Well my trousers are feeling looser so I must be doing ok.
(no I don’t know why I’ve apparently gone Scottish)
Lost: 3.4lbs
Lost so far: 10.6lbs
Average Weekly Loss: 3.5lbs
Weight: 293.6lbs (20st 13lbs)
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Author: latepaul
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L3 Week 2 – Big Week
Lost: 7.6lbs
Lost so far: 7.2lbs
Average Weekly Loss: 3.6lbs
Weight: 297lbs (21st 3lbs)
Well I knew that I’d have a better week than last week – mostly because I’m being strict on the counting and on the exercise – but I never realised it would be this good. That’s my largest single weekly loss ever. It puts me back under 300lb, which is nice. That was my first milestone target.
Still a long way to go and experience suggests it’ll slow down quite quickly but I can’t deny I’m happy with that.
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L3 Week 1 – Counting Counts
So, a little late, here’s the results of week 1 of L3. The reason for that is that I made a concerted effort to finish Under the Dome this week and so most of the time I’ve either been reading or certainly not feeling like updating the blog.
Lost: -0.4lbs
Weight: 304.6lbs (21st 7lbs)
Not great eh? Well it’s partly the fact that I started off a bit slack – in my own mind I was ‘easing back into it’, I was eating up the remainder of any treat food I’d had left over. Most of that I probably could have absorbed but by the end of the week I slipped into an over indulgent weekend.
What I realised was that I needed to get tough with myself again. Having a week like that – well the early part of it – is ok when you’re a few months into a diet, but if you start off that way and you slip, well the place to slip to is more extreme.
So I’m back to a tougher regime:
- actually counting calories (including measuring) and not relying on what I know looks right
- sticking rigidly to limits – once I start allowing myself to go a little over my daily allowance, or skip exercise, then it’s a slippery slope.
The good news is – early unofficial week 2 reports predict I’ll be looking at a healthy loss.
Yay so I finished my first book of 6000 pages 2011. It’s almost April and only one book? Well fortunately it was a long one. A very long one.
This is actually the first Stephen King book I’ve ever read. I may have dipped into Salem’s Lot after it was on TV as a teenager but I’ve never read a full novel. Mostly that was because I didn’t really respond to horror as a genre. Well this isn’t horror (well… but we’ll get to that) and I’d read the blurb and it sounded interesting. Plus M. had read it.
Under the Dome is about a small New England town that wakes up one morning to find that an invisible barrier has been placed all around it. The story then revolves around the efforts of the people in the town to cope with effects of being cut off from the rest of the world. They have to survive with whatever resources – including people – that they have. The book has a lot of different characters but follows about half a dozen closely. Ultimately the question becomes whether they can discover what the Dome is and whether they can get rid of it.
No wait. That’s not ultimately what the book is about. It’s the question we finally get to at the end of it, but the book is really about what happens to these people when they’re forced to survive on their own. And it ain’t pretty. It becomes a sort of Lord of the Flies for adults.
All of which I found quite interesting and fun – for the first 400 pages or so – but in the back of my mind I wanted to know more about the Dome. I decided it was one of three broad possibilities based on what genre this book was part of –
- the ‘thriller’ answer – the Dome is put there by some shadowy government agency, or foreign power. The reason why here particularly will perhaps be connected to one of the characters’ pasts.
- the SciFi answer – aliens put it there and by the end of the book we’ll meet them.
- the Supernatural answer – it’s some ghost or human with spooky powers doing it.
The trouble is that that isn’t what King was interested in telling me about. The Dome is just a macguffin to set up the trapped situation. So whilst he does finally explain where the Dome came from and why, 95% of the novel is not about that at all. Perhaps it’s a tiny bit of a spoiler to say that but if I’d known that I may not have read the book. (Although it does occur to me now that the fact the book’s called ‘Under the Dome‘ and not ‘The Dome‘ is a clue.)
I also felt that whilst the story of how they folks cope was interesting – it went on too long. An example from early on in the book is the various incidents as people discover the Dome. Mostly these are accidents as people hit the invisible barrier, whether in their cars or on foot. There a wide variety of these recounted in detail. After about 5 or 6 I had gotten the idea – it was a barrier, it caused accidents, it affected a lot of folks in the town – but King describes probably 2 or 3 times that many incidents. It’s like if you were making a movie and in it there’s a scene where a crowd turns nasty. You’d hire a lot of extras sure, and you’d film a few close ups of individuals shouting and baying for our hero’s blood (say) – but once you’d shown a few of these shots cut with wide shots of the crowd you’d have created the necessary impression. No need to labour the point.
King is very good at creating tension in the plot, so you do sort of want to know what happens next. It’s just that a lot of that was about detail and you could sort of see where it was all going.
Without being spoilery there were things about the ending that I didn’t like. It’s like at a certain point he feels he’s done what he set out to do and then thinks “how can I wrap this up quickly?” Well the way he chose was effective, even spectacular, certainly a climax for the novel, but for me personally, a little unsatisfying.
6/10 – there’s a lot of ‘under’ before you get to the ‘dome.
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L3 Week 0 – The New Normal
*sigh*
Seriously.
*really big sigh*
OK. I’m back at the point where I want to start trying to lose weight again. And having just eschewed flubbage another cute term for the project isn’t necessarily consistent, but who ever said I was that? Still “L3” is nicely cryptic and terse.
Plus I couldn’t think of anything better.
I’m writing this mainly to register my weight at this new starting point. Which is 304.2lbs. (At least I think so – my scales seem to fluctuate more than they used to – but then maybe I’m nearer the edge of their tolerance)
Anyway I about a stone lighter than I was two and a half years ago when I first tried this. In other words I’m nearly back to what I was. And I feel uncomfortable and I get out of breath easily. So sooner or later I felt I had to re-start the diet/exercise.
So it’s become the new normal, the new default position. At least for what I should be doing. Once I didn’t really think about it and ate what I wanted. Now, even if I do that, I’m doing it as someone who feels I really should be dieting. I’ve become the kind of person I used to feel sorry for – someone either denying themselves or feeling guilty for not denying themselves.
But I feel I don’t have a choice – as I said it’s uncomfortable being this overweight.
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The Death of Flubbage
I’ve decided to ditch the term flubbage and start allowing myself to blog on the topics I used it to describe.
Flubbage is a typical me word – it’s an attempt to be cutesy, slightly silly and self-consciously quirky. And whilst I can be all those things that’s not all I am. And if I categorise all writing on my personal life as such then aren’t I being a little too self-deprecating?
OK it’s still true that most random visitors here probably aren’t that interested in my life per se. But that doesn’t make it, or what I feel and therefore write about it, trivial.
Besides which, making it a good read is at least as much about the writing as the topic. Which isn’t to say I think I can necessarily wow the RVs but then I’m not sure my reviews of books, TV and movies are either.
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6000 Pages – 2010 Results
So here are the results for the 2010 “6000 Pages” project. I’m referring to it that way because I intend to do it again in 2011 with pretty much the same rules. First a couple of things I need to clarify before I can get on to the fun part – the numbers.
High Fidelity was the last book I completed in 2010 but the rules allowed me to count one book that I was part way through. In fact I was part way through 8 books so I really need to pick one as the one that “counts”. I had not expected for this to be the case but I guess the freedom of starting a new book instead of struggling on with something I wasn’t getting into was too much. However as I re-read the rules from the beginning of the year I see
Only one unfinished book counts. I expect this to be the last one. It means I don’t have to race to finish whatever I happen to be in the middle of on 31-dec (unless I want to)
So the intent was not simply to count an unfinished book to gain extra points, but to count a book I was going to finish anyway. This being the case I’m going to pick not the unfinished book with the highest page count (The Illearth War) but one I intend to finish in 2011 (Solar).
| “Some Numbers” | ||
| 2009 | 2010 | |
| Total reading time | 98:23:00 | 107:38:00 |
| Mins per/day | 16 | 17 |
| Pages/hour | 50 | 51 |
| Pages read | 4924 | 5357 |
| Pages read that count | 4924 | 5050 |
| Pages/day | 13 | 15 |
| Books completed | 18 | 14 |
| Average book length | 274 | 352 |
| One book every … days | 20.25 | 26 |
| Reading days | 71 | 85 |
| Time/reading day | 01:23:00 | 01:15:00 |
| Pages/reading day | 69 | 64.9 |
| Longest gap | 54 | 45 |
| Average rating for book | 7 | 7.6 |
So you can see that by most measures I did better this year than last – I read more often, read more pages (if not more books), the gaps between reading days were short and spent more time reading. I enjoyed it more too – which is true both from my overall impressions and from the fact that my average rating has gone up. So I must have scored more points right?
Er not quite.
The scoring rules are quite simple. First we take my “pages that count” score and each 100 pages above/below scores/deducts a point. Well I read 5050 pages so rounding up I can give myself 1 point.
Second take the number of reading days and compare to 85. In fact I read on 85 days so 0 points either added or deducted.
Then I get points for average book length. 352 is in the range 326-375 so I score 2 points.
Giving me an overall score of 3. Which doesn’t compare too well with last year’s 17 for “25 books”.
But hang on I said
the new scoring rules […] are designed to give me a stretch, to hopefully allow a similar score to last year for a similar amount of effort (so I can aim to ‘beat’ my score, even if the basis is entirely different)
and yet my “similar” but slightly better efforts (as shown in the table) give me significantly less. I can only conclude that despite my stated intent I miscalculated. I am therefore retroactively changing the rules so that I start with a “base” of 15 points. That seems reasonable given that I can potentially lose points for all three of the main criteria. And 15 seems fair because it gives me an overall score of 18points – which means I “beat” last year’s score but only by 1 point, which seems to reflect what’s shown by the more detailed figures.
Slightly Revised Rules
So, mainly for clarity, here are the rules for 2011.
1. Start with 15 points
2. For every 100 pages above/below 5000 add/deduct a point. Round up if 50 or above and down if below.
3. For every “reading day” above or below 85 add or deduct 1 point – upto a maximum of +15 or minimum of -10.
4. Round up the average page count to the nearest 5 and:
- 0-250pages – -1 point
- 251-300pages – 0 points
- 301-325pages – 1 point
- 326-375pages – 2points
- 375-500pages – 5points
- 500+pages – 10points
5. Only one unfinished book counts. This book must be finished the following year. Deduct 1 point if the previous year’s unfinished book is not complete.
Okaaay…. this could be long, and like my review of A World Out of Time, could be as much about me and my life as the book itself.
Could be, but let’s try to rein it in shall we?
I first read High Fidelity when it came out in 1995. I’ve re-read it a couple of times since but probably not for 10 years or so. I decided to re-read it as part of 6000 pages because I wanted both an easy read and an enjoyable one. The film of the book starring John Cusack is also a favourite of mine and I re-watched it after reading the book.
High Fidelity follows Rob Flemming, a 35-year-old music fan, owner of a failing record shop and something of a slacker. The book begins with the ending of his latest long-term relationship and much of the story is about the relationship between music, fandom and well, relationships.
Do I listen to pop music because I’m miserable or am I miserable because I listen to pop music?
The genius of High Fidelity – and it is genius – is that it perfectly captures what it’s like to be a boy in a man’s body, which is certainly my experience of being male. The incessant making of lists, the obsession with sex as the most important part of a relationship (but not really) and just all this inner insecurity.
15 years ago when I first read it I identified with Rob because of all this stuff – even though he was only temporarily out of a relationship and I was more or less permanently so – the theme of being generally rubbish with women fitted. The fact that I still experience this all these years later – well that’s perhaps the bittersweet side of re-reading this book.
It’d be very easy to just give lots of funny, touching or on-the-nose quotes – and in a way that might be appropriate as it’s the kind of thing Rob would do. However to sum up let me just say that I love this book because it’s not only very easy to identify with the characters but Hornby also makes them likeable, despite some not so likeable behaviour on the way. It has warmth and hope and optimism.
10/10 – a great book if you’re a boy.
The Winter Ghosts is, unsurprisingly, a ghost story. It concerns Freddie Watson who in winter 1928 takes a trip to the south of France. For the last decade or so he’s been dealing with the guilt of surviving a brother who was killed in World War I. He crashes his car and is forced to take refuge in a remote village. Whilst there he goes to a village festival and meets Fabrissa, who has also suffered loss and grief. However all is not quite as it seems.
OK, I say “all is not quite as it seems”, because it’s one of those trip off the tongue cliches, but in fact if you’re expecting a ghost story (and the title gives that one away doesn’t it?) then you’ll probably see exactly where this is going.
Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy The Winter Ghosts, I did. The predictability is almost comforting in a way, like watching a familiar film on TV at Christmas. It has the feel of one of those classic Victorian ghost stories. Also the Kindle edition which I read had ‘wood-cut’ style drawings as illustrations interspersed with the text and this gave it a nostalgic feel reminding me of some of the books I read as a child e.g. the Narnia chronicles.
(I just found out how to do screenshots on my Kindle – cool huh?)
I’ve read that The Winter Ghosts started life as a shorter story called The Cave and I think it shows. There were times when it feel padded with description. However I did think there was a nice sense of atmosphere and I learnt something about the history of the Cathars in the Pyrenees.
7/10 – a wintry ghost story, perfect for Christmas reading.
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So They’re Really Doing It…?
About a year and a half ago I blogged on the then rumour that a Buffy film might be made without Joss Whedon’s involvement – and that that might not be so terrible a thing.
For those who hate clicking links and actually reading stuff, my argument was boiled down to:
- Most movies, even ones where there’s a real script and real people involved, don’t get made.
- Most movies that are made aren’t any good.
- Sometimes a different take on an idea is better than a continuation.
- A movie probably isn’t the right kind of medium for the kind of stories Buffy on TV was about – so even with Joss it wouldn’t be the same.
So I came out in favour. Partly it has to be said, because I didn’t think it would happen and partly because I wanted Joss to go on and do new and fresh things. Well he did and is. But also it is.
Happening that is.
That is, I mean they really are making it. A new Buffy. Without Whedon, without Gellar and without a lot of the characters we know and love[*].
And I find my theoretical “It might not be so bad” has been challenged somewhat by the reality. In particular:
- the fact that they’ve hired Whit Anderson (who?) to write the script. Apparently she (seriously who?) had an interesting take on the concept.
- the fact that it’s perhaps pitched primarily as a comedy (that worked out well for the original didn’t it?)
- that it looks for all the world like a cynical attempt to cash in on the whole vampire thing that culminated in the Twilight movies. (That Buffy pre-dates most of this by at least a decade has meant I can safely deride this trend without attacking my beloved show.)
So yes, I concede it probably won’t be any good and I’ll probably hate it (though I’ll have to see it of course). But I won’t be joining any protests or online petitions (although feel free to yourself).
Because the other half of the argument – that Joss should move on and do other things – is still valid. He should and he is.
[*]I think because the people concerned own the rights to the original movie and underlying concept – but not the TV show and its add-ons i.e. Xander, Willow, Angel, Spike and Giles. Or maybe they do but they just wanted to make it a clean slate.