Stoic
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Down, Not Out
“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”
– Thomas Edison
I Was Told There Would Be Pie
This past weekend, Jess and I walked down to the 79th St farmer’s market, to stock up on summer fruits and vegetables. Apparently, strawberry season is upon us, as there were tables and tables of strawberries of all sizes. And, at one stand, there were some truly gigantic rhubarb stalks. So, I bought a bunch of strawberries, and a couple rhubarbs, with the intention of making a strawberry rhubarb pie.
Previously, I’d never made a strawberry rhubarb pie. Or, so far as I can recall, any kind of pie at all. (Except for chicken pot pie, which I don’t think quite counts.) A bit of Googling yielded this recipe for “Grandma’s strawberry rhubarb pie,” which had a slew of positive reviews. So I stocked up on the few ingredients not in my kitchen already, and went to work.
While I love to cook, I’ve never been a fan of baking, the precise measuring and hands-off watching through the oven door far less suited to my personality than savory cooking’s improvisations and fixes on the fly.
Still, you can’t argue the results:
The pie was delicious. Look out Martha Stewart, as I’ll definitely be trying my hand at pie-making again soon.
Manly Stanley
Coming down the home stretch of hockey season, I just wanted to pause to respect the underlying level of athleticism that hockey elites display. Sure, they make look like a bunch of toothless mooks when interviewed post-game. But they’re in amazingly, terrifyingly good shape.
In most sports, there’s a single athletic test that correlates to high-level performance. If you excel at that underlying skill, you likely excel at the sport overall. In the case of basketball, for example, it’s vertical jump. In the case of football (at least for several key positions), it’s time on the 40-yard dash.
In the case of hockey, however, the single best correlate is actually body fat percentage, above a BMI threshold. Great hockey players require a large amount of fat free mass (i.e., muscle), alongside very low levels of fat. In other words, they need to be totally jacked, more so than similarly ranked players in almost any other sport.
Watch the Stanley Cup, and show those players some respect. If not for their crazy levels of fitness, then at least for the fact that they’re literally willing to beat each other bloody for our entertainment. Now that’s commitment.
[And speaking of both violence and fitness, it’s also worth noting that the only other fitness-marker-to-sports-performance correlate I know of is between wrestling success and anaerobic power output. Which also probably explains why wrestlers have had such a great run in the CrossFit world. Kind of a consolation prize for the years we spent wearing spandex body-suits in front of high school peers.]
Right Here
“Make yourself the master of every situation and wherever you stand is the true place.”
– Rinzai
Word Wise
Over the last few months, I’ve heard a slew of smart, literate people use ‘nonplussed’ to mean ‘unfazed’ or ‘unimpressed’.
Unfortunately, that’s not what the word means.
Instead, ‘nonplussed’ means ‘bewildered’ or ‘confused’.
I’m totally nonplussed as to why nobody can use that shit correctly.
[Bonus fact: similarly, ‘ambivalent’ doesn’t mean ‘I don’t care’. Instead, it means pretty much the exact opposite: ‘I’m torn between strong opposing feelings about this.’ Get that one right, too.]
Immune to Poison
While it’s more overtly driven by money than film or television, advertisement can be a great storytelling medium nonetheless. I love this spot each time it comes on, as it captures something essential about being a dude:
Definitely Clio-worty.
Mac Tools: Trip Mode
Like many people, I do a lot of my computing in coffee shops (and restaurants and bars), where wifi coverage is slow and spotty at best. As a result, I frequently tether my iPhone for use as a mobile hotspot.
The problem: I pay for bandwidth on the phone by gigabyte, and I have a slew of cloud services constantly sending and receiving files (say, backing up photos and videos) in the background, which drives up my usage.
Enter the simple app TripMode, which notes when you’re using your phone (or any other similarly designated slow / pay-per-byte / whatever networks) for access, and allows you to allow and disallow access individually, app by app.
TripMode runs $7.99 (or $6.99 while on pre-launch sale) and, if you’re like me, will very quickly pay for itself.