I Didn't Work Out With a 300-Pound Medicine Ball Today

I went into the sporting-goods store, went right for the 20-lb medicine ball lying on the floor and lifted it up. The young lady working the cash register asked if I needed any help. I told her the truth: that I had just come in there to do a set with the 20-pounder.

I asked whether she was aware that medicine balls as big as 300 lbs were made and offered to the public. She said no, seemed genuinely surprised and asked what medicine balls so big could possibly be used for.

I told her that I saw two possibilities: 1) Frontin'.

Somebody might buy a 300-lb medicine ball just so they could pay 3 or 4 strong people to carry it into their home, and keep it on their floor and try to convince other people that they actually exercised with it; and 2) I asked if she'd seen those World's Strongest Man contests on TV. She said she had. I pointed out that in those competitions, sometimes kegs and stones and other unwieldy objects were lifted which weighed 300 lbs or more. I asked rhetorically: How would someone train for such a competition, if not with a 300-lb medicine ball?

We chatted a little bit more about medicine balls. Just in case it's not already completely obvious: I'm fascinated by medicine balls these days. I happen to have owned an 8-pounder and a 5-kilogram ball for years. I googled looking for exercises in which I wouldn't actually have to throw the balls. One thing I found is called the Russian Twist.

I am really feelin' the Russian Twist right now, which I've been doing with the 8-pound ball. I'm feeling it in a really good way. I guess, technically, a Russian Twist is not done with a weight, and if you do it with a medicine ball or some other weight in your hands, it's a Weighted Russian Twist.

After my stop at the sporting-goods store, I walked around the strip mall. Literally: I walked all 360 degrees around it. I saw one bird in the trees behind the strip mall; it was flying too fast and close for me to tell what kind of bird it was. I walked for about 40 minutes altogether. Got a little endorphine thing going on right now. Hope I don't feel 300 years old and like all my bones have been crushed when I wake up tomorrow morning. I think I'll be okay. I think I may finally be doing that thing I've been telling myself to do for years and failing to do: starting an exercise routine and building it up gradually, in a sustainable way, without injuring myself. Those 5-mile walks I was doing a couple of months ago, soon after my surgery: that was overdoing it. That was unsustainable. But I should be able eventually to do 5 miles and more at a stretch, by gradually working up to it, and carrying drinking water with me. I don't have to get there today. I don't have to be a beautiful super-athlete today -- and it's a good thing that I don't have to do it today, cause I can't do it today. 40 minutes walking and a little bit of light, careful medicine-ball work was good for today. Plus plenty of stretching.

Did I mention how much I love the medicine balls? I can picture myself carrying a medicine ball on a long walk as if it were a pampered dog. And by the way, I have found a way to throw a medicine ball in my house: I just lie flat on my back and push the ball with both hands straight up, hard as I can. So far, I don't seem to be in danger of putting a hole in the ceiling.

Wish List of New Discoveries of Ancient Texts

There's nothing at all realistic about this post. It's pure wishful thinking.

Trogus was highly regarded as an historian by his Augustan contemporaries, and yet, except for an epitome and a table of contacts, his work has disappeared. Why did the work of an esteemed historian vanish? Some say that's the wrong question, and perhaps they're right. They say the real question is,how did any ancient literature survive at all, all the way down to our own time?

As regular readers of my blog know, and as others can see by clicking here, I wish the missing books of Livy would be discovered. He wrote his history of Rome in 142 books, 35 survive, plus a few additional odds and ends. Livy's reputation as an historian has often risen and sunk. I believe it's risen recently, as some archaeological finds support his versions of various events. But Livy is still avidly read even by those who put no stock in him as an historian, because he's a good writer, who tells stories in a very engaging manner.

Texts by Livy as well as by many other ancient Latin authors disappeared in the late 6th century. It would be great if we found out that some people of that time had hidden collections of ancient Latin, just as, a fewer centuries earlier, some Gnostics and other Christian heretics had hidden their favorites texts, and if we were to stumble across some of those collections of the ancient Latins, as we've recently stumbled across some of those collections of early Christian writings. Other than stumbling across them, how can we find such collections of Latin texts mentioned and quoted until the late sixth century, and then no more? (How long was Petronius' Satyricon, all together?) You might as well ask me how exactly to go into a forest and find a unicorn.

Time has not been kind to ancient Phoenician manuscripts. We possess very little Phoenician literature today. On p 588 of The East Face of Helicon, Martin L. West fantasizes about coming across a corpus of ancient Phoenician the size of the Old Testament. Why stop there? Imagine a mighty chest, longer than a small canoe and fat as a keg, so well-built by the best and proudest of Phoenician Carthage's craftsmen that it preserved almost immaculately the hoard of the choicest Phoenician literature on papyrus and parchment with which it was stuffed to the brim, then to be hidden from the Roman fires, hidden until our own time... I mean, it'd be nice to get the other side of the story of that conflict, wouldn't it? Round things out a bit, it might. Not to mention the many centuries' worth of an entire civilization's poetry, history, science...

I don't wish so intensely for more and more and still more finds of ancient papyri of the Bible and other Early Christian texts, but that's okay, there are many others fervently wishing that in my stead. It would be nice to have the entire collected works of the Classical Greek tragedians, and more than just fragments of the pre-Socratics, and every lecture Aristotle ever delivered.

I don't know enough yet about the Hittites, Babylonians, Assyrians or ancient Persions to even know what more to wish for from them. And as far as the rest of the world, let me put it this way: my first introduction to Lao Tzu and the Tao is about a week old. I'm reeling from that. (In a good way. A very good way.) I'd never, ever before seriously asked myself: can I learn to read Chinese? Anyway, to return to the theme of this post: I don't know enough about any ancient literature other than Latin and Greek to know of any lost writings to specifically long for. The Vedas? I don't know much more than the name. When did the Japanese begin writing? Beats me.

Please feel free to mention your own wishes.

Upcoming Books From Steven Bollinger

First of all, I've got to surf the Jordan B Peterson wave:

I will do this with my book 0 Rules for Life: Welcome to the Existentialist Void, the first honest self-help book. The first one that tells you that all self-help books are crap, and that you've got to figure out some stuff for yourself. It will be an introduction to existentialism (which is also known as common sense), thinly disguised as self-help crap: "The good news is also the bad news: there are no rules for life, except those you make for yourself. You make your own rules whether you want to or not, whether you realize it or not. Embrace the terror and embrace the freedom: they are one and the same." And so on. Motivational crap like that.

In fiction, there's my already long-awaited novel. I've mentioned this one before: Because it's There. It's the story of an unmotivated young man who suddenly, in one instant, is struck by a powerful motivation: to cross the entire world with no vehicles, motorized or non-. This includes no boats, rafts or even life jackets. Yeah, you can bet that the swimming will be the hard part!

And then there will be the dozens if not hundreds of books consisting of essays from this very blog. Did you realize that I've posted on The Wrong Monkey nearly 1700 times? As John Cleese said in that cheese shop which was utterly uncontaminated by chesse: "What a senseless waste of human life!"

All I need is a genius agent or a Kickstarter campaign or generous patrons or something. Anything. As always, all I need is all the help I can get. SPREAD THE HYPE! Spread it thick like decadent jelly. Spread it high, spread it low. Go spread it on the mountain. Go Spread Me. Spread me like the nice monkey I am. Spread me before I spread again!

Almost forgot: there are also the 2 novels I've already finished and nearly forgotten: Salvation, my version of the story of Jesus in which Jesus is an atheist, Jesus and Pilate are good friends, and Christianity spreads as the result of a series of misunderstandings. For example, in my version, Jesus says, DON'T turn the other cheek. If you're not going to fight back, then at least cover up or run away. Misunderstandings like that.

Then there's my second novel, The Independents, which is about 300 or 400 pages long.

Then there are the two novels I've begun on this blog: the one with angels, with no title yet; and Because of Mistakes!, a novel about some people in London in 1900, at least two of whom are autistic. (It's not a mistake to refer to autism in 1900: it's an anachronism of which the author is aware. A piece of poetic license.)

The World's Greatest Bookstore

Is it possible that it would be worth traveling all the way across the world -- even if you don't like traveling -- just to see a bookstore?

Ah, but this is not just any bookstore, my friend. I'm talking about El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Some guys named it "second most beautiful bookshop in the world." Who named it so? Who cares! What is the number one most beautiful bookshop? I don't know! You don't seem to get my point -- this one is in Buenos Aires! Have I ever been in Buenos Aires? Well, to be completely honest -- no! But I was in Bonn once, and a girl I was seeing and I went all dressed up a movie theatre because we mistakenly thought they were going to show Stop Making Sense and clear out some of the seats to make a dance floor, and we thought that, all dressed up, we might look quite nifty among all the punks. (Who knows, maybe the Bonn scene would've been way ahead ahead of us, and we would've been just one among many quite unsurprising couples playing dress-up.) But we were there on the wrong night, and Apartment Zero was playing, set in Buenos Aires, starring Hart Bochner and Colin Firth, dubbed into German.

I loved the movie. She didn't. We didn't have much in common except physical attraction. That was almost 30 years ago, and physical attraction is still extremely important to me, but that might've been the relationship which finally convinced me that physical attraction, all by itself, is not enough to make a relationship rewarding. I'm heterosexual, and God knows she was gorgeous, but I found myself glancing around the theatre as the heavily homoerotic Apartment Zero played, wondering whether I might spot some guy who was bored with his guy with whom I could escape.

As it turned out, I didn't escape from her until a couple of months later.

So no, I've never ever been to Buenos Aires. And no, I don't know if El Ateneo Grand Splendid is really even all that splendid. The potential splendour of bookstores is not even the point. Well then, you demand, what on Earth IS my point? And I stare at you in horror as you ask me that, because I have never stopped trying to make my point. If you were playing footsie with me under the table right now instead of interrogating me about bookstores then we wouldn't even be having this unpleasant little tiff! Go ahead! Run away! You're so gorgeous and so unhappy and it's not my fault at all!

I don't know what she wanted from me. If she had just come right and told me, as specifically as she possibly could, what she really wanted, maybe I could've given it to her just like that, and maybe then she would've stopped being unhappy, just like that, and maybe even today, almost thirty years later, we'd still be married, and we'd have three stunningly gorgeous kids, maybe even an unbelievably beautiful grandchild or two. If she'd just told me what she wanted. Yes, if she'd been completely honest, maybe I would've turned and run in horror and never looked back. Or maybe I would have had exactly no problem giving it to her. And then suddenly she would've been happy. And that would've been so great. I never saw her happy, but I can easily picture it. I hope, somehow, that she's happy now. I can see her face lighting up with a smile as beautiful as Rachel McAdams'.

Medicine Balls

I have some medicine balls. Not this many:

One of mine is slightly larger than a basketball and weighs 5 kilograms. That's right: kilograms, not pounds. I wonder where it's from, originally. Probly not Murrka.

Another one is slightly larger than a shot which is thrown in the shot put. And there's got to be simpler way of mentioning such a shot. Then again, maybe not. It's just barely small enough that I could put it like a shot. I'm very curious about how far I could put it. I'm not going to find out today because it's icy outside. Okay, I could go outside right now and put it. I probably won't. We'll see.

I know that exercise with medicine balls generally involves throwing them. But I can't throw them inside my house, which has limited space and fragile walls and floors. I watched a video yesterday in which a trainer had his clients throw medicine balls as hard as they could against cinder block walls. At one point the trainer said approvingly of his client, a UFC fighter, "Yeah, he's trying to throw that ball right through that wall." I sometimes hold a medicine ball and move around with it, or shift it from hand to hand, or throw it up, but not high enough to hit the low ceiling, and catch it before it hits the floor, and repeat. I don't know whether I'm getting good exercise when I do such things, or injuring myself, or neither. Hey, maybe I'm doing both!

Yesterday I was holding the 5 kilogram ball, and I actually wondered whether it was about as heavy as medicine balls get! Yeah, it seems kind of silly in retrospect that I wondered that, because I googled it and found medicine balls weighing as much as 300 pounds.

The 300-pounders are not any bigger than regular medicine balls. I don't know what they're made of, whether they're rubber all the way through -- extra-heavy rubber -- or basically just iron or brass with a very thin coating of rubber, or what. I don't know -- if you can play catch with one of those, you may be overdoing it, and maybe you just need a really good hug. But who am I to judge? Go ahead and get your freaky strong on if you want to.

I'm pretty sure that I could lift a 300 lb medicine off of the ground or floor all by myself. I'm also pretty sure that if I did it right now, I'd injure myself. But it doesn't have to stay that way. I could transform myself from a Great Big Fat Guy to a Great Big Freakishly Strong Guy Who is Not Fat At All. It's possible. Or I could go thin. I've been thin before, it wasn't bad at all. It was much easier to jump around like a cat when I was thin. Or I could just forget about everything except enjoying lots and lots of great food, and go for 500 lbs. (Weighing 500 lbs, that is. Not working out with a 500-lb ball. Although that too would be possible...)

I think that tossing the medicine balls as described above, repeating for dozens of reps, is good for me. I think I can feel myself getting stronger and less fat. Tossing a medicine ball just a little ways into the air, because of the low ceiling, I can feel it in muscles all over me, from my calves to my neck.

I think it's possible that I won't write any more Great Big Fat Guy posts. Maybe instead, the next Great Big Fat Guy post will just be a Great Big Guy post. That'd be sweet. And I think it's more likely than me weighing 500 lbs. Yeah, I really feel it all over. Feels good. There is no doubt, I'm getting some good exercise from these medicine balls.

(But, of course, a well-rounded exercise program includes many kinds of exercise. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that medicine balls can do it for you all by themselves.)

(Although...)

Biblical Scholars Be Trippin'

The meme above is one of those things that's hysterically funny if you understand it, and if you don't, explaining it to you would probably just exhaust me and bore you. So I'll just say that one reason Biblical scholars be trippin' is that they continue to discover huge amounts of extremely-old Biblical manuscripts.

For example, James Snapp Jr wrote last June about some palimpsests. When the ink is scraped off of a piece of parchment to make room to write something new, the indentations left by the old writing are a palimpsest. For over a century, people have been getting steadily better at using technology to recover palimpsests: that is, to make them readable again. Snapp wrote:

For at least the past five years, reports have circulated about the contents of palimpsests (recycled manuscripts) that were discovered in 1975 at Saint Catherine’s monastery. National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, The Atlantic, ScienceBlog, Ancient-Origins, and the BBC have all told readers that major research is underway that involves ancient manuscripts and expensive manuscript-reading equipment.

Now the Sinai Palimpsests Project has a website, and visitors can easily get some sense of the scale of the work that is being done with the (relatively) newly discovered manuscripts. The manuscripts at Saint Catherine’s include all kinds of compositions: ancient medicine-recipes, patristic sermons, poems, liturgical instruction-books, Old Testament books, and much more.

Fifteen continuous-text Greek manuscripts are among the newly discovered palimpsests. All but one of these New Testament manuscripts have been given production-dates in the 500s or earlier.

Another thing they be trippin' about is claims that the Codex Sinaiticus, famous for being the oldest complete Bible known to exist -- and named Sinaiticus because it was found in the very same St Catherine's monastery in Sinai where they have found the above-mentioned palimpsests -- is actually not nearly as old as had been thought. It was dated to the 4th century, now here come these guys saying it was made in the 7th century. But apparently that brouhaha has come and gone and the 4th-century dating has survived. But don't take my word for any of this: let Steven Avery tell you all about it.

MB&F L’Epée 1839 Grant

This is Grant.

Grant can be moved into 3 different positions, and is about 7 inches wide and 8 inches long.

And, as you can see by this photo --

-- Grant is a clock, a joint venture between the companies MB&F, who make mostly somewhat out-there watches, and L’Epée 1839, who make mostly weird and playful clocks. Grant is named after a WWII tank which was named after Ulysses S Grant, was made in a limited edition of 150 pieces, and retails for a little over $20,000, which is a real bargain when you look at all of the high-quality craftsmanship and fine materials which have gone into this piece.

Can we talk about socialism? There are some socialists who hate wealth and money and want to do away with it. Then there are socialists such as myself and George Bernard Shaw. Shaw wrote, in the Preface to Major Barbara,

"To teach children that it is sinful to desire money, is to strain towards the extreme possible limit of impudence in lying, and corruption in hypocrisy. The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization, the one sound spot in our social conscience. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty as conspicuously and undeniably as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness. Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys base people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people. It is only when it is cheapened to worthlessness for some, and made impossibly dear to others, that it becomes a curse. In short, it is a curse only in such foolish social conditions that life itself is a curse. For the two things are inseparable: money is the counter that enables life to be distributed socially: it is life as truly as sovereigns and bank notes are money. The first duty of every citizen is to insist on having money on reasonable terms; and this demand is not complied with by giving four men three shillings each for ten or twelve hours’ drudgery and one man a thousand pounds for nothing. The crying need of the nation is not for better morals, cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, culture, redemption of fallen sisters and erring brothers, nor the grace, love and fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for enough money."

(My emphasis, lest some careless reader think that I or Shaw were telling the lazy poor to complain less and work harder.)

The other sort of socialist -- the Puritan sort, even though they often are atheists -- will point to things like Grant and say that they represent all that is wrong with the world. They may bite their tongues, if they were raised as Christians, to keep from saying "all that is wicked," but that's what they mean. Shaw and I favor universal basic incomes, that is: giving money to everyone, because everyone should have it. We see nothing wicked about Grant. What is wicked to us is that the world is arranged so that so very few people can afford to buy themselves something like a Grant, if they so choose. (Not everyone could buy a Grant even if everyone were rich, because there are only 150 of him, but there are many extravagant things like Grant.) And that other sort of socialist, the Puritan kind, ought to brush up on their Marx, especially Marx on the subject of leisure, if they think Marx is on their side, and not not mine and Shaw's.

It strikes me how many of these socialists who say they're against wealth are a lot wealthier than I've ever been. They have varying definitions about how wealthy is too wealthy, but, conveniently, it tends to be much wealthier than they are. Bernie Sanders may well be a millionaire, but billionaires really grind his gears. For them not to be much more focused on poverty requires, I think, both a lack of experience of it, and a lack of empathy. It happens now and then that a rich Puritan socialist will actually give away everything they have, to the point where they actually become poor on purpose, but it doesn't happen often. Shaw, as far as I know, was never close to being poor, but he was gifted with enormous empathy. He was able to spot suffering without having experienced something similar to it himself. And he was clever enough to see that one doesn't reduce the amount of misery in the world by becoming miserable.

Anyway, I just came here to say: lookit Grant, he's wicked cool!

Martha Nussbaum, Non-Insider

In 1947 Martha Nussbaum was born. Her name at birth was Martha Craven. She claims to have repudiated her own "aristocratic" upbringing and to dislike elites and in-groups, whether it's the Bloombury group or Derrida. She has taught at Harvard, Brown and the University of Chicago, received more than 60 honorary degrees, and a few days ago she won the Berggruen Prize, which comes with a $1 million cash award.

In the mid-1980's, when Nussbaum was a professor in both the Classics and Philosophy Departments at Brown, she published The Fragility of Goodness, a book which added considerably to her already considerable prestige in academia. In the late 1980's, I was a Collage Scholar in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. We College Scholars were given The Fragility of Goodness to read. Prof Nussbaum came to the University of Tennessee to speak. There was a Q&A after her lecture. I asked several questions.

I have never been particularly drawn to nor particularly repelled by Nussbaum's writing. I think I went to the trouble of coming up with questions for her because I was drawn to the aura of power around her. Double full professor in the Ivy League at around age 40, that's sumpin. Many camerapeople followed her around, including at least one video camera crew. I don't remember what my questions were. I'm quite certain they were uninteresting.

By this time, 1988 or early 1989, I had heard the name Derrida, but not with connotations which tempted me to read him.

Bill Moyers interviewed Prof Nussbaum on TV about The Fragility of Goodness. In his introduction, there are several shots of Nussbaum's visit to the University of Tennessee. In one shot, from behind the speaker's lecturn, in the upper-left corner of the screen, is a small smudge which may or may not be me.

In 2007, Peter Sloterdijk, a German philosopher whom I still liked somewhat at the time, despite numerous German-speaking friends having assured me that he was an asshole, published a book about Derrida. That was the first time I was strongly tempted to read a text either by or about Derrida. However, my competence in the German language never ceases to grow, and the more precisely I'm able to understand Sloterdijk, the less I like him. I didn't get a copy of Sloterdijk's book about Derrida, nor, at the time, did I get any books by Derrida.

Less than 2 months ago I finally began to read Derrida. I've taken an immediate and immense like to him. I'm a postmodernist! Who knew?!