20K! Finally!

It took me ten days to get here instead of five (thanks to five days spent backtracking on Eliza's scenes), but I'm at twenty thousand words. Dead Rick is learning things about his own past -- nice things, which are actually more painful in their way than the bad things would be. (Don't worry; we'll get to those, too.)

I'm approaching the midpoint of Part One, aiming for three parts in total. I may spend part of tomorrow working backward for where I want Eliza at the end of this section, to figure out what should happen between now and then; I should definitely spend part of tomorrow trying to figure out where I want Dead Rick to be headed. I know you can get to your destination by the headlights, but it would be great if I knew a few of the landmarks that lie beyond their beams.


Word count: 20,375
LBR quota: A brief hint of love. Even if Dead Rick can't actually remember it.
Authorial sadism: Writing a whole scene of Dead Rick doing what he's supposed to, then deciding to arrange things so that he actually wasn't supposed to do it.

I'll believe it when I see it, but . . . .

Courtesy of moonandserpent: Elfquest movie inches closer to actual existence.

I've always assumed the thing would never happen, but if it did . . . folks, this is one of the deep foundational stories in my head, one of the things that's been with me for years and years and years. A movie would either be awesome or a travesty. I'm willing to risk the latter for the chance of the former.

And now I need to persuade myself that the things I have to get done today take priority over curling up with Elfquest.

a pair of links to ponder

This post is a summary of a lecture given by Dr. Robert Lustig, talking about fructose and the role it may be playing in the general weight gain the U.S. has seen over the last thirty years.

This post is a counter-argument to Lustig.

I don't know for sure what to make of any of it, except that I do feel Lustig's being a bit alarmist by calling fructose a "poison" and agitating for its regulation. I'm not a biochemist, so round about the part where tongodeon's post turns into wodges of acronyms and other specialized terms (i.e. the metabolisys grafs), I lose track of the argument. But I can comprehend the beginning and the end, and they told me two useful things.

First, I thought I was all virtuous because I'd almost completely eliminated soda from my diet, replacing it with fruit juice. Why? Well, I'd heard that high fructose corn syrup was bad. Whether Lustig is right or not about the problems of fructose (not just HFCS), it does seem to be true that getting my fructose from juice doesn't really make as a big of a difference as I'd assumed. I'm still chugging the stuff in large quantities, and I trust Lustig is at least right about how my body metabolizes it. What the effect of that might be, seems to be the point under debate. Anyway, I'm going to experiment for a while with cutting back on fruit juice, too, and see what that does.

Second, the "exercise does not work by burning calories" paragraph was exactly what I needed to read, because it clarifies for me some things I've never understood. The math of burning calories never worked out in my head (because it doesn't, really), so I appreciated seeing a brief catalogue of the other things exercise does, that can have an effect on weight. (Aside from all the non-weight-related benefits, of course, like strength and endurance and agility and so on.) In other words, now I know what "it raises your metabolism" actually means.

Anyway, if you happen to be a biochemist on the side, I'd be interested to hear what you think of Lustig's arguments. Is fructose (whether consumed as HFCS or sucrose) that important? How about the connection with fiber? Or is this, as the second post argues, just the new "low fat" argument, another attempt to demonize one specific part of our diet while losing sight of the big picture?

The Gimpy Feet Guide to Ungimping

(Yeah, I know, I'm posty today. Trying to clear out some links that have been sitting around for a while, that require more discussion than can profitably be done in a linkdump post.)

Someone a while back asked what I was doing about the problem of collapsing arches in my feet. Since most of my foot/ankle problems are interrelated (surprise!), I figured it was worth doing one collated post on all my physical therapy -- with bonus link about barefoot running.

This site shows pictures of most of the PT. I'm doing all four exercises in the "resistance band" group on that page, plus two others: with cotton balls between my toes, I'm squeezing the toes together, and I'm also doing the one where you put your foot on a towel and gradually scrunch the fabric up with your toes. Three sets of 15, each day. So far I've graduated up two resistance bands; when I can do four sets of 15 with the next (and strongest) band, I'll probably call it quits with that stuff.

I'm also doing three other exercises, more newly-added to my repertoire. First, I'm standing on one foot. No, really. Aside from the atrophy caused by the surgical recovery, I also had a pre-existing weakness in my tibialis posterior, which is a muscle that runs down the inside of your ankle and splays across the sole of your foot. It's one of the muscles closely involved in arch support (another being the tibialis anterior, on the outside of the joint), and it plays a big role in balancing. When I try to stand on one foot for any real length of time, I can feel it crapping out on me, causing my ankle to roll inward, with predictable consequences for my balance. So this exercise is remarkably tiring, at least for one tiny part of my leg. The other two are lunges (of the athletic, not the fencing, sort) and one-foot squats, which I can't really do worth a damn. I'm supposed to stand on one foot and squat down as low as I can (including lowering my back and sticking my butt out; this isn't a plié), while keeping my heel on the ground. Between the weakness of that one muscle and my possibly structural inability to dorsiflex very far, this turns out to be a carnival of wobbling on my part.

So if you have arch problems, you want to do the inversion and eversion exercises, the ones where you're moving your foot from side to side against resistance. And it turns out that helps a lot for balance, too: in karate last night, I discovered that when I do one of the rapid 180-degree turns many of the kata include, I'm now landing in zenkutsu-dachi on the far side with MUCH less instability than I used to. I never thought to connect that with the arch issues, but it seems to be related.

Also -- on the topic of arch problems -- you might want to read up on barefoot running. This is something I only recently encountered, and I'm not a runner myself, so I don't have much first-hand knowledge on the subject. But there's a chapter in the book Born to Run that makes a convincing argument for how our highly-engineered running shoes have actually contributed to foot problems, rather than reducing them. And the reasons seem like common sense: the shoe, by stiffening and cushioning the foot, radically changes the mechanics of how we run. I had a deeply suspicious reaction when my primary care doctor told me the solution to my arch problems was putting more support in my shoes; wouldn't that just further weaken my feet? (You can imagine what my PT said when I asked her.) There's at least some evidence that running barefoot, or in minimal shoes, with a forefoot or midfoot strike, will actually strengthen your arches by -- here's a wacky idea -- using them as evolution intended.

I'm not likely to take up running any time soon, but for those of you who do it, you might want to investigate some of the minimal-shoe options out there.

And now, having dealt with some of the crap cluttering up my browser, I'm off to be productive on a different front. Namely, folding laundry.

more web-fu needed

The book I'm reading tells me there was a Catholic church opened, I think in Whitechapel, on 22 June 1876. (Following the decision of a priest belonging to the Oblates of Mary Immaculate to start preaching to Whitechapel laborers.) Can anybody help me figure out which church this is? St. Anne's? Their website gives no history.

Or, y'know, find me a list of Catholic churches in Whitechapel as of 1884 or thereabouts. It's a measure of our modern age that I was terribly disappointed to discover Wikipedia did not already have a page for "Catholic churches in Whitechapel" that I could check for founding dates.


EDIT: Nevermind. Found my web-fu, then found this.

things that amused me tonight

Dropping the name "the Honourable Mr. Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes" into the book.

What? I needed a baron's son of the appropriate age, and he was the first one I found.