What makes a good work-out song?

What makes a good work-out song? I was thinking, that if I could, I would listen to music like the very very beginning of "Heroes and Villains" where the songs just busts out, though preferably the live version (which sounds less dated and has more energy, though in any case the song no matter what version has too many tempo changes to be good overall for cardio).

If any readers out there have thoughts, I would love to see your ideas for songs in the 'comments' section to this post.

Flannery O'Connor on the Catholic Church.

I heard an anecdote the other day that Flannery O'Connor, who grew up a Catholic in the deep South and remained a Catholic to her death, had one thing she'd always say about the church -- "Wrong man for the job!"

I'm not sure if the anecdote is true or not, but I hope it is, since it's kind of nice.

2 things Spanish, "sycophant".

For a term paper the one book that keeps coming up is in Spanish. I checked it out and looked at it this morning. One sentence in the book began "Mas importante..." Honestly, how can you take a language seriously that begins a sentence with "Mas importante...", especially when the sentence is one in an academic book and is all very self-serious about itself? There's a reason French, German, and English are the standard languages of scholarshoip -- they have self-respect.

On another note, I found out the derivation of the word "sycophant" today. "syco-" means 'fig' in Greek, and "phant" comes from a Greek root meaning 'clear/apparent', so together they mean something like 'someone who makes figs appear from the deep foliage of the tree by shaking the trunk', hence its application to someone who makes revelations or falsely slanders someone.

Separated at birth?

Suddenly-ubiquitous scraggly mountain man Daniel Craig...

and once-ubiquitous shaggy mountain troll?

Two words to describe humanities graduate students when they try to describe what they do to other people:

"Incapacitating nuance."

Got my hair cut yesterday.

I got my haircut yesterday at the Japanese spa a little ways away from my house. Diezel was my barber again, and he asked me how my New Year's was, and when I said it was lowkey, he said his was too, and he and his girlfriend watched Dick Clark on the couch for a while and opened a bottle of wine, but they didn't even get through half of it, then a little after eleven they put on a movie, but his girlfriend went off to bed since she was tired, and then next thing he knows he wakes up and it's like 12:50am and the movie's still going and he missed the ball-drop, so he went into his girlfriend's room and woke her up and gave her a kiss, and then he went back in and finished watching the movie. Only, when he told me this, right after he said "we opened a nice bottle of wine," he lowered his voice because the Japanese women were around and was like, "and we blew a couple joints and got real mellow," and then he raised his voice again and went into the whole movie thing and her going to bed and him falling asleep and whatnot.

Also, he was telling me how he rented "The Bucket List" a few weeks ago and it made him cry, which never happens with movies. I told him to rent "The Purple Rose of Cairo", which always gets me, and when I told him that Mia Farrow was in it and that Woody Allen directed, he was like, "But she don't get directed by him any more, I bet, she get near him and she gonna give it to him, the pervert."

Diezel, it also turns out, has a penchant for zombie movies, and really enjoyed "I Am Legend" when he went to go see it a few weeks ago.

Lent, and my uncle's girlfriend.

Last year my uncle's girlfriend was at a little get-together at some people's house and everyone was Catholic, so they were asking each other what they were giving up, and my uncle's girlfriend was like, "Martinis," and everyone started looking at each other, since they weren't sure if she was being a dick and martinis meant nothing to her, or if martinis meant a whole lot to her, in which case she'd have a big problem.

Now _that_ was a shit.

The weather is unseasonably warm and all the snow is melting, and when I walked in the main library, it was like this wall of stuffiness hit me, and when I was writing that last post, my stomach started turning a little little bit, and then the next thing you know, I had to shit severely, and when I went to the bathroom just now, this whole watery-yellow shit with pieces of orange in it just flew out of me and floated on top of the bowl, as I saw when I got up, and then I remembered that I when I had been cutting up veggies for the week this afternoon, I ate an orange, and then I felt like some turkish coffee as well, so I had that afterwards, and both of those together is *not* the recipe for a healthy, comes-out-all-in-one-piece shit that you can take at your leisure.

Another night at the bar.

All the bars in the city went smoke-free on January 1st, even though the ban had already been slated for July. So, not only do smokers have to adjust to the ban, but they also have to jump right into smoking outside in the freezing cold without any smoking outside in nice weather and then fall weather and then finally mild snow to ease them into it.

Anyhow, on Friday night I went out with a few friends who all chain smoke over beer, and they were all tense like no other. Someone pulled out a pad at some point to write out a palindrome for us -- "Nurse, I see gypsies, run!", which we realized must actually be, "Nurse, I *spy* gypsies, run!" -- and then somehow we all decided to improvise pictionary to take their minds off of smoking. Since they were the tense ones and competition brings out the worst in me, I ended up being the guy to think up the words and write them on little slips of paper and put them in my knit cap and shake it up and let them pick it out. I could have been a dick and written up words like 'task' and 'azalea', but I decided to be nice and do things like 'hatbox' and 'foam'. By the end of the night, when I was two whiskeys in, I was forgetting the words I had written and could have joined in the playing if I had wanted, with no handicap necessary. If I remember correctly, that was round the time they were drawing 'midget' and 'salmon', though some time after 'yeti'.

At one point, too, we discussed how your cats eat you if you're dead, and a lot of times when they open up an old person's house who'd died from a heart attack, they find the person chewed up by their kitten or what have you. "What I don't get," my friend was like, "Is it because they're hungry, or are they waiting?"

Later on towards right before we left, my one friend's Belgian friend who works with maps was telling us about this one small department that's tucked into the U.S. Geography and Survey Department or whatever the fuck that one department of the federal government is called, and how its main function in history was to make sure there weren't two names of one town in a given state -- if there were two Bloomingtons, for example, one was forced to change its name to "Bloomington Heights" -- but now it mainly keeps track of records of places that have had their names changed in case people need to trace a name through time and they can't find it on current maps. When I then asked him why people would change the names of places, he was like, "Because they're offensive."

"Like what?", I was like.

"'N*gg*r Butte'," he said, dryly.