Sunday Weigh-In
Mar. 23rd, 2008 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jakebe
Weight This Week: 165.2 lbs.
Weight Last Week: 167.4 lbs.
Change: -2.2 lbs.
Time: 32 minutes
Distance: 2.90 miles
Speed: 6.0 mph
Calories: 298
Chest Press: 80 lbs.
Bent-Arm Cable Pulldown: 45 lbs.
Lent ended on Saturday, so I decided to celebrate by going to my favorite chicken place, Popeye's. I broke my meatless fast with some naked chicken strips, red beans and rice, biscuit and some Sprite. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was nowhere near as good as I had imagined it to be.
These past few days, I had been building up the idea of eating meat to be this joyous, wonderful thing. I was looking forward to having turkey and cranberry sandwiches again (a taste I picked up this past holiday season), and the occasional burger, and even chicken strips. The idea, I told myself, would be to have meat for a week, until the end of March or so, and then see if I wanted to be vegetarian on a permanent basis.
Right now, I'm leaning towards going back into meatless living. Honestly, the turkey and cranberry sandwiches were the only cravings I had consistently, and I'm sure I could find a good meatless substitute for them. Once that last hurdle is overcome, I believe I can go vegetarian without looking back.
Spring is here in California; actually, it's been here for a little while, but now's a perfect time to really revel in it. I don't have to worry so much about friends from other areas of the country being pissed about our 70 degree weather and all. ;) The ducks and geese are noisy in the mornings, and the afternoons are tremendously bright and warm. The dawns are clear and pleasantly crisp. Thoughts of being outdoors are almost constantly in mind now; I'm thinking it would be just lovely to take my laptop out under a tree and just write there for as long as the battery holds.
Ah, maybe next weekend, eh?
So, after seven astonishing episodes, CBS' Jericho is finally going off the air for good. This little show jumped onto my radar last summer, helped a little by the unforgettable image of a boy standing on the roof of his house, looking at a mushroom cloud rising up in the distance. The premise was catnip to me: a small town in Kansas has to deal with the consequences of a series of nuclear attacks in American cities, which is nothing short of the breakdown of civilization and a removal of contact from the outside world.
The show started out weak, but I kept watching with the hope that it would get better. Every episode improved its quality just enough to hook me along for another week, but mostly it took a great premise (think 1983's Testament as a TV series, as depressing as that sounds) and somehow made it pedestrian and "folksy." While I doubt you could go with ultra-realism and retain the masses -- because really, who wants to watch a bunch of photogenic people slowly dying of radiation sickness? -- I expected them to deal with more difficult issues than they did. It was a very sanitized version of the end of the world, where every problem could be overcome by good old American ingenuity, traditional family values and pulling together as a community.
The second half of the first season expanded the world, and got a lot more interesting. Mayor Johnston Greene, about as close to Father Christmas as you could get, was voted out of office and replaced by the hawkish Grey Anderson, who had run on a platform that placed security over freedom. A security outfit that had been contracted independently by the Armed Forces to establish law and order ran through towns, sacking them of food and supplies, and killing anyone who disagreed too strongly. The neighboring town of New Bern, themselves a victim of just such an attack, threatened Jericho with out-and-out war. This all lead up to a great season finale that ended with the two towns engaging in open conflict, and the discovery that America was piecing itself back together...in a much different form than what was known.
The series was inexplicably cancelled, then, prompting a frenzy by the fans. CBS reversed its decision after they sent in 40,000 pounds of assorted nuts to their offices, giving producers seven more episodes as a mid-season replacement. Fans went to work spreading the word through the internet, and the cast and crew threw everything into the next season, making as strong a case as possible to be picked up for a third season.
The second season, so far, has been absolutely amazing. The stakes have been raised considerably, leading the main characters to make desperate decisions that really show what they're *really* like. It's what they should have been doing in the first season! Ravenwood -- the independent contractor that had been ransacking towns -- returns to run daily operations in Jericho, to disastrous effect. The military of the Allied States of America entrenches itself, and we learn just who's behind the nuclear attacks in the first place. Throughout the season, the series has touched on the media's role in holding the government accountable, the duty of the citizen to stand up for his rights, and what kind of government we might expect under military-industrial rule. It's been very, very good.
Alas, ratings for this shortened second season -- even with the TV landscape largely barren of new scripted programming -- have been off 25% from last season, so it's been cancelled. Again. For good.
I can't say I'm surprised or disappointed that the show is gone; at least it ended on a creatively strong note, exceeding my wildest hopes for it. Still, it would have been nice to see if they could have sustained the same great tenseness for 21 more episodes or so.
Weight Last Week: 167.4 lbs.
Change: -2.2 lbs.
Time: 32 minutes
Distance: 2.90 miles
Speed: 6.0 mph
Calories: 298
Chest Press: 80 lbs.
Bent-Arm Cable Pulldown: 45 lbs.
Lent ended on Saturday, so I decided to celebrate by going to my favorite chicken place, Popeye's. I broke my meatless fast with some naked chicken strips, red beans and rice, biscuit and some Sprite. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was nowhere near as good as I had imagined it to be.
These past few days, I had been building up the idea of eating meat to be this joyous, wonderful thing. I was looking forward to having turkey and cranberry sandwiches again (a taste I picked up this past holiday season), and the occasional burger, and even chicken strips. The idea, I told myself, would be to have meat for a week, until the end of March or so, and then see if I wanted to be vegetarian on a permanent basis.
Right now, I'm leaning towards going back into meatless living. Honestly, the turkey and cranberry sandwiches were the only cravings I had consistently, and I'm sure I could find a good meatless substitute for them. Once that last hurdle is overcome, I believe I can go vegetarian without looking back.
Spring is here in California; actually, it's been here for a little while, but now's a perfect time to really revel in it. I don't have to worry so much about friends from other areas of the country being pissed about our 70 degree weather and all. ;) The ducks and geese are noisy in the mornings, and the afternoons are tremendously bright and warm. The dawns are clear and pleasantly crisp. Thoughts of being outdoors are almost constantly in mind now; I'm thinking it would be just lovely to take my laptop out under a tree and just write there for as long as the battery holds.
Ah, maybe next weekend, eh?
So, after seven astonishing episodes, CBS' Jericho is finally going off the air for good. This little show jumped onto my radar last summer, helped a little by the unforgettable image of a boy standing on the roof of his house, looking at a mushroom cloud rising up in the distance. The premise was catnip to me: a small town in Kansas has to deal with the consequences of a series of nuclear attacks in American cities, which is nothing short of the breakdown of civilization and a removal of contact from the outside world.
The show started out weak, but I kept watching with the hope that it would get better. Every episode improved its quality just enough to hook me along for another week, but mostly it took a great premise (think 1983's Testament as a TV series, as depressing as that sounds) and somehow made it pedestrian and "folksy." While I doubt you could go with ultra-realism and retain the masses -- because really, who wants to watch a bunch of photogenic people slowly dying of radiation sickness? -- I expected them to deal with more difficult issues than they did. It was a very sanitized version of the end of the world, where every problem could be overcome by good old American ingenuity, traditional family values and pulling together as a community.
The second half of the first season expanded the world, and got a lot more interesting. Mayor Johnston Greene, about as close to Father Christmas as you could get, was voted out of office and replaced by the hawkish Grey Anderson, who had run on a platform that placed security over freedom. A security outfit that had been contracted independently by the Armed Forces to establish law and order ran through towns, sacking them of food and supplies, and killing anyone who disagreed too strongly. The neighboring town of New Bern, themselves a victim of just such an attack, threatened Jericho with out-and-out war. This all lead up to a great season finale that ended with the two towns engaging in open conflict, and the discovery that America was piecing itself back together...in a much different form than what was known.
The series was inexplicably cancelled, then, prompting a frenzy by the fans. CBS reversed its decision after they sent in 40,000 pounds of assorted nuts to their offices, giving producers seven more episodes as a mid-season replacement. Fans went to work spreading the word through the internet, and the cast and crew threw everything into the next season, making as strong a case as possible to be picked up for a third season.
The second season, so far, has been absolutely amazing. The stakes have been raised considerably, leading the main characters to make desperate decisions that really show what they're *really* like. It's what they should have been doing in the first season! Ravenwood -- the independent contractor that had been ransacking towns -- returns to run daily operations in Jericho, to disastrous effect. The military of the Allied States of America entrenches itself, and we learn just who's behind the nuclear attacks in the first place. Throughout the season, the series has touched on the media's role in holding the government accountable, the duty of the citizen to stand up for his rights, and what kind of government we might expect under military-industrial rule. It's been very, very good.
Alas, ratings for this shortened second season -- even with the TV landscape largely barren of new scripted programming -- have been off 25% from last season, so it's been cancelled. Again. For good.
I can't say I'm surprised or disappointed that the show is gone; at least it ended on a creatively strong note, exceeding my wildest hopes for it. Still, it would have been nice to see if they could have sustained the same great tenseness for 21 more episodes or so.
