Fun in the Sun?

[By Crabby]

I hate sunscreen. Anyone else?

I hate the sticky ickyness of it. I hate when it runs in my eyes. I always get too much of it on my clothes, and not enough of it on my skin. I hate having to put it on for a morning run, then, after showering, having to put it on all over again.

Of course there's been some research about the anti-cancer properties of Vitamin D, and some folks are recommending a little bit of sun exposure without sunscreen. But no one seems to be saying this is license to skip the sunscreen entirely.

Nope, Not A Smart Move
(Photo credit: genosfear)

Does anyone else old enough to remember "tanning," as an intentional activity, guilt free? It made going to the beach and taking a nap feel like an accomplishment! You got "credit" for flopping down on a towel in the sand and absorbing rays, because you were improving your appearance which would make you more popular. How cool was that?

Sigh.

Then we found out we weren't supposed to tan on purpose.

I know some people still do. If you are one of those people who goes without sunscreen or burns your skin on purpose, can I pass on a message from a good friend of mine who did that too when she was younger? She has melanoma now. She says: "Don't."

Off course we keep hearing that theoretically there is a pill on the way, but I've been hearing this for ages now. Could we hurry up with the sunscreen pills, please scientists? That and the jet-packs we were all supposed to be flying around in by now?

Like many people, I make myself wear the sunscreen even though I hate it. The brand I use is supposed to quite effective. I use a spray version for my legs 'cause I'm lazy, and a lotion for the rest of me that tries to be somewhat less oily and gooky. At least it calls itself "dry touch." Still feels slimy to me, but somewhat less so than the others.



This is a popular and well-reviewed sunscreen. I won't chase down all the links, but part of the reason I've come to use it is that health magazines and dermatologists seem to recommend it pretty often. For example, in this compilation of product review sources, my brand comes in at #1.

But according to the Environmental Working Group, which has put together a database of cosmetic ingredients and their safety, I might as well be smearing rat poison all over me instead.

They say my sunscreen is NOT recommended because it contains ingredients linked to:

• Cancer
• Developmental/reproductive toxicity
• Allergies/immunotoxicity
• Neurotoxicity
• Endocrine disruption
• Persistence and bioaccumulation
• Organ system toxicity
• A few minor things like skin irritation, and
  
• Biochemical or cellular level changes.

That is a scary list.

How seriously should I take this, does anyone know? Is the Environmental Working Group mainly an advocacy group, or is it a bunch of serious, well-respected scientists that we should be paying way more attention to?

Because, damn, it they're right, I should probably switch from my easily available, everybody-recommends-it brand of sunscreen to one of the obscure brands that makes their "safe and effective" list. Even though my local drugstores don't stock them and they're probably slimy.

Here's where my distrust of advocacy groups and "stuff you read on the internet" collides with a similar distrust of our governmental regulatory process. The quaint notion I used to have that "if something were really dangerous they wouldn't let companies just sell it in the stores" has, alas, been tested too often. Now I believe: hell yeah, they will, if it's good for business.

So throw in some anxiety, wishful thinking, laziness, and frustration, and you end up with me not knowing What The Hell to Think.

If anyone has any thoughts or info on this, please help!

They Say Its Your Birthday

[By Crabby]

This is not a real post--as you can see, it's being posted on a Sunday, when no one is around to read it.

Whose birthday is it today? Well, mine. But June 8th is also the birthday of a few other folks. Those of us who aren't dead yet will attempt to celebrate/bemoan our advancing years in whatever way works best. So enjoy, Kayne West, Joan Rivers, Jerry Stiller, Robert Preston, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Boz Scaggs, Barbara Bush, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Nancy Sinatra. Oh and best wishes also to the retired Belgian tennis player and some guy who apparently invented the World Wide Web.

The fact that no one is reading this is no problem, because I am probably not actually on Some Guy's World Wide Web anyway. Instead, I am off enjoying a Perfect Birthday Celebration. What happens on a perfect birthday? Well, everyone has their own ideas but here is mine:

• A little bit of exercise, but only the fun kind like the rock walk.
• A massage.
• A couple of things to unwrap.
• Dinner out with loved ones at a favorite restaurant that has excellent food but is Not Too Fancy.
• Perhaps a gratuitous dessert containing chocolate.

Ahhhh.... I guess another year ain't so bad.

Does anyone else have favorite Birthday treats?

Take Me To The Closet, Bub

If you listen to music while you run (or any other time, but let's pretend this is a fitness post) you have probably encountered this phenomenon:

The song lyrics are difficult to hear, and sometimes the words you "hear" in fact sound quite silly. But you rack your brain for alternatives and it still really sounds like those are the actual words! Later you discover what the real lyrics are, and of course your goofy version was totally wrong.

Cranky Fitness does not pretend to be the first to discover the humor in "mondegreens," or misheard song lyrics. Google the phrase and you will find bazillions of hilarious examples.

However, does anyone else find it irritating that most of these collections are based on the premise that the listener actually thought the silly lyrics were the real ones?

Isn't it funny enough that the Creedence Clearwater lyrics "There's a Bad Moon on the Rise" sound so much like "There's a Bathroom on the Right" that you could almost swear that's what they were singing? Do sensible adults really have to pretend that they believed a song that hit Number 2 on the Billboard charts was written about the location of a restroom facility?

Or that Jimmy Hendrix was asking his listeners, back in 1966, to "Excuse me while I kiss this guy?"

Seems more likely that people heard funny words and thought: "Doesn't it almost kinda sound like they're saying ______? Wouldn't it be funny if those were the actual lyrics?" Yet it remains a tradition that we act as though we once were certain the goofy lyrics were authentic.

(So I'll concede the "when I was seven years old I thought..." sort of stories are a lot more credible. I thought lots of silly things myself when I was a kid. But even some of these sound a little fake sometimes).

But let's put aside the question of whether these mishearings are truly misunderstandings. Some of the collections you come across from various sources (like here or here) really are quite amusing.

For example, do you remember any of these classic lyrics?

Madonna's: "Like a virgin, touched for the thirty-first time."
(very first time);

Eurythmics: "It’s all right, babies come in bags"
(Baby's comin' back);

Robert Palmer's: "Might as well face it you're a dick with a glove"
(addicted to love);

Cher's: "Gypsies, Chimpanzees"
(Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves);

Maria Muldaur's: "Midnight after you're wasted"
(Midnight At the Oasis);

Joni Mitchell's : "A gay pair of guys put up a parking lot"
(They paved paradise and put up a parking lot);

Or the Eagle's : "I'm looking for a lover who won't blow my brother, she's so hard to find."
(my cover, not brother)

(Note: the "corrected" lyrics in parentheses may not be entirely right either, as I didn't bother to look 'em all up).

Alas, an effort to turn this into a more intellectual scholarly discussion of misheard song lyrics turned up nothing the least bit researchy. Well, except this totally incomprehensible study. (Seriously, I have no idea what the hell that was supposed to be about).

So what are some of my mishearings? Unfortunately, most of mine aren't that funny, or else they are entirely too common. For example, the Bee-Gees song "Bald-headed woman" came on at the gym the other day, but tons of us hear it that way, not as "More than a woman." Likewise, I'm not the only one who hears the Savage Garden tune "I Want You" as referencing a poultry-flavored soft drink, Chicken-Cherry Cola. I couldn't even figure out what the heck the real lyrics were.

I do have a tune on my iPod in which a woman enthusiastically implores her man to "Take Me To The Closet, Bub." However, she doesn't sound nearly sultry enough to be suggesting a furtive sexual encounter surrounded by coats and umbrellas, so I suspected those weren't the real lyrics. Yet even trying really hard to make sense of the words, it took weeks to finally hear them as "Take Me to The Clouds Above."

And there's a line in a song called "Poison" in which the singer is talking about how tempting having sex with her lover is:

"Your mouth, so hot; your ware, uncut;
"Your skin, so wet; black lace, on sweat"

I guessed I was probably hearing that wrong--would she really comment on the fact that her boyfriend had an uncircumcised penis? And would she use the rather old-fashioned sounding "ware" as a euphemism? But it kept sounding like that's exactly what she was saying. I finally had to look it up online to find out that "your ware, uncut," was actually "your web, I'm caught."

Dang, I shouldn't have looked. I liked the uncircumcised version better.

So obviously I'm not very good at funny mishearings--I'm hoping you all can do much better--either ones you misheard yourselves, or other funny ones you've come across.

In the meantime, here's an amusing video, and you don't even have to like Pearl Jam to enjoy it.

Neanderthal fitness

"Anybody wanna wrestle?"

I don't know if I'm turning into a luddite or suffering from The Call of the Wild.

I expended roughly 200 calories the other day because I mowed the lawn with a push reel mower. (No, not the old ones from 30 years ago that were heavy as a tank -- those really were the epitome of Cranky Fitness. The new ones are so light even I can push one around.) Using a push reel mower instead of a gas-powered one made me feel good, almost as good as I feel when I bicycle to work instead of driving the gas guzzler.

It's surprising how virtuous it feels to be unplugged. Why is that? Am I hankering back to the Olde Days when everyone had to do everything by hand? I can almost hear the ghost of my grandmother telling me I'm crazy. (When my grandmother was young, they traveled in horse-drawn buggies. "Oh," I said, "that must have been fun." She shook her head. "Very bumpy.")

I appreciate the technological stuff like smoothly paved roads and the ability to buy food I can't grow in this climate, and yes, especially the fact that I can communicate electronically with friends I've never met and who live on the other side of the world. I get all that. It's cool.

So why does it feel so good to not use technology? Barbecues might not be very healthy, but food cooked over an open fire smells better and tastes than the microwaved version. We've evolved technologically, but emotionally we're not that far removed from the stone-knives-and-bearskins crowd.

"To better leverage our products, we need to kick mastodon ass ..."

The 'Caveman diet' is popular right now. I'm not passing judgment on this diet yea or nay, but I think one reason it is popular is that people have an urge to get 'back to basics.' Can the urge to exercise unplugged can be traced back to a yearning for an equivalent exercise program?

There really isn't an appealing equivalent for Neanderthal fitness -- at least, not one that fits in with the demands of modern life. I tried to picture merging the Stone Age with the Information Age, and all I could think of was:

0800: Crawl out of cave, discover how to make fire, brew coffee
0900: Work with Ugh on synergistic leveraging strategies
1200: Check out blogs
0100: Try to look busy and productive
0500: Chase mastodon, bring home for Mrs. N to roast

No, that doesn't sound like much fun.

But it's summer! The outdoors is calling!

Great outdoors, on line 1...

Maybe what I'm suffering from is spring fever. Dr. J. wrote a post about the need to experience nature. He quotes E.O. Wilson, an American biologist, researcher, and naturalist postulated, among many environmentalist views, as saying that “humans have an innate, biologically determined need for nature.” By combining exercise with being outdoors, I fulfill a couple of basic needs.

Do you prefer exercising outdoors if you have the chance? Or do the comforts of technology, cable TV and an iPod win out over mosquitoes, sunburn, and fresh air?

“To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of year, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.” - Rachel Carson

Sneaky Tip for Strength Training

So our fit friend Jen got me reading the magazine Experience Life, and they had an interesting strength training tip that I thought I'd steal. It's called "Pausing for Power."

(Hey, it's Recipe Day, so I figured I could get away with something short and of special interest. Those of you who do not Strength Train can go make pasta!)

Anyway, when you are doing a set of yucky strength training exercises, you know how at the end you just physically can not do one more repetition? You tell your muscles "please, just one more!" and your muscles say "ha, ha, ha, sorry, no f*cking way?" This is generally how you know you've finished the set.

At this point, traditionally, you do one of two things. The first option: wait for your muscles to recover enough to do another set. (This can be a boring awkward waste of time unless you're good at multitasking). The second option, if you are lazy like me, is to say "that's over, thank God!" and move onto the next exercise.

Well, it turns out there's a sneaky Third Option:

You just pause and rest at the end of the set for few more seconds (5-10, usually, but up to 30 if necessary) until you can crank out just one more repetition. Then wait a few more seconds, and repeat again-- until you really can't do anymore.

This trick will allow you to either squeeze out more repetitions or use higher weights, and is apparently a good way to increase power and break through plateaus.

(There is supposedly some science behind this, but the source is a guy with a self-published book. He's probably very smart and all, but let's just say it's a "tip," not an authoritative study. The only way to know if it's any good is to see if it works for you.)

The technique works better for certain exercises than for others, and there are some general hints you'll want to find out about. So if you do want to try it, check out the article first.

Here's what I liked about this tip:

It's perfect for slackers like me who generally do only one set but occasionally feel the odd urge for a little bit of extra progress. This way, you're sort of skipping right to the "hard" repetitions at the end of another set, without having to do the whole other set.

It's a little early to tell if it's working for me--I think it is. And it does take a bit of experimentation to figure out how long to wait and which exercises you want to use it for. (Probably not best to use it all the time). But I'm having fun messing around with it. And at the very least, it's a good way to mix things up a bit.

So do any of you read stuff on blogs or in magazines and run out and try them? Any other good tips for strength training you've discovered that either make it more efficient or less loathsome?