30', 20 + 10, Precor Elliptical, level 12, maximum elevation.
3x12 @ 12 bicep curls with dumbbells
3x10 @ 30 bicep curls with a barbell
3x12 @ 30ish arm extensions
I couldn't manage the tricep rope pull down at all.
3x12 @ 40 chin-ups (the assisted chin-up, where the machine assists, for me, over 2/3 of my body weight)
Then it was time for Michael Moore.
Monday we saw "Bowling for Columbine" at DU. I haven't read Stupid White Men myself, but every time RDC tells me something from the book it sounds familiar. I was glad to see the movie again, though, because I was paying attention to different things. Today was the man himself.
And Jon Krakaeur is coming to DU soon as well. Where is my copy of Into Thin Air, damn it? I think Sooby has it. At least I have Into the Wild.
It was called "an evening with" Michael Moore because I'm sure he wouldn't've wanted to call it a lecture. He speaks well off the cuff. I was really glad he called us all responsible for what happens next. While he still was taking longer questions (in the last 10 minutes, both the question and answer had to be fewer than ten words), someone said that students here might not be registered here or from Colorado but legislators whom you contact don't know that. Moore didn't point out for the crowd, as he should have done, that a name on an email or a phone log is nothing without an address for exactly that reason. I do plan to fax--more effective than to email--my state representative tomorrow morning about the possible reopening of the gunshow gunbuying loophole.
In the crowd, though not introduced (I just spotted him) was Columbine victim Daniel Mauser's father, who appeared in the movie. I didn't notice either of the two wounded students who also appeared.
A couple of people asked him some IDon'tWorshipYou questions, which was good, and which he had specifically encouraged. Why make people laugh at the ignorance of Charlton Heston and James Nicholls and those two young men from Michigan who apparently didn't know how many days were in a year let alone in a school year? Isn't that cruel? Moore opined (correctly in my opinion, me who laughed during "Pulp Fiction") that laughter through sadness or in shock is valid. During the lightning Q&A, someone asked if he recognized he used the same shock techniques that the media he criticizes use and he said, "I certainly hope so." Someone else said the audience were sheep, applauding at any little thing, and would he encourage people to find out the facts for themselves. Yes he would. Someone asked about fair editing in the Heston interview in "Bowling," and he said the cuts are perfectly chronological as can be seen in the clock over his head. He didn't say, however, whether he cut less bone-headed statements than those that wound up in the movie. (I noticed that although he used a single camera throughout, two angles appear after the Heston interview: one showing Heston walking away from over Moore's shoulder, another showing Moore's front as he holds a photograph of the child shot in a Michigan school that Heston is walking away from. RDC excused that because it's not like that didn't happen, it's only that they had to restage it, and rhetoric devices blah blah blah. I say a documentary should be a documentary. (I might have been thinking of William Hurt's single tear in "Broadcast News.")
Someone asked about Palestine and the Usan funding of Israel. He emphasized that Jewish people deserve sympathy and support because of the Holocaust, to the point I thought he was going to Hitlerize the question into humor or uselessness, but then he said, "with that said, we shouldn't give another dime to Israel while it's killing innocent civilians." He distinguished between the terrorism by a powerless Palestinian and the organized killing by the government of Israel. He said he's emailed Yasser Arafat suggesting he get a million Palestinians to sit in the street in passive resistance, because while some of them will be shot the world won't allow the million to be shot. He took the audience to task for the smattering of applause that following his saying "never another Holocaust" in contrast to the more vigorous clapping that followed his statement about not giving more money to Israel. No one in that audience, however, was old enough to be responsible for the Holocaust, whereas we all, by virtue of being alive and taxpayers now, are responsible for what's going on in Israel now. I don't feel responsible for the Holocaust any more than I do for Ferdinand and Isabella's ethnic cleansing of Spain, which they conducted while sending Columbus off to begin another ethnic cleansing. I recognize that my country and I have profited from WWII's aftermath, but I can't change the past. I can only affect the present.
Moore called our infant mortality rate an act of violence, which is good. He suggested a question to ask of people who are pro-war: how threatened do you personally feel by Saddam Hussein right now? How imminent do you consider his threat to the United States of America's land and people and you at this instant? Which is what I have thought for a while: the United States has sat back while wrong was done until threat was imminent before acting: secession happened and the North did nothing until the Confederacy fired on Ft. Sumter; Germany mowed over Europe twice and we did nothing until the Mexican telegram in WWI and until Pearl Harbor fired us into WWII. I do not see Saddam Hussein's immediate threat to the sanctity of the United States or to Usans, but only that his removal would benefit the plutocracy. There's a lot of EvilDoing in the country now that's killing people now that the administration ignores because it's not profitable to them to correct.
The Rocky Mountain News's article correctly pointed out that Moore didn't give a source for the survey that he said shows how liberal the majority is, but tsk'd that he only glancingly mentioned Columbine in the first 75 minutes of his talk. Did the reporter then leave, not hearing the final 15 minutes, which was all Columbine, or did the person merely consider that for Moore to concentrate on an imminent war to the not-actual-exclusion of a nearly four-year-old domestic event was insensitive or wrong? I liked that Moore pointed out that Columbine could have happened anywhere--another reason not to focus on it here more than elsewhere. Someone asked him how to reassure an eight-year-old not to be afraid of attending that high school when the time comes. He spoke of how statistically, mathematically unlikely another slaughter there is. Which I'm sure will put the little kid's mind at rest.
His next movie is going to be called "Fahrenheit 911: The Temperature at Which Freedom Burns." I wonder how many people are aware of the Bradbury story, and I dislike the shorthand of "9/11" instead of "September 11th," but it's a good title.
No one, including me, asked him what he is doing with the millions he has earned through movie and book royalties.