Gandolfini Was Not "OK" Before Heart Attack

When I heard that Gandolfini had died I was not surprised. I know that sounds morbid but it's true. When I heard the rumor it was a heart attack I was not surprised either.

at 51, his death was at a relatively young age. When you're that age and you don't die of an accident, there is usually an underlying medical condition. Gandolfini's condition was not unknown to anyone who saw him for it literally right in front of him.

The news commentators were trying to be kind, but I knew that the gut that Gandolfini was carrying was the most likely "cause" of his death. Many men are carrying a lot of weight around their waists. It is known that for men, having such a large omentum is a sure sign of impending heart disease and diabetes.

We men need to take this issue seriously. That "big teddy bear" look may have some cultural cache in many communities but it is not healthy at all. Gandolfini wasn't always that big. He grew. I see this a lot among men and women. I see their high school photos and a vast majority of them, while not slim by any means were not as large as they let themselves get. And let me be clear, most of them let themselves get to whatever size they got to. They ate whenever and whatever they wanted. They avoided exercise. They made excuses and rationalizations for their increasing size. They did not take it seriously when they could not climb stairs without gasping for air.

These people are currently having their lives and health risked by so called "fat acceptance" movements by people who actually could not give a fuck about their physical health. Many have bought into the binary that says that either your huge or your anorexic. Few of them look at those pictures I mentioned earlier and see that there is a wide middle ground that they should be in.

Gandolfini did not have to die just now and if you are carrying a large gut you don't have to die prematurely because of it either.

Has Technology Killed Cursive Handwriting?

From Mashable

But in recent years, the nation's Common Core State Standards — which at least 45 states and the District of Columbia, have voluntarily adopted — took out the requirement for cursive instruction in K through 12 schools...Putting pen to paper stimulates the brain like nothing else, even in this age of e-mails, texts and tweets. In fact, learning to write in cursive is shown to improve brain development in the areas of thinking, language and working memory. Cursive handwriting stimulates brain synapses and synchronicity between the left and right hemispheres, something absent from printing and typing.

Agreed.

I never had good handwriting and I was alarmed one day when I realized I had forgotten certain cursive letters. Now I take time out daily to write the alphabet in cursive both as individual letter forms as well as a continuous string. I also pick a paragraph or two off of a website, usually a news site and rewrite it in cursive.

I definitely notice the difference. While I'm no expert on brain development I can certainly say that my fine motor skills in my fingers has improved.

Rent A Tire?

Are these people fucking nuts?

When the tires on their Dodge Caravan had worn so thin that the steel belts were showing through, Don and Florence Cherry couldn't afford to buy a new set...

The Rich Square, N.C., couple last September agreed to pay Rent-N-Roll $54.60 a month for 18 months in exchange for four basic Hankook tires. Over the life of the deal, that works out to $982, almost triple what the radials would have cost at Wal-Mart.

Just how stupid do you have to be to do some dumb shit like this?

Look, if you can't afford new tires then you buy second hand tires from a tire shop. They won't last anywhere near as long as new tires, but you aint' payin' 1k for tires that cost $300.

Secondly, if you cannot afford to purchase at least second hand tires, then you cannot afford a car. LA Times

The 92%

From A Voice For Men:

Luca Steffenoni, expert of crime, computed in a book that accusations are used in 86% of the divorces. A research by Prof. Camerini et al. showed that in Italy 80% of persons accused of child abuse are fathers, and they turn out to be innocent in 92.4% of the cases.

Remember. Women never lie about abuse. Never. If she makes a claim, you must believe it because she would never lie.

Disruptions: Even the Tech Elites Leave Gadgets Behind

Some couples who work in tech seem to be trying to step back the most. “At least once a month my wife and I jump in our car and drive until cell service drops off (yes, this is possible) and spend the weekend engaged with all things analog,” Evan Sharp, a founder of Pinterest, said — on e-mail. “We read, we walk all over the California hills, we cook, we meet people who don’t work in technology.”

Other couples have told me of a “no gadgets in the bedroom” rule. (Kindles are sometimes an exception.) Some say they leave their phones at home when they go for Sunday brunch. Rather than take a picture of their bacon and eggs to post to Instagram, they can now enjoy each other’s company, and do that strange thing called talking.<

Yes please. I certainly am one who thinks folks spend far too much time in their phones and completely ignore the rest of the world. Particularly annoying when you're on a "date". At first I thought it was simply that I was uninteresting, but I think we have a growing set of people who cannot devote the attention necessary to maintain a conversation.

More Gender Bullshit From The Verge

I'm not sure what kind of editorial overview goes on over at the Verge, but whatever it is, they apparently have no straight males who are still have their testicles attached and backs that contain anything resembling bones. Most recently they posted a report about alleged gender bias in the NY Times. Apparently an "assistant professor" at  UNC Chapel Hill ran a script  "Jailbreak the Patriarchy" to determine is a patriarchal cesspool.

You'd think a "professor" of any type would automatically be skeptical of a tool who's very purpose is biased to analyze data. That's why we have SPSS, SAS and other actually neutral statistical tools to do such work. But when you put a biased professor up with a biased tools you can expect biased  bullshit to be the result.

Instead of working from scratch, he relied on a well-known browser extension called Jailbreak the Patriarchy, which swaps gendered words on a web page ("he" becomes "she," "wife" becomes "husband," and so forth.) From there, he pulled a full week of New York Times articles from late February and early March 2013 — a total of around 1,400 pieces, excluding corrections and paid obituaries. Using his scripts, Caren picked out both some general metrics and specifics about the kinds of words that were used.

Yeah...instead of  you know..doing his own research he uses a fucking browser extension. Where the hell do they award these degrees? Lets look at his results:

After determining the thousand most common words used in these sentences, he subtracted things like proper nouns, weighted the numbers to compensate for the larger number of male sentences, and found the 50 that were most disproportionately associated with a gender. For men, that included largely sports or political words: "male" sentences got 61 mentions of "governor," for example, compared to 2 mentions for "female" ones. "Baseball," "teammates," "bank," "economy," and "political" also skewed heavily male.

Hmmm....I see.

Well how many male governors are there in the US? Well actually it's easier to find the number of female governors  ever in the US: 36. There are 50 states. The number of female governors ever is 36. But this idiot thinks that the fact that 61 mentions of governor as "male" is a sign of bias?

Lets take the rest of the list. Basball weighs heavily male? Why How could that be explained without "Patriarchy"? Oh right  MLB is a male only dominion. Which means if you mention baseball in any national capacity you will mention males.  Don't think that's fair? Fine? When the women can out hit the men (distance and speed). Out pitch the men (speed) Outrun the men (speed), then they can go try out for the Mets and Yankees. Then watch the female references rise. Until then it's not bias.

Same thing with "teammates" again, most National level sports are male only (WNBA a notable exception). Therefore is you mention the word teammates it is most likely in reference to those sports that have all male teams. You don't go reporting on male teams and switch the gender of the persons you report on just for kicks.

Similar reasons exist for "bank", "economy" and "political" as, as is mentioned all the time by feminists, these are areas that are heavily populated by males.

Lets look at his other findings:

On the female side, words tended to relate to fashion, entertainment, or women's reproductive capabilities. "Memoir," "novel," "fashion," and "singing" were all female-skewed words, as were "gender," "kids," and "abortion." The words "victim," "cancer," and "violence" were also female words

Well nothing surprising there either. The vast majority of straight men do not as a rule obsess over "fashion".  Women have "abortions", men do not so no surprise there. Since feminism has a cottage industry in creating victims (Adria Richards anyone?) we should find it unsurprising that women are correlated with victimhood. You get what you create. Similarly since breast cancer is discussed ad-neauseum by the media, even though men are diagnosed and die of all non-gender specific cancers at higher rates than women , it should come as no surprise that cancer is "feminized". And make no mistake this is not "patriarchy's" doing. It is feminists who argued that women's health has and is ignored by male dominated medical industries. So please stop with the patriarchy arguing on that one.

"To be honest, I was a little shocked at how stereotypical the words used in the women subject sentences were," Caren writes.

Shocked? I'm not an "assistant professor" anywhere and I'm not "shocked" by any of it.

HTC One Forward Facing Speaker.....

This would be the N800 circa 2006

HTC One 2013

All kinds of progress.