Vlog the Inhaler, or The Occasional Video Blog Musings of Jim Thornton

And by you, I mean me.

The quality of my vlog is likely to go downhill for a little while as my limited powers of cognition are siphoned off in various ways.

For one thing, I had blood drawn yesterday.

For another thing, I am consuming a lot of soy protein, with its insidious ingredients, genistein and daidzen, compounds that beans use to kill fungi.



These compounds also happen to resemble estrogen.



ESTROGEN RECEPTORS (a) IN MAMMARY GLAND

For another thing, my new levels of phytoestrogens are causing me to take the vapors, as we ladies of Society refer to our time as women.

Do not expect sense, transitions, a narrative line.

This is a "hack" my swimming coach Bill's son, Liam, boy genius, figured out how to put on the Sewickley YMCA's computer.

I like to go on to this before and after practice, check out my vlog statistics, and give my entries another couple "Excellent's--*****!":



(Please don't forget to click "excellent" yourself--Liam deserves it!)

Liam is a very good swimmer, but he is an even better hacker. He is 8. This still picture does not give you a complete sense of the devastation of his hack.

You click anything on the screen, and these You Are An Idiot placards proliferate like wildfire, rendering the computer useless.

Well, actually, not useless exactly. It becomes a very, very good electronic sooth sayer. You stare at the screen in growing fury. It tells you, hundreds, maybe thousands of times, that you are an idiot.

Eventually, it sinks in.

After practice last Friday, the team went out for pizza, and some of the parents brought their kids.

Liam sat next to me, and he was so intrigued by hacking technology, that he spent much of the dinner drawing this:



Not only is Liam very good at computer technology, but he is an excellent artist. I think that his crayon drawing of the You Are an Idiot computer screen comes closer to providing the actual experience than the photo above.

Note 1. You can see that he has placed in his drawing various instructions for turning the mayhem off, but I am too much of an idiot to understand the encryption.

Note 2. You can see that the pizza parlor's placemat has a map of Italy on the opposite side from the drawing. Also, I think there is a small spot where Liam dropped some Sierra Mist. Future anthropologists 14,000 years from now: Please have a field day, courtesy of one Mr. Liam White, 8, and his Boswell, one Mr. Jimby the scrivener, 56.

Which brings us to Part 2.

Liam's father, my best friend and swimming coach, emailed me this so that I would see if first thing upon awakening. He knows that I am a twin; that I have been on antidepressants longer than John; and that I am a caricature of John playing an old and bewildered man.



You can actually find more out about this interesting subject by clicking here:

http://www.time.com/time/health/arti...ealthsci-yahoo

(The gist: after 40, you can look younger by getting a little bit fat, which puffs out your skin, reducing the empty-baggy saggy cadaverousness that the emaciated old tend to develop; you can also avoid the sun (in your youth, alas, was the time to do it); not smoke; and--interestingly to those of us who believe that "without chemicals, life itself would be impossible"--avoid taking antidepressants, which cause the facial muscles to sag. This is probably the reason I look so much older than John. Otherwise, I should look younger. I live in a cloud forest, and I am fat. John lives in a solar zone, and he's thin.)

Now, here is a picture of the Thornton twins:



Oh, well. Who knows?

Perhaps soy will prove a paradoxical salvation for the likes of me.

I can't really call it an epiphany per se, because I think I have known this for a long time. But mark today, February 10, 2009, with my official public announcement of acknowledgement, for from this day on, I will no longer argue to the point:

I am an old-looking idiot.

But an old-looking idiot with a theme song written expressly for me by two adorable young looking geniuses. If you haven't listened to this already, and if you are feeling at all like an old-looking idiot yourself today, I refer you to the bottom of:

http://forums.usms.org/blog.php?b=1419

Regardless of what your name is, be it Bobinator or Qbrain, Duckson or Kafka, just add the Gallyumbo part to your moniker and share in the rejuvenating powers of music!