Mmmm... Cheese.

As I wrote in my Good Thing He's a Cartoon post a while back, you can throw a bunch of food combinations into WolframAlpha and it will crunch the numbers and give you a dietary summary much like you see on the sides of any packaged food product. For example, if you get snacky in the middle of the night and decide to have 1 bag of Skittles, 5 apples, 4 beers, a head of lettuce, 14 slices of wheat toast, and 167 grapes it will make some assumptions and print out what you see on the left (click to enlarge).

As you can see it just gives you the facts. It doesn't judge you... unlike some software I could name.

But, hey! Aside from the fact it appears you are trying to kill yourself via Vitamin A poisoning and that you are all but guaranteed to wear out your toilet plunger the next day you are going to need to work off all those calories. But how? Luckily, WolframAlpha is there to help with that, too.

Go ahead and type in “climbing stairs”. You are brought to a screen where you can figure out how much time you would need to spend on a StairMaster (or similar) to exercise your guilt away. Sticking with the defaults and the midnight snack described above it looks like you would burn 589 calories per hour, so you would need to spend the better part of four hours sweating your binge off.

Piece of cake. (1 piece of cake = 239 calories = 24 more minutes on the StairMaster, btw).

“But I don't have easy access to a StairMaster,” you whine. No problem. You can put in the direction as both ascending and descending so get on over to your stairs and get to work. Unfortunately, you need to work an extra 45 minutes to make all those calories go away (to quote Remo Williams: “Down is easy.”)

“I live in a one-story ranch,” you whine some more. Fine. Just scroll down a bit and voila! You find some equivalent activities that don't require any stairs at all. But, before we do that, let's make your midnight indulgence a little easier on the imagination and on the colon. Let's say you eat a block (8 ounces) of cheddar cheese and wash it down with two medium-sized glasses of red wine...

What? Don't look at me like that... Oh, like you've never done it... If you're so damn perfect why were you up half the night eating lettuce and Skittles, then?

Anyway, when I scroll down a bit (your screen will be different) I see that a person can trade their toil on the stairs for arguably more pleasurable “sweeping outdoors”. Unfortunately, it takes 1 hour and 41 minutes of sweeping to do the equivalent work as one hour up and down the stairs so you will need to set aside about five and a quarter hours to get rid of the wine and cheese.

You might ask through your cheese-filled pie-hole: “Umm, there is no way I am going to spend that much time sweeping – old curling injury, you understand. Aren't there any other suggested activities that don't involve stair climbing or scrubbing the bejeezus out of my sidewalk, my driveway, and the cul-de-sac out front?”

Sure. Just reload the page and you are given the same data but with three new activities. Here are some (apparently real) options and the time it will take to burn off 1,529 calories worth of cheese and wine:

• 4 hours and 14 minutes caulking a log cabin
• 4 hours and 42 minutes of Greek dancing
• 5 hours and 17 minutes working in a bakery (or marching in a marching band or playing the drums)
• 2 hours and 0 minutes swimming the butterfly
• 9 hours and 12 minutes bookbinding
• 2 hours and 38 minutes of working in a steel mill
• 8 hours and 28 minutes bird watching (precisely twice as long as log cabin caulking... really?)

Considering you didn't have the wherewithal to even find a flight of stairs and your log cabin is as caulked as its gonna get, it's likely none of the above choices are realistic options for you.

It's probably just best to lay off the cheese.

Wordle Answers, Bored Goth Poem Answer

 

Hey!  Now that the associated posts have fallen off the front page, here are the answers to the Five Wordle Cloud Quiz and the "Bored Goth Poem" Puzzle.

What am I talking about?  Click here for the original Wordle post, and click here for the "Bored Goth" post.

Spoilers below!

Cloud 1: Genesis Chapter 1



Cloud 2: President Obama's Election Victory Speech - November 5, 2008



Cloud 3: President Kennedy's "Moon" Speech - May 25, 1961

 

Kubla Khan - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Art of War Chapter 1 - Sun Tzu

Angel but not devil

Monster but not hero

Empty but not void

Nothing but not zero

Fifth but not fourth

Sixth but not seventh

Ninth but not tenth

Twelfth but not eleventh

Angst but not faith

Zigzag but not straight

Comment but not question

Angry but not sedate

Liquid but not solid

Vacuum but not air

Problem but not solution

Anxious but not scared

What am I ?

Answer: The first words in each of the lines have no rhyme.  The last words do. (Sources: Wikipedia, WolframAlpha)

Wait. What?

Umm... shouldn't that be... ah, screw it, I'm takin' the left anyway.

Ow, My Everything.

Hello again.

Remember that post where I talked about messing up my back? Well, that turned out to be the start of a cascade failure of my body in general. I am not sure if there is a causal relationship, but what appears to be a rapid disintegration of my joints lines up nicely in time with the back incident.

As I was just about done healing, I was hit by foot and ankle pain severe enough to wake me up very early one morning. Upon getting up to see what was wrong it all of a sudden felt like I was stomping barefoot across a gravel driveway as angrily as possible. I nearly collapsed at the side of the bed as much out of surprise as out of pain.

I wobbled around for a bit like a newborn deer until I was able to converge on a mobility solution that minimized discomfort and maximized speed. "Minimized" and "maximized" here are extremely relative terms. It was as though I gained 40 pounds and 40 years in one day.

After about a week of this getting worse and worse (despite my best attempts at self-medication and footwear changes) my wife brought me to see a doctor. This is why dudes get married in the first place, I am told – to have someone around that makes them take care of themselves. At one point I needed to leave work early because if I didn’t drive home then, an ambulance was going to have to come get me.

I won't bother listing Latin medical terms or naming medications that sound like they are the cross between a Greek muse and a two-year technical college, because, frankly, it doesn't matter. It suffices to say that the inside of my medicine cabinet now rivals that of the average sixty year old. The near-constant low grade headache combined with a soupcon of nausea should fade as my body adapts to the newest chemicals it is forced to deal with.

The pain and discomfort are currently daily morning events and have grown to include my wrists, forearms, elbows, and knees as well as my feet, back, and ankles.

If this is how sixty year olds feel all the time... Jeebus...

But the newest meds do appear to be helping.

What is not helping is being unable to exercise for the better part of a month and a half. I am mobile enough now to play with my son for more than 15 minutes at a time and the doc said I could start back to the gym if I felt able. That's cool and all but I am just happy to be, once again, able to confidently manage stairs and use a keyboard for something not work-related. So here I sit and type with ice packs jammed in my socks.

How pathetic is that?

It looks like I am going to have to put my "Run Two 5K's" New Year's resolution on hold, sports fans, maybe until next year. Hopefully not longer. There is a very good chance that this whole deal is short-term and temporary so we will see.

Wish me luck.