Still No Crab in Sight

Crabby is taking yet another day off, but will be back tomorrow in some form or another, perhaps with an actual post about health and fitness!

She hopes many of you are not reading this at all, because you're off on a Road Trips or you're hiking or playing tennis or spending a day at the beach (please say hello to any Crabs you see there) and not stuck back at work. If you don't have a long holiday (or any holiday at all) then Crabby hopes that you are at least having a nice day.

For those of you with mixed feelings about the whole Fourth of July Long Weekend Celebration, Crabby would like to refer you to this column by Jon Carroll at the SF Chronicle. Crabby is a longtime admirer of Jon Carroll.

Crabby has seen your comments coming in and she is eager to get back and chat with everyone. She is thinking of you all even as she makes herself go outside and do other things.


See you all soon!

UPDATE:
So Crabby did finally figure out how to disable comments for this post--she thought it might help her stay away for the day if no one could leave any tempting comments for her to respond to.

But she finds she hates it! It seems so unwelcoming. So even though most of you have already come and gone, she's going to turn comments back on again.

Happy Independence Day!

Since Crabby has been yammering on and on lately about Priorities and Balance and such, she is hereby declaring her Independence from Cranky Fitness for the day. And possibly the 'Morrow as well. You never know. Actually, something will probably be here, but it may not be a "real" post.

Crabby is going to disable Comments for this post. But if you have anything you want to let her know about just put it in another post and Crabby will find it when she gets back to responding to comments.

And until she returns, visit some other great blogs! Here are some fine friends of Cranky Fitness, both recent and not-so-recent acquaintances:

The Goat's Lunch Pail

The Cricket Chronicles

Remaindered Random Musings

Beauty for Ashes

Sylvia's Journal


And y'all have a great holiday (if this is one for you)!

UPDATE:
Well, I can't seem to disable comments on one post without doing it on them all. So I'll open this up again, and will still enjoy reading people's thoughts. But I probably won't respond except in a general way in this post.

And to those of you with feed readers, I hope publishing this post three times in a row isn't messing you up!

Crap. Make that four times. I forgot to switch it back on.

Housekeeping

This is the sort of post Crabby would normally save for a weekend, because other than one sad little research citation, the whole thing is about blog "housekeeping," not health. But she wants to catch all her Beloved Readers before they scurry off to enjoy the long holiday weekend, leaving Crabby alone by herself in her Crab House, pretending she doesn't notice it needs dusting and vacuuming.

Anyway.

Crabby had planned to be discreet and low-key about the Recent Changes at Cranky Fitness around commenting. She did not want to get anyone who may still be lurking out there too riled up. But then she decided what the hell. Readers knew something was up.

So Crabby has decided to stop being all mysterious about it. It may in fact be a good time to set forth a few Blog Commenting Policies, just to prevent any future misunderstandings.

As Alert Readers may have noticed, the Comments, formerly unrestricted, are now being "moderated." Moderation just means that Crabby gets your Comments in her email and has to approve them before they are released for public consumption.

Moderation is annoying from both ends, but probably worse for Readers. Crabby at least gets to see her words in print as soon as she hits Publish, while you all have to wait and come back later.

And then what happens when you come back? Maybe Crabby is still off doing Crabbish things so you have to return yet again. (Or worse, you might decide Crabby's blog is just not worth the effort!) And then when you do return you find Crabby has released a whole bunch of comments at the same time, many of which appear before yours does. And maybe some of those comments say the exact same thing you did! But no one knows you thought of it first! Or whatever--you may not be nearly as neurotic as Crabby. But in any event, it's a pain.

We'll dump Moderation soon, but if necessary, it may return.

Basically, what happened was that a new visitor did not believe it was fair of Crabby to delete his comments, and so he vowed he would outlast her and keep putting them up over and over again until she relented and let him air his thoughts.

But Crabby didn't like his thoughts much, nor the way he expressed them. And Crabby was too lazy to keep deleting the same comments over and over, so instead she enabled moderation.

Crabby wants to be the first to point out that she was indeed being arbitrary and possibly unfair. If hers were the only blog in the world, it would be inexcusable for her to say "some people may speak and others may not."

But since there are something like 75 million blogs out there, Crabby isn't too worried about this sort of unfairness. Those who find Cranky Fitness an unfriendly forum can find plenty of other places to make their points. There is no First Amendment Right to air your thoughts on someone else's "publication," whether that publication be a small blog or Fox News or the front page of the New York Times.

That said, Crabby really does want to keep an open mind about allowing a variety of different points of view. She lets stuff slide in the Comments section sometimes that others might delete as offensive. But then every now and then a comment seems to "cross a line" and she deletes it. It is her blog and therefore her line. (And these sorts of comments have never been from regular visitors; only first timers with no previous connection to the blog).

So for clarification, Crabby reserves the right to be completely arbitrary about deleting comments. But as examples, here are some things she might delete:

1. Spam. (Which does not mean Reader Recommendations. Crabby loves these! She means things that appear out of nowhere and don't seem to have anything to do with health or fitness). If somehow she messes this up (which she may have actually done once before) and you're a regular reader and she mistakenly deletes you as spam, just come back and make it clear you're really Cranky Fitness fan and are not here trying to sell something.

2. Insults or threats directed at other Commenters or Crabby;

3. Graphic sexual discussions that seem to have little to do with topic at hand; (and sometimes our subjects are quite racy, so context is everything) and

4. General inappropriate weirdness of the sort that suggests that you are (a) mentally unbalanced; (b) intoxicated or (c) at the wrong blog.

(Note: there are some #4 type comments scattered about that Crabby let slide; if you're ever REALLY bored and decide to prowl around the archives some of them are quite amusing).

Does this all make sense?

And now it is time for Crabby to direct you to our Health Research Study for the day, a random and not particularly recent paper chosen only because it involves Housekeeping! Or at least the study of "structured tasks such as cleaning dishes and clothes." This thing is so pompous and pointless, that Crabby can't even bring herself to make fun of it!

It starts off: "As the prevalence of obesity has increased, so has sedentariness..." and doesn't get any better after that. She won't even tell you what it concludes. Crabby's hoping a brave reader or two will take a look here and report back to the class what they think of this ground-breaking research.

So, Crabby hopes you'll all be patient with Moderation just a bit longer until it is gone. We have some posts coming up in the following week that could be considered offensive or controversial, so Crabby may leave it on just a bit longer. Or she may take it off and put it back on again as needed. Either way, she hopes this will not keep you from Commenting on Commenting, or on anything else that occurs to you!

Antioxidant Fruits--It All Gets More Complicated

Like many other health conscious consumers, Crabby tries to pick the healthiest fruits and vegetables she can stand. All things being equal, if she has to eat foods that are not cupcakes or cheeseburgers, Crabby figures she'll go with SuperFoods--those packed with fiber and antioxidants and vitamins and minerals.

Crabby is particularly keen on antioxidants. She is under the impression that if she eats lots and lots of antioxidants, she'll never grow old or infirm and she'll just keep living a happy vigorous life forever! (Please don't break it to her that this is not technically true. She doesn't want to hear it).

Anyway, it seems like every week a new study comes out telling us that we really should be eating a ton of some particular food because it's packed with antioxidants. Like, for example, wild blueberries. Crabby actually reads these studies, and if the food is not vile or obscenely expensive, she dutifully goes out and buys a bunch of it and eats it so that she will never die.

But a new study has just made everything more complicated. Because now scientists are measuring how much of the antioxidants actually end up in your blood plasma, where it can do you some good. And guess what? Some of the most touted, packed-with-antioxidant Superfoods like Wild Blueberries weren't all that awesome at delivering the goods.

Researchers (led by a guy named Ronald Prior, just in case he's Googling himself) investigated how the consumption of different fruits affected plasma antioxidant capacity. Volunteers ate blueberries, cherries, dried plums, dried-plum juice, grapes, kiwis or strawberries. And guess what? The scientists discovered that some antioxidants are easier to absorb and utilize than others.

The chlorogenic acid in plums, for example, did not raise plasma AOC levels in volunteers even though plums have a lot of antioxidants. Likewise wild blueberries helped a little, but they weren't all that great. However, grapes and kiwifruit were awesome!

So what does this mean? Ditch the whole antioxidant quest and go back to cupcakes and cheeseburgers?

Well, no, not so fast. Because even the lame fruits were better than a non-fruit alternative: when volunteers drank a shake made with protein, carbohydrates and fat, their blood antioxidant levels dropped.

So from what Crabby can gather: Keep eating lots of fruits and vegetables. If you're weirdly obsessed by antioxidants and planning to live forever like Crabby is, you may want to keep an eye out for new studies which will come out with a whole different list of Superfoods that actually get more of the good stuff into your body.

Or better yet, let Crabby obsess about it. If the new list includes watermelon and peaches but leaves off broccoli and brussel sprouts, she promises you'll hear about it promptly on Cranky Fitness!

Due to some temporary "technical difficulties" Crabby will be moderating comments for a while. Which means there will be a delay between when you publish your comment and when your comment will actually appear. Don't worry! Your comment will still exist even if you don't see it for a bit. And if you hit the publish button a few times before you realize what's going on, don't worry about that either!

And one more thing--Crabby is still seeking reader suggestions for health related books or products she can put in her "Readers Recommend" Amazon ad. So far, BunnyGirl has supplied a couple of good ones. Anyone else? You can leave your ideas in the comments to this post, or the last one, or any place you want! Crabby will find it.

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!)