3 Exercises You Should Already Be Doing

In an effort to earn a break from the whiny, petulant responses to blog entries that don't involve me spoon feeding you people exercise protocols, I've decided to clue you in on three exercises you probably don't do, and have never even considered doing.  There'll be multiple reasons for this, ranging from the fact that you might get injured (a tremendously stupid fear, given that it's just as easy to get injured walking across the street as it is to hurt yourself lifting) to the fact that you've simply never heard of the lifts.  As such, you should all gather round the metaphorical fire as I drop a bit of knowledge on you.  Prepare to be spoon-fed, fuckers.

I had a lot of fun making this picture, mostly due to the fact that I hate babies.

Reverse Grip Bench Press

I've suggested that people do this lift in the past, but I've apparently neither explained it sufficiently, nor placed enough emphasis thereupon.  As such, allow me to introduce you to a lift I consider to be far superior to the bench press- the Reverse Grip Bench Press.  To be honest, I don't know who invented this exercise, or when.  I'll bet that it was within the last 60 years, when the bench press became tremendously popular, but it really didn't get much press until Anthony Clark hit the scene.  Clark was an absolute fucking beast, and he ended up benching over 800 lbs with this grip.  An article on Clark's exploits with this lift is what got me interested in it, and I've dabbled with it on and off for the last 15 years.  

Many people on the internet have taken to recommending that lifter avoid this lift, as it bears a high possibility of injury and is banned from use in competition.  The fact remains, however, that it's a fucking awesome lift, and if you do it correctly, you're not going to injure yourself.  This brings us, thus, to an explanation of how this lift should be conducted.  I train without a lifting partner, because I'm a lone fucking wolf like that.  As such, it's well-neigh impossible to do a traditional reverse-grip bench without a liftoff and a competent spotter.  Instead, I set up in the rack and do these from the bottom position, which bears a couple of advantages.  First, it helps with my bench power from the bottom position, and drive from a pause is pretty much the entire shitteree for raw powerlifters.  Second, unless some natural catastrophe occurs that destroys the building in which you're lifting and brings the fucking rack down around your ears, you should remain pretty well insulated from the chance of injury.  Thus, you're just going to take a shoulder width grip and start from the bottom of the lift (setting the pins in the rack at or about your chest weight on the bench, and press the bar up from your stomach.  The more you arch, the shorter the movement, and the more you can press, so arch fucking hard.  I recommend chalking the hell out of your hands to improve your grip- I'm willing to bet the vast majority of the reported injuries on this lift occurred because the bar slipped out of their hands.  

The bar should be lower on his abdomen (toward his navel), but you get the idea.

As far as sets and reps, I either do lots of singles or a few sets of 5, and change it up from day to do.  Lately, I've been hitting this one 2x a week, as I've abandoned regular bench press altogether.  Why have I done so?  Because I know a lot of people with shoulder problems, and all of those people list the bench press as their favorite lift.  Additionally, when I bench frequently, I have a harder time getting into position for BTNs and back squat.  As such, it's all reverse grip bench press for me, as it seems to have awesome crossover to the regular bench press, without all of the shoulder impingement and bullshit.


One last thing- DOING THESE IN THE SMITH MACHINE IS FUCKING STUPID.  It's like painting a bloody, double-bladed axes pink and bedazzling it.  Do it in the fucking rack or don't do it.  No one gives a fuck how much you can do in the smith machine, and telling people what you can do in the smith makes you look like an ass and puts them in the uncomfortable position of having to dispose of your body for sapping them of valuable testosterone points with your nonsense.


Curl and Press

I know- we all have the same mental image of this exercise.  Some fat broad in the gym with 2 lb, rubberized pink dumbbells, doing endless repetitions of this exercise while standing directly in front of whatever particular set of dumbbells it is that you'd like to use.  She's frequently doing this in perfect rhythm with her friend, who's usually skinny and using the same bullshit weights.  On a side note, what the fuck is with random broads thinking that they have to synchronize each repetition with that of their lifting partner?  Is there some synchronized swimming channel they're always watching to acquire this universal and bizarre training technique?  

Anyway, the other place wherein you'll see this exercise jocked is the randomly awesome but generally useless magazine Men's Health.  It's not always wrong, and the articles in that mag are generally better researched and far more educated than those in any magazine outside of Muscular Development.  In any event, it was not that bastion of douchery and consumerism that got me into the exercise, either.  The guy who's responsible for talking me into this exercise did so from the grave- Hermann Goerner.  The Curl and Press was Goerner's bread-and-butter exercise, which he did three times a week with kettlebells at the outset of his workout.   His set and rep scheme for this consisted of approximately 10 sets, going from 55 lbs. to 110 lbs. in 5½ lb. jumps (2½ kilo) jumps. These were done very strictly – usually only 1 or 2 reps with each arm, working up quickly to the 110 lb. bells.  I've done them with both dumbbells and kettlebells, and thoroughly enjoyed them.  I did them in alternating fashion, curling and pressing one bell at a time for singles. I think my form's likely a little looser than Goerner's, and I like to occasionally go really fucking heavy by turning this into a curl grip clean and one arm press They're a nice break for the joints in your arms and shoulders, which can take a pounding from more explosive movements like jerks and behind the neck push presses, and can help your log clean and press, bicep strength and size, and will generally add some low impact volume to your upper body pressing movements.

If they're good enough for him, they're good enough for you.

Jump Squats
This is another exercise that you'll generally find darkening the pages of Men's Health, but it's actually useful if you do it right.  First, I recommend you drop the fucking dumbbells- leave them to the bodybuilders and the women.  Start with your regular warmup weight in the back squat, and drop ass to grass.  Sit there for a second, so that you've got no bounce and no momentum, and then fucking explode so hard that you leave the ground.  You're not trying to set any records for height, here, but just trying to pop hard enough to leave the ground.  As I get heavier, I'll generally pause less or not at all, but still try to drop below parallel before firing out of the hole.  I'll generally work up to singles, doubles, and triples with 315, and find that it's a nice change of pace from heavy back squats, and it helps with my explosiveness out of the bottom and my overall squat depth.

Captain Kirk was all about gettin' low.

I can hear lots of you winding up- this is insane/it's only possible with steroids/injury/I'm a giant bleeding vagina.  It's not my job to convince you that you're not as weak as you think you are.  Is this a high risk movement?  No more so than getting behind the wheel of your car every day.  Can you injure yourself doing heavy jump squats?  Probably.  You could do one of two things- fall over, or snap your spine in half.  To the first, don't do it.  Falling down is stupid, unless you're Michael Douglas- that movie fucking rules.  For the second, sure, you can snap your spine right in half if you land flat on your ass on the ground, or if you land with your knees completely locked.  Frankly, if you do either of those, you deserve to injure yourself.  Your back and legs serve as giant shock absorbers.  Thereby, the force various "exercise scientists" across the internet describe as crushing one's spine in their railing against heavy jump squats is dissipated, as it's absorbed in greatest part by your thighs, rather than your spinal column.  Furthermore, the spine is in greatest danger of injury when bending or twisting, and the explosive nature of this exercise demands a vertical, or nearly vertical posture, which places you in strongest possible spinal position.  You can improve this still further by practicing soft landings (where your ankles and knees flex in concert to absorb the shock of landing), which will reduce the amount of kinetic energy that will be absorbed by your intervertebral disks by 150-fold over a hard landing.  (Zatsiosky, pp.140-141)

Shock absorbent.

In other good news, the switch from slower, more grinding back squats into explosive, yet heavy jump squats will shift some of the load in the exercise, and should alter the movement enough so that you can can circumvent some of the bottleneck effect that Zatsiorsky describes in Science and Practice of Strength Training.  The bottleneck effect occurs when a comparative strength imbalance in one joint limits the total amount of weight one can lift.  Because the exercise is performed in a fundamentally different way, and the loading protocols are significantly different, it might be possible to utilize this exercise in particular to overcome sticking points in both the squat and the deadlift.


So give these exercises a try.  They'll give you something different to do in the gym, and might turn out to be some staples in your workout.  At the very least, they'll make those sensitive parties among you pause before beginning to bitch anew.  

Impressing people. Its easy!

You are so lucky to have learned this lesson for free. I should be charging for this gold.

Haha. 

:-)

G-Mac's Wipeout Video... the funny one. Seriously.

Apologies again for the bad link.

"Quote: 

"So what, once I killed a gopher with a stick". 

I had to fight a raccoon to the death once over a tree fort. In the final skirmish I brought a golf club up the tree with me. A putter I had found while hiking on the escarpment. I don't know how long our final encounter lasted but it felt like a really long time. We both ended up at the end of a very thin branch that was nowhere near thick enough for either one of us, never mind both. I remember feeling pretty scared in the last few moments; it was either him or me. Yeah, that fucker ended up in a garbage bag that got thrown off a friend's 10th floor balcony. I missed the dumpster on the first throw and had to go downstairs and toss him in from the ground." - The Glen 

Hooligan Horrorshow- Glen "The Angriest Motherfucker Alive" MacCharles

Deep in the wilds of Canada there exists a man that's the most pure physical embodiment of hatred since Albert Johnson capped a bunch of mounties from his bunker in the frozen wastelands of the very same nation in which Glen MacCharles resides.  Given that my training philosophy is open sourced, and I'm sure you people are all curious about what one another does or doesn't do in terms of training and diet, I thought I'd start posting some bios to facilitate mutual learning.

What have I learned from Glen?  It is apparently possible to thrive on little more than hatred and milk.  Additionally, this is the way to obtain the physique of a turn of the century strongman, which is essentially what Glen's rocking.  Motherfucker looks bizarrely like a modern day Edward Aston, if you mixed in a bit of the wacky redheaded guy from Braveheart and 13th Warrior for good measure.

Your name is Scottish as all hell.  Do you live in Scotland?

I live in Hamilton, Ontario. I think this city might have the highest per capita of retards, it's great. It's also (and this one is a fact) got the most Tim Horton's Donuts shops than anywhere else in the world. I live in the fucking ghetto too. My house overlooks the playground where all the "gangsta" wannabes spend all day drinnking beer. That playground is full of broken glass. I thought I hated the human race before I moved here three and a half years ago. I was wrong. The more I see of these cracked out bling bling clowns the more I truly believe that a full scale nuclear holocaust is the only answer. Just destroy it all and rebuild from scratch if there's anything left at all. If I didn't have a responsibility to my wife and kids I really think I'd eventually just go out there and start beating the shit out of them with a handful of broken glass in each hand.

You're a fucking maniac.  What the fuck is Wipeout?

Wipeout is a gameshow on TV where contestants have to make it through a series of obstacle courses to try and win $50,000. There's no second place on that show so you either win or get nothing. The whole point of the show seems to be about injuring and humiliating everyone on it. Right up my alley.

That sounds about as much like anything I know about you as chocolate seems to go with cellophane and carpet cleaner.  In any event, what's your diet and program looking like these days?  Any PRs you feel like mentioning?

My diet is extremely simple. I've just never had any interest in junk food. Even as a kid I used to trade my Hallowe'en candy away to my sisters. I just didn't want it. Consequently, I'm the only one out of my brothers and sisters that doesn't have a problem with being a fatass. On a typical weekday I eat:
Breakfast
Three raw eggs in a glass of chocolate milk with olive oil, honey and peanut butter. I blend this all together in a Magic Bullet.

First Break
Ham and pastrami on whole wheat with lettuce and mayonnaise and a 710 ml pop bottle full of milk.

Lunch
Same as first break.

Last Break
Some kind of fruit, usually a banana but I like apples too.

When I get home I eat whatever my wife puts in front of me. Some staples include steak, porkchops, Hamburger Helper, chicken fettucine alfredo, roast beef pot roast. She's a fucking awesome cook. When I was a kid my mom didn't even cook at all. Her mother used to cook, send the food over to my house and then my mom would reheat it. By the time I was in the second grade or so she didn't even do that anymore so I grew up eating whatever bullshit I could prepare for myself. I ate a lot of cereal, sandwiches, minute rice, Kraft Dinner, that sort of crap. I was a pretty scrawny kid. But all of that just makes me appreciate a good homecooked meal that much more now. I don't necessarily have a huge appetite but I love eating.

My program doesn't really look like anything. I like a lot of different exercise protocols and I like a lot of different rep ranges too. Sometimes I lift weights, sometimes I lift sandbags or kegs, sometimes I just do a lot of pushups and squats. Lots of sets, lots of reps, lots of weight.

As far as PRs, well, I backlifted a steel beam at work a few weeks ago that, according to the order, weighed 3000 lbs. Orders always overestimate the weight so it was probably actuallu in the mid to high 2000s but still pretty good if you ask me. I press big pieces of steel over my head at work all the time. You're supposed to use the crane for anything over 50 lbs but fuck that. So far the heaviest piece I've presses overhead was 208. I might have done more than that but never calculated the weight for it. I've done more than that on a barbell before but big pieces of steel are way more fun.

Some of my best lifts are

Squat 500

Bench 315

Deadlift 545

Behind the Neck Push Press 315

And I really like wrist curls so I regularly use 135 or more in that exercise. My forearms are way out of proportion to my upper arms. It's awesome.

Since everyone will be wondering, I may as well get it out of the way, so the comments look less gay- what are your vital statistics (height/weight/age)?
As far as vital statistics, I'm 32 years old, married with three kids (11 year old boy, a five year old daughter and a four year old daughter. The girls were born exactly 362 days apart. Including miscarriages, I kept my old lady consistently pregnant for about three years.), 5'8" tall and my weight fluctuates between 180 and 190 depending on how hard I'm pushing myself in the weightroom. I've been working out for about 15 years and competing in strongman contests for seven years.

Like me, you appear to be of the opinion that it is better to hated than beloved.  I could fill a book with stories about my efforts to retain my "Most Fucking Hated" title, which I wear proudly.  Most recently, I found myself getting cockblocked by a fat chick at a bar, who I handed two bucks and told to her fat ass over to McDs for a couple of things off the dollar menu, as it appeared that her blood sugar was getting low, and she was being a cunt.  The fat chick then pitched a fucking fit, and got me 86'd from yet another bar.  Any stories of that ilk you feel like sharing?

I would definitely rather be hated than loved. It's way more fun. There are a small handful of people in this world whose opinions about me actually matter as far as I'm concerned. My wife and my kids. Anybody else can fuck right off. My mother never loved me and told me I was a mistake all the time growing up. She was right though, I was a mistake. People shouldn't keep babies like me. A lot of people cry about shit like that but I never really cared. I figured it out pretty early and simply moved on. She had gotten herself pregnant and asked my dad if she should get an abortion. He told her to do what she thought was best so she went and got one. He must have seemed upset or something after because she deliberately got herself knocked up again immediately afterward to make it up to him. Well, I guess this must have really pissed him off and he apparently accused her of being batshit crazy which, if you ask me, she was. Anyway, their marriage broke up before I was even born and I am the living representation of that failure. I was also hated by most of my peers at school. It made me feel good after a while though. Sooner or later you realize that if hatred is what they want, hatred is what they can have. Being completely surrounded in hatred myself, I had nothing to lose as far as I was concerned so I became the biggest asshole I could possibly be and treated everyone like shit. I started to learn about how fragile the human ego is, how easily a person can be hurt, and I exploited it as often as possible. By the time I was finished high school I was blacklisted from any and all house parties in the east end because everyone knew I'd walk into a house and destroy the whole place, literally just trash the place, without giving it a second thought. I'd smash the fuck out of kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms, start wrestling matches in the living room, steal shit, hide people's shoes, anything to encourage general chaos. Nobody seemed to be able to figure it out, why I would do shit like that. But the way I saw it, I was nobody before, just some piece of shit to be shoved out of the way or pointed out to be laughed at. Now I was one of the most hated individuals in their lives. I could fuck them over constantly and there was nothing they could do about it because I literally didn't give a shit about their feelings.
Some of the younger crowd would pool all their money together and give it all to me with a list of shit they all wanted from the liquor store. I'd turf the list and just fuck off with their money every time. I got away with that one several times before they just stopped giving me money. The more hate I created, the more I wanted. It was never enough. I had to keep pushing the envelope further and further. To a certain extent I still do even though I have grown up some since those days. Now I'm content to just be an all around asshole.

I'm not sure if Glen's pissed about his choice in footwear or the fact that someone replaced his dog with a muppet.  Maybe he just really has to shit.  

In your opinion, is there any cardio worth doing other than fucking?

Well, nothing beats a good sportfucking but I've been known to run, jump rope and do high-rep bodyweight exercises from time to time. This one time, three friends of mine and I were drinking at a baseball diamond in the middle of the night and some goof came walking over out of the bushes asking for a smoke or a light or some other such shit. One of my friends started swinging at him almost right away. The thing is, when this guy went down, my other two friends ran over to get in on the beatdown and this guy was fighting from his back like he was a goddamned superhero. Throwing kicks and insults in every direction. Normally I prefer not to bother getting involved in swarmings but this time was different. I figured I'd circle around towards his head and just stomp him right the fuck out since nobody else could get the fucking job done. Well, I couldn't hit the fucking guy either! It was like tryiong to stomp on a squirrel. He eventually made it to his feet and ran off down the block. We chased him for a bit but I already knew we had no chance of catching him. He turned around at a corner way the fuck up ahead of us, pulled up his shirt and shouted, "You're not in shape!"
I started to take cardio training a bit more seriously after that night. I was already pretty lean and strong but shit, I used to be a 100m sprinter on the track team as a young kid and I couldn't even catch this crackhead because I was "not in shape." Had I maintained my running ability I might have been able to catch that douchebag and wrap his face around a No Parking sign or something. It was humiliating. We nicknamed that fuckhead Spiderman but I've never seen him again since. So for just general health or fat loss, any type of cardio will do fine and if you lift weights with any effort at all you can probably get by with just that. And in most people's cases, they never should have allowed themselves to become fatfucks in the first place. Ten minutes three times a week on a treadmill isn't going to reverse 10 years of sitting on the couch elbow deep in a bag of chips every fucking day.

Is there anyone you'd like to murder, or fuck, or both, in front of a million people?

There are so many that I don't think I can narrow it down to just one. There is a guy who tried to use my wife and kids against me during a flame war because he's an obviousl chickenshit pussy who takes his online time very seriously. I think he'd be good fun to beat to death in front of a million people. He lives at 31 Old Westford rd., Chelmsford, Ma 01824 but I can't be bothered traveling all the way there just to knock out a few teeth and then come all the way back home. In a perfect world though he'd be right around the corner and living in a wheelchair today. My kids could use him as a toy. 
Beyond that, I plan on fighting anyone I see after I die, if there is an afterlife that is. So whether it's God, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Satan, Vishnu or just some other tool, he's getting punched straight in the fucking face the moment we lock eyes.

Lastly, Fuck/Marry/Kill- Your mom, your dad, and a random stray dog.  Reasons?

My dad's already dead so he's out. If he wasn't so fucking old while he was alive he might have been fun to fight to the death. He was 80 when he died a few years ago but was apparently a badass motherfucker when he was young. I want proof. 
I've got no use for my mom so she can fuck right off. Fucking her would not be very exciting. She's told me and just about everybody else I know all about the night she lost her virginity more times than I can count. Apparently she was so scared shitless that she made her first husband wait until the second night of their honeymoon and then closed her eyes, spread her legs, squeezed the bedposts and cried the entire time because of how much it hurt. Doesn't that sound like fun? Marrying her is also out of the question. She has no idea how to coexist with other humans. I can understand being generally displeased with the race as a whole. Most human beings make me want to scream so loud that the planet implodes. I understand treating people like shit too because it makes you feel good. But cultivating misery within your own home makes very little sense to me. She fucked up two marriages and every other relationship she ever had already. I don't even wat to kill her because I might actually get more enjoyment watching her die of self-loathing all by herself.
As for a stray dog, Hell, I'd rather be a stray dog than a human being. Maybe I'll marry that one.

... and that will about cover it.  We are all better people for having basked in the glow of Glen's hatred, which likely has consumed the galaxy at this point.  In any event, this is what this blog's all about- spreading the fucking knowledge, and coming to the conclusion that there's more than one way to skin a fucking cat in the gym, provided that it's more work you're doing, and not less.

Vegetarianism and Veganism Are As Logical As a Poopie-Flavored Lollipop

In the last installment of this series, I outlined the long and storied history of dietarily-indicated mental illness, which manifests as vegetarianism.  The history of vegetarianism in the US is one predicated entirely upon religious fervor, asexuality (or in the case of Kellogg, klismaphilia that left him grossed out by sex but satisfied by enemas), and anger, rather than a desire to necessarily be healthy.  Alternatively, it was predicated upon a love for all living creatures, which although misplaced, was at least the more rational of the two bases for this dietary regime.  Now we'll examine the modern vegetarians' vociferous claims about the superiority of their health with this dietary regime, in the face of reality, common sense, and essentially every fact since the dawn of the recorded human word.  Though this is the rhetorical equivalent of kicking a quadrapalegic baby, this, like kicking the baby, is simply too much fun up with which to pass.


I refuse to end a sentence with a preposition, no matter how ridiculous it makes the sentence.


Vegetarian arguments:

• Similarity to other primates, who eat less than 5% of their calories in the form of meat.  I'm sure that it goes without saying that this list makes you angry enough to headbutt a dog.  As dogs are cool, I'd not advise it, because headbutting dogs generally leads to a massive loss of testosterone points.  Unless, of course, it's a chihuahua or other purse dog, in which case it's a massive gain of testosterone points if you cook and eat the animal after headbutting it to death.  Purse dogs are not dogs, because dogs, by their very nature, capture and kill squirrels.  Therefore, if a dog could lose a one-on-one battle with a tree-dwelling rodent, it is not a dog, and may be killed and eaten at will.  Similarity to other primates is immaterial, because we diverged from our closest primate relatives millions of years ago.  The main feature lacking in the chart above, which is bandied about wholesale by idiot vegetarians the world around, as they're too fucking weak and lazy to do any research off the internet, and too stupid to engage in any critical thinking, is GUT SIZE.  Ever see a gorilla at the zoo?  They're frugivores, which is what we're allegedly supposed to be, according to the tree-hugging, estrogenic lunatics running every vegetarian website on the planet.  Gorillas have gigantic guts, which are necessary for them, due to the fact that all of the vegetation they eat needs to ferment as part of the digestive process.  Stomach size is markedly different between us and other great apes- humans' stomach small intestine, and colon are  10-24%, 56-67%, and 17-23% of total gut volume in humans, while for orangs and chimps it is 17-20%, 23-28%, 52-54% in orangs and chimps, respectively. In other words, they have massive colons to support fermentation of vegetation, whereas we have comparatively large stomachs, to digest more meat.(Milton, pp 100-102)  Humans and chimps split from the same ancestral tree 2.5 million years ago, and spurred on the path to a belly 40% smaller than the mostly vegetarian chimpanzee, and a brain 3 times larger. (Paleo Diet, p 38)  Thus, even though early hominids had teeth very similar to the modern gorilla, (EHD 43), modern humans have changed drastically.

Australopithecus afarensis.  Doesn't look much like modern human, either

• "There is no more authoritative source on anthropological issues than paleontologist Dr. Richard Leakey, who explains what anyone who has taken an introductory physiology course might have discerned intuitively--that humans are herbivores. Leakey notes that "[y]ou can't tear flesh by hand, you can't tear hide by hand.... We wouldn't have been able to deal with food source that required those large canines" (although we have teeth that are called "canines," they bear little resemblance to the canines of carnivores)." (Huffington Post).  -  This argument is one of the more fucking absurd arguments floating around, and it's a sad state of affairs that Richard Leakey somehow got caught up in this.  Neanderthals unequivocally ate a diet that consisted of virtually nothing but meat- 10000-12000 calories of it a day.  They also lacked sharp teeth and claws, but guess what?  They didn't need them, because THEY HAD STONE TOOLS.  In fact, hominids have been using tools for over 2 million years- plenty of time for them to develop the requisite biology for the digestion of meat.  (Science Daily)  Neanderthals had even bigger brains than modern humans, which is important due to the fact that their diet was so heavily meat-based, and the metabolic requirements of larger brains would necessitate calorically-dense food consumption, which means they had to eat meat, or they'd fucking die.  This is why gorillas are lazy motherfuckers, and exhibit very little social interaction, whereas humans have shit like Facebook, because they honestly believe they need a level of social interaction and personal involvement with near-perfect strangers that would make the world's greatest narcissists of bygone eras seem comparatively humble. (Milton p. 104)  The adoption of carnivory by Oldowan hominins can be linked directly to the evolution of the hominin brain and social systems, according to Robert Blumenschine, and the very fact that this was facilitated by the use of stone tools distinguishes us from non-human primates, as their lack of tool use limits the usefulness of their predation.  (EHD, p. 167-168)

• Plant eating creatures have the longest lifespans.  Really?  Not according to scientists who study humans.  According to scientists at USC, "t"The “meat-adaptive gene”, known as ApoE3, is unique to humans and is a variant of the cholesterol transporting gene, apolipoprotein E, which regulates inflammation and many aspects of aging in the brain and arteries."  (Futurity)  Additionally, the average lifespan of a crocodile is between 50 and 100 years, and whales live up to 200 years... which pretty much just takes an elephant-sized shit on the vegetarian animal lifespan theory.

Although vegetarianism and Christianity used to go hand in hand, vegetarianism is now the de facto diet of atheist radicals of the anarcho-communist/feminist/any asshole with a beret-ist variety, so perhaps a little evolutionary science for them...

People who read books know a fact that vegetarians do not- that at one point in history, the Earth's total population of humans dropped to between 5,000 and 10,000 individuals, due to the eruption of Mt. Toba in Sumatra, which killed off most of the available plant and animal life on Earth in 71,000 BC.  During this period of time, humans were confined to an extraordinarily small area of Africa that escaped glaciation, where they subsisted on a diet that was "approximately 50-70% meat and 50-30% plants, respectively."  This diet was necessitated by the die-off of plants and animals, and the lack of a varied diet that could have been otherwise obtained though plant gathering.  It was at this time that the Neanderthal diet came to consist of naught but meat, due to the complete lack of availability of edible vegetation, which likely lasted for at least 1000 years.(Plants/climate) 

If the fact that humanity was forced to subsist on a diet of primarily meat for over 1000 years is compelling, perhaps the size of our brains is.  I've already covered the fact that our encephalization necessitates the consumption of calorically dense foods, especially given the fact that our bodies are comparatively small (so we have less room for the digestion of low-energy foods).  Many anthropologists attribute the massive increase in hominid brain size over the last 4 million years with the introduction of far more meat into their diets, which began with homo erectus and continued with modern humans.  Others believe that it was the consumption of seafood, rife with Omega-3 fatty acids, that spawned this explosion in cranial capacity.  Either way, it was the consumption of meat that led to human encephalization.  A new theory has recently arisen, grabbed hold of like a life jacket on the Titanic as the veggies watch their inane theory sink like that ill-fated shitheap of a boat, that tuber played a role in human encephalization.  Comically, none of them have actually read the study on which they're now basing an argument shakier than a Jenga tower in an earthquake, as one of the proponents of this theory, Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham, believes that his evidence for this theory is scanty.  

Famous Athletes?
Wherever you find a vegetarian website, you'll find the same dumbass list of vegetarians and vegans trotted out for you.  The list, as you can imagine, is just as wrong as feeding soy formula to a male baby is- horribly, horribly wrong.  Bill Pearl and Andreas Cahling are held aloft as two bodybuilders who ate no animal protein and yet succeeded at their sport. These two men, however, ate a fucking boatload of animal protein at every meal. They might not have been sitting down to a steak that'd choke John Candy's fat ass to death, but Pearl ate a couple of dozen eggs a day and drank fucking GALLONS of milk a day, while Cahling ate nothing but open faced goat cheese sandwiches.(peep it)  Mind you, Cahling was a shitty bodybuilder, but that's beside the point. Tony Gonzalez abandoned veganism after a month of sucking, and Prince Fielder became a vegan after reading SB promptly (only to be blasted in the press as his batting average dropped lower than his daily protein consumption)  In addition to these guys, you'll find a comprehensive list of about ten other people, of whom you've likely heard of none, and for good reason- they've not done anything worth knowing about.  Thus, the argument that people flourish on this diet is invalid, as they'd have much more than a list of ten people, and far more accomplished people, at that, to proffer as proof of the legitimacy of this diet.  Oh, and to the ten people who are going to shout : "Mac Danzig could kick your ass!" SUCK IT.  If a 140 lb vegan would kick my ass in the octagon, I suppose I'd deserve the beating I received.  

The Verdict
Vegetarianism is clearly only embraced by people with severe mental illnesses who are also attention whores. They wish to foist their idiocy upon others due to the fact that they feel tremendously insecure about the poor life decisions they've made, and are incapable of defending themselves from the predations of others due to their poor dietary decisions.  As such, they'll attempt to convince anyone softheaded enough to be snowed by their half-baked arguments that they're correct, in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary.  As such, my friends, I believe it's high time we send them to the camps, where they belong.


Citations:
"Why meat-eating humans outlive apes."  Futurity.  The article posts preliminary findings scheduled for publication in a special PNAScollection on “Evolution in Health and Medicine” on Jan. 26.  http://www.futurity.org/science-technology/why-meat-eating-humans-outlive-apes/
"Stone Tool and Bone Find Earliest Ever Excavated." Science Daily.  Nov. 5, 2003. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/11/031105065322.htm
Milton, K. Primate diets and gut morphology: Implications for human evolution. IN: Food and Evolution: Toward a Theory of Human Food Habits, M. Harris and E.B. Ross, (eds.). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. pp. 93-116. http://nature.berkeley.edu/miltonlab/pdfs/kmilton_foodevolution.pdf
Bluejay, Michael.  "Humans are natural plant-eaters, according to our best evidence." June 2002.  http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/natural.html
Sutherlan, William.  "Plants/climate may be the key to Neanderthal Extinction."  http://ezinearticles.com/?Plants/Climate-May-Be-Key-to-Neanderthal-Extinction&id=4279873
Palmer, Jack.  "The Prime Movers in Hominid Encephalization" http://www.ulm.edu/~palmer/The%20Prime%20Movers%20in%20Hominid%20Encephalization.pdf
Costandi, Moheb. "Diet and brain evolution: another item on the menu." http://scitizen.com/evolution/diet-brain-evolution-another-item-on-the-menu_a-27-1088.html
Ungar, Peter. Evolution of the Human Diet.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Cordain, Loren.  Paleo Diet.  New York: Wiley, 2002.

Its ok.

That is it. I am declaring it.

Blogs are for interesting people, and when you aren't doing anything interesting, they feel like a lead weight. 

I am not quitting blogging, or anything drastic like that. Just putting it out there that times come and go where I am bored and bored people are boring. Bored yet?

I think I need to try something new with this blog, because its a dull advertisement space for my Etsy shops, which I also find incredibly dull these days. I don't produce any design or product when I am bored.

So there it is. I am bored of me. At least this me. Just part of the insane freakout that is my rapid aging.

At least it made me make this graphic....

Stay tuned. Or whatever.

Vegetarianism and Veganism- The Best Indicators of Severe Mental Illness Since the Tinfoil Hat

When I lived in Tucson, I was entertained on my daily walk to and from class everyday by a woman who seems to have been the perverse conjuring of HG Wells and Charles Dickens, and then basted in a delicious Alex Jones-esque broth of irrationality.  The woman, whose name I never obtained, spent her days not panhandling, and not even badgering passersby, but actually screaming at them until they threw money at her and fled in terror.  She had filed her teeth to points, had a tan deeper than any of the douchetards on Jersey Shore, and wore a curious amalgamation of actual clothing and random street detritus that would not have seemed out of place in one the Road Warrior.  The best part, however, was her hair, which was thickly matted dreadlocks that had been spraypainted a rainbow of colors, and then braided with tinfoil.  I realize that at this point, the woman sounds impossibly absurd, but there she was, every day on University Ave., screaming at stop signs, or anyone standing in front of her.  When she was coherent, which was remarkably infrequent, I'd ask her questions.  One day, I gave her a dollar, and made her promise me that she'd spend it on crack.  She cackled wildly, which actually frightened me (a person with teeth filed to points, laughing, seems like they're preparing to gnaw your fucking leg off), replied that one couldn't buy much crack with a dollar (an astute observation), and stated that she intended to buy green beans.  I mentioned that she could get a burger from Carl's Jr. up the street if she had some change, but she replied that  she "don't eat that shit."  Intrigued, I pressed her a bit, and came to find that in spite of the teeth, she was a vegetarian.


You could have knocked me over with a feather.  I would think that a person used to eating refuse would lack such discerning tastes, but she pontificated at some length about the dangers of meat eating thereafter, which disabused me of my previously held notions about the homeless.   I mentioned that meat could hardly be worse for her than the shit she was absorbing from all of the paint on her scalp, but she simply cackled again and stomped off.  She was, I assure you, the most formidable vegetarian of all time- fuck Mac Danzig.  I would posit, however, that after meeting a variety of vegetarians and vegans, she's likely not the least sane of the lot, and probably closer to the mean than the outliers of this ridiculous and thoroughly insane sect of deluded dieters.  Luckily, after screaming at a group of tourists while quite literally foaming at the mouth, she threw a metal trashcan through a storefront and promptly got the shit kicked out of her by Tucson PD, and I never saw her again.  If only that was a microcosm of the vegetarian community, and they were all locked in camps now, as that woman is definitely chained up in a nuthatch somewhere for life.  Alas.

A History of Vegetarianism in the Western World

Obviously, vegetarianism's been around awhile in the East, since the Right-Hand Path fuckers in Buddhism and Hinduism have been studiously avoiding meat for millenia.  They didn't blather on at extraordinary length about the efficacy and superiority of their diet, however, and pretty much just stayed up in the mountains meditating, too weak to annoy anyone.  Thus, I shall focus on those who've badgered, cajoled, and berated us Westerners through the years, somehow managing to convince people that their diet is both healthy and ethical, the absurdity of which I shall address later in this post.


The root of this particular mental illness arose, oddly, in Christianity, though its roots go back to ancient Greece.  Prior to its adoption by Christian zealots, it was the diet popularized by the infamous nutbag Pythagoras, who while awesome with triangles, drowned students for making discoveries he couldn't while at the same time yammering on about the sacredness of animals' lives.  Yes, even in ancient Greece, vegetarianism was the purview of the completely unhinged.  Thereafter, people who were so super pissed for Jesus that they wanted to starve half to death got in on the game, discontented with the idea of someone suffering more for another god.  For those of you about to be fulled with righteous indignation, I'm not laying this at the feet of your Jewish messiah- it's his followers who are the fucking idiots.  Various Christian sects in the Middle Ages practiced asceticism and vegetarianism, but they were by and large wiped out in short order by Torquemada's merry band of slaughter-happy lunatics for the Lord, so their influence is at best negligible.(Flesh Inferno)  Freed from the steel-fisted chokehold of knights so angry for Jesus that it made them rape bitches and set babies on fire, people in the Renaissance picked up the torch of semi-starvation again and decided that it must've been cool, because pre-Christians did it, and they had central heating, unlike people in the Renaissance (actually, they didn't know it, but the Romans really did have central heating, about which Western civilization apparently forgot until the 18th and 19th centuries, as they were too busy slaughtering heretics and getting the plague).  

Vegetarianism wasn't really all that big a deal in the Renaissance, however, and was pretty much relegated to a couple of notable figures who apparently loved animals.  One guy who's held aloft by vegetarians as a pioneer of this era is Leonardo Da Vinci, which is pretty fucking amusing, because it's based on little more than hope.  People will try to tell you he was an avowed vegetarian, which is awesome, given that their staunch belief in this "fact" is based on one sentence written about him-  "Certain infidels called Guzzaratida Vinci."  The sentence was lifted from a letter written by Andrea Corsali, to one of Da Vinci's patrons, and was not echoed in any other writing by or about Da Vinci.  Though the evidence there is about as thin as a monomolecular blade out of a Warhammer book, vegetarians will yell all day long about how the smartest man ever was a vegetarian, but given that Da Vinci was a prolific writer and never addressed the subject, I would suggest taking that shit with a grain of salt.  And a steak.

It was getting depressing.

Post-Renaissance, the mantle of vegetarianism was taken up by those parties I mentioned before, the religious zealots.  Unconvinced that life sucks enough without suffering deprivation that would make modern-day Rwanda seem like a fucking Hedonism cruise ship, these fuckers got busy making life really suck, and decided to deprive themselves of sex, sleep, meat, and leisure time.  Oh, I'm not exaggerating, fuckers.  The Ephrata Cloister, founded in 1732 by one of the biggest assholes in the entire span of human history, Conrad Beissel, believed just that.  Beissel, fuckhead that he was, decided that people were living just a little bit too cushy in an era where smallpox was running rampant and we were still fighting Indians on a daily basis to prevent them from eating our children, and established the Cloister in Lancaster, Pa.  People living there were sworn to celibacy and vegetarianism, had to sleep on wooden benches with wooden blocks as pillows, and were allowed two 3 hour blocks of sleep a night, interrupted by a two hour period in which they had to go outside and wait for Jesus.  Seriously.  The rest of their day was spent in hard labor, because they figured that a homeless, jobless guy from ancient Mesopotamia who hung out with a whore and got people hammered on wine and gave them fish to eat would want them to live in a manner completely opposite of the way he lived, apparently.  Way to think it through, guys.  

Cheery guy, eh?

This type of idiocy was not uncommon, however, and was not confined to the US, as Reverend William Cowherd (1763–1816)  founded the Vegetarian Society in England in 1809.  This is considered to be the first modern vegetarian society, and also practiced total abstention from sex. (Vegetarian Society and IVU)  Though you and I would assume that the abstention was simply resultant to the precipitous drop in testosterone suffered by anyone who adopts a vegetarian diet, I guess these morons wanted to hedge their bets.  Thereafter, the Seventh-Day Adventists were founded, and they spawned a massive shitshow of vegetarianism that led to the modern vegetarian movement.  Foremost among their progeny was Sylvester Graham (July 5, 1794 – September 11, 1851), who advocated a nearly vegan diet consisting of whole grains, fruits, and veggies, and preached abstinence from both sex and masturbation throughout his life. While he did invent Graham crackers, this was the only positive thing the Presbyterian minister did in his short, shitty, sexless life. According to Wikipedia, "Grahamism was influential in thevegan movement. Sylvester Graham focused on meat and milk, which he believed to be the cause of sexual urges. In fact, he claimed animal byproducts produced lust; Grahamism thus rejected meat, animal byproducts, and alcohol in order to develop a purer mind and body", in addition to "white bread, feather beds, pork, tobacco, salt, condiments, tight corsets, nocturnal emissions, heavy clothing, and hot mince pie." So, the only thing that could help you in a life bereft of meat, masturbation, seasoned food, and sex would be to be so fucking hammered, at all times, that you thought you were dead, but that was out for him as well.  Wow.  

He needs a stabbing on general principle.

Graham was followed shortly by another Adventist, John Harvey Kellogg (February 26, 1852 – December 14, 1943).  Graham's foundation paid Kellogg's way through medical school, presumable to foment further interest in removing any and all pleasure from one's life in an effort to attain a mythical purity of soul.  As expected, Kellogg followed in Graham's footsteps, echoing the same diet and anti-sex, anti-masturbation nonsense. When not prescribing daily yogurt enemas, Kellogg was busy NEVER FUCKING HIS WIFE OF 40 YEARS, giving circumcisions sans anesthetic to teenage boys to curb "unnatural urges" or sewing their foreskins closed, and for the love of fuck, applying pure carbolic acid to the clitoris as a means of allaying "abnormal excitement" in broads.



Yes, these are the people who have brought the world vegetarianism.  Note, by the way, that they were not vegetarians because they thought it was natural, or because they thought it was necessarily the healthiest way to eat.  They ate it because they either loved animals too much to eat them, or because (ignoring the New Testament altogether... but Christians never cherry-pick verses, do they?) the Jewish God says in Genesis "Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed...to you it shall be meat."  Yes, that shit is flimsier than the reasoning behind calling Da Vinci a vegetarian, but a lack of tangible evidence isn't stopping the likes of David Icke, Alex Jones, Barbara Boxer, or vegetarians!

Next time: the best way to kill a vegetarian is to just sit back and watch him(or her in the case of the chick above) slowly starve, but alternatively, you could rip the arms off of his fallacious arguments and beat them to death with them.

Sources:
Whitechapel, Simon.  Flesh Inferno: Atrocities of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition.
"Ephrata Cloister" http://www.ephratacloister.org/history.htm
Vegetarian Society.  "History of Vegetarianism."  http://www.vegsoc.org/info/developm.html
Twigg, Julia.  "THE VEGETARIAN MOVEMENT IN ENGLAND, 1847-1981 : A STUDY IN THE STRUCTURE OF ITS IDEOLOGY"  http://www.ivu.org/history/thesis/bible-christian.html