(UPDATED) Mark Rippetoe (no relation) is the wuvvably assholish Texan expert on weight training or strength training (see below). Rippetoe’s book Starting Strength is in its third edition (some with multiple versions) and has sold 350,000 copies, his bespoke publishing house claims. It has bizarre typography and washed-out photographs, but is chock full of bitchy aperçus – just what one demands of a book about deadlifting and such.

“Ask Rip” (sic), Episode 51 (some crosstalk elided):

WOMAN: I’ve got a vegan lifter of about 150 pounds. How do I help him to… recover?

“Recover” here has the specific sense of being physiologically ready to train the same muscle groups again. Everyone in the room knows that, but pretends not to.

— Well, you put him in a home. [laughter] How do you support him?

— As far as nutritionally – to recover.

— He’s got an eating disorder, Joyce. He has an eating disorder, and I – I don’t know…. I think you’re practising psychiatry if you do that….

Like, any of you guys have a vaygun diet question? I don’t wanna hear it. [laughter] I get that a lot.

We’re – I’m not a psychologist. I can’t deal with your eating disorder. It’s not my job to deal with your eating disorder. And it’s an eating disorder. That’s all it is…. But it’s an eating disorder and I don’t know that you’re qualified to deal with it, you know? I mean, what do I say to this guy? Logic doesn’t seem to be working…. Nah, I’d stay away from those people.

Rippetoe then goes on to describe “a standard little skinny high-fashion, you know, upper-middle-class little chick with an eating disorder” (who “wouldn’t eat”). “I trained her for about a month and fired her.” The two are apparently equivalent.

I looked up the traineuse who posed that question, and, while also teaching her not to top-post, Joyce Luke and I had a discussion via E‑mail that shows she knows what she’s talking about. (Then why ask God-Emperor Rippetoe, who knows nothing, in the first place?) I was quite insistent that she had to be adaptable to whatever needs her clients or students had, whether that be missing a limb, being blind, being vegan, or being a 99th-percentile godlike figure (this means Steve Langton). And, rather amazingly, she denied any such obligation. (Then why become a certified coach if your goal is to fire imperfect or inconvenient students?)

Joyce mused about following up on my suggestion that she actually study certain characteristics of vegan strength athletes, including (again my suggestion here) any deficits that cannot be realistically overcome.

Equating vegans to anorexics is like comparing lesbians to pedophiles. Sometimes one does mess with Texas.

A rat bastard, but our rat bastard

The Q&A later covers obese lifters. As fat as I am, Rippetoe asks? (“How obese? The critical question. Obese like me, or, like, 585-pound obese?”)

That part is a tad unfair. Muscle for Life (sic) podcast, Episode 91: “Now, I’m 60 years old and I’ve got a pot belly, because (1) I don’t care, and (2) I don’t really care. So – you know, and I eat too much and I drink too much and all this other stuff. But, you know, I probably – I weigh about 230 at 5′8″. I still deadlift 500; I bench close to 300; um, knees are kinda creaky these days – I’m not squatting heavy much. But, aside from the pot belly, I look like a relatively muscular probably-50-year-old guy.”

Watching and listening, I think Rippetoe betrays a bit of boredom at the sheer repetitiveness of training these pikers, but, as with Stu McGill for back pain, this is the expert one heeds. One just does everything he says. I can tell you that as an expert in other fields who is ignored completely, so I choose to take my own medicine. Experts all become contrarians at some point unless they have the patience of a saint, and who the hell has that?

Yes, he’s a rat bastard, but, like Nassim Taleb (who also deadlifts and “looks like a butcher”), he’s our rat bastard.

Updates

• (2018.03.11) God-Emperor Rippetoe is presumably the one who didn’t just ensure that a so-called E‑mail activation step on the Starting Strength forums never worked but also half-blocked my account there and rewrote my bio to read “Supefluous.” Hugs and kisses and tempeh by the pound, Mark!

• (2019.05.13) I’ve decided that Snide-Emperor Rippetoe is a more fitting sobriquet for my fave fat ’n’ rat bastard. It was just last week when protégée Joyce Luke could not bother to answer her own E‑mail and got a boy, Jarrod Schaefer (no relation), to handle an eldergay vegan’s queries. Worse, while arguing with a vegan he purports to be “pursuing his nutrition certification.”

  Schaefer will end up a bigger rat bastard than Rippetoe is, with none of the charm and more of the bile. He’s halfway there already.

  This Jarrod Schaefer is a coach to be avoided at all costs. Joyce Luke is hardly any better. The reason is simple: They will trash-talk people behind your back. Maybe even you.

Gavin McInnes talking with Chadwick Moore (Episode Nº 399) about tranny cruises (excerpt, .MP4).

Conservatives, broadly speaking, are incapable of communicating visually.

• They use Windows (Rush Limbaugh a prominent exception), an antitypographic platform that leaves you afraid of your own computer, which really is out to get you. (I’ve done paid work – indirectly – for Microsoft Typography. Some of my best friends work at Microsoft. Facts are facts.)

• When your only means of communicating with the world are top-posted E‑mails in Outlook; Word for Windows; and PowerPoint, you have no actual design vocabulary.

  Since you’re afraid of your machine and because Microsoft Office defaults and templates are so vile (requiring expert competence to override them), you just bang shit out using those defaults and templates. There is a cognitive style of PowerPoint.

• It is impossible to teach Windows users anything about typography. You can’t even get them to understand what an apostrophe is. It’s been attempted for a full generation and simply cannot be done.

At some level, those complaints apply to all members of the inferior species that is Windows users. Now we get to the repercussions of the conservative mind. [continue with: Conservatives cannot design →]

(CORRECTED) 2Bad2Late (perverse official orthography: 2BAD2LATE) is a tiny YouTube “channel” that mislabels itself as a “podcast.” In it, junior right-wing assholes here in Toronto – for diversity points, they all seem to be vizmins and/or first-generation Canadians – trade right-wing-asshole talking points. That’s the general format, though the interview segment with Proud Boys Toronto, in which guests described what happened to them at a protest I attended, was highly useful first-hand testimony (except it was on another “channel” – my mistake).

Also part of the general format is young right-wing assholes shitting on gay men and lesbians. While I still prefer to be stabbed in the front, I had the impression that the younger right-wing assholes, like younger card-carrying Conservatives, weren’t homophobic anymore. These guys are. (But I know another of 2Bad2Late’s guests and he’s fine.)

• — And the thing is, I wish we could find clips of old Pride events. Like, you should – we should try and find clips where – see what the floats and see what everyone was doing in, like, I dunno, like ’90? How long has Pride even been going on?

  — I dunno.

  — So we’ll find clips of, like, one of the first couple runs of Pride and see what they’re like.

  My response was “You mean like James Leahy’s painstakingly assembled videos, some online for two years now?”

• That same (“podcast”) episode featured extensive griping about old guys walking around naked in Gay Pride, and how their kids, which none of the participants actually have, shouldn’t be exposed to that sort of thing. Of course it’s pointless to explain the history of TNT Men, or the fact that you aren’t actually naked in Ontario if you’re wearing socks or shoes. All these explanations are pointless.

  (Prediction: These young men, if and when they go to the gym, never appear nude there under any circumstances. Supplementary prediction: These guys don’t actually go to Gay Pride and have never seen anyone “naked” there.)

• It was just this week when a female-identified vizmin guest told us “And, interestingly enough, I heard that lesbian couples are more violent than gay couples.” SOUR RIGHT-WING VIZMIN HOST: “Yeeeah! I love that statistic so much!”

• One thing they did get right: Typesetting an Š in a Lithuanian proper name. I didn’t know they had it in ’em.

Is there a punchline? Of course there’s a punchline. These free-speech warriors not only ignored every opportunity to learn something for once, they blocked on Facebook exactly one person exercising free speech. (Take a wild guess.) That’s the sort of thing I associate with downtown progressives, trannies, “LGBT+,” the 519, and the like.

Young guys are brash and headstrong. I was one once, and these boys will grow out of it. (The host won’t outgrow being sour, and may stay a homophobe forever. God help any faggy gay son he may have.) But when that point of maturity finally arrives, they’ll look back and make the most important realization there is: I was right all along.

2Gay2Homo has about 4,300 total video views, 0.1% of which are mine. The power-law or Zipf or Pareto effects are all at work here, and these guys are going nowhere.

At lengthy intervals, the Big 5 publishing cartel, operated by females but run by heterosexualist males (and Jonathan Galassi), dares to publish literary homosexualist fiction. (Michael Cunningham: “I can’t help noticing that as soon as I write a novel without a blowjob, they give me the Pulitzer Prize.” Gay is not what fiction is about.)

For reasons known only to this intelligentsia nested within an elite, some white trash from France now has the full force of the American publishing industry on his tail. Édouard Louis, a nom de plume, as he appeared in FANTASTIC MAN:

Louis’, or Belleguele’s, The End of Eddy has no real 21st-century function or role. It is a book full of eternally recognizable archetypes of the young sissy. It’s just that those archetypes have been translated from the French (also into Deutsch). (Like all Big 5–published books, this one’s typography is indifferent and apparently produced on Windows using circa-1998 software.)

It is torture to read a novel not just because nobody in it goes to the bathroom, spends every night watching TV, or surfs obsessively on their phones, nor just because the novel was permanently discredited by David Shields’ Reality Hunger as a Victorian form that has not evolved. (I’ve never been the same.)

If gay literature (and gay cinema) are Literatures and Cinemas of Recognition, where the job of the creator is to cause the beholder to pause and nod “Yes,” then The End of Eddy represents Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which name is a stickler’s minefield that’s as tricky to pronounce as Knopf, deploying a 20th-century army to represent 20th-century homosexualist archetypes using a 19th-century form.

Why, though? [continue with: »Das Ende von Eddy« →]

At least a couple of decades. Certainly the entire time I’ve lived here (almost 30 years).

• Lionel Tiger, Men in Groups, third edition, 2005 (discussing the first edition of same, 1969 [!]):

  Among other things[,] I endured bomb threats at lectures in Vancouver and Montreal. I was warned of a “kneecapping” should I persist in giving an invited lecture at the New School University for Social Research in New York – a large security guard accompanied me during my entire visit there…. A cover story about the book in Maclean’s magazine in Toronto generated a raucous demonstration by outraged feminists and became national news. Canadian feminists have been especially unforgiving and narrowly harsh ever since[,] and reviewers of my books there appear to reanimate their post-adolescent sociopolitical zeal of 35 years ago.

• Russell Smith (q.v.), How Insensitive, p. 241 (really the ur-text covering this phenomenon):

  “I should deal with this Moonfire thing,” said Ted. “Can I write at your desk?”

  “If you can clear a space.”

  Ted pushed aside the magazines on John’s desk and found a clean sheet of paper and a working pen. He began to write,

  First, let me make clear my sympathy with the cause of the humane treatment of animals, and with the international feminist struggle. My intention – if intention there was, in a few unguarded jocular moments – in making the comments Next printed, was entirely humorous. Of course some humour is more acceptable than others, and I now realize how insensitive

• 

• Bionic Woman Adventure Colouring Book

• HAVE YOU SEEN YOUR CAT?