When I got back from Niger, I made this post about my adventures in angering a chameleon. Granted, it’s not the nicest thing I could have done to the chameleon, but it didn’t harm him. For some reason, this picture has drawn a few nasty comments on Flickr. “Congratulations, that makes you an asshole.” “Blah blah bad english how you like if we poke you with stick?” Those are both paraphrased, especially the last one.

What. the. hell.

It’s not like I tied it to a stick and pulled of its toes for shits and giggles. Amanda told me that chameleons look really cool when they’re agitated, and that we could poke him to get him to change colors. I got a stick, prodded him in the side until he changed colors, and then we put him in the tree, saving him from certain death at the hands of the local cat.

What drives people to make comments like that? Are they super-protective of animals? The large number of cat pictures posted by one of the commenters inclines me to think so. The other had no (public) pictures posted at all. Maybe they just have time to kill. Well if it’s the former, I have an announcement to make:

I eat dead animals

except, they’re killed just for my culinary pleasure. Not like, dead animals I find in the street. Gross.

That ought to give them something to be pissed about. I don’t even eat meat that often anymore, but I do eat it.

I should note that today started out pretty good (except for the rain) and slowly progressed from good to bad to worse. This last photo comment was enough to rile me up sufficiently for a blog post. I hope to have a better one for you before I go to bed.

We aren’t out of the woods just yet, folks:

Gorram hurricanes.

Several years ago I did some cadaver work as part of my undergraduate degree. It gave me new insight into things my body does, things I feel, how things work (or don’t). I learned that the places where muscles attach to your bone are called insertions. I think one end is the origin, and the other is the insertion? I can’t remember for sure.

Technically, the muscle doesn’t attach right to the bone. There’s some fascia in-between. I would imagine that if your muscle rips free of its insertion point, it would probably peel the fascia off of the bone along the way. The area between the bone and the fascia would fill with blood, and the end result would be something of a mess. That fascia is part of the bone healing process. When a bone breaks, the fascia in the area fills with blood, it congeals, goes through some phases of regeneration, and in the end you get new bone. Would you get some bone in-between if the fascia were ripped off at the insertion point?

You might wonder what inspired this train of thought. In an effort to regain my upper body strength from the days when I was swimming three to four times a week, I’ve been doing some calisthenics every morning. Using the weights I found abandoned in the basement of the building, I’ve started doing some bicep curls. I can feel the inerstions (or origins?) of the biceps on my forearms, and they feel a little stressed. Amanda suggested that I give it a rest until they feel better, and now that I think about it, I’m inclined to agree. I don’t want the above scenario to take place, certainly.

The days that you see a small number, like two or three minutes, under Exercise in the stats, I’ve only done calisthenics. When I run, I only put my 2-mile run time, but don’t include the calisthenics. In the interest of holding some sort of consistent measuring practice, I’m going to stop counting the calisthenics and such, and only post my run time. The calisthenics are neither aerobic in nature, nor really time-related. Therefore, any time that you see posted henceforth should be aerobic exercise of some kind. Days with 00:00 posted I will still have done the push-ups and so on.

And here are the stats for today:

This little stats project has made me much more conscious of my coffee drinking. I think I’m on my way to kicking the habit, or at least reducing it. I’m not actually sure that I want to stop using caffeine (yes using — it sounds so dirty, doesn’t it?). It seems like a little bit to start the day is enough. I’m getting half-cups and so on by brewing quarter-caffeinated coffee. I blend store-bought half-caff with decaf and, voila! Quarter-caff.

I’m going to read a bit more of Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle and then it’s off to bedfordshire with me.