Why are you doing such a shorter time interval now than you were then?
To keep his heart from exploding.
I could never get the hang of the elliptical, it always felt like I was going to get sucked into the cogworks or something. I prefered the erg.
I know what you mean about the elliptical. I got one without handles, and I think having to balance actually works stabilizer muscles a bit, and definitely makes the machine more pleasant to use.
I would have never guessed that your athletic prowess depended so much on that fraction of a kidney they removed. Good thing they didn't take the whole thing out.
It has occurred to me that I don't actually know what they took out.
You should have had a family member or friend there, taking video.
I have a relative who's a personal injury lawyer; you have no idea how many plans just like that I had to put the kibosh on.
A handle-less one actually sounds pretty good, they were a big source of the awkwardness for me. If ever I return to a gym, I'll try one out.
Oh, man, I really want to get an erg, but the wife already bought a recumbent exercise bike, and now there's no room. Curses.
It has occurred to me that I don't actually know what they took out.
It now occurs to me that perhaps I misunderstood you. In which case, here's a start.
The elliptical totally rules. I put on the headphones and rock out. It is *great* exercise. The machine I like best has handles, but I don't use them. I use my arms to turn the pages of the book or magazine or whatever, and somehow the handles never seem to get in the way. Oh, and as far as ellipticals being for poofs? Fuck the haters. :-)
Ergs are great. Best workout from an exercise machine I've ever gotten. Nothing compared to actually being out on the water, of course, but it'll still get you in great shape.
Curses.
Ergs are a lot of fun, and great exercise (I used one for a few years), but the recumbent is a lot easier on your back, and in the long run, you won't be sorry for that.
easier on your back
Probably true, but it's doing nothing for my upper body.
I have this dream of putting an erg on a shell and attaching the drive to a screw propeller so you can get a rowing workout on the water but while travelling in the direction you face.
Austin has a good river for rowing, but there are lots of bridges and other hazards, and craning your head around every few strokes to make sure you don't hit something is teh suck. That's why I prefer rowing crew, but trying to get eight people (or even six or four) and a cox to show up regularly when you can't threaten them with being "off the team" because it's so hard to find good rowers is also teh suck.
10 -- the little dude holding the whole gut in his embrace is kinda cool.
From M/lls' wikipedia link: The kidneys are bean-shaped excretory organs in vertebrates.
Um, hello? You can't explain the shape of the kidneys in terms of beans! We already explain the shape of beans in terms of kidneys!
"Bean-shaped" isn't much of an adjective in any case -- there are lots of different shapes that would qualify as similar to some bean. Kidneys are more specifically kidney-bean-shaped.
Hey! a dolphin ate the kitty! Somebody call the exterminator!
Explanations have to stop somewhere, and then we simply have to mention beans.
You can't explain the shape of the kidneys in terms of beans! We already explain the shape of beans in terms of kidneys!
In topology they're all just spheres anyway, so what's the difference?
22: It's no mistake. You're seeing that page on porpoise.
Brock Landers has given me an idea for something to talk with a professor about concerning Putnam.
I see a kayak in your future.
I love kayaks, but they don't give one the awesome leg workout that rowing does.
Also, IIRC, in the language of a certain large group of inscrutable Eastern people, the literal name for cashews translates to "kidney nuts".
16: The few occasions I rowed a single, I used a little headband with an attached rearview mirror. Was kind of tricky to get used to, but with practice it works pretty well.
No, it's not the same, but a good kayak stroke works a bunch of muscles. Plus you can see where you're going, and if you happen to have an ocean handy you can have a whole lot of fun with the waves.
It's all about whaleboats. There's nothing like straining against a lead keel.
Matt F and DaveL, why won't you acknowledge the brilliance of my proposed invention? WHY??
34: Not sure how well a screw propellor would do with the erg's on-again, off-again power output, so you'd need either a hell of a big flywheel or maybe some kind of a generator/battery/motor setup, either of which is going to be heavy as hell. But maybe you could do it as a sidewheeler. The mechanics would be simpler, the wheel(s?) would hold some inertia, and it would look cool as hell.
Or, you know, kayak.
There is no necessary enmity between the kayak and the m/tchboat, DaveL.
It has occurred to me that I don't actually know what they took out.
Or put in.
37: I was given to understand that the main purpose of sports was creating unnecessary enmity.
But if we kayakers and m/tchboaters unite, we can totally kick the collective asses of the canoe people and their scurrilous allies the boogie boarders.
At least they cut into you to (allegedly) remove part of your kidney, ogged, instead of going up and yanking it out through your urethra.
No, ben, no poke boaters. Boaters get mad if poke them.
34: Every time I try to picture it, I imagine it as being some sort of excessively complicated Victorian-era industrial machine, with steam pumps and brass gagues, Phileas Fogg riding atop. This image is giving me a great deal of enjoyment.
I suppose one could put together a propeller system, though something like this might be simpler. Don't know how well it works, though.
Let it be noted that M/lls has trouble getting cox to show up.
40: Wipe out the weakest tribes first. Start with the drowners.
Let it also be noted that the cox uses a piece of equipment called a cox box.
From the video it looks like it works really well. Whether it would work with the instability of a shell, the leg push, and the need/desire to feather the oars, is another question, but man, that really is a cool, elegant idea.
Let it also be known that most cox seats aren't really designed with a 6 foot, 180ish pound guy in mind. And that if you pull your oars in before I've exited the boat, I will, after briefly drying off, hunt you down and kill you.
Yeah, that's what I wasn't sure about--they demonstrate it in a regular rowboat, but a shell is pretty different. Still, interesting idea.
You would cox? Wow. Yeah, that seat works better if you're a 5-foot, 95-pound girl.
40: You're going to have to be a little more specific than "canoe people." These, we can take. These, I don't pick fights with.
Does it make sense to write of some idea that it "lapsed into general acceptance" or is the quoted phrasing just confused about what a lapse is?
This question obviously doesn't refer to anything in the post or comments.
Depends on the context...if it's referring to something that was once taboo or frowned upon, but is now not so big of a deal due to societal apathy, then sure. Lax enforcement of a once strongly-held rule seems required here. Otherwise, it should probably be "came into general acceptance", if it's just about unexceptional progression of values (or whatever).
The taboo point is a good one, but the claim I'm looking at could be stated as, "Scholars interpreted historical event X this way, until someone disputed it" where the first clause is written as "the interpretation lapsed into general acceptance, until someone disputed it."
Ah. No, that's wrong, I think. Should be something like "...informed scholarly opinion until it was later disputed", or even more simply "...was widely accepted...".
Actually, thinking about some more, they might just mean "lapped", but wrote "lapsed" instead. As in, "the tide lapped [i.e., washed over] the shore"; thus, "the idea lapped over the academy". Though I might be mistaking another word here.
That use of 'lapsed' is definitely wrong.
It could just say, 'this interpretation was generally accepted, until ...' or, 'interpretation X, the generally accepted view, until... ' which are more elegant.
What is an "elliptical"? Is it one of those things they sell on infomercials? If it is then hahahahaha.
The only remotely acceptable piece of physical training equipment is a punchbag.
Punchbags, pfft. Real flesh and blood people, who move and hit back, if you want to be serious about it.
perhaps so, but "being serious about it", sir, is the mark of a poof.
Oh I'm so very brave on the internet.
Heh. re: poofery, I can talk -- I got my nose severely bashed by a girl a few weeks back. Still smarts a bit.
52: Ain't that the truth. As I was, in high school, pretty much a 5-foot 90-pound girl, I made an excellent cox.
Could we arrange a Scottish vs. Welsh iron-cage match here?
Dude, you're back in the gym! Good for you. (Although I also hate and fear the elliptical.) When do you start swimming again?
And 52: Yeah, I coxed once or twice in emergencies, and even at 5'7" it's pretty brutal. There's not a lot of room up there.
65: Doesn't nattarGcM have to first beat you up for calling him 'Scottish'? Or is it 'Scotch' that's verboten? In any case, the Internet is great for developing fun new stereotypes -- I now think of everyone from the UK as prone to hitting stuff.
"Scottish" is correct. "Scotch" is the rustic Scottish equivalent of what we call "Screech" on htis side of the water.
But I'm not afraid of McGrattan, anyway! And I have no teeth to worry about. I'll smash his so-called fists with my face until his fretting hand is entirely useless for any musical purpose.
Scottish is correct, or Scots. Both are fine. Scotch is the one that earns the slap in the chops.
I'm not violent, honest. Also, this week I am on stage in an 'opera'. Stereotypes, I confound thee!
Do you play the slide guitar part in the MacHeath/Jenny tango duet?
You're calling opera nonviolent? I don't think so.
66. It's just the wild Celtic fringe. The only thing I ever hit is the bottle. Scotch, for preference.
Not nonviolent, just poofy.
re: 70
I am supposed to, but I am playing it without slide. As fretted notes. Although I will 'slide' into them -- glissandi rather than proper slide. There's no practical way to switch between guitars with the staging.
Also, Weill, I have decided, was a bastard. Writing the same chord with different enharmonic spellings, from one bar to the next is just cruel.
I've never seen the instrumental score. But I *love* that song, however the chords are spelled.
Both Weill and Brecht had to have both been something of bastards. Threepenny Opera gets quite aggressive.
There's some nice arranging in it. The vocal melodies are often very catchy too.
However, since I am playing the guitar, banjo and hawaiian guitar parts (all on electric guitar) and it's pretty clear Weill had no clue about the guitar -- several of the parts involve detuning (Eb scordatura, anyone?) and monster stretches or really awkward fingering -- it's a bit of a bugger. Musically it's very simple though as are all the parts -- they just overlap and interlock very cleverly.
In the original staging the same guy played banjo, guitar, mandolin, hawaiian guitar, bandoneon and cello. The original score as Weill wrote it is arranged for 8 musicians playing 23 instruments!
ttaM: Sometimes composers do stuff like that for the second edition, for copyright-renewal purposes.
8 musicians playing 23 instruments
Isn't the score just "for 23 instruments", and it happens to be playable by 8 musicians? Or does the score actually specify that individual A switch from instrument ? to instrument ??
The score says when to switch. 'nimmt Guitar', 'nimmt Banjo', etc.
The original performance used a small ensemble of multi-instrumentalists, so I presume it was arranged with them in mind. The first recordings (from about 2 years later) use the same core musicians but it's arranged for more people. I presume most later recordings and performances use more people. We are using 12 or 13 (I think).
re: 80
The problem isn't with the slide itself, it's that generally guitars can be set up for playing slide or for playing normally but not both. The action (the height between the strings and the fretboard) generally needs to be higher for slide. If it's too low the bottleneck whacks off the frets and creates loads of unpleasant metallic noises.
There are exceptions, some people use quite a high action anyway so can get away with playing slide on their normal guitar.* In this case, it'd be really difficult to raise the action to slide height as the other parts I play are pretty difficult in terms of stretches or awkwardly held chord shapes and I wouldn't want to do that with a high action.
So, it'd need to be two guitars, and that just isn't practical with the staging.
* actually, both my nylon string and my archtop jazz guitar already have actions high enough but for various reasons aren't suitable for this.
Our recreational rowing club had this initiative to get at least one person from each crew trained as a coxswain to increase their general availability. Coxswains are much in demand, but it's not a particularly rewarding thing to do.
So I volunteered and so that I'd be able to trade off with a member of another crew so that both crews would have a dedicated cox. And actually coxing is kind of fun, and I got pretty good at it, despite the cramped quarters. Still, there was a huge mismatch between people who wanted a dedicated cox and those who were actually willing to be a cox sometimes. Damn freeriders.
Also, it's amazing how dense otherwise intelligent people can be after a good workout, despite repeated remonstrations throughout the row to remember to keep those f*$#ing oars out on the water until your cox has exited the boat you stupid motherf&@kers!!!!11!!!
What happens to the cox if his crewmates pull their oars in prematurely?
Another upside of whaleboats is that they don't tip. Also, while your cox probably shouldn't be the heaviest person on the crew, he or she needs to be tall and strong enough to leverage the rudder oar.
Hey JM, did you hang out much at the Hyde Street Pier? IIRC they had a whaling ship moored there for a while in the mid-80's and then moved it elsewhere.
Just a little west of there--like a block--is the San Francisco Sea Scout base. We usually did most of our rowing practice out of the Berkeley Marina, though.
Cool. When I was in 5th grade (and again when I was in 6th), my class went to Hyde Street on a program where we (over the month or so beforehand) learned the different roles people worked on the ship and got assigned a duty like "sailmaker", "longshoreman", etc and then stayed on the ship (lumber schooner C.A. Thayer for a couple of days, living like sailors. About the most school-related fun I had in grade school. The second year I got to be the shantyman.
Should be a close-paren after "Thayer".
That sounds awesome. Next time you get out to California, you might want to check out the reproduction of The Golden Hind at Drake's Bay.
You do know that the whaleboat is the largish rowboat that was sent off a whaling ship, right? And let me tell you, having rowed those things, I can't imagine being dragged along in one by an angry, harpooned whale. Some of the whaling scenes in Moby Dick are tremendously present and terrifying to me.
Yeah I did not know that prior to reading this thread but when I saw the term I figured it out from the context.
In order to restore the unity of the thread, someone has to talk about playing slide guitar on some type of archaic boat, preferably a shell or a kayak.
"Kayak" is a Turkish word, BTW. You heard it here first.
83: What LB said. Rowing shells are incredibly narrow and therefore extremely prone to tipping. What prevents this is the oars sticking out on both sides, kind of like pontoons.
When you're at the dock, the dockside oars are no long performing this function, and if the cretins pull in their waterside oars before everyone has exited the boat, well, those remaining in the boat are likely to get wet.
Also, while your cox probably shouldn't be the heaviest person on the crew, he or she needs to be tall and strong enough to leverage the rudder oar.
The rudder in shells is tiny, about the size of a pack of playing cards, and easy for the cox to maneuver. But using the rudder much upsets the balance of the boat, which makes it difficult or impossible to row, and generally slows things down, so it's better to rely on asking either the port or starboard side rowers to row a little harder as necessary to take care of steering needs.
92 -- for several years after the class trips, I went to monthly shanty sings on board the C.A. Thayer. People certainly played guitar there though I don't strictly speaking remember any dobros. Then the parks department fired the ranger who organized the shanty sings and they stopped happening. Fuckin parks department.
93 -- what I'm wondering is how they can get the oars once everybody is off the boat?
"Chanty" is the songs. "Shandy" is a very weak, diluted beer, often mixed with lemonade or the like, that sailors drank all day long.
I may have told this story already here someplace, but I'll tell it again if I haven't. When I rowed crew at the University of Chicago, we rowed in the Lincoln Park Lagoon, next to the zoo. (Lions roar at sunrise.) It's short -- you can row at full speed for about two minutes, maybe, before you have to turn.
Shells are very difficult to maneuver, and you don't have to in a race, really, races are pretty much straight-line affairs. So you can have a fairly good team that still has a lot of difficulty maneuvering their boat; getting up to the starting line of a race, they wallow all over the place and look like idiots. Being able to move your boat around deftly and smoothly makes a crew look very competent, and kinda intimidating, at least at the level of competition we were at (pathetic).
Because of all the required turning in our practices, we were incredibly skilled at making our boat do what we wanted. We could do stunts with that thing. And so we'd show up at regattas, and scare the hell out of all the other crews moving up to the start because we were clearly much better than they were.
And then we'd lose pathetically because we were weak. It was all very sad.
You should have asked for a shell slalom.
97 - My sister's Ultimate team used to play in the city basketball winter leagues, in the lowest division. They would run out, in their matching sponsored jerseys (because their Ultimate team won Nationals and stuff) and do incredibly intricate warmup sprints and stretchs. Then they would lose by 50 points.
They had a coach and a manager and a crowd of fans with banners at every game.
99: Which team was she on? Was this a college team or one of the top club teams (I thought most of them were all-mens, or pretty close)?
I've been hoping to get into the club scene in Ultimate after playing back at university, but a year out meant I was certainly not up to snuff at last year's round of try-outs.
Also, this thread is almost making me regret not following up on my intermural crew try-outs. Then I remember that it would've involved being inches from water at 5:30 am in the wintertime. Y'all are nuts.
Trust me, the rowing keeps you warm.
Here's a thought, since you're looking to get back into shape. A marathon-running friend of mine recently lent me this book. Despite the cheesy name, the advice seems really solid; it's all about efficient, low-impact running. He also teaches classes in w-lfs-n's neck of the woods, I think.
what I'm wondering is how they can get the oars once everybody is off the boat?
Rowing shells are incredibly narrow, say about 18 inches wide. The oars are long and the handle-end of the oar on, for example, the starboard side extends past the gunwhale on the port side. So after you step out of the boat, it's very easy to grab the handle and pull your oar in. But seriously dude, DO NOT DO IT until I've exited the boat.
This is a decent photo of an eight, to help you picture things. Also this. And this.
I don't know, ogged. I use the eliptical myself, on account of my crappy knees. But I'm still not convinced that they're non-poofy. Running or swimming has always been much, much more tiring to me.
101 - Burning Skirts, Pie Queens, Home Brood.
