You have probably heard in the news about Dan Cathy, the CEO of Chick-fil-A, and his comments on family. He said,
We are very much supportive of the family -- the biblical definition of
the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business,
and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.
So, this successful businessman is taking some heat for his opposition to same-sex marriage. He is shunning at least what, 10% of potential customers who could be gay, and maybe more from folks who support same-sex marriage, but are not gay.
Same-sex marriage is definitely a hot political topic. I understand why the press focused on it, but I'm bewildered by his latter comment, "we are married to our first wives." First wives? So Mr. Cathy doesn't support divorced families? Is he interested in potentially shunning more than half his customers who are divorced?
Maybe he just doesn't choose his words very carefully. Or, maybe he isn't sensitive to people who don't fit into his ideals. Maybe he's a bully. Consider the video below, which humorously accounts Chick-fil-A's lawsuit against a T-shirt guy in Vermont for making T-shirts with the slogan "Eat More Kale".
Check out these melons. This is the first summer I've attempted watermelons in my garden. I'm not sure what took me so long. Well, maybe it was my nomadic lifestyle.
So I'm not sure when to pick em. They are getting big and green. I'm thinking of picking the biggest one off of the vine tomorrow to see how sweet it is. Any comments on what I should do?
One thing I love about the internet is following obscure events that I would normally be oblivious to. For the past two days, I was following one of those events every few hours, the 2012 Badwater Ultramarathon. Have you heard of this one, that really long race in really hot temperatures that is mostly uphill. It starts in Death Valley, California in the middle of July at 282 feet below sea level and finishes 135 miles later at 8,360 ft on Mt. Whitney. For a better description, listen to Leslie Stahl of "60 Minutes":
If you finish it, your reward is a belt buckle. It seems to me that only really crazy people bother to sign up for this race. And so I thought it was fitting when I heard that a guy who only eats fruit signed up. Michael Arnstein, the guy who calls himself The Fruitarian, finished this race a few hours ago as I write this post in 16th place out of 96 crazy people runners. His time was just over 31 hours.
Michael Arnstein in middle, photo by BW135 RD Chris Kostman
Honestly, I don't think that Michael Arnstein is crazy. I admire his conviction and have been learning about his lifestyle through the internet. And look at the guy, does fruit make you fat? Yeah, he runs a lot and burns a lot of calories, but he also eats a lot of fruit (see my previous post about him). And he's in very good company. Check out his race pace compared to the overall BW135 champion, Mike Morton, as well as former champions Dean Karnazes and Pam Reed. I also added Art Webb's race pace to the graph. Art was a little slower. He's just some guy who has completed 14 Badwater races and set a personal best time and age group record this year. He did this at the age of 70.
It's curious that all five runners had a similar overall pacing trend. It's not a coincidence when you consider the elevation profile of the race route.
Michael Arnstein finished in 16th place, one place ahead of Pam Reed and four places behind Dean Karnazes. For awhile, as the pace chart shows Michael was ahead of Dean. Congratulations to all the Badwater finishers, but especially to the guy that I was rooting for, The Fruitarian.
I think one of Michael's motivations for all this running is to show what's possible on an all fruit diet. But I'm sure not everyone will share his perspective. Some will say, "Hey, he probably woulda beat Karnazes and others had he swallowed a plug of meat." What do you think? Does Arnstein's fruit diet help his running performance, doesn't matter or hurts it? Leave your comments below.
You may have noticed a little ad over on the right-hand side bar, or an add previewing my Youtube videos. That's because I added monetization to my blog and Youtube videos recently. This is more of an experiment than a get rich quick scheme. Maybe only if I acted like Youtube Fred would this be a get rich quick scheme.
I'm curious to know what the value of traffic is. My hypothesis is that a view is worth a fraction of a penny, like maybe $0.001. My blog has existed for just over a year and I've had about 13,000 views. So if I monetized from the beginning, I would have raked in $13.
There's one problem with this calculation. It's something called a payment threshold. Adsense (Google's monetization department) doesn't write a check until you have surpassed $100, or in the case of my hypothesis: 100,000 views. And I don't know if there's an expiration date on views or if it accumulates from month to month?
Wuhan is in the Hubei Province of China. During my stay, there were a few days were I had the opportunity to be a tourist. On one of those days, I visited the Hubei Provincial Museum.
Hubei Museum on Blue Sky
It is one of the best known museums in China with over 200,000 ancient cultural relics. I only digitally captured about 100 of those remnants.
One of the exhibits features artifacts from the tomb of Marquis Yi dated around 433 BC. Yi was the ruler of Zeng during a part of the Warring State Period (476 BC - 221 BC). The tomb was discovered in 1977 in Hubei when the People's Liberation Army was destroying a hill to build a factory.
The tomb was constructed of large wooden timbers and divided into four chambers for a total area of about 2400 square feet. The smallest chamber contained military artifacts. Another chamber contained the tomb of King Yi and 8 tombs of young women. A third chamber contained 13 more tombs of young women. The largest chamber contained the most famous discovery of the tomb, a set of 64 bianzhong or bronze bells along with stone chimes, flutes and various string instruments. Weapons, women and song: modern man hasn't evolved much compared to 2400 years ago.
We were treated to a bianzhong concert using replicas of the original instruments that were on display in the museum. The zhong bells have a special oblong shape which produces two tones depending on where they are struck. The bells can play a complete 12 tone scale, predating the development of the European 12 tone system by about 2000 years.
I walked away from the museum have a greater appreciation of Chinese culture. If your perspective of China is one of a developing country, bear in mind that they have had thousands of years of trial and error experience.
The guy with his shirt pulled up looked strange and funny to us, but it was a fairly common site. Other behaviors that caught me off guard were folks spitting on the sidewalks, hawking a loogie, standing too close and slurping their noodles. I don't want to give the wrong impression here. I enjoyed my stay in China and would readily visit again. I respect a culture that has existed for thousands of years, and there's plenty good about it, as my other Wuhan videos show. Sometimes, you just gotta laugh.
