On a related note, the real reason I meant to discuss going to the movies that day was that I walked to the theater rather than driving. It was supposed to tie into the running theme, the discussion over the LA Marathon as a revelatory experience for how roads connect in Los Angeles and how sometimes it’s way easier to walk places than to deal with traffic, parking, and the like. While nobody walks in LA, I guess that makes me a nobody. And happier for it — it’s less stressful and cheaper than dealing with gas, parking fees, and such. But I happened to snap a photo of my walking pace and this being an ill-defined running “blog,” I thought I’d include it here.<\/p>\n
Next, given my quest for 50 States<\/a> and Seven Continents<\/a>, and my own “Road To…” Marathon Series<\/a>, you’d think I’d love numbers and stats all the more and all the time. But for the past few weeks… heck, the past few months… I’ve been weighed down by numbers and stats courtesy of one of the worst investments I’ve ever made… at least from a psychological perspective.\u00a0 I am of course referring to a bathroom scale.\u00a0 Inconceivably to me, I’ve seen my weight fluctuate to the point that I’m a good 10-15 pounds heavier than I want to be.\u00a0 And it’s not “muscle” so there’s no sense in thinking, “well, muscle weighs more than fat.”\u00a0 Because in the words of Paul Simon, “Why am I soft in the middle?”<\/p>\n I debated about this as a topic because I’m sure people are sick of hearing me whinge about my whole weight issue.\u00a0 I’m freaked out as I step on the scale and the LCD readouts can warp my mood.\u00a0 It’s silly as it’s more important how you feel than what that number reads.\u00a0 But that’s an easier thing to say than to internalize.\u00a0 Try as I might, that number impacts the way I see myself and the way I feel.\u00a0 I’ve had many days where I feel slothful and sluggish and I think part of that is contributed to by that infernal number.\u00a0 I’ve opted to cut short my body weight issues discussion for now because I have no idea if it relates to the ultimate goal of this web site or not.\u00a0 But I thought maybe a discussion on how no matter the number of marathons or races one does, there are certain things that do not go away — and body image and feelings of sluggishness\/slothfulness are part and parcel of that.\u00a0 Not sure if that’s helpful to others, helpful to me, or just an excuse to whine online.\u00a0 But there ya go.<\/p>\n And in a final note on numbers for the day, this whole website is produced via a series of two digits — 1s and 0s.\u00a0 It’s all just binary code rendered according to a set programming language, right?\u00a0 Yet different platforms read those same binary numbers slightly differently.\u00a0 The whole thing looks fine in the “What You See Is What You Get” window on my Microsoft Surface Pro 3.\u00a0 The computer geek acronym squad calls this WYSIWYG, but it should perhaps be changed to “What You See Is What You Hope to Get” or WYSIWYHTG.\u00a0 That won’t happen as that’s too much a mouthful, unlike WYSIWYG, right tech geeks?\u00a0 Insert one of those emoticons or emoji smiley face snarks to indicate that written sentence should be read with a skewed, facetious tone.\u00a0 Perhaps that’s why different platforms read things differently — they’re more or less fluent in snark.<\/p>\n In any case, when I check the site on my phone’s browser or my iPad or even on another Windows machine, the layout can be… wonky.\u00a0 Certain random images load at “LARGE” size when I know they’ve all been set to “MEDIUM” in the image attributes tab.\u00a0 Oddly, some images get rotated no matter what I do in the “EDIT” screens of the image, no matter how many times I rotate it properly on my computer and then re-upload it to the site.\u00a0 Ghosts and gremlins exist in the machines out there.\u00a0 That or different machines read the numbers differently.\u00a0 In that, we’re back to the lies, damn lies, and statistics; somebody can recast the stats to whatever they please, be it a larger image size, a rotated worldview, or the belief that 1+1 equals 3.\u00a0 There’s probably a better capper to that series of suggestions but WYSIWYG — I’m a bit off and fumbling through.<\/p>\n Still, I’m trying to take comfort that if different platforms can interpret the same numbers differently, then perhaps that bathroom scale just needs to be viewed from a different perspective.\u00a0 After all, a great many science museums have taught me that what I weigh on earth isn’t the same as what I weigh on other astral bodies<\/a>.\u00a0 Take the Moon.\u00a0 There I’d weigh about 16.6% of what I weigh here… so maybe I should just start thinking of myself as a Moon Colonist.<\/p>\n After all, what’s a little lie, damn lie, or statistic amongst friends?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was only today when I googled this phrase that I realized I’ve been mis-attributing it to Will Rogers. I thought he popularized the saying, “There’s lies, damn lies, and statistics.” But google says it had been mainly propagated by a different country gentleman philosopher – Mark Twain. And even then there’s debate about where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[215,212,208,210,207,216,213,211,214,209,168],"class_list":["post-543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-binary","tag-box","tag-damn","tag-gross","tag-lies","tag-numbers","tag-office","tag-regression","tag-scale","tag-statistics","tag-weight"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"IMG_7489\"](\"http:\/\/www.runkevinrun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/IMG_7489-e1454961462112-225x300.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n