Behind the Scenes at Cranky Fitness

Since we had Leah kindly supplying actual Health-Related Content today, Crabby is free to bring you a few updates from the always busy and bustling Product Development Laboratories at Cranky Fitness!

And boy are they busy back there. Completely imaginary Dedicated workers, thousands of them, are toiling away night and day to update this site and bring you the easiest to find without even Googling latest, most important updates in health and fitness news! And it's not just up-to-the minute content, either. Cranky Fitness plans to keep Screwing around with the Sidebar Optimizing its' User Interface continuously in order to try to make a few bucks someday enhance your browsing experience!

Can you tell Crabby recently discovered how to do Strike-Through Type? She promises to cut it out. Soon. Probably. Eventually. Her recent infatuation has probably officially killed it. All the hip bloggers will move on to something new tomorrow. Check back here in about three years to find out what it is and Crabby will kill it again.

Anyway. So, changes. Innovations.

You may have noticed there are new ads again! Hopefully these will acquire some variety over time. Or maybe you will always be taunted by Snack Chips. Crabby herself found herself craving crunchy snack-foods last time she was at the store, and wonders if all the Blogher bloggers are throwing all kinds of crackers and chips and pretzels and other tempting carbs in their carts all of a sudden without even knowing why.

But the Blogher people somehow seem Way more likable as ad partners than the Google Alternative. So Crabby will just eat her snack chips and shut up about it until they get a few more sponsors going. And a cool thing about the Blogher ad process: they highlight posts from other member blogs. Perhaps you have seen these.

The downside: more clutter on the sidebar. The upside: some days, Cranky Fitness gets to clutter up the sidebars of other blogs! Crabby hopes new people will come and subliminally confuse Cranky Fitness with Snack Chips and think the blog is Tasty and Healthy and Addictive and Convenient and Brightly Packaged!

In other blog news, Cranky Fitness made A European List of the top English Language Health Blogs. How did Cranky Fitness manage to make the list at all, despite being too new for a google page rank, not very big, and weird? Well, partly it was because the blog gets so many comments! So thank you, Commenters! We came in at #79, beating out, for example, a blog called UroStream.

(Crabby didn't check to see whether UroStream was about, well, exactly what it sounds like. Who knows? Maybe it's another way of spelling Euro-Stream and its mission is highlight the important health benefits of European-style rowing. Perhaps they're immensely popular and they've got tasty photos spreads of buffed Continental crew teams with tousled hair and glistening bodies. Crabby prefers to think this, actually.)

Cranky Fitness is also now a Blogburst contributor! Blogburst is a syndicator that actual News Outlets sometimes use. So far, they haven't found anything normal enough here to pick up and distribute to the masses, but it has only been a few days. Crabby may experiment every now and then with trying to sound more like a regular health blog in hopes of getting Noticed. So if sudden Normalcy should attack the blog, do not be alarmed! It will be sporadic and temporary.

***Important Update! Cranky Fitness has now moved up to #17 on the European Guy's Top Health Blog List! Why? Who the hell knows, and it's probably a mistake, but Crabby's pleased! Also, she checked out UroStream and it's actually really cute. It's a blog written by a urologist with a sense of humor, though unfortunately it features no photo-spreads of muscular rowers.

So that's all for now, but stay tuned! Crabby is working hard to realize her dreams of making Cranky Fitness one of the very best, most informative silliest but nonetheless weirdly popular health blogs on the Net!

Friday!

Afraid there's not much Health Research Reporting this Friday, because Scientists Were on Strike All Over the World Crabby was lazy, but let's run through a couple of studies just so we can pretend this is an Educational Health Blog. (Don't worry, the charade won't last for long).

So a Brown University study discovered "a solid association" between depression and living in a damp, moldy home. One interesting note: the researchers were completely surprised, as they had actually set out to show the opposite. They were trying to debunk previous studies that showed a link, figuring that there were other associated factors such as employment status and crowding that hadn't been taken into account before. But nope, turns out it actually was the mold!

Can menopause make you fat? Though this study involved rats, the surgical simulation of post-menopausal conditions, and estrogen supplementation, researchers felt it suggested a link between estrogen levels and the regulation of obesity. (Millions of middle-aged women throughout the world were shortly thereafter heard to shout, in unison, "See, I f**cking told you so!")

And for our last bit of research: Summer babies are more likely to end up wearing Coke-bottle glasses. According to this study, babies born in born in June and July had a 24% greater chance of becoming severely myopic (near-sighted) than those born in December and January. “It is probably a long-term effect of early-life exposure to natural light that increases the chances of a child becoming short-sighted,” said the Smart Scientist, Michael Belkin. As an extremely nearsighted Crab (born in June), Crabby found this study intriguing. But she likes Belkin's previous research even better: he found a strong correlation between myopia and intelligence. “It is not a myth at all that people who wear pop-bottle glasses are smarter. They tend to be,” he said.

Okay, done with Research! Here's some other random stuff:

Check out this awesome blog which has a hilarious product review. Female readers, in particular, you really must at least take a look.

And via Elastic Waist, this is a pretty fascinating comparison of pictures of gorgeous actresses both "primped up" and, well, not so carefully put together for the camera. Crabby is generally a fan of the "natural" look, but, wow, this was weirdly surprising and entertaining.

Can't help it: Crabby, having sent you over to Vanilla's blog just last week, feels silly doing it yet again but she can't seem to help herself. This post cracked her up.

Want some fun exercise? Okay, these are not 'real' exercises; they only involve moving your thumb or your wrist, depending on how you like to move your cursor around. But otherwise, these links have nothing to do with health and fitness! You can try the Cute or the Not Quite as Cute version.

And finally, Crabby always finds herself amused by the Helpful Suggestions Google has for products she might enjoy, based on whatever e-mails she's currently reading. This ad came up while she was viewing reader comments on her post about How to Get Up Early.

Enjoy the long weekend, folks! Crabby may return for part of it, or may not. But the only way to find out is to refresh that page continuously! Or hell, go out and have a good time.

Labels that Lie: "Zero" Integrity

Since the Associated Press just reminded us again that you can't trust a food label to be accurate, Crabby thought she'd use their article as an excuse for a little rant. She's tired of swearing at her computer, and now that it's fixed, she thought it might be time to get back to her more usual swearing about Health and Fitness annoyances!

And Crabby doesn't mean those obviously Scammy Miracle Weight Loss Products marketed by skeezy fly-by-night companies you've never heard of. This is mainstream, government sanctioned lying by big Fortune 500 companies. No doubt they all have the usual corporate mission statements about "delighting customers" and "exceeding expectations" and offering "extraordinary quality and value!" They never seem to include "Lying our Pants Off to Make People Think Crap that Will Eventually Kill them is Actually Good for Them" into those mission statements.

Anyway, what the AP article is talking about is labels that say "zero trans fats."

You've seen these. Say you're at the grocery store and you pick up a package of Tempting Junk Food that you know probably isn't good from you. But, at least it has finally switched away from Evil Trans-fats. It's packaging shouts out "Now with Zero Transfats!" Good news!

But then you look further on down at the ingredients, and one of them is "partially hydrogenated something-or-other oil." Hey, what gives? Isn't that a Trans Fat?

Yep, of course it is! Even though the package has quite a few transfats in it, they've declared an arbitrary, teeny tiny portion is "a serving." And because our always-helpful government agencies allow them to declare that .5 grams of something is really "zero"--all the trans-fats in the package simply disappear!

Why is it a hardship to put the actual amount of transfats on the label? Crabby speculates that the extra ink it takes to print .5 instead of 0 must be really expensive. Or something.

This doesn't mean there's necessarily a lot of transfats in the product. There may not be. But half a gram is not zero! It's a lie! And you can't even figure out for yourself how much is in the whole package, because apparently they don't have to tell you.

This drives Crabby crazy. Because unlike you Smart Readers, average consumers don't necessarily know about the cheaty rounding rules, or to look for partially hydrogenated oils on the label. They think if it there's a big banner saying there's Zero Transfats in a product, that means there aren't actually any transfats, no matter how much you eat. Which is wrong, but actually quite logical.

It's not just transfats either. Splenda is very low-cal, but it doesn't actually have "zero" calories in it. And have you ever bought a can of Pam "Fat Free" Olive Oil and wondered what the hell is supposed to be in there if there's no fat? How can there be no fat or calories in a can full of Oil? (Crabby doesn't buy it anymore anyway, since it smells more like paint thinner than olive oil, and she's no longer afraid of Good Fats). But still. They use a microsecond spray as a serving until they find one less than .5, then round down. And again, by magic, all the fat and calories in a can of Olive Oil simply cease to exist.

There are only about 37 million more examples of deceptive advertising like this (and don't let Crabby Go Off on "Now Made With Whole Wheat" yet again) but she thought she'd share another new twist she discovered.

Crabby herself is now Virtually Fat Free!

At least that must be the explanation. Because here's what happened:

Crabby hates to shop for clothes and has not done much of it in the past few years. But she went off to Macy's over the weekend and braved a One Day Sale. She actually bought things! Including shorts.

And Crabby is pleased to announce she has dropped two sizes! All her hard work has paid off. She now wears a size that is so small it barely exists. It might as well be a Zero! (Which is now, apparently, an actual size). Crabby had to keep going back for more clothes because she couldn't quite believe how much she had accomplished over these last years.

The interesting thing is that it was so easy! She's just doing the same cardio, the same weights, eating the same mostly healthy but sometimes Abominable diet, yet the labels prove she is so much thinner than she used to be.

The strange thing, though, is that all her old clothes with the much bigger number on the label still fit her just fine. They should be hanging off her! Obviously, the dryer must have shrunk them. Also, her bathroom scale must be out of order because it still has the same old range of numbers it always did.

Because to arbitrarily declare that a pair of shorts that has not changed dimensions is nonetheless now a "smaller" size? That would be dishonest and misleading, wouldn't it?

Crabby is so very, very proud of herself!

Adsense, Amazon, and Monetizing Your Blog

If you are not a regular reader of Cranky Fitness, but have arrived here instead on a google search hoping to learn how to earn some money:

Ha ha ha ha ha! Tee hee hee. That's a good one.

Sorry, that wasn't very nice. Crabby lured you here on False Pretenses. She has no idea in hell how people make money doing this. But if you skip down to the bottom of this post, someone who claims to know has written a book giving away all the secrets to blog monetization!

Quick, hurry, before all the copies are gone!

(Thundering sounds of footsteps. Fading now... All quiet.)

Whew, are the Googlers gone? Is it just us again? Excellent.

So now Crabby will try to explain (1) Why there are suddenly Amazon Ads all over the place instead of Adsense Ads; and (2) What each of them do. Originally she also planned to explain (3) Why she's willing to be such a shameless Product Whore in the first place. But she couldn't think of a good reason, other than that she's greedy and delusional, so she decided to drop part (3) of the post.

Anyway, as regulars may have noticed, all the weird Adsense ads are gone. ("Milkatraz?" WTF was that about?) Crabby knew they wouldn't make much money. She's still just a tiny blog, after all. But she had no idea they'd be so stupid and repetitive and unappealing! And gosh darn it, her readers may be Cranky but they're not all Old.

Perhaps if she hosted a better, hotter, more exciting blog, Adsense would have sent her better, hotter and more exciting ads. But Cranky Fitness is just Cranky Fitness, and the ads sucked, so they're gone now.

So now the Crab House is plastered with Amazon ads instead. They probably won't earn Crabby any money either--people actually have to order stuff off of them, not just click on the ads, and realistically, how often is that going to happen? But a Crab can dream.

The Amazon Ads, while likely off-target much of the time, do seem to offer greater variety and flexibility than Adsense. Crabby fantasizes that one day, a Needful Reader might actually encounter a Helpful Product, fall in love, and generate a "win-win" situation for everyone!

(Crabby blames her Most Significant Other, a successful businessperson, for making terms like "monetize" and "win-win" sound like actual English to Crabby's ears).

So here's what Amazonian fun we've got going so far. But of course Crabby is still messing around with all this, so it could be completely different tomorrow.

First off, there's a big "Omakase" ad on the sidebar. (Omakase means something in Japanese but Crabby can't remember what. "Easy Code for Lazy Bloggers," she thinks is how it translates). This ad is supposed to magically factor in both the contents of the blog as well as the preferences of readers who already have accounts with Amazon.

Does it? Crabby doesn't know what wild-ass junk you folks might see. For her, Amazon is pretty much ignoring the contents of blog. Health and Fitness? Hello Kitty? Lithuanian Folk Dances? We could be talking about anything here. The sidebar just announces: "Crabby, here's what you searched for last time on our site. Why the hell didn't you buy it? Do it now, damnit, or we'll just keep displaying the same crap until you give in."

Okay. Annoying, sure, but it least it has nothing to do with Wheelchair Exercise Equipment and is thus an improvement over adsense. She's very curious as to what you all are seeing though.

The link at the very very bottom of the page, below all the posts, is an Amazon-generated list of Health & Self Improvement books. Some of them actually look appealing sometimes; others look downright Icky. Crabby trusts her readers to know the difference.

There's also a search box in case you remember, in the middle of a post about Acupuncture, that you need to buy your Aunt Thelma a Needlepoint book for her birthday.

And then there's silly stuff like the ad Crabby put at the bottom of this post. She's mostly just joking about that one. She stuck one at the bottom of the archived IGallop post too, just in case future IGallop Googlers are actually looking to buy the thing and happen to land at Cranky Fitness. But she won't be doing this on current posts unless she's really so excited about something that she just Has to Share.

What would be cool, as long as Crabby is doing the Amazon thing, is to sometimes feature products that you, loyal readers, recommend. Do any of you know of a great health related book or product that might interest other readers? Please suggest it to Crabby and if it's offered on Amazon, she might put it on the sidebar. (This means actual regular readers, though, not Drop In Spammers). She thinks there might be some way to make it rotate, too, to offer a smorgasbord of Reader Recommendations.

Crabby knows that many of you who have blogs do not take advertising or pimp for affiliates, and Crabby applauds you. She hopes she's not driving you readers totally crazy. But if she's going to keep blogging for the long haul, as she'd really like to, she'd like to fantasize that she could earn a few pennies one day. Her plans for an eventually profitable Crabby McSlacker Health and Fitness World Empire keep her safely and happily off the streets. She thus humbly asks forgiveness of all of you.

After skipping over the Silly and Gratuitous Blog Monetization ad, please let Crabby hear your thoughts about ads on blogs. Hate them? Don't notice they're there? Have an idea for a good one you'd like to see on Cranky Fitness? Or Really Really Really Detest them? Or... any other thoughts? Tell Crabby how your weekend's going. Whatever!


(Is this book any good? Crabby has no idea. How's that for marketing!)