Rakes Progress

Memory Foam to the Rescue - Brad's Story

For the most part, Brad’s life was perfect. Just a few months out of college, he secured a stable, good-paying job. He had a doting girlfriend who wasn’t pushy about marriage and starting a family. He had a close-knit group of friends that gathered together for weekly basketball and poker sessions. There wasn’t much that Brad could complain about, except his sleep.

Brad didn’t realize that he had issues with sleep until he was noticing negative symptoms the following morning. On nights that he had problems falling asleep, or going back to sleep after using the toilet, he was experiencing typical side effects of poor sleep the next day. He was constantly tired, and because of this, he was easily irritable and had a short temper. He woke up feeling aches and pains throughout hisi body. It was hard for him to concentrate, and in some instances coordination did not come easily. Brad’s appetite was not what it used to be, which was evident in his clothes hanging loosely from his body. Eventually, Brad was turning to the use of prescription sleep aids to help him fall asleep and stay asleep at night.

Brad tried researching better sleep online, and found that his mattress might be the problem. Studies show that sleeping on new mattresses highly correlated with better quality sleep, and he hadn’t slept on a new mattress since he was living with his parents in high school. Brad decided then and there to invest in a new mattress, and visited his local mattress store.

At the mattress shop, Brad got an in-depth education on mattresses. There were innerspring, hybrid, waterbed, foam, pillow top, gel, air, memory foam and latex mattresses. The salesman emphasized the importance of sleeping on a good mattress and urged Brad to take his time trying them all out and asking any questions that come to mind. After much deliberation, Brad decided to take home the memory foam mattress.

Memory foam, also known as visco elastic foam, mattresses are made of high-density polyurethane foam which changes its shape to mimic the shape of the sleeper and distribute weight evenly over its surface to eliminate pressure on the sleeper’s hips and shoulders. Studies have shown that the best memory foam mattresses can really improve sleep but be sure to read some reviews first.

When the store delivered the mattress to Brad’s apartment, he was like a kid on Christmas day. He couldn’t wait to rest his tired head and achy body down for some much-needed good sleep. The next day, Brad felt a new person. It didn’t take a week for his body to adjust to the new mattress, it took one night.

At work, Brad was all smiles. He made some great suggestions at an important meeting, and his work done more efficiently. His change was so perceptible that his coworkers even commented on it. Most assumed he “got freaky” the night before and were stunned when he told them about his newly purchased memory foam mattress.

If you’re suffering from sleep issues, and it’s seriously effecting your life, think about investing in a new mattress. Because your sleep is worth it. 

Drone Footage in TV Shows

Most drones have the ability to carry cameras, but the UAS used by Hollywood filmmakers are usually multirotor crafts with many propellers to fly. Small quadcopters with a GoPro are light; the smallest weighing around 2 pounds. Heavier drones can carry larger cameras, and the whole setup can weigh up to 30 pounds. In drone filming, you will need a pilot to fly the quadcopter and a camera operator. The camera operator controls the camera carried by the UAS via remote control. A third person may also be employed who is in charge of the focus of the camera. The director of the footage can see real-time shots via wireless HD video link.

Drone Laws

While the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) deliberated on the specific rules and regulations for commercial use of drones, six Hollywood companies have been cleared to use drones for filming movie and television footage. Pictorvision based in Van Nuys, Vortex Aerial based in Corona, Astraeus Aerial, Aerial MOB, HeliVideo Productions, and Snaproll Media have received exemptions from FAA unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) laws including some general flight rules, pilot certification requirements, manuals, and maintenance and equipment regulations.

These six companies still have certain UAS limitations. The drones can only be operated on closed sets, within the line of sight of the pilot, using certified pilots. UAS may not go higher than 400 feet.

Aviation-safety advocates have been vocal about their opposition to these exemptions, citing accidents like air traffic crashes and drones falling into congested areas, and privacy.

The Drone Advantage

You’ve seen drone footage in films and TV shows, but you probably didn’t realize it. Those scenes shot right next to a train or helicopter, and over tanks, explosions, buildings and motorcycle jumps were most likely shot with a quadcopter. UAS can fly at low altitudes, which is out of helicopter range.

Hollywood is scrambling to use drones on their sets because they offer new creative options, are low in cost, and fairly safe to use. Quadcopter expenses range from $4,500 to $8,000 per day, whereas helicopter expenses run up to $20,000 per day. You can even re-create this stuff at home as the best quadcopters are equipped with HD cameras.

Overseas, filmmakers are already using drones to film captivating scenes. Games of Thrones employs the use of quadcopters in the United Kingdom. Scenes from SkyFall were filmed in Istanbul. The Wolf on Wall Street had scenes shot from a house party in the Hamptons. Scenes from Van Helsing were shot in the Czech Republic. Transformers: Age of Extinction, Pompeii, The Surfs 2, The November Man, and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets were all shot internationally. Expendables 3, filmed in Bulgaria, shortened their aerial shots from a projected 38 days via helicopter to just 10 day via UAS. 

Att'n: Bwana

From Granta, "How to write about Africa," which presumably is meant as a guide for enterprising erstwhile erotica writers who feel like faking the funk on a whole different continent:

Aways use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar', 'Masai', 'Zulu', 'Zambezi', 'Congo', 'Nile', 'Big', 'Sky', 'Shadow', 'Drum', 'Sun' or 'Bygone'. Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas', 'Timeless', 'Primordial' and 'Tribal'. Note that 'People' means Africans who are not black, while 'The People' means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African's cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.

At the very least, this would allow one to write a decent installment of Indiana Jones, no?

Bukowski: 1 Frey: 0

PopMatters recently let drop a special section about the Frey/LeRoy hoohah, and though there's not much else that needs to be said about those clowns*, your pal did note a decent observation about Bukowski in one of the articles:

If you have actually read A Million Little Pieces...you can see the recipe for hubris oozing through the language, a penchant for self-worshipping edginess and roosterish machismo that already signals a somewhat one-eyed and inflated view of his world. It's a nonetheless cracking if overextended and relentless read in that vein of dirty realism most finely evoked by such obvious influences as Charles Bukowski. The difference being that Bukowski always had a flair for self irony and humour, and a curiously brutal sensitivity that gave no quarter to anyone's lies, including that of his own myth as America's Barfly poet laureate. One reason, perhaps, why so many fans fail to see that the softness in Bukowski's later work is just as raw as the toughness in his earlier material? They just don't want that level of honesty messing with the image. 

YPTR agrees.  Although Buk was clearly the beneficiary and ringmaster of his dissolution--or, at least, his dissolute image--there are plenty of instances of him letting the air out of that particular balloon, even early on.  The later stuff, with the poet grappling for meaning and (lost) authenticity in the fat-and-happy, driving-a-BMW years, is interesting because the contrast between his lean years and later success is just so stark and difficult to swallow, for poet and reader. 

It seems obvious, if sad, that CB's "irony and humor"--the realization that there's a way to go on, but ultimately no cure--all but disqualified him for the kind of spotlight that Oprah's Self-Help/Hype Machine so briefly shined on Mr. Frey.  Not that Buk needed it.

Franzen, if crass, probably knew what he was doing.

(*Except: If JTL's practiced eccentricity and JF's pseudo-macho WWE-wrastlin' buffoonery didn't set off any alarm bells for you a long time ago, then it's time to recalibrate your bullshit detector.)

How I am going to get fit this year with a rowing machine

I know...most New Years Resolutions are pretty pointless, I mean most people love to say all the things they are going to change but few actually go through with it. The way I see it if you really want to change your life you shouldn't need a new year to motivate you, it should just be something that you want to do.

Despite this I have made a New Years Resolution to improve my overall health and fitness, and in doing so I decided to purchase home fitness equipment. Now, I did a lot of research and there are some really interesting products out there on the market but in the end I decided that a rowing machine would be the best choice for me. In fact it is probably the best choice for most people because it offers a true full body workout unlike a treadmill for example.

What are the main benefits of a rowing machine?

Firstly, it works both lower and upper body muscle groups at the same time.

Secondly, it offers a very powerful cardiovascular workout which is great for a healthy heart and also for burning those calories.

Lastly, it is very easy on your joints which is beneficial for everybody but especially those with problems here.

How to choose a rowing machine

Deciding which is the best rowing machine can be tough so it is important to read some rowing machine reviews such as these. I decided in the end to go for the Concept2 Model D as it is widely consider by professionals and fitness enthusiasts alike to be the ultimate rowing machine. It is fairly pricey, I purchased it from Amazon for $900 but the way I see it is that if it lasts more than 2 years it has paid for itself in terms of gym membership payments.

It really isn't necessary to spend as much money as I did because there are some really solid budget options out there that will still get you fit. They may not offer such a realistic rowing experience or come with an advanced computer but if your goal is to just burn some calories then something like the Kettler Favorit will work just fine.

Even if you are on a real budget you can choose something like the Stamina Body Trac Glider 1050 which costs less than $200 and will get the job done. This one is also great for those who have limited storage space in their homes as it folds up nicely.

Summary

So now you know my goal, it will hopefully keep me accountable throughout this year and I hope to share some positive progress in the future. At the same time I wish everyone else the best of luck with their own goals for the new year, especially those like me who are making a real push to get fit. Let me know in the comments below how you plan on improving your health this year.

The Last Word on Auster

Mr. Sam Jones sent along this link to a review of Auster's Travels in the Scriptorium, asking: "Did this negative review by a skilled critic enlighten?"

Yes, Mr. Jones.  It did:

With its earnestly literary atmosphere not far from self-parody, it's hard to imagine anyone other than die-hard Auster fans warming much to Travels in the Scriptorium. What makes the book so unsatisfying is how its whole scenario is a high-concept but ultimately pointless gimmick. This is always the risk hazarded by metafiction and is the standard knock on Auster delivered by his critics. Unfortunately, there's no refuting that view here. In the New York Trilogy, Auster surmounted the problem because its narratives were anchored by an unnerving feel for the self's vulnerability, the sense that any one of us might find ourselves suddenly confronting the revelation that even in life we are little more than barely sentient ghosts. Similarly, Auster's portrait of his father in The Invention of Solitude as a spectral cipher who lived his everyday existence as a kind of absence is at once harrowing and compelling. But many years have passed since he created these works, and in the interim Auster has lost connection to a true subject. In Travels in the Scriptorium, the insubstantiality of Mr. Blank has no real resonance other than to fill the echo chamber that Auster has made of his career. Despite the emphasis on the fundamental actions of his body—crawling, shitting, ejaculating—he remains, like the rest of the novel, a stillborn creation. A proper retrospective, by making us see things that we hadn't realized were there all along, should inject some fresh vitality into our sense of an author's work. Travels in the Scriptorium sucks out whatever life there is in Auster's invented universe, leaving a sterile vacuum of self-regard.

This is scathing stuff, but at least (taken as a whole) it grants Auster and his book the consideration they deserve.

(YPTR's only quibble is with Gibbons cherrypicking a sentence from Auster and showing how it suffers in comparison to Bellow's "opening salvo" in Herzog.  That's not cricket, Mr. Gibbons!  No need to stack the deck.)

Champagne Wishes & Vibrator Dreams

I'ma (re)posting this for all you modern lovers.  It could be quite lousy as far as love poems go, who knows, but it reminds me.

All the Earth, All the Air

1.

I stand with standing stones.
The stones stay where they are.
The twiny winders wind;
The little fishes move.
A ripple wakes the pond.

2.

This joy's my fall. I am!--
A man as rich as a cat,
A cat in the fork of a tree,
When she shakes out her hair.
I think of that and laugh.

3.

All innocence and wit,
She keeps my wishes warm;
When, easy as a beast,
She steps along the street,
I start to leave myself.

4.

The truly beautiful,
Their bodies cannot lie;
The blossom stings the bee.
The ground needs the abyss,
Say the stones, say the fish.

5.

A field recedes in sleep.
Where are the dead? Before me
Floats a single star.
A tree glides with the moon.
The field is mine! Is mine!

6.

In a lurking place I lurk,
One with the sullen dark.
What's hell but a cold heart?
But who, faced with her face,
Would not rejoice?

--Theodore Roethke