I dropped ten pounds in two days. That can't be healthy. That might explain why I feel like crap right now. Or it could be the chest cold I've been fighting. Or perhaps a hangover from hashing yesterday.

Who knows? It's a mystery.

Tags: culture of fitness, hashing, navel-gazing, navy

Isn't it interesting that now that I have been relying solely on the command to make me exercise, I actually failed the weigh-in? I think so, yes.

We use the BMI chart for judging whether a sailor is overweight or not. The thing is, and it seems even the Navy knows this, the Body-Mass Index is bullshit. The medical establishment admits it, though grudgingly and quietly. It makes lots of assumptions about you in order to neatly peg you as obese, overweight, normal or underweight. Of course, the Navy is flexible; if you are over the limit for BMI, they'll tape you - which allows even more error depending on where and how tight they put the tape. If you scrunch your neck down and suck in your gut, you pass. So naturally, yesterday, the Chief doing the taping had the tape snug around my neck and wasn't even touching my waist with the tape.

I know I'm carrying a bit of extra weight at 190 and 5'8" (up from 183 last deployment), but it's not as though I don't have any physical ability or endurance. In fact, the thing that has been most detrimental to my physical fitness over the last couple of weeks has been mandatory command PT. Everybody get together and do lame calisthentics, 100 jumping jacks, 100 pushups, etc. The pushups are really killing me with the tendonitis. The running in formation has given me a muscle strain in my knee and hastened the return of my shin splints.

The thing that pisses me off the most is that I was doing just fine before all this garbage started and now I'm concerned that if I do manage to pass the weigh-in by Friday, I may fail the physical test because I'm hurting so damn bad.

To dull the pain, I've been popping 800mg tablets of Motrin a couple of times a day, a couple Excedrin once in a while, a multivitamin and ginseng. I've also been taking fiber tablets to help with the poundage. Now, with two days to go, I've added a run at lunch every day this week and Hydroxycut. Good grief, I hope it works, because I feel like crap. Vision... blurring...

The good news is that the Physical Readiness Test is next week. Assuming I make weight Friday, it'll all be over by Tuesday.

This sucks. I like to run and lift wieghts and listen to my MP3 player. I enjoy a good workout - I always feel terrific afterward. In fact, I'm going hashing today.

If I'm borderline obese, as the BMI says, then I have serious doubts about claims that obesity is of epidemc proportions in America, especially given how we measure it.

Tags: backsliding, culture of fitness, navy, rant, think for yourself

Happy D-Day.

Tags: backsliding, navy

Good grief, it turns out I was a terrorist target:

Six foreign-born Muslims were arrested and accused Tuesday of plotting to attack the Army's Fort Dix and massacre scores of U.S. soldiers — a plot investigators say was foiled when the men took a video of themselves firing assault weapons to a store to have the footage put onto a DVD.

...
They also allegedly spoke of attacking a Navy installation in Philadelphia during the annual Army-Navy football game, when the place would be full of sailors, and conducted surveillance at other military installations in the region.

The guy giving the press conference just said they missed a golden opportunity during the Army-Navy game and that they were surveilling the ships inport. One of those was my ship. I hope it was our menacing force protection posture that discouraged them from thinking we were a soft target.

Tags: navy, terrorism

OK, this is way over the top.

Matt Boyd, writer for the completed web comic MacHall, and now Three Panel Soul, was recently fired from his job where he was working under a government contract. He was overheard by a fearful coworker while discussing the purchase of a rifle for paper target practice, around the same time as the VT shootings. The coworker reported this and he was promptly fired, without even the opportunity to clean out his desk.

Three Panel Soul began a short series of comics about the events here.

Some of his former coworkers saw these comics and called them in as a threat, and later Matt was visited by four police detectives at his home. The coworkers also claimed the woman pictured in comic #21 resembled one of them, apparently unaware that Matt does not create the art for the strip. The comics were called a borderline terroristic threat.

I'm sorry Matt worked with hypersensitive whiners, it's a shame about his job. Is this the sort of work environment people with real jobs deal with every day? I'm glad I'm allowed to play with multi-million-dollar weapon systems for a living.

Tags: political correctness, zero tolerance

I can't help myself, honestly. There's only three new episodes of Heroes this season and I've started getting enthralled with all the Heroes 360 Experience content.

I think it's fantastic what many TV shows do these days with extra content for fans to discover by paying attention. I don't watch much on TV, but what few shows I do watch, I really like. Shows like Lost and Heroes have all kinds of cool interrelated websites and easter eggs which supplement the plot and depth of plot. I should start including easter eggs on PCIF.
What kind of an easter egg, I have no idea.
If you've never seen an episode of Heroes, NBC has them all online. If you've ever enjoyed any sort of episodic storytelling, I highly recommend you join me in my drooling fandom.
For more content, the graphic novels are terrific.
Besides, any show that has Malcolm McDowell pulling off a grandfatherly archvillan has got to be considered amazing by anyones standards. (Archvillain, of course. Grandfatherly? Wow!)

Could I write about current events that are irking me? Sure... as soon as I'm done obsessing.

Tags: easter eggs, geekgasm, heroes, intarwebs, lost
Current Location: The Intar-webs
Current Mood: geeky

Whew, the sure-fire way for me to beat a geekgasm is to venture into fanfic/'shipper's territory. I like to geek out on sci fi, but I've always stopped at that line. When I do creative writing, I invent my own characters and plot. Fanfic just ain't my thing... and 'shipping is kind of creepy. (Take Harry Potter 'shippers, for example.)
Anyway, I was reading the Intar-webs a few days ago, as I am wont to do from time to time, and I found this article at Michelle Malkin describing the Army's self-destructive policy toward blogging.

The original Wired article states:

The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops' online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.

Well, heck. I understand the need for OPSEC, honestly, but milbloggers are the best public affairs resource the military has. However, even the most innocuous information can useful to an adversary. I don't post future destinations or details about ongoing operations, but I write about day to day life here on the ship and it's available to anyone and there's just no telling what information could be of use to someone looking to harm U.S. servicemen or high-value targets. Somebody on my ship and another ship have already gotten into trouble for posting details about my current visit to Mayport and ships' schedules.

Everything I write here and elsewhere becomes open source, available to anybody at all that wants to look. Just in the last 100 hits on PCIF, I've got one from Malaysia, Argentina, India and all over the U.S. (including the Pentagon); I've also had hits from plenty of middle eastern and from China and South Korea. (All South Korean military officers are spies. No kidding.) Anything I write will be unclassified and if I am informed that my posts may be harmful to ongoing operations, I'll take them down. I post on a variety of topics, some of which are military-related and some that are tangetial to operations my ship participates in.

I don't think that silencing milbloggers is good, but we all need to realize the potential harm it could do. I think training and spotchecking will help, but milbloggers need to take personal responsibility for the information they put out there. It turns out that the Army actually is not restricting milblogs any more than they already do, but it's good for us to be reminded that the Internet is not a private medium and that it never forgets.

That's what I get for taking three days to post about breaking news.

I personally enjoy how my old friend Josh handles this. He's currently a reservist called to active duty in Iraq and his Iceblog is pretty entertaining. Wish him luck.

Also:
OPFOR - Aw Hell.
Coconut Commando - No More Blogging For The Commando?
Mary Katharine Ham - How to Lose the Information War for Good: The Death of Combat Blogging

Tags: 'shippers, deployment, fanfic, opsec, personal responsibility
Current Location: Standing duty
Current Mood: vexed