I am having some of the best workouts in months. Today I put up on the bench 325lbs ten times. Seems like I am setting little PRs as the days go by. I had been stalled, and I mean STALLED at 300-315 for about 13 months. I could put up 300, 315, 325, and 350 once in any given workout but would be completely stalled out at one rep at each never reaching a full two reps. ODD but true. In the past 8 months I have been hitting the Cybex assisted pull-up station every other day working up to my body weight. I have definitely reaped dividends from this practice.

Today was the first day I actually felt my lats whilst benching. Not only that but the more I focused on tightening them the easier the weight went up. I think in all honesty that 405 is not too far away.

New Book for the Collection

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún is a previously unpublished work by J.R.R. Tolkien, written while Tolkien was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford during the 1920s and ‘30s, before he wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It makes available for the first time Tolkien’s extensive retelling in English narrative verse of the epic Norse tales of Sigurd the Völsung and The Fall of the Niflungs. It includes an introduction by J.R.R. Tolkien, drawn from one of his own lectures on Norse literature, with commentary and notes on the poems by Christopher Tolkien.

Gesta Gymnasium

Today was a great day in my squatting routine as I hoisted 525 lbs for a single rep full range.

strôngmn

Strong·man (strôngmn) n.: an intense sport of which the modern derivation is a direct descendant of the Scottish and Icelandic/Scandinavian test of manhood. A typical strongman competition is a test of strength, endurance, ingenuity and heart. It consists of events adopted from traditional Scottish Highland Games, variations of powerlifting, and Olympic lifting.

the habit of thinking

"The great intellectual tradition that comes down to us from the past was never interrupted or lost through such trifles as the sack of Rome, the triumph of Attila, or all the barbarian invasions of the Dark Ages. It was lost after the introduction of printing, the discovery of America, the coming of the marvels of technology, the establishment of universal education, and all the enlightenment of the modern world. It was there, if anywhere, that there was lost or impatiently snapped the long thin delicate thread that had descended from distant antiquity; the thread of that unusual human hobby: the habit of thinking."

G.K. Chesterton

two cow economics

Here are each of the basic economic philosophies explained in simple "two-cow" terms:

Communalism: You have two cows. You keep one and give one to your neighbor.

Communism: You have two cows. The government takes them both and--from time to time--provides you with sour milk.

Fascism: You have two cows. The government takes them and sells you the milk.

Liberalism: You have two cows. The government takes them both, shoots one, milks the other, pays you for the milk, and then pours it down the drain.

Socialism: You have two cows. The government taxes you to the point that you must sell them both in order to support a man in a foreign country who has only one cow which was a gift from your government.

Free-Market Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.

Centralized, Multi-National-Corporation

-Based, Government-Subsidized, Democratic Socialism: You have two cows. You sell one, force the other to produce the milk (government mandated homogenized and pasteurized for safety of course) of four cows and when it dies you write off the depreciation, hire a lobbyist, and garner a government bail-out and tax-breaks in order to purchase two new cows. Repeat.

Northernness

Pure [Northernness] engulfed me. . . . There arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself. . . . The distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss. . . . And at once I knew that to "have it again" was the supreme and only important object of desire