Sperwer's Log [37'34"N / 126'58"E]
According to Korea’s own Chosun Ilbo, Korea’s electronics firms are lagging behind their competitors, including the supposedly already surpassed Japanese. I wonder whether this little question mark will make it into one of the posts of the Korea Babbitt Brigade over at the Marmot’s Hole. Not.
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I’ve been thinking about new year’s resolutions for a few weeks now. Even though we’re now ten days in I still haven’t settled on any.
In the meantime, though, I have started another cycle of strength training. Yesterday was leg day, the focus of which – naturally – was squats. Ten sets. Five warm-ups: 20×45; 10×95; 10×135; 10×185 and 10×205. Five working sets: 10×225 across. Total weight moved: 20,250 pounds. Accessory work included 50 preliminary body weight squats and 5 knock-on sets each of quad extensions, glute/ham extensions and hamstring curls.
There is simply no other exercise, and certainly no machine, that produces the level of central nervous system activity, improved balance and coordination, skeletal loading and bone density enhancement, muscular stimulation and growth, connective tissue stress and strength, psychological demand and toughness, and overall systemic conditioning than the correctly performed full squat.
So says Rippetoe in Starting Strength. All of which sounds true to me, especially the part about central nervous system activity — I didn’t get much sleep for all the buzzing in my CNS last night (although that might also have been a result in part of working out late in the day and taking a lot of caffeine along with the B vitamins and amino acids in my workout drink).
In any event, the lack of quality REM sleep didn’t stop me from going back to the gym to get some more today — dead-lifts, in particular – an exercise that Rippetoe describes as
… more functional in that it’s very hard to imagine a more useful application of strength than picking heavy *h*t up off the ground.
Whatever the functionality of dead-lifts and the supposed superiority of squats in stimulating the CNS, it’s dead-lifts that generally kick the ass of my nervous system, and today was no exception
This afternoon, after 25 roman chair back extensions and 25 side extensions on each side, I did ten sets. Five warm-ups: 20×135, 10×185, 10×205, 10×225 and 10×225. Five working sets: 10×235, 10×235, 7×235, 7×235, 5×235. Total weight moved: 20,265 pounds. I might have gotten more but my grip was failing on the last three sets, preventing me from completing a full ten reps.
So I dead-lifted only about 15 pounds more than I squatted yesterday, but it was much more stressful. By the end, my forearms and hands were spasming and my lower back was twitching and I had a terrific headache for a few moments. It may have been the knock-on effect of doing deadlifts a day after having done squats and not having gotten enough rest, but it’s pretty consistent with my past experience. Next time, though, I’m breaking up squat and dead-lift days.
Finished off with 5 sets of pull-ups, 10 reps each, with a 45 pound offset – again because my grip was still shot from the dead-lifts; (still it’s obvious I’m going to have to work harder on pull-ups, as I wouldn’t have been able to do unassisted body-weight reps; it’s been too long since I did).
Looking forward to a good night’s sleep and a day off the iron tomorrow. Maybe just some serious cardio intervals. I’m carefully considering doing one or more of Lyle MacDonald’s Stubborn Fat Solution Protocols to get rid of the lower back quarter panel grab handles that are the only remaining subcutaneous fat deposits of any significance that I have and that have to go if I want to get down to 10%BF and/or have any sort of respectable V-taper
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You can easily learn more about Dustin Carter’s story by searching the internet. As far as I’m concerned, these images are ’nuff said.
What else do you need to nudge you out of whatever motivational rut you’re in?
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I would have expected this to have made it into a separate entry or at least that someone to have flagged this in this week’s Open Thread of The Marmot’s Hole; but since it seems to have been overlooked –
B.R. Myers takes the leftist Korean “intelligentsia”[sic], in the person of novelist Hwang Sok-yong, to the woodshed in his NYT review of Hwang’s “The Old Garden”. Here’s the money stroke of the switch:
The striving for simplicity and emotionality among students bewildered by long reading lists is, as the historian Ernst Nolte once wrote, “almost disgustingly easy to explain.” Harder to understand is why a man of Hwang’s age and experience would want to present this striving as something the world needs more of. … The hunch that we are dealing here with an ideology even sillier than Marxism is confirmed in one of Yoon Hee’s lines: “It’s a fight that has continued for over a hundred years since we opened up the port.” In other words, Korea’s problems began when it ceased to be the Hermit Kingdom. The penny drops: this is how the students could have fought so heroically against a pro-American dictator in Seoul, yet found so little cause to criticize the paranoid nationalist thugs in Pyongyang.
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Well, September is here again, the latest annual physical is out of the way, and it’s time to start another 12 week cycle of iron slinging.
Let’s run the opening numbers:
Height: 189cm
Gross Weight: 102.82kg
Mineral Mass: 4.52kg
Lean Mass: 85.80kg (Protein Mass: 22.90kg /Fluid Mass: 62.90kg)
Fat Mass: 12.5kg
Body Fat %: 12.16%
Resting Pulse 52
This go-round I’m also creating a photographic record of the jump-off point. (Unfortunately, any improvements in three months’ time will be much less dramatic than those achieved to date compared with a starting point 3+ years ago that included 30% body fat, and ~ 23kg more fat and 16kg less muscle than today. I regret that I don’t really have any pics to document that transformation.)
First-up: portrait of a sixteen inch gun:
Portrait of a 16 Inch Gun
The mandatory ab isolation:
AB Pack
And a few full clevelands:
In the Gym
Jeans
Jeans 2
Locker Follies
Locker Follies 2
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The Associated Press has an interesting piece up about the 40th re-union of the crew of the ill-fated USS Pueblo, now (still) displayed by the NORKS as a war trophy and an incitement to anti-Americanism more than 40 years after the NORKS seized the unarmed vessel in international waters on January 23, 1968. The NORKS moved it out of Pyeongyang to Nampo when Ambassador James Kelly visited in 1999, but returned it to Pyeongyang later, where it is moored in the Daedong River in the center of the city. The NORKS reportedly also more recently made an offer to repatriate the Pueblo in exchange for the obeisance visit of another senior US Government official and the remittance of suitable tribute extortion aid. Some interesting context: According to the Wikipedia article referenced earlier, facts have come to light that indicate that USS Pueblo was captured by North Korea at the instigation of the Soviet Union, which was seeking a cryptographic machine onboard to match with a key provided to the Soviets by the spy John Walker. And, further historically-speaking, the Pueblo Incident has been played by the NORKS for all its worth as an echo of the infamous M/S [S/S ?] General Sherman Incident. In 1866 a privately-owned American-registered merchantman, the General Sherman, sailed uninvited up the Taedong River toward Pyongyang, where she ran aground and was destroyed by Korean shore batteries and troops, who burned the ship and killed the entire crew. Kim Il Sung claimed that his great-grandfather was involved, fabricating a tale that portrays his great grandfather Kim Ung-u as a brave fighter against the “U.S. imperialists,” who led the attack on the General Sherman, and thereby purportedly initiated Korean anti-American struggles in the 1880s. Apart from the absence of any tenable evidence of Kim’s grandfather’s involvement, another small problem with that account is that the General Sherman, although owned by a private US commercial shipping firm, was operating under charter to the British trading firm Meadows and Co., based in Tientsin (present day Tianjin), China. So it was the Brits, not the Americans, and certainly no US government entity, who actually initiated and provided the motive for this ill-begotten commercial foray into Korea that, by all accounts, was as much an attempt to extort as offer trade. Because the General Sherman was US-flagged, however, the Korean destruction of the ship and killing of its crew resulted in a US inquiry into the matter under color of the well-established right of nations to protect their commercial shipping. And that first brought Korea to the attention of Admiral (then Captain) Robert J. Schufeldt who was detailed six months later in 1867 to take the USS Wachusett to investigate the fate of the General Sherman and its crew. Schufeldt’s voyage was hampered and then abandoned on account of bad weather; but later he posed as the very self-consciously styled “Perry of Korea”, “opening” Korea to the United States by negotiating the May 1882 [Chemulpo (i.e., Incheon)] Treaty of Amity and Commerce that laid the (rather unstable) foundation for the subsequent very checkered history of US – Korean relations.
(originally posted 2008.09.07)
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One of my principal avocations since embarking on the quest for “abs @ 56″ has been moving large amounts of weight around – initially mostly my own 
– but for awhile now mainly the iron variety. I also spend a fair amount of time cruising the information superhighway for technical and motivational material. Sometimes, among the abundant roadkill, I even find something useful, like this helpful delineation from the publishers of Arthur Dreschler’s classic Weightlifting Encyclopedia of the differences among “weightlifting”, “weight training”, “resistance training”, “bodybuilding” and “powerlifting”:
Definitions of Weightlifting:
There are several categories of people who exercise with weights. These categories are often referred to as: weight lifting, weightlifting, Weightlifting, weight training, bodybuilding, powerlifting, lifting, Olympic lifting, Olympic-style weightlifting, strength training and resistance training. Let’s clarify the differences.
Weightlifting: Weightlifting, weight lifting and weightlifting all have a “generic” meaning which refers to the activity of lifting weights. To those who are well versed in the use of weights, the word weightlifting has a particular meaning. It refers to the Olympic sport of Weightlifting, which tests strength a power through two methods of lifting a barbell overhead – the Snatch and the Clean and Jerk. Weightlifting is the only Olympic sport involving weights, which is why it is sometimes referred to as Olympic lifting or as Olympic-style lifting, or Olympic-style weightlifting.
Weight Training: Weight training refers to any activity which involves the use of weights. The term weight training is commonly used in referring to people who lift weights but not for the purpose of competing in bodybuilding, powerlifting or weightlifting (although many people lift weights as a means for improving their performance in another sport). Many people who lift weights refer to themselves as “lifters” for short.
Resistance Training: Resistance training is an even broader term than weight training because resistance can be supplied by weights, machines, rubber strands and any number of other devices that resist the movement of the exerciser. It is nearly impossible to engage in any vigorous resistance training without getting stronger as a result. However, strength training is a means of training with resistance that is focused on improving strength, as compared with muscle size (although people who train for strength are often seeking increased muscle size as well).
Bodybuilding: Bodybuilding is a sport or activity in which the primary objective is to develop the size of the skeletal muscles. Bodybuilders focus on other areas as well, such as developing all of the muscles proportionally (symmetrically), minimizing body fat and increasing their strength. Because bodybuilders focus on muscular development, that is the main thing they achieve. Strength, for example, tends to take a back seat to size (though many bodybuilders are very strong).
Powerlifting: Powerlifting is a great sport that was conceived as a pure test of strength. And it tests strength about as well as Olympic-style Weightlifting. The sport that consists of three events: squat, bench press and deadlift. Powerlifters are very strong because they focus on developing that capacity exclusively. Overall, the strength of powerlifters very close to that of Olympic-style weightlifters. However, powerlifting is not an Olympic sport and it has multiple “federations” which govern it, so there can be multiple “world champions” each year (Olympic-style Weightlifting has only one international governing body and one world champion per weight class worldwide). Powerlifting is also not practiced as widely as weightlifting. For all these reasons, the level of competition tends not to be as high in powerlifting as it is in weightlifting, which is why competitive Weightlifters, as a group, have earned the right to call themselves the strongest athletes alive. More importantly, no other athletes approach the strength of weightlifters and powerlifters, as the men and women who compete in these sports are totally focused becoming the strongest athletes in the world. Moreover, they compete on measurable events which are standardized worldwide, so that performances can be reasonably compared. You won’t see these athletes flexing their muscles or lifting tree trunks on “pay-per-view”, but they are quietly driving the levels of human performance to all time highs.
The Weightlifting Encyclopedia is available new for about the same price Amazon has it on offer for used from Weightlifting Org., Inc.
If some of the knuckleheaded, lightfooted Larries commenting over at The Marmot’s Hole here and here had some even purely intellectual grasp of what’s involved, they wouldn’t be so condescendingly glib about the recent triple world and Olympic record-setting accomplishments of Korea’s female gold medalist in Olympic lifting at the Beijing Games, Jang Mi-ran [장 미 랑].
Jang Mi_Ran Setting Olympic and World Record 2008
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Andrei Lankov’s latest, in his ongoing series of interesting columns about Korean history in The Korea Times, is about the assassination and historical status of Korean “freedom fighter” Kim Gu.
One of the things that Lankov fails to mention, though, is that Kim Gu himself – who looks more like the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland – had quite a record of political assassinations, and old-fashioned murder, not all of the victims of which were ostensible Japanese colonialist oppressors of Korea.
In fact, his first victim was an ordinary Japanese civilian, a traveling salesman of a Nagasaki trading company on a business trip to Chemulpo (Incheon), whom Kim killed in an effort to make a name for himself as an avenger of the brutal and senseless murder of Korea’s Empress Myeongseong (Queen Min). She was assassinated in the so-called Eulmi Incident, of October 8, 1895, by a group of Japanese ruffians and Japanese and Korean troops organized by the rogue Japanese minister to Korea, Miura Goro.
He also excelled at the elimination of rival Korean politicians, such as Song Chin-U, editor of the Tonga Ilbo and leader of the Korea Democratic Party in 1945 [Eckert, Lee, Lew, Robinson & Wagner, Korea Old and New: A History (351)], and he is likely to also have been involved in the elimination of the moderate leftist leader Yo Un-hyong.
More perspective on Kim can be gained from three more or less mainstream Korean histories picked off the shelf at random:
The Korean Independence Party [of Kim Ku) carried out terrorist activities against the Japanese. Yi Pong-ch’ang, one of its members, attempted to assassinate the Japanese emperor at the Sakurada Gate in Tokyo, and another member, Yun Pong-gil, threw bombs at the Japanese attending a celebration of the Japanese emperor’s birthday at Hungk’ou Park in Shanghai on April 29, 1932, wounding many prominent Japanese such as Shigemitsu Mamoru, General Shirakawa Yoshinori, and Admiral Nomura Kichisaburo. Shirakawa and another Japanese died of wounds. Andrew Nahm, Korea: Tradition and Transformation (315).
Whereas the independence movement in Manchuria was carried on mainly through armed resistance, there were those Korean exiles in China who adopted terrorist tactics in their fight against Japan. The best known organizations of this sort were Kim Won-Bong’s Uiyoltan (Righteous Brotherhood) and Kim Ku’s Aeguktan ( Patriots Corps). The bombing and assassination plots carried out by these groups were almost too numerous to count, but the best known are the terrorist attacks on the offices of the Oriental Development Company and other targets in Seoul in 1926 by Na Sok-chu of the Uiyoltan, the attempt to assassinate the Japanese emperor by hand grenade in 1932 by Yi Pong-ch’ang (1908-1932) of the Aeguktan, and the bomb set off by Yun Pong-gil, also a member of the Aeguktan, in Shanghai’s Hung-kuo Park in 1932, killing or wounding a number of high-ranking Japanese military and civil officials. Ki-Baik Lee, A New History of Korea (365-66).
The Korean exile movement in China had remained factionalized through the 1930s. Kim Ku trained military forces and organized assassinations and bombings in China and Korea proper. Eckert, Lee, Lew, Robinson & Wagner, Korea Old and New: A History (324).
After the Manchurian Incident of 1931, the Provisional Government entrusted Kim Gu with the authority to carry out "special operations" [emphasis added] against Japan. Kim Gu organized the Korean Patriot Corps (Aegukdan) in Shanghai in 1926. In January 1932, Yi Bong-chang, a member of Kim Gu’s Patriot Corps, attempted to assassinate the Japanese Emperor with a hand grenade, but failed. However,, on April 29 of the same year, Yun Bong-gil, also a member of Kim Gu’s Patriot Corps, successfully detonated a bomb in Shanghai’s Hung-kou Park, killing or wounding a number of high-ranking Japanese and civil officials. Lee Hyun-hee, Park Sung-soo and Yoon Nae-hyun, New History of Korea (557-558).
All of which leaves one feeling less than sympathetic for Kim when he was killed by An Du-hui, probably at the instigation of Syngman Rhee (although, as Lankov observes, that probably will never be proven).
The interesting aspect of Kim’s historical status mentioned by Lankov is the approbation in which he is held by all segments of South Korean society, including the Left, notwithstanding that he was a staunch anti-communist and anti-leftist — a fact that could be a hook for an interesting exploration of the strange political permutations resulting from the growth and development of modern nationalism in Korea since the late 19th century.
Addendum: The question of Kim Gu’s status as a terrorist caused something of a stir not long ago when a visiting English professor of Korean Studies called him such in a summer session at Korea University, as reported here and here and commented on at legnth by the usual suspects (including yours truly) at The Marmot’s Hole here and here.
Cross Reference: Gusts of Popular Feeling has an interesting picture of Kim Gu’s funeral on July 5, 1949, along with the New York Times article about him on the occasion, here. One of his commenters reminds us that Kim was one of the Presidents of the Provisional Government of Korea in exile in China, in which capacity he declared war against Germany and Japan in December 1941.
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Another year, another campaign season. I’m making another effort to start and sustain a blog and, to speed me on my way — at least content-wise, while I struggle with the latest technical trivia of Wordpress, Thesis, html, php, etc. – I’m reposting some material from the past. So it’s back on the warpath to the call of an old theme – Once more unto the breach:
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our Expat dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of soju kimchi breath blows in our faces,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
…
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest weigukin.
…
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in darun nara, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
…
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Henry V, Act III (With apologies to the Bard).
“Once more unto the breach” is the speech Henry gives to rally his men at the Battle of Hafleur (september 22, 1415), where the English made their initial landing in France in Henry’s undertaking to reclaim the historical lands of the English throne in France and lit the fuse on The Hundred Years War. That’s (a young) Laurence Olivier as Henry V in the 1944 film of eponymous title; here’s a clip from the movie:
More famous today, in no small part because of its play in the oft-rerun series The Band of Brothers, is Henry’s speech at the Battle of Agincourt (October 25, 1415), which took place on a small plain between the woods on either side where were located the towns of Agincourt and Tramecourt – and the companies of English and Welsh longbowmen who treated the charging French knights to the sort of enfilading fire from both flanks that the British were to experience centuries later in Crimea during The Charge of the Light Brigade:
He that shall live this day, and see old age, Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’ Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.’ Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, But he’ll remember, with advantages, What feats he did that day. Then shall our names, Familiar in his mouth as household words- Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester- Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered- We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition; And gentlemen in England now-a-bed Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day
Kenneth Branagh did a relatively good job of it in his rendition of Henry V:
– better to my taste anyway than Laurence Olivier’s stylization of it:
.
The most moving version, though, is that delivered not by an actor but men who did live another of those days (and more than a few more) to see old age and honor the memory of their comrades (from Band of Brothers):
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