Dar Kush

The glimpses I've seen of J.J. Abrams' new STAR TREK movie look terrific. FINALLY someone has the nerve to re-imagine the original material. One complaint I had about the movies: where are the creatures? I mean, monsters, you know? Big, meat-eating animal thingies. Even on the television series they occassionally had monsters. The movies all seemed like they were consciously trying to limit themselves to television-scale imagery, and as a result, the films all felt...small.

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Great meditation this morning. Clear and strong. Should be a good work day.

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Strange, strange thing. Watched QUANTUM OF SOLACE on DVD yesterday...and liked it quite a bit. I'm wondering about my original reaction. For one thing, the action scenes were far clearer on my 42 inch screen than they were in the original theatrical presentation. The direction was still a little sketchy--there were a couple of times when I just couldn't figure out exactly where everyone was. But the acting was terrific, the writing was better than I remembered it, and...well, it just looked and felt a lot better. A fight scene in an elevator was still absurdly choppy, but another fight scene was among the best in the entire series, and I was dumbfounded that Eon productions would let their director frame and shoot his movie so it would look better on the small screen than it did on the big one. Of course, maybe if you have to choose one or the other, it would make sense to choose the medium that will last decades, not weeks. But clarity is important in 007 action scenes.

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Really, in a number of ways it didn't feel like a "Bond" movie at all...except that it did, in the re-invention sense. I'm more excited about the next movie now.

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"Let The Right One In" is possibly the best vampire movie I've ever seen. This Swedish film about the friendship between two young children in a town where people are being mysteriously slaughtered...well, you don't want to know more than that. Extremely artful and almost dream-like, "Let the Right One In" is genuinely disturbing, and actually engenders the off-kilter emotional responses to vampirism that so many films strive for, and so few achieve. I don' t want to say more about it. See it!

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Adam Crafter quantified the difference between diet, exercise, and diet/exercise quite nicely:

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"I have different set points at different action vs. eating combos:

If I'm lazing about, and not IFing I can get near 260lbs. (historically)
Just hard exercise, normal diet: 230ish.
Just IF, no exercise 225.
IF, some exercise 210
IF, hard exercise 190 and possibly below."

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This is so clear: If you want to lose weight, control both input and output. Anything else is playing a game.

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It is heartbreaking that so many people don't want to hear it. Almost every week, I hear something new about the negative health effects of overweight. And the way society reacts? Frankly, society reacts to overweight the way it reacts to sickness--avoidance, a bit of disgust, a lack of attraction. And we can regret the way we treat the unwell, perhaps, but this is the situation as I see it: there ARE a raft of real-world, non-subjective negative effects, we know it even if some are in denial, and the social reaction is based on this reality. I suspect that we react as if the "disease" is communicable (which it is: habit patterns definitely spread from one friend or member of the family to another). And a relatively small percentage of the American population has a specific attraction to the well-padded, even if we accept it in the people we love. I think fighting against this isn't going to be very productive. If there wasn't a giant amount of research linking obesity to a wide range of life-shortening issues, that might be different.

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Assuming there are no major fear or power issues, the biology/physics of weight loss are simple (if sometimes grueling). And what bothers me is all of the otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people who continue to obscure the realities. Inevitably, people talk about either exercising OR "dieting." Never both at the same time, because once you walk down that road, you meet the truth, and that's something that we, as humans seem to be willing to go to any lengths to avoid.

ﾠDiet (lifestyle change)+Exercise+Weight loss

Or turbo-charge that:

I.F.+ Interval training+Fear Removal exercise=REALLY efficient weight loss.

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So far, 90% of the mornings when I do yoga with Jason, his school behavior is perfect. More than if we're just hanging out, and MUCH more than if I am preoccupied in the morning. If the yoga has something to do with it, it might be just teaching him to breathe properly under stress. Or center himself. Or take his bountiful energy and put it into something relatively quiet (I use both ordinary yoga, the Tibetans, and Scott Sonnon's Prasara flows). Or maybe it is just the power of Daddy Time.