For chest and back I do 7 exercises, alternating between the two. I start with a machine type of bench press at 50 pounds. Then I go to a single-hand rowing machine where I do 60 pounds per arm. Next comes a seated, forward press where hands start at the sides and then push forward and inward until they almost touch directly in front of the breastbone. I do those at 90 pounds. Then I do a pulling exercise from a seated position, with arms in front and palms-facing grip, pulling handles down and somewhat backward--I do these at 100 pounds. The fifth exercise is another seated press, but with arms in a high chest position and pushing straight outward. The sixth exercise is a cable pull, pulling handles directly to the chest with back in a steady position and chest out, doing these at 110 pounds. The final exercise is a chest fly--starting with arms out to the sides and pushing the machines handles to the center and front of the chest, and I do 70 pounds. For all the chest presses, flys, and single-arm pulls, I do 4 sets to 15 reps or muscle exhaustion. For the other two back exercises I do 3 sets.

I'm headed out to Atlanta tomorrow morning and then up to Chattanooga for the weekend. Maybe this time I'll finally get to see the choo-choo. At the very least I expect to get to Distant Replays, and hopefully at some point a Shoney's breakfast buffet, and at some other point a big pile of barbecued meat. The event is the national championship of popular culture trivia, aka TRASHionals, and I am part of the group that runs the thing. The only things I can guarantee are fun questions, wackiness, and a lot of sub-referential humor. I can't wait to tell you all about it next week...

A couple of things that have been bugging me recently, and a couple of disturbing signs in my neighborhood:

• Bugging #1: Are there any polite ska bands? You only ever hear about the rude ones.
  
• Bugging #2: This has been bugging me forever, but why exactly was trucking Coors east of Texarkana considered bootlegging in Smokey and the Bandit?
  
• Sign #1: The bus bench where I get off the bus at night has an ad on it for Chris Nam, who is absolutely the picture of the overly smiley real estate agent in any cul-de-sac suburb in America (except, you know, more Korean than most). But the disturbing part is his slogan: "Everything I Touch Turns to Sold!" I have nothing to add here.
  
• Sign #2: A couple blocks down from me is something called the "Oriental Mission Church"--where the mission might once have been toward the "Orientals", and now it's by them. So they have this banner up for their Easter children's program, and here's the text in its entirety:
  "Jesus, How much do you love me" "THIS MUCH" Jesus said and then he spread out his arms and DIED ON THE CROSS. That's HOW MUCH Jesus loves you!

Yes, the red is in red. No, I'm not making any of this up. Yes, I have to go lie down for a while.
P.S.: Final thought for today: If I ever write a review of the real Rollerball, you'd best believe it will be in Westminster font.

Here's what abs/arms days looks like:

I start with the floor exercises. Four sets of 30 crunches, and every other time I do that I do them flat footed and alternately do them with knees at a 90-degree angle on an exercise ball. (Think medicine ball size, but lightweight.) The next exercise I do is leg lifts--3 sets of 20, with legs bent so that they form roughly a 45-45-90 triangle with the floor as the hypotenuse, if that makes any sense. It turns out these are a lot harder than straight-leg lifts. Then I do 3 sets of 15 of what I call "ax-handle crunches. In standard sit-up position, feet on the floor, it's a crunch to the middle and then one toward each side. Three crunches, then, is 1 rep. The last abs, and also lower back, exercise is called a "Good Morning" (liars!). Standing with knees locked, hold a barbell behind your neck and bend forward as far as possible, then straighten up again. I do 3 sets of 20 of these, and recently I've started adding token weight to the bar--5 pounds per side.

I follow this up with 3 or 4 arm exercises. In each of these I do 3 sets of 15 reps, or to muscle failure. The first exercise is a straight shoulder press, done on a machine with a slightly reclined seat. I do this machine at 60 right now. The next exercise is a standing cable triceps exercise. Standing facing the machine, I keep my elbows at my side and reach up to grab the bar with palms facing outward, and push straight down. I recently moved up to 100 pounds on these, a good news/bad news scenario. Good news: my triceps are pretty strong and getting very solid. Bad news: I'm risking seriously overdeveloping the back of my arms relative to the front. But that's better, I guess, than the shapeless lumps I used to have. Anyway, for biceps I do curls in one of three ways--with a cable like the triceps (roughly 60 pounds), with a 50-pound barbell, or the dreaded preacher curls at about 40 pounds. The key to the first two options is keeping elbows tight to your sides, not cheating them forward through the motion, and not leaning your back away from the motion. I'm not doing a particularly impressive amount of weight on the curls, but I'm building my biceps pretty successfully because I've done a good job at sticking to the strict form my former trainer instilled into me on curls. The last exercise I do about every third time--these are apparently called Upright Rows, except I do them with cables instead of a barbell, and at about 50 pounds.

After that, of course, is 35 minutes on the bike as described the other day. Next time I'll talk about the third of my exercise "days"--chest and back.

I got back to the gym for the first time since my trip this morning--I'm finally getting back on regular time now that I'm back from changing time zones, having the time change while I was there, and then changing back. Confused? Yeah, so was my equilibrium.

So I've been thinking for a long time that I might actually lay out some of my gym routine here sometime when I was stuck for blogging material, and you can guess what that means now.

Basically, I have three "days" that I try to do twice a week. When I'm super on-the-ball I actually manage to do so, and when I'm extra supr on-the-ball I go in on the 7th day for exercise bike only. My days are chest/back, abs/arms, and legs, and today was legs.

Legs days start with my cardio, which is 35 minutes on the exercise bike. It's the bike's "Cardio" setting, which is a three-minute warmup, a gradual 5-minute increase in resistance until you reach your target heart rate (mine is 140 bpm), and then for the remainder of the time the bike adjusts to keep you at that heart rate. Since my legs are my strong suit, I can do this at a pretty high resistance level, burning 450-to-500 calories in 35 minutes according to the bike's own stat-keeping, at between 80 and 90 rpm.

The next part is the part that will shock people who've known me for a while. For years I had a running gag line--"Stairs, my mortal enemy," and it was basically true. Now I do 5 of what I call "vertical wind sprints." The gym has a staircase that is 18 steps, a landing, then 19 steps. I take them two at a time, walk back down, and repeat. Stairs and I have, clearly, made a bit of a rapproachment.

Next I do machines. I start with squat presses. From a sitting position, you extend your legs upward at a 45-degree angle, with feet on a platform attached to a weight bar. At the top of the lift, your legs are fully extended; at the bottom, knees are at about a 90-degree angle, without letting your butt roll up off the seat. This is the same motion as a squat except seated rather than standing, so it's not so much of a core exercise, so it isolates the quadriceps and protects my bad feet (plantar fasciitis). Right now I do 8 sets of 15 reps each--4 at 360 pounds with feet apart followed by 4 at 270 pounds with feet together.

The other two machines I do are leg extensions--seated, the weight is relaxed with feet hanging straight down, and you lift by extending the legs to almost straight in front of you. I do 4 sets of 15 reps or until muscle failure (i.e. can't do another one in that set), currently at 75 pounds. Finally I do a lying leg curl which works the hamstrings, doing 3 sets of 15 at 80 pounds.

I finish off with two stretches. One seated, stretching forward to an extended leg, and the other lying backward with one leg extended and the other bent back under. I do each stretch on each leg for 30 seconds.

Total workout time, approximately 80 minutes. Tomorrow, abs and arms.

I got the strangest album out of the library today. It's filled with classic baseball tunes and oddities, and I finally heard the original of Talkin' Baseball. It's just not the same, though, without Mike Scioscia's tragic illness making us smile.

Oh yeah, and here's a really inaccurate book about the case I'm working on. I guess it must be a genre convention of true crime, but the totally made up conversations and internal monologues of people who didn't talk to the authors--and which most of the evidence contradict--started bugging me at about page 12, and they haven't let up. I'd tell you more if I could, but, you know, privilege and all.

I don't expect any more posts until at least Monday, because I'm going out of town this weekend for this.

Fox Sports West 2 (motto: "For when one channel of Van Earl Wright and Big Sky football just won't suffice") is currently showing something called "Laker Living Room". Basically, the concept is that you watch [owner's daughter/Phil Jackson main squeeze] Jeanie Buss, Mrs. Shaq, Mrs. Kurt Rambis, Lisa Leslie, and Leeann Tweeden (from the network) as they, um, watch the Laker game. It's kinda like watching Mystery Science Theater, if Joel, Mike and the bots were sleeping with Lee Van Cleef, Mamie Van Doren, and Roger Korman. And Lisa Leslie was there.

They actually started with a segment where they asked whether the various players "Got Game" based on how they dressed entering the arena. To the shock and dismay of none, everybody got game except for Devean George. This is officially the low point in the history of sports, TV, irony, the Los Angeles Basin, and round things.

I love the smell of popcorn popping, almost as much as I love the smell of cinnamon rolls baking.

Someone was making this stuff today in the break room at work; it didn't taste as good as it smelled, but then that wouldn't have been physically possible.

Sometimes you really learn something about yourself. Like when you type your name into googlism. They're right--I am responsible for over. (Meme courtesy of cybele.)

Googlism for: joe wright

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Oh yeah, in other news, big envelope from USC, small envelope from Berkeley. There are two plausible readings for the latter. One is that I'm going to Michigan, because law school admissions are highly structured and it's unlikely that one will get in a top 3 school if one has been rejected anywhere else. Two is that Berkeley is a special case because it is required by state law to have highly numbers-based admissions, so it can't take into account intangibles such as a good personal statement or experience working in law in the same way other schools can if they so choose. So this either tells me that I won't or that I might get into one of the big 3. So, as usual, my point is basically that I have no point.

Busy day: gym, IHOP, Amoeba, Hooters, Starbucks, Farmer's Market.

I'll elaborate.

I got back to the gym Monday morning after two and a half weeks off for annoyingly persistent headcold. I made it in there Tuesday and Wednesday too, then took Thrusday off because I had to work early in order to see the Sour 16 game. I didn't make it in Friday either, for no good reason at all, but I got up a 6 this morning and went right in.

Quick digression: until I left USC almost 2 years ago, I had been working with Omar, a personal trainer there, for close to two years. At our last session he gave me a copy of his training bible, the Governator's book. I've finally been reading it a bit this week, so this morning I tried some new exercises--specifically, Arnold presses and preacher curls. Suffice it to say I'm trying to type fast, because sometime soon my arms will be immobile for a day or two.

The IHOP/Amoeba/Hooters portion of the day came because Tom is in town for a wedding, so I played L.A. tour guide a bit today. We spent a good bit of time at the greatest record store anywhere, (TRASHionals attendees be very afraid--I did some prize shopping) and saw Hollywood, Koreatown, and Santa Monica a little more generally. After leaving Tom in Santa Monica, I popped my head into the new Hear Music Starbucks on the Promenade--an interesting idea, even though I didn't buy anything. Then I went to a normal Starbucks, where I pretty much read The Heat Is On cover-to-cover. I don't think it's happening right now, but I could easily go on a Chester Himes kick; I've been wanting to pick up some of his mysteries ever since I first encountered Grave Digger and Coffin Ed in the film Cotton Comes To Harlem.

Finally, I just came back from the first LA Blogs get together for Angeleno bloggers. Good times. I got to meet some interesting people such as Cybele, wildbell, and Jay, and got to hear Farmer's Market karaoke ranging from not good to not bad. Other than the 20 miserable minutes spent trying to park, it was a fun outing, and hopefully it will fulfill my primary purpose in going--being inspired to start writing more frequently again.