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

It has been seemingly forever since one of my Vlogs has attracted 850+ hits (Spatulizaton Surgery) or 2000+ hits (my feature on swimming teammate, Meera "Will Swim For Polish Vodka" Ramsooksingh).

I thought that perhaps the fault was in my recent propensity for depressive ruminations, so it seemed reasonable that throwing a CreamPuff swim in might counter the trend towards melancholia and downerville descent. However, the recent posting that featured the velocitudinous maiden generated not much more, if any more, vlog traffic than the preceding entry, which compared modern life to the urge to vomit and the hope you can avoid vomiting but can't.

Neither extreme seems to have captured much of an audience. Thus today's entry will be my attempt to appeal to many, many different volg-experiencing constituencies.

1. Femme. As you can see, I am leading this vlog with a picture of our favorite Mermaid, a former Miss Junior Teenager Pennslvania who is clutching in her very dainty mitts in the picture above the official paper documenting that she has finally managed to ditch her slave name and re-adopt her maiden name in its place. Congratulations to our cheerful teammate who is no longer the linguistic chattel of what some have described as a living "devil." Today is also her birthday. Mermaid, this vlog--and the extreme free publicity it is likely to generate for any of your future money-making schemes and/or attempts to get a greater number of Facebook friends than me--well, this is your birthday gift from me.

What's that I hear?

Nonsense, you must keep this present! I know it's expensive, but I wouldn't think of accepting it back.

Okay, so much for the lecherous subset of the vlogging viewership.

2. Freestyle After last Sunday's 4 hour tennis beating, during which the combination of exhaustion and defeat conspired to drive me into the ground, I went to swimming practice on Monday and was unable to make the intervals! I ended up doing the whole practice and then some, however, I was slow, exhausted, achy, chilled (despite the chronically high temperatures of our Y septic tank), and riddled with stomach pains (though this could have been the fault of a training meal of french fries, a chocolate milkshake, and chicken wings.) Anyhow, I didn't do anything on Tuesday save lie around and ache in a fluish way. On Wednesday, I forced myself to go to practice but gave myself permission to go extremely slow, swim nothing but freestyle, and leave at any time. I ended up feeling okay, provided I did not swim hard. Of 3400 yards, only two 50s were swum out of my comfort zone.

Audience for above: swimmers looking for excuses to take it easy during practice when they imagine they might be sick.

3. Flu. I've been reading about the 1918 Pandemic and trying to arrange some interviews for what looks to be my next article--i.e., what the worried epidemiological world is doing now in the hopes of preventing a mass casuatly tag-team scenario or bird and swine flu strains, coming back with a vengeance. In the process of preliminary research, i came across the theories of one Paul Ewald, Ph.D., one of the founders of evolutionary medicine. I had assumed that he subscribed to the notion that viruses, for the most part, evolve in the direction of less virulence (rather than more of it) over time, under the theory that it does a rider little good to kill the horse upon which he is speedily galloping. It turns out the evolutionary biology of pathogens is infinitely more complex, and the "lesser virulence" scenario holds mainly when transmission from host to host becomes more difficult. I don't want to bore you with concepts I myself have not yet mastered, but suffice it to say, and you heard it first here, I predict a relative paucity of deaths come this winter, though a reasonably high infection rate. If you are lucky enough to have already caught flu, but the case was so mild that you wrote it off as a cold, then you, madam or sir, are almost certainly sitting in the catbird's seat.

Audience: me. I am really hoping that the last few days of achiness will be the only price I have to pay for not dying in November.

4. Flip. In the regular threads, Anna Lea Matysek, blushing bride of our web master nonpareil, AKA, MR. Anna Lea Matysek, or "Jim" Matysek as he was known before he married Anna Lea, recently posed a question about cheap video equipment. I answered her question in words there on the thread itself. Then, desirous of a break in reading about virulence evolution, I decided to do a video review of my recommended cheap camera, the Flip Ultra.

Here 'tis.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avV9gTQ2RFU"]YouTube - Untitled[/ame]