular, we need to make sure that we have qualified testers to create and administer the tests. We need an entire system designed to test the people that write the tests, to make sure that their testing skills are tested. Testers that succeed can go on to give other tests to testers. Those that fail will be mercilessly teased, and can then apply for a job at the local Department of Motor Vehicles.

This system of writing tester tests, testing testers, and grading tests taken by testing testers test-takers, will result in a progressively more refined testing environment with the best testers we can produce. But in the meantime, teachers can get back to actually teaching and children can focus on learning. Or taunting the weak ones and taking their lunch money, which is what school is really all about.

Little Joke for Thursday

I wonder:

Are those people that aren't on some kind of reality TV show called the unwatched masses?

Video: Chet Does Nerdcore

I wrote this geeky music video piece for a recent tech conference about the product I work on. It's about people and product-related things you've probably never heard of, but I'm hoping it's funny anyway.

When I am King: Fashion Tips

When I am King...

Button-up shirts will be tucked into pants that fasten at the waist.

Somehow, while I wasn’t paying any attention, it has become a fashion trend to untuck those button-down dress shirts that men wear. I think it’s supposed to give the wearer a look that says, “I care enough about what I look like to spend money on a nice shirt, but not enough to bother tucking it in.” It also has that casual, slept-in-my-clothes look, combined with a feeling of having forgotten to tuck back in the last time you went to the bathroom. All that’s missing is some toilet paper stuck to the shirttails.

I’m having a hard time dealing with this development. For one thing, I can’t get at my pockets anymore because they’re covered by these shirt tails hanging around like last month’s cold. But even worse, there’s this loose feeling of my clothes not being completely on that I just can’t adjust to. The shirt is wafting around, open to the elements, and I’m not liking it.

Then I realized; the men’s shirt has become a blouse. Maybe if we wore bras, things would feel more secure and cozy in there.

Meanwhile, the pants have become looser and ride lower than the waist, showing a part of the body that is only attractive on about 2 people in the world.

The strangest thing about it is the disparate origin of these fashions. Untucked shirts come from the world of Large. Instead of tucking in shirts, men trying to hide their gut would untuck and let the shirt fall straight, like covering a nuclear arsenal with a camo tarp. Instead of seeing who could stand to miss a lunch based on the size of their middle, you’d just have to look for the untucked shirts. This worked like a charm until this new fashion trend where everyone seems to be untucked. Maybe it’s a conspiracy by the Large-ish Association of People (LAP); by forcing the trend on the rest of us, they can now hide in public.

The low-riding pants fashion, conversely, comes from the usual place: the world of Thin. This fashion mistake is brought to us by supermodels who haven’t fully digested a single meal in years. The pants look great on them because they add a third dimension to an otherwise 2D body. But you put them on a real person and everyone looks like a plumber in mid-repair.

Shirts that hang out, pants that don’t come up to the waist: It’s like a married couple going through a midlife crisis. They’re having a trial separation and playing with their lifestyles. Maybe the shirts are going to start seeing other articles of clothing, maybe even other shirts. And the pants are just sinking lower into depression. I just want to shake some sense into them, “You’re shirts and pants! Get ahold of yourselves! And each other!”

When I am King, shirts will tuck in again. And they’ll do so into pants that cover all of those parts of the body that should never have been seen in public in the first place.