I prefer unhealthy sugary ice tea like Lipton, Brisk, etc.

*ban1.0
Brisk Man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0fDc_emk6E

*related= https://videosift.com/video/Top-5-Life-Hacks-for-Vaseline-YOU-SHOULD-KNOW
* ban2.0
Brisk Man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOtyWea1mYY

*ban2.0
Brisk Man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOtyWea1mYY

*related= https://videosift.com/video/TOP-10-AWESOME-LIFE-HACKS-DIY-EVERY-HUMAN-SHOULD-WATCH-AND-T
*ban1.0
Brisk Man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0fDc_emk6E

@anniya, is this your video and account on YouTube?

Brisk Man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0fDc_emk6E

@anniya, is this your video and account on YouTube?

Brisk Man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0fDc_emk6E

A tad brisk out there

WHY IS THIS SONG SO CATCHY?

1. Brisk tempo
2. Simple singable melody
3. Repetition, repetition, repetition

Definitely an earworm.

And why was it a military base? Because all those "founding fathers" who poured a butt load of money into PT were in danger of losing it all when Seattle got port status instead of us. Those "founding fathers" still had lots of pull in Washington DC, so they got the Fort put here to prop up the local economy. And now it is a State Park -- one of the few that actually doesn't need any tax funds to stay open -- it actually makes a profit.

Plus there are wonderful bunkers to play in. And walks to take through the woods.

Have you ever seen An Officer and a Gentleman, with Richard Gere and Debra Winger? That was filmed here. All the base scenes were filmed at Fort Worden. A couple of years before I got here. You could tell which buildings were used in scenes -- or rather, which SIDES of buildings were used in scenes. They repainted the buildings a pristine white -- if they were in camera view. So the backsides were all peeling and nasty.

That was before the Fort started making money, of course. All the sides of the buildings look nice now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1Ehz_cAMGc

You can see the Fort at :57, 1:05,1:52 and the iconic 2:06. All a brisk 15 minute walk from my house. Look out my kitchen window, and you can see the tree covered hill that is the Fort. (The jogging scene at :38 is on the other side of the hill - sheer bluffs to the water.)

It is indeed a very neat place. You watch that movie, come over here, and I'll give you a tour, okay?

If anyone wants to read more about Stephen and LGBTQIA youth, here is the NYT article.

The New York Time's

Generation LGBTQIA

By MICHAEL SCHULMAN

Published: January 10, 2013

STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares "positive perspectives" on being transgender.

In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue - hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room - Stephen exuberantly declared himself "a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut," and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and "any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters") to his toy zebra.

Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.

Armed with the millennial generation's defining traits - Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off - Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.

If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn't whom they love, but who they are - that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.

But what to call this movement? Whereas "gay and lesbian" was once used to lump together various sexual minorities - and more recently "L.G.B.T." to include bisexual and transgender - the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. "Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.," said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.

Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is "L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.

"Q" can mean "questioning" or "queer," an umbrella term itself, formerly derogatory before it was appropriated by gay activists in the 1990s. "I" is for "intersex," someone whose anatomy is not exclusively male or female. And "A" stands for "ally" (a friend of the cause) or "asexual," characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.

It may be a mouthful, but it's catching on, especially on liberal-arts campuses.

The University of Missouri, Kansas City, for example, has an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Resource Center that, among other things, helps student locate "gender-neutral" restrooms on campus. Vassar College offers an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Discussion Group on Thursday afternoons. Lehigh University will be hosting its second annual L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Intercollegiate Conference next month, followed by a Queer Prom. Amherst College even has an L.G.B.T.Q.Q.I.A.A. center, where every group gets its own letter.

The term is also gaining traction on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where posts tagged with "lgbtqia" suggest a younger, more progressive outlook than posts that are merely labeled "lgbt."

"There's a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality," said Jack Halberstam (formerly Judith), a transgender professor at the University of Southern California and the author, most recently, of "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal."

"When you see terms like L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," Professor Halberstam added, "it's because people are seeing all the things that fall out of the binary, and demanding that a name come into being."

And with a plethora of ever-expanding categories like "genderqueer" and "androgyne" to choose from, each with an online subculture, piecing together a gender identity can be as D.I.Y. as making a Pinterest board.

BUT sometimes L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. is not enough. At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, eight freshmen united in the frustration that no campus group represented them.

Sure, Penn already had some two dozen gay student groups, including Queer People of Color, Lambda Alliance and J-Bagel, which bills itself as the university's "Jewish L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Community." But none focused on gender identity (the closest, Trans Penn, mostly catered to faculty members and graduate students).

Richard Parsons, an 18-year-old transgender male, discovered that when he attended a student mixer called the Gay Affair, sponsored by Penn's L.G.B.T. Center. "I left thoroughly disappointed," said Richard, a garrulous freshman with close-cropped hair, wire-framed glasses and preppy clothes, who added, "This is the L.G.B.T. Center, and it's all gay guys."

Through Facebook, Richard and others started a group called Penn Non-Cis, which is short for "non-cisgender." For those not fluent in gender-studies speak, "cis" means "on the same side as" and "cisgender" denotes someone whose gender identity matches his or her biology, which describes most of the student body. The group seeks to represent everyone else. "This is a freshman uprising," Richard said.

On a brisk Tuesday night in November, about 40 students crowded into the L.G.B.T. Center, a converted 19th-century carriage house, for the group's inaugural open mike. The organizers had lured students by handing out fliers on campus while barking: "Free condoms! Free ChapStick!"

"There's a really vibrant L.G.B.T. scene," Kate Campbell, one of the M.C.'s, began. "However, that mostly encompasses the L.G.B. and not too much of the T. So we're aiming to change that."

Students read poems and diary entries, and sang guitar ballads. Then Britt Gilbert - a punky-looking freshman with a blond bob, chunky glasses and a rock band T-shirt - took the stage. She wanted to talk about the concept of "bi-gender."

"Does anyone want to share what they think it is?"

Silence.

She explained that being bi-gender is like manifesting both masculine and feminine personas, almost as if one had a "detachable penis." "Some days I wake up and think, 'Why am I in this body?' " she said. "Most days I wake up and think, 'What was I thinking yesterday?' 

"Britt's grunginess belies a warm matter-of-factness, at least when describing her journey. As she elaborated afterward, she first heard the term "bi-gender" from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as "agender" and used the singular pronoun "they"; she now sees her gender as an "amorphous blob."

By contrast, Britt's evolution was more linear. She grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and never took to gender norms. As a child, she worshiped Cher and thought boy bands were icky. Playing video games, she dreaded having to choose male or female avatars.

In middle school, she started calling herself bisexual and dated boys. By 10th grade, she had come out as a lesbian. Her parents thought it was a phase - until she brought home a girlfriend, Ash. But she still wasn't settled.

"While I definitely knew that I liked girls, I didn't know that I was one," Britt said. Sometimes she would leave the house in a dress and feel uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. Other days, she felt fine. She wasn't "trapped in the wrong body," as the cliché has it - she just didn't know which body she wanted.

When Kate told her about the term "bi-gender," it clicked instantly. "I knew what it was, before I knew what it was," Britt said, adding that it is more fluid than "transgender" but less vague than "genderqueer" - a catchall term for nontraditional gender identities.

At first, the only person she told was Ash, who responded, "It took you this long to figure it out?" For others, the concept was not so easy to grasp. Coming out as a lesbian had been relatively simple, Britt said, "since people know what that is." But when she got to Penn, she was relieved to find a small community of freshmen who had gone through similar awakenings.

Among them was Richard Parsons, the group's most politically lucid member. Raised female, Richard grew up in Orlando, Fla., and realized he was transgender in high school. One summer, he wanted to room with a transgender friend at camp, but his mother objected. "She's like, 'Well, if you say that he's a guy, then I don't want you rooming with a guy,' " he recalled. "We were in a car and I basically blurted out, 'I think I might be a guy, too!' "

After much door-slamming and tears, Richard and his mother reconciled. But when she asked what to call him, he had no idea. He chose "Richard" on a whim, and later added a middle name, Matthew, because it means "gift of God."

By the time he got to Penn, he had been binding his breasts for more than two years and had developed back pain. At the open mike, he told a harrowing story about visiting the university health center for numbness and having a panic attack when he was escorted into a women's changing room.

Nevertheless, he praised the university for offering gender-neutral housing. The college's medical program also covers sexual reassignment surgery, which, he added, "has heavily influenced my decision to probably go under the Penn insurance plan next year."

PENN has not always been so forward-thinking; a decade ago, the L.G.B.T. Center (nestled amid fraternity houses) was barely used. But in 2010, the university began reaching out to applicants whose essays raised gay themes. Last year, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate ranked Penn among the top 10 trans-friendly universities, alongside liberal standbys like New York University.

More and more colleges, mostly in the Northeast, are catering to gender-nonconforming students. According to a survey by Campus Pride, at least 203 campuses now allow transgender students to room with their preferred gender; 49 have a process to change one's name and gender in university records; and 57 cover hormone therapy. In December, the University of Iowa became the first to add a "transgender" checkbox to its college application.

"I wrote about an experience I had with a drag queen as my application essay for all the Ivy Leagues I applied to," said Santiago Cortes, one of the Penn students. "And I got into a few of the Ivy Leagues - Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. Strangely not Brown.

"But even these measures cannot keep pace with the demands of incoming students, who are challenging the curriculum much as gay activists did in the '80s and '90s. Rather than protest the lack of gay studies classes, they are critiquing existing ones for being too narrow.

Several members of Penn Non-Cis had been complaining among themselves about a writing seminar they were taking called "Beyond 'Will & Grace,' " which examined gay characters on shows like "Ellen," "Glee" and "Modern Family." The professor, Gail Shister, who is a lesbian, had criticized several students for using "L.G.B.T.Q." in their essays, saying it was clunky, and proposed using "queer" instead. Some students found the suggestion offensive, including Britt Gilbert, who described Ms. Shister as "unaccepting of things that she doesn't understand."

Ms. Shister, reached by phone, said the criticism was strictly grammatical. "I am all about economy of expression," she said. "L.G.B.T.Q. doesn't exactly flow off the tongue. So I tell the students, 'Don't put in an acronym with five or six letters.' "

One thing is clear. Ms. Shister, who is 60 and in 1979 became The Philadelphia Inquirer's first female sportswriter, is of a different generation, a fact she acknowledges freely, even gratefully. "Frankly, I'm both proud and envious that these young people are growing up in an age where they're free to love who they want," she said.

If history is any guide, the age gap won't be so easy to overcome. As liberated gay men in the 1970s once baffled their pre-Stonewall forebears, the new gender outlaws, to borrow a phrase from the transgender writer Kate Bornstein, may soon be running ideological circles around their elders.

Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. "In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian," Professor Halberstam said.

Even at the open mike, as students picked at potato chips and pineapple slices, the bounds of identity politics were spilling over and becoming blurry.

At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before the crowd. He and a friend had been pondering the limits of what he calls "L.G.B.T.Q. plus."

"Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?" he asked.

Then he rattled off a list of gender identities, many culled from Wikipedia. "We have our lesbians, our gays," he said, before adding, "bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual." He took a breath and continued. "Pansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous."

By now, the list had turned into free verse. He ended: "Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human."

The room burst into applause.

Correction: January 10, 2013, Thursday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article and a picture caption referred incorrectly to a Sarah Lawrence College student who uploaded a video online about being transgender. He says he is Stephen Ira, not Stephen Ira Beatty.

Source NYT

Fair Use

...or dont be a pussy, buy a conventional longboard and just push it with those leg things attached to your waist. or just walk like spoco suggests. 1 mile is like a 20 min brisk walk and its good cardio. It looks like a cool toy, but I'm not buying this "future of personal transportation" bs, especially since their market basically seems to be people who will already have a longboard/skateboard and might just prefer the exercise.

I'm on a weight-loss journey at the moment - here's my take...

I'm following in the footsteps of my sister who's super slim now and very healthy. She's virtually a vegetarian and regularly sees a nutritionist and gets her blood tested (due to a medical problem she's hopefully overcoming).

She eats every three hours and is militant about avoiding sugar. It's the big problem in most people's diets. The mileage from exercise seems to vary for many but she takes regular brisk walks whenever she can and is also now biking.

She gives me good tips all the time, like avoiding the low-fat options. Those will almost always contain a bunch of unhealthy additives and you're better off with the full-fat version.

Finally my standing desk bits just arrived from IKEA. Not looking forward to putting it together...

http://howto.videosift.com/talk/Standing-desks-may-improving-your-Sifting-and-your-health

*fixed>> ^eric3579:

dead

Tolkiens pacing was terrible

I'll dispute that. Story pacing is highly dependant on the reader's level of immersion, and Tolkien was attempting a deeply immersive story where the 'pacing' was largely irrelevant. Many people are quite jaded in this regard, and if the plot isn't moving along at a brisk pace they lose interest. That isn't necessarily the fault of the author, but a matter of a lack of tolerance/patience on the reader. No work of literature can satisfy every reader in that regard - so the end result of whether a book is properly paced is highly individualistic. You have writers on both extremes. Some move so fast that the reader feels like the story is choppy and shallow. Then you have guys like Jordan who spend so much time on so much background that the plot is almost utterly lost. I think Tolkien strikes a masterful middle-ground where he provides depth of background and detail, while not having so much that the average reader feels the plot is moving too slowly. Again, that isn't universal because everyone is different - but the fact that LOTR has endured the test of time and remained a classic proves that it is an assessment that applies to 'most' people.

and some of the characters (looking at you, Tom Bombadil) add nothing to the story.

Depends on what you mean by nothing. The Old Forest, Bombadil, and the Barrow Downs are chapters that some people don't get. If the hobbits had just gone straight to Bree then a lot of people would be happier. It can be argued, but Bombadil gives some background to Middle Earth that Tolkien felt was important. For him (JRR) the work was a literary exercise in establishing what he felt were 'lost' Anglo-Saxon mythology. Iarwin Ben-Adar was part of that world for him, and a part that he felt mattered. He is referenced in the Council of Elrond, and here and there in other parts of LOTR. He may fill no vital plot function, but he certainly adds to the story (not to mention background on the Northern Kingdom, and the Westernesse blades).

The first half of book 6 is essentially "Sam and Frodo keep walking to mount doom", but it really drags.

I felt quite the opposite. I thought that the chapters of Sam & Frodo walking to Mt. Doom were rather a breakneck pace compared to what was happening. But at that point JRR is breaking down both Frodo and Sam physically and spiritually, so it can't just be a rapid "Poof! We're at Mt Doom now!" thing. It had to be a hot, blistering, difficult slog. For it to only be 2 chapters was actually pretty breif I thought. Escaping Cirith Ungol took a chapter - then two chapters were them walking and Mt. Doom itself. All in all I thought it went pretty fast.

It all depends on what folks like, really. Some people can't stand it when Tolkien takes 2 pages here and there to describe the landscape of the Woody End, or a couple pages there to talk about some bit of Rohan's history, or whatever. Some people love it. I personally felt that JK Rowling's pacing blew chunks because she spent tons of time focusing on bullcrap character junk (mostly Harry whining). But some readers just eat that stuff up, so I have to allow that my personal tastes cloud my judgement on Rowling's pacing. It's a matter of taste. What seems irrelevant to you may be pure gold to someone else.

Jackson and Walsh's story is better structured

Don't get me started on Jackson & Walsh. I liked the LOTR movies generally, but these two ham-hands did some pretty awful writing considering the pure perfection of the source material. One example: Aragorn's perfect speech, "We shall make such a chase as will be accounted a marvel among the three kindreds - elves, dwarves, and men. Forth, the Three Hunters!" was changed to the god-awful, "Let's hunt some orc!" I could literally go on for hours listing scripting crime after crime. Jackson/Walsh were NOT either masterful writers, or pacers. When they stuck to the story and didn't jam thier fumble-witted fingers into the pie it was great. The more they took "creative license", the worse it got.

So, my unexpected result this year.
I've been trying to lose weight for 15 years. 5'8" 205 lbs. I've tried dieting and always struggled, like most people, with that feeling of starvation and all the temptation that makes you fail.

In March I started walking at lunch 5 days a week and cut my calories down to about 1100 per day. At first I had no workout gear and after a mile and a quarter walk I was winded and sweating. Kept on going with the brisk walking and pushing myself harder and further. After a month and a half walking wasn't enough to wind me so I started alternating some jogging. Bought walking shoes and shorts/shirts to work out in. I kept pushing myself and counting my nutrition using a smart phone app so I wouldn't be deprived of vitamins and stuff on the lower calorie diet.

Surprisingly, no hunger. I started to find it hard to over eat because I wasn't hungry. I fealt nasty when I ate high calorie food. The app helped me make smart decisions when it mattered.
Over time I had to jog more and walk less to get a workout. After 4 months I was varying my workouts daily but averaging 4 miles per day during my lunch break. After 3 months I'd reached my goal of getting under 190. After 6 months I'd lost more than 30 pounds.

I have more stamina, look good, feel awesome and grew a beard for winter. ;-) Just had a physical and my cholesterol and blood pressure are perfect for the first time in 10 years. Every result on my physical was perfectly in range.

The only thing I did different from all my other attempts in 15 years was walk.

If you try to imagine walking/jogging 45-60 minutes a day, 5 days a week...you will fail before you start. Just go the first day and walk fast for as long as you can. Then make the decision to go the next day and push yourself again. Every day, decide to do it. Before you know it you'll be doing distances and times you never imagined and digging in the back of your closet for old clothes that fit.

Walking works.

I simply can't see this video as evidence of the U.S. becoming a police state. There are literally cameras everywhere filming what is happening and no one is arresting the cameramen/women. The officer making the arrest lets the press get incredibly close and he is amazingly calm despite the people all shouting at him and getting in his face. He doesn't yell at the reporter who gets on the elevator with him, he just tells her to get out twice (in a calm but commanding manner) and tries to push her out firmly, but not violently.

All hell breaks loose at 1:42 because the reporter who wrote the post I linked to above grabs a camera away from the assistant who is being arrested and tries to walk away. The cop tries to stop the reporter, but doesn't want to let go of the assistant either, causing the assistant to fall down (looks like an accident to me).

It seems to me it was stupid of the reporter to try to take the camera from the assistant. If I were a cop making an arrest I would probably have the same reaction: I'd be concerned that the suspect just passed off something illegal (possibly drugs or a weapon) to a friend before I'd had a chance to do a proper search. The reporter walked briskly away after getting the camera too, and wouldn't give it back when the cop demanded it, making her behavior seem even more suspicious.

How was the cop supposed to know it was a camera that got passed off? He was busy trying to get the other woman out of the elevator when the hand-off got made and probably didn't even see what was passed. And then the reporter resisted handing over the camera, which is essentially the same as interfering with the arrest since that camera is potentially evidence (until the cop examines it, he doesn't know if it's a real camera or is stuffed with drugs).

So what can we conclude form all this? Mistakes were made all around. Not having credentials on you and visible would be the first mistake made. Not sure what the initial arrest was for, but it seems like that was probably a mistake too. Taking the camera and then trying to leave the scene? Yeah, that was a big mistake. All the reporters getting in the cops face about the arrest was a mistake too--you're there to report the news, not make it. This isn't Syria; these reporters are not going to be tortured for months and "disappeared" afterward. Lots of mistakes here, but I see very little evidence in this video of police overstepping their authority.