Indigenous Ability

Neuroscientist, Scott Grafton, has gifted the empirically thoughtful and scientifically literate a volume that is chockful of provoking information. The book, Physical Intelligence: The Science of How the Body and the Mind Guide Each Other Through Life , makes a case that smashes a bit of that Cartesian duality mind-body separation nonsense that many armchair philosophers wheedle and wrangle over till the cows come home. Mr. Grafton, warns that perhaps the cows will never come home if we stay mired in “ This is mind stuff ” and “ This is physical body stuff .” He demonstrates more than capably and quite convincingly that we need to recognize that mind directs the body [no argument there I wager] but also what makes up a large part of our mental intelligence is how the body bolsters and interacts with the mind even in areas you might have formerly considered mere intellectual matters. The volume is full of provoking/enlightening observations throughout.  Let’...

In today’s sermon we shall ramble through WWI nautical ingeniousness, Old West architecture, Major League Baseball fashion, and, if we’ve done the job right, wind up with an observation or two regarding the cost-to-benefit analysis of being a bad-ass or simply “ dressing like a bad-ass.” Let’s start with our WWI history. Q-Ships. What exactly is/was a Q-Ship? Let me back up a little, let’s discuss why Q-Ships were conjured in the first place. U-Boats. We all know what these are. The U-Boat, or “ Unterseeboot ” [you guessed it, “undersea boat”] was a major contribution to Germany’s success at sea. These roving bands of submarines sank exhaustive tons of ships, cargo, let alone the number of lives lost. Many were lost on both sides, as submarine duty is particularly hazardous-even today, all the more so in the early days of the technology. U-Boats stalked shipping lanes, looking for ship profiles that read as easy prey and then they struck. ...

Oh, Crew, looking to get outside the comfy smooth gym and test your real mettle with activities and objects that haven’t been designed to make hefting them easier so you can skip grade-school reveling in the WOD participation trophy hamster wheel? Then, belly up to the bar for a PT Challenge from ye olde days of lumberjack and woodsman prowess. Pulp wood was a designation for bucked lengths not quite up to par for lumber use. For our purposes, and those into Woodsman and Lumber Sports Competitions, grab yourself 4 lengths of log four feet in length with an approximate weight of 30-40 pounds per. If you don’t have logs available, you can hit the resource that is Home Depot and pick up a couple of 6 x 6 pressure treated timbers. They come in 8-foot lengths so a wee middle cut to each gives you a PT resource that will last. [They’ll be a bit on the light side but they will serve the log-bereft.] The Course ·         Lay out...