The Twelve Days of Gheorghemas: Day Five

On the fifth day of Gheorghemas, Big Gheorghe gave to me

Five Beers and Tunes

Four Resolutions

Three Gheorghemas Gifts to Give Yourself

Two Stones of Weight Loss (Your Mileage May Vary)

and Running Gags with Quatro Kitties

 

Beers leverage a variety of hops to make them unique, just like songs relies on different loops/sounds to make each one unique. Below are music and beer pairings from NPR’s top songs of 2021 to enjoy through Gheorghemas (if you can find the beers).

 

#5 – Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen's - Like I Used To & Rusty Nickel’s Hazy Girl (5.5%)

Two amazing songwriters collaborating over the pandemic speaks to a collaboration beer. But not just any collaboration, but a Pink Boots collaboration beer. For this tune, pop open a tasty Hazy Girl and enjoy the ride.

#4 – Megan Thee Stallion – Thot Shit & New Belgium La Folie (7%)

I’ll be honest on this one, I have no idea what the hell is going on in this song but it’s thot shit. So pop the top of highly-rated beer from New Belgium and a woman brewer, La Folie. This beer is sour with a kick of higher alcohol -- well, at least compared to your PBRs and Bud Lights of the world. 

#3 – Lucy Dacus – Thumbs & Lawson’s Sip of Sunshine (8%)

This dark song about a father’s unspeakable acts with the lyric “I would kill him” needs a more uplifting drink. Enter Lawson’s piney Sip of Sunshine to still leave a little bitter note with a ray of hope.

 

#2 Wet Leg - Chaise Lounge & PBR (4.6%)

“Are you coming backstage after the show?

Because I've got a chaise longue in my dressing room

And a pack of warm beer that we can consume”

pairs well with the rockstar’s beer of choice: PBR. So crack open a warm PBR and enjoy this tune.

 

#1 Lil Nas X - Montero & New Holiday’s Dragon’s Milk Triple Mash version (17%)

The Triple Mash version of Dragon’s Milk is described as “the ultimate indulgence” for an aged stout. Why a stout? I’m told Lil NAs X is stout down there.

Drink 'em if you can find 'em.

Birds Aren't Real

In the late 60s and early 70s, the CIA launched a massive clandestine program to kill off America's bird population and replace it with extremely lifelike drones in order to create a continental aerial surveillance system. 

And they would've succeeded fully if not for the dedicated bravery and patriotism of the Birds Aren't Real movement. Originally founded in 1976 as a whistleblower action, the movement was forced underground in 1991 and only recently became active again. Peter McIndoe, a 23 year-old college dropout from Memphis revived the campaign, which has grown to include thousands of mostly young people concerned about government spying on citizens. The group has received coverage in recent weeks from a broad range of media outlets, including as august a publication as The New York Times.

I know what you're thinking. This is absurd. But if it can be true that Hillary Clinton led a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington, DC and John F. Kennedy is still alive and will return to lead the nation and the 2020 Presidential election was stolen, then why can't it be true that the birds we see in the sky are surveillance drones? Checkmate, sheeple.

Okay, fine. Birds Aren't Real isn't real. Or at least it doesn't really believe that birds aren't real. Despite McIndoe's finely honed counter-arguments and the movement's elaborately detailed pastiche of evidence, the founders admit that they've got ulterior motives. Claire Chronis, a Birds Aren't Real organizer from Pittsburgh, let the NYT onto the game, “My favorite way to describe the organization is fighting lunacy with lunacy.”

Gen Z has come of age in a world beset by batshittery. QAnon counts adherents in the goddamn United States Congress. Benghazi became a ubiquitous battle cry. Millions of people think Bill Gates is trying to implant microchips through fucking vaccines for the love of God.

I applaud the effort, even as I see a fraught potential outcome. I fear an ouroboros endgame, where the joke ultimately eats itself and people that don't get the parody start to believe in it. We're a nation primed to believe conspiracy theories about government overreach. The aforementioned QAnon is a prime example of the devastating consequences that follow what when people can't tell the difference between insane conspiracy and reality, led by grifters who profit upon their ignorance. I hope the Birds Aren't Real kids can avoid that muddle and lead us out of the mire.

And so on balance, I pleased to see at least a little corner of Gen Z is fighting back, seeing absurdity abound and raising it.

God Bless those loons. Who aren't real. But are. We need them.

The Twelve Days of Gheorghemas: Day Four

On the fourth day of Gheorghemas, Big Gheorghe gave to me

Four Resolutions

Three Gheorghemas Gifts to Give Yourself

Two Stones of Weight Loss (Your Mileage May Vary)

and Running Gags with Quatro Kitties

I know what you're thinking. Resolutions are as useless as the pixels they're written on, and yours, rob, are even less useful than that. We know you and your weak will, after all.

First of all, that's not very nice. But at least I know where I stand. Jerks.

But you're right. My history of follow-through is as sketchy as an Uzbek cryptocurrency. That doesn't
mean I shouldn't try. And I've had some semi-breakthroughs of late. I have a 70-week Peloton riding streak going (I'm no zman, but I try). I drink at least 80 ounces of water every day (and at least 48 ounces of coffee and 32 ounces of beer - all the ounces up in here). Baby steps.

There are some things I definitely want to focus on in the new year. I could start now, but why do that when there's a completely arbitrary demarcation that allows me three solid weeks of procrastination?

For starters, I'm doubling down on kindness. One of the managers that works for me is retiring at the end of the year. He's been with our business for about five years, and his current job is a pretty big step down from where he was at the peak of his career with one of our competitors. He took the job because he thrives on teaching and coaching sales reps. He's as good at it as anyone I've ever met. 

He's so good because he genuinely cares for his people, and approaches his job with caring and kindness. I've learned more from him than he'll ever know. 

I've always tried to be a 'good' person, but I've never really connected that to leadership until I met this fellow. Since then, I've come across some great writing by people like Tom Peters who draw a clear line between taking care of people and team performance. This article by Fast Company illustrates the difference between being kind and being nice and how the former yields real-world benefits. 

As a corollary to my first resolution, I really, really want to be less angry* at the state of the world. Fuck, but I find too many reasons to rant pointlessly into the intervoid. I don't need to catalogue the various violations that offend me - you've heard them before. 2022 is a decent year to try to temper my rage, since we're still two+ years away from turning the country fully over to the dark side, so I can conserve some energy. 

* I'm really going to try, honest. I don't have high hopes for this one.

One of the proximate causes of my anger is almost certainly the amount of time I spend on social media. I can't give you a good estimate of the number of hours I've spent on the Tweet machine this year, but it's certainly too high to be healthy. And conversely, my time spent reading is way, way down. At the moment, the following books sit on the side table in my living room in various stages of completion:

• Deacon King Kong, by James McBride
• Soccer IQ (Vols. 1 & 2), by Dan Blank
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley
• Political Tribes, by Amy Chua
• Our Towns, by James and Deborah Fallows
• I'll Be Gone in the Dark, by Michelle McNamara
• Sorry for Your Trouble, by Richard Ford

I've also got about a year's worth of hard copies of The Atlantic to work through. And Dave's about to drop seven more books on the pile. I totally need to make it a point to read more.

I'm in a pretty good spot, fitness-wise, so I'm not going to make a point to focus there. So long as my knee holds out, I can play soccer, ride my bike, run a little bit, and generally stay active. Keeping busy coaching soccer and volunteering on the board of the local club, so doing at least a little bit for my community. I don't lack for good eating and drinking - not messing with that, even though I'd probably sleep better if I did less of the latter.

No, I think I'm about experiences now. Many of us lost a close friend earlier this month. I've seen colleagues and neighbors lose parents, brothers, and even a son just in the past two weeks. The whole quickening of the passage of time thing is a cliché, but that doesn't make the days slow down. And I want to spend those days doing interesting things with the people that make me happy.

And so among other things (spending time with my wife in the early days of our empty nesting come
August comes to mind), I resolve to see every Gheorghie at least once this year. Starting making the bed in your guest room, friends - I'm crashing your scene. 

Can't wait.

And Then There Was Micky

Pour out some bubblegum-flavored pop for Mike Nesmith, the wildly underrated songwriting backbone of The Monkees, who passed today.

And if you think this is a way for me to procrastinate writing Day Four of Gheorghemas, I won't correct you. Not even using Wite-out.

The Twelve Days of Gheorghemas: Day Three

On the third day of Gheorghemas, Big Gheorghe gave to me

Three Gheorghemas Gifts to Give Yourself

Two Stones of Weight Loss (Your Mileage May Vary)

and Running Gags with Quatro Kitties

I previously gave you some gift ideas for Mother's Day and Father's Day.  I now present the three things I enjoyed the most in 2021 as potential Gheorghemas gifts to give yourself or others.

A Peloton bike

I ordered a Peloton bike in July 2020 and it arrived in November 2020.  The next day I sprained the daylights out of my ankle raking leaves (I rolled it when I stepped off the curb into a pothole in the gutter).

As a result I wasn't able to use it until January 2, 2021.  Since then I've done 367 rides on what I estimate to be 218 days, along with 108 strength workouts, 4 yoga practices and 3 cardio classes.  That's 333 days of exercise over the last 341 days.  Those of you who know me best are stunned--rootsy probably passed out when he read that.  For the rest of you, it's safe to say that I worked out more in the past 11 months than I did in the previous 11 years.

Why?  I'm middle aged, I have (or had) high blood pressure, and the day before I ordered the bike zdaughter poked me in the love handle and said "Wow Daddy, your belly goes all the way over to there?"  I was the fattest I've ever been, about 187 pounds, and my slight frame isn't meant to carry that much weight.

So I exercised a lot, essentially quit drinking, but continued to eat more or less whatever the hell I want but only between the hours of 11 am and 7 pm (OBX Dave stole my thunder).  I get horrible sleep when I drink so I don't miss the booze.  I didn't eat breakfast between the ages of 13 and 28 (which was when I was at my skinniest) so the fasting wasn't hard.  I started eating breakfast at 28 because a bunch of motherly women at work heckled me into eating "the most important meal of the day," and other people convinced me it was important to jump start my metabolism in the morning to keep my weight down but looking back at things, this is when I started gaining weight generally.

The Peloton was key though.  It's fun, it's convenient, and yes it's expensive but not much more than a gym membership and my health insurance covered a few months of the streaming subscription.  I've always hated gym-class-style exercise but the combination of good music, entertaining instructors, and on-demand content all in my basement made me want to keep doing it.  You also get an output score during the ride so you have a goal to shoot for, and you can see other people's scores as you ride which keeps the competitive juices flowing.  It's perfect.

via GIPHY

And I lost 18 pounds!  I am literally 169 pounds right now and I want to lose another 4-9 more.  I feel great.  I had to dig through my drawers to find my old belts to keep my pants from falling off I'm so much thinner.  

Bonobos Extra Stretch Travel Jeans

I kept my old belts but not my old pants so I needed new ones.  I've been wearing Bonobos pants for about 15 years.  They're great, although I prefer the original chinos to the new ones--they added some stretch that reduces the need to iron but adds a sheen I don't like.

Their Extra Stretch Travel Jeans solve this problem.  They look like and fit like jeans, but they feel more like sweatpants.  As the name implies, they are stretchy but there is zero sheen.  They come in a bunch of different colors.  I got Walla Walla Walnut because they split the difference between jeans and khakis, but they're actually darker than pictured on the internet so it's more of a brown.  The Amarillo Tan is also darker in reality so it's really khaki.

Hollah at me (or challah at me for Hanukkah) and I'll send you a 25% off referral coupon.

Glerups

Glerups are the best slippers ever.  They're Danish and thus exceedingly hygge.  The uppers are wool felt, and they keep your feet at exactly the right temperature.  Never too hot so your feet don't sweat but never cold either.  They come with leather or rubber soles, in backless slip-on, shoe, and boot styles.  I have the shoes with rubber soles (in gum, natch) and I wear them around the house every day, all four seasons.  I asked for them for Gheorghemas last year and I raved so much that zwoman got herself a pair of the slip-ons.  She is 100% on board and wears hers daily too.  You need cozy slippers if you're going to work from home all the time.

Yes, they look like cartoon shoes.  Yes, my feet look like Smurf feet.  Yes, zwoman's dog think they taste good so the left one has seen better days.  Yes, I'm wearing colored stretch denim.  I don't care.  I feel healthy, my pants feel comfy, and my feet feel cozy.  That's all I can ask for at this stage of my life, and I wish you the same this Gheorghemas.

The Twelve Days of Gheorghemas: Day Two

On the second day of Gheorghemas, Big Gheorghe gave to me

Two Stones of Weight Loss (Your Mileage May Vary)

and Running Gags with Quatro Kitties

An OBX Dave Joint

Y’all come to this site for health advice like guys go to strip clubs for the cheeseburgers. However, I thought as we all move toward and past the half-century mark, anything that might provide help is worth a look.

Dieting and weight loss was a $78-billion industry in the U.S., pre-pandemic, and the global market for weight loss products and services is expected to hit $255 billion in 2021. There are dozens of diets – high-fat, high-carb, low-fat, low-carb, vegan, paleo, ketogenic, Atkins, Mediterranean. Many require people to drastically alter what they eat and force metabolic changes to achieve desired results. Some market their own foods for their programs at hefty sums, such as Weight Watchers, Nutri System, Jenny Craig, Slim Fast, Herbalife.

One program, however, does nothing like that, and may in fact save money. That’s because it doesn’t target *what* people eat, but *when* they eat. It’s known as intermittent fasting, and it’s a daily or weekly practice that confines people’s eating to a specific time frame. The most common and effective is what’s called the 16:8 program. An eight-hour window in which people eat, and a 16-hour cycle in which they eat nothing.

The science is, essentially, if people go from Pop Tarts to popcorn, eating and snacking during their waking hours, the body is constantly in some state of digestion and storing leftovers. It limits the ability to maintain and cleanse itself. Researchers and scientists point out that our hunter-gatherer ancestors sometimes went days without food and functioned quite well. Agriculture made food more plentiful, and more recently grocery stores and Waffle House make food available 24/7, often to the body’s detriment.

After going hours without food, the body exhausts its sugar store and instead burns fat. Enzymes that would be involved in digestion are instead focused on breaking down toxins. The liver also gets involved, converting non-carbohydrate materials such as lactate, amino acids and fats into glucose energy. Fasting also puts the body under mild stress, causing cells to become stronger, much like muscles and the cardiovascular system from exercise.

According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, intermittent fasting results in weight loss, it lowers blood pressure and resting heart rate and levels blood sugar. It can help stave off type 2 diabetes and heart disease. In areas of thinking and memory, working memory in animals and verbal memory in humans improved. In young men, it helped prevent obesity and resulted in fat loss, while maintaining muscle mass.

An intermittent fasting program doesn’t dictate what people eat, but implied is that they eat reasonably and reasonably well. Don’t binge mozzarella sticks or Doritos, but again it’s not prohibited. Lean meat, veggies, fruits, nuts, whole grains. A couple of meals, or maybe one big meal and smaller munches throughout the eating period. Whatever works. 

Ideally, people are asleep for 7-8 hours during the fasting portion, so there are eight or nine hours when awake with no food. During that time, people are permitted to drink zero-calorie beverages, such as water, tea and black coffee, which provides some semblance of fullness before and after the eating period. The most common eating windows are 11 a.m.-7 p.m., or noon to 8 p.m., but again it’s up to the individual. There’s also an alternative fasting regimen known as 5:2, in which people eat normally five days a week, but the other two they’re limited to one 500-600-calorie meal and the aforementioned drinks.

“Fasting” is probably too extreme a term for the program. It’s not prison hunger strike-level, or Ramadan-style fasting where people ingest nothing from dawn to sunset for 30 days. It’s more like scheduled eating and abstaining. But “fasting” is more fashionable shorthand, and in a fat-ass society of abundance, anything within the same area code as real sacrifice is ripe for overly dramatic verbiage.

All diets or body change programs require some discipline. Kids and family meal times, and irregular work schedules might make fasting a challenge. The holidays aren’t the easiest time to implement a restricted eating program, with parties and get-togethers. Researchers say it takes the body two-to-four weeks to adjust to the change. Some folks get cranky going without food in the early stages of the program, but nutritionists and dieticians say that if they get past the transition period they begin to feel better and are more likely to stick with it.

Or, folks could just practice moderation, exercise and get proper sleep. But where’s the fun in that?

The Twelve Days of Gheorghemas: Day One

It's a yearly tradition for me to both delay the start of Gheorghemas due to procrastination AND make it all about me, so here we are folks. Dig in for the most wonderful time of the year.

On the first day of Gheorghemas

Big Gheorghe gave to me

Running gags with quatro kitties

Happy Gheorghemas to you and yours...let's get this party started.

Wrapped

Like many consumers of streamed music, I just got my year-in-review recap from Spotify. A couple of caveats before we get into the results, which are largely predictable, with one very notable exception:

• I listened to a lot more podcasts this year on Spotify than I did music. My 1,407 minutes of music on Spotify only ranked me in the 27th percentile of users. If my podcast app did the same thing as Spotify, it would tell you that my top listen was NPR's Up First (which is my early-morning dogwalk starter), followed by The Right Time with Bomani Jones, Men in Blazers, and 99% Invisible.
• I tend to fixate on a band for a period of time to the exclusion of others. This will become obvious as you read this post.

Without further ado, my top five songs of the year.

This one was filmed at Norfolk Academy's 2014 Homecoming. Guessing a Gheorghie might've seen this live and in person.

I do love this song.

This was the first song I ever heard on the very first iPod I ever owned, courtesy of my man Whitney, who loaded it with a fuckton of music.

There's a thematic consistency, at least. Spotify says my aura for 2021 was wistful and poignant. So, yeah.

Three of the bands represented on the top five songs list also made it into my top five bands of 2021, so I won't give you anything more by The Avett Brothers (#2), Wilco (#3), or Crowded House (#5). 

The band I listened to the most is also the one I saw in the last show of the before times. I find myself pretty frequently dialing up their stuff, because I really dig their sound and lyrics - they put me in a good headspace. Proud to say that I was in the top 6% of all Spotify users in terms of the number of times I listed to these guys:

Which leaves the number four artist on my list. It came initially quite a surprise to me, but then I realized that this performer released two records over the past 18 months that my daughter loved and turned me onto. And that one of those records featured one of my favorite indie artists. So there's a reason Taylor Swift made it onto my list.

I listened to a few things other than Indie/Alt/Swifty stuff. Here's what Spotify compiled as my songs of the year.

The World's Best Rock and Roll Band

The header to this post is a quote from Iggy Pop. He was talking about Sleaford Mods, a Nottingham, England-based punk duo.

I stumbled up upon the Sleafords the other day and have spent the past few nights down a grimy post-industrial truth-telling rabbit hole. Lead singer and lyricist Jason Williamson has an austere, raspy spoken-word style, which he delivers over DJ Andrew Fearn's stripped-down electronic soundtrack. The band has slowly built an audience since their founding in 2007, not charting until their eighth record, and rising as high as fourth in England with their latest, Spare Ribs. They just performed their first arena show, fittingly in Nottingham. The review is spectacular.

Williamson's influences include both Stone Roses and the Wu Tang Clan, which is excellent. In the extended trailer for a documentary about the band entitled Bunch of Kunst (see below) we see how those styles combine.

Here are a handful of Mods videos, the first of which features Billy Nomates, a revelation in her own right.