Exercise and Fitness on Stack Exchange
If you’ve ever used StackOverflow or any of the related StackExchange websites, you most probably know how great they work for Q&A purposes, especially for domains where beginners tend to ask the same questions over and over again and where determining which advice is good and which users to trust is incredibly difficult.
Briefly, the StackExchange platform allows for votes on both answers, questions and comments, it is entirely community moderated and permissions come with increasing reputation. You get reputation by asking good questions and giving good answers. Once your reputation increases, you get various moderation rights, starting with the basic voting capability to the point where you can edit everything on the website. Common topics get turned into community wikis where everyone can contribute for creating a database of knowledge.
The proposal for an “Exercise and Fitness” stack exchange website has been suggested a while ago and the project is now in “Commitment” phase, meaning that people need to commit (essentially promise that they are interested in the website and will be fairly active when it comes online). Once enough people have commited, the project will launch in Beta and the process can begin.
If this is something you think you will be interested in, follow this link to commit and help make it happen.
Common drug misconceptions
I know that the“Season of the Fall” is here because the entire “cold remedy” section in the supermarket was simply EMPTY last week. The fruit section on the other hand was doing okay… *head desk*
I find it amazing that although everyone knows there is no cure to the “common cold’, people still think and refer to most cold remedy drugs as “cures”. Allow me to take a moment to tell you how you’re doing it wrong. Read more
Bodyfat percentage with pictures
I think this is a great little article to help one understand what bodyfat percentages actually mean or “look like”. It also implicitly shows how low BF confers the muscular look many people are looking for. Check it out.
PS: thanks Serban for the link
How to prevent super-bugs (medical, not software)
Norway does it right. How?
Read it here.
It’s almost disturbing that solutions like this have been explained, tested and proposed for years, but are still being ignored. Thumbs up for Norway!
Real men
Although TC from TMuscle.com already wrote an awesome article about this, which I have previously referenced here, I will try my hand at this in yet another written angry rant.
I am so sick of “real men”. I don’t know who is to blame for this plague. Whether it’s the media, the arts, the growing stupidity, the technocrats, in all honesty, I do not care, but this is really ticking me off. Real men, everybody has this broken perception of what a real man should be. I mean we all know it right?
First of all, real men do not show feelings. They probably are assumed to not have them in the first place. If your manly heart vibrates to a song, to a nice piece of art or to the big eyes of a kitty, it’s time you punched yourself in the face and chugged a pint of beer to bring yourself back on track, because real men don’t have feelings.
If I write a blog (do real men even have blogs??) post about Santa Claus and throw a little bit of sentimentalism in there, I get sneers from every other male stumbling on it. If I dare at any point show emotion in say, a blog post, a facebook status or anything of the like, I get stamped as “emo” (or similar). No, you moronic wool-headed lummox, I’m not emo, I’m HUMAN. Sometimes I feel happy, sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I fell really pissed off, like now. They’re called emotions and just because you can’t deal with them and need to suppress them doesn’t mean everyone does the same.
Actually, let me stop here and correct my first point. Real men do have some allowed emotions, most important of which is anger. And because real men are suppose to be angry, they need to show it. A real man swears, a real man is violent, a real man breaks the rules, because everyone knows rules are for woosies. This translates into everything a real man does. Real men don’t listen to girly music, they only listen to angry music. Real men like action films.
“Real men drink harrd”. Yup, you know it. If you go to some party and you’re not doing shots of everything, all at once, usually being very vocal about it and ending the whole thing with a huge burp, you’re not a real man. Real men get so drunk that they need other real men to help them get home. That unless they’re true alpha males and decide to drive their drunk ass home, because they can – they know they can!
Sometimes, real men, after they get drunk, go out clubbing, but don’t make the mistake of thinking they go there to dance. Oh no no no, real men don’t dance, are you crazy? That’s for women and girly men. They go there to drink some more and of course to search for “real women” (I’ll talk about these some other time), that grind. Now in case you don’t know what grinding is, you’re not a real anything, stop reading my blog, you’ll make me look bad in front of my ever-so-important online friends.
“Real men” train. They lift big weights and drink big protein shakes. No, they don’t have diets, diets are for women. They just lift and “take protein”. Now you are definitely never going to see a “real man” in a yoga or pilates class. Real men don’t need THAT kind of crap, it’s too easy. Sure, there “cores” are pretty much non-existent and never trained and they have the posture of a terrified cornered cat, but that’s ok because real men need to get back aches every now and then so it keeps them toughened up.
Yeah, I could go on for hours and hours, but let’s cut the crap. “Real men” as our society likes to call them, are male-like creatures with suppressed emotions, no respect for others (especially no respect for women), no real friends, no true direction in life, no ability to appreciate the world or themselves and as far as I care filled with fear and unhappiness, with no future and no power. You will always find them in packs, they don’t survive by themselves. They shadow and plague the image of masculinity, of real “real men”.
Real real men are nothing you would expect them to be. They can externalize emotion and they do. They allow feelings to fill their hearts, because they are not afraid to deal with that overwhelming sensation. They respect women because they understand the ways in which they are different and they don’t fear the power that women have, because they know that they have their own (and they are equal). They love arts, they’re not afraid to listen to music that is not angry, to watch a drama or to read a love story. They’ll even read poetry and some will maybe write it.
Real real men do what they want to do, not what others pressure them into doing because they have the courage to be different and the strength to suffer the consequences of being different. They take care of themselves and their loved ones. They’re loyal and they care.
Real real men talk about their problems and ask for help when they need it. And they have close loving people in their lives to give them that help. Real real men can be happy and they usually are.
Unfortunately, I sometimes fear that real real men are a dying breed and I’m afraid we don’t yet fully understand how much we actually need these men and what a disaster it is that we are seeing fewer of them everyday. By the time we’ll figure out something went wrong, it might be too late to make it right again. But don’t worry, real men will help us out… as long as we have beer to give of course.


