Best Summertime / Hot Day Songs

The current national heatwave produced an all-time record high for my hometown yesterday. 108F. Wow! What's your musical soundtrack for these hot, summer days? Here are some songs to prime the pump. These are mostly about summer and heat. What are your favs?

A Hundred and Ten in the Shade - John Fogerty

Hot Hot Hot - Buster Poindexter

Heat Wave - Martha & the Vandellas

Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer - Nat King Cole

Summertime - Will Smith

Hot Fun in the Summertime - Sly & the Family Stone

In the Summertime - Mungo Jerry

Boys of Summer - Don Henley

Rock Lobster - B-52s

Under the Boardwalk - The Drifters

Summer in the City - The Lovin'  Spoonful

Summertime Blues - Eddie Cochran

Too Darn Hot - Ella Fitzgerald

Summertime - Janis Joplin

Summer Breeze - Seals & Croft

Don't Be Ignorant: Know Your Food Portions

A friend of ours recently purchased a food scale and started weighing her food in order to determine portion sizes. Here’s what she said: “Got a food scale last week to get correct portion sizes. This has been an eye opening experience. No wonder I have had a weight problem, lol!”

When it comes to eating, ignorance is not bliss. This is especially true when you have food in abundance, as is the case in America. Most of us get up every morning and basically eat whatever we want, not knowing or ever considering how much food we really need. So why is knowing correct portion sizes important?

Because you only need so much food per day. How will you know if you are getting enough or, as is most often the case, too much if you have absolutely no system of measurement?

Food is enjoyable. Food is a cornerstone of social interaction. Food is comfort. But first and foremost, food is fuel. It provides energy for the body to support daily life functions in addition to any other activities we do. If you take in too much, the excess energy is stored as fat. If you continue to store fat day after day, well, you get fat.

Eating without any frame of reference is just a bad idea. So how do you approach portion control so you don't eat too much? You have to start with the basic unit of energy measurement for food: the calorie.

A calorie, when it comes to food, is the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 kilogram of water by 1 °C. It is a measure of energy. Food has potential energy that can be converted to real energy in the human body. The science behind calories have been around since the late 1800s, and just about every food imaginable has a determined calorie count. And the information is readily available to most everyone at any given time.

So how many calories do you need a day? The answer depends on certain variables such as your age, sex, and activity level. It is easy to determine your basic calorie needs through many different websites. Just search calorie calculators. If you are trying to lose weight, you need to use more calories a day than you take in. You should try to lose no more than 1 to 2 pounds a week unless cleared by a doctor to lose more. A handy webpage for figuring what you need and tracking food is MyFitnessPal.

So now you know how many calories you need in a day to lose weight. A pound of body fat equals about 3500 calories, so to lose a pound a week, you need to take in 3500 less than what you use. Most all packaged foods come with the calorie count for that food printed on the label. For instance, I am looking at a can of soup that contains 2 servings. Each serving has 120 calories. When I eat the can of soup for lunch, I will have taken in 240 calories. If I needed to measure out a serving, the label tells me that one serving is one cup. Here comes the need to track portions.

If you know the calorie count in a certain amount of food, then you need to know how much you are taking in to correctly track your intake. It may need to be measured in volume or in weight. The soup I have tells me the number of calories in each cup. Less liquid foods may be labeled by weight, usually in grams. I purchased a food scale at Wal Mart in order to better track portion sizes at home.

If you have a food such as produce or meat that is harder to determine due to no label information, the USDA has thousands of foods and their calorie values on their website.

So there you go. Can you see why portion control is so important? A food that is very dense in calories can get you in hot water very quickly if you eat too much. One of my favorites is peanut butter. Just two tablespoons contains about 200 calories! It's a great food and is not necessarily bad for you, but the calorie count is high. I could easily eat 8 tablespoons in no time. I need to be sure I am portioning it out when I eat it so that I don't go over my daily limit for losing weight.

Our problem in America when it comes to portions and what we need is sheer ingnorance. Most of us don't know what we need each day, and we merrily shove into our mouths whatever we want based on how the food makes us feel. Don't be misinformed! Take charge of your health and know what you are taking in.

Poland 09 - I am a Lingual Loser

Naivety. I’m not sure it can be helped when one travels abroad, especially on the first international trip.

Upon learning that I would be going to Poland, I did what I am sure many people do. I researched the food, photos of the cities I’d be visiting, and the language.

“I’ve got plenty of time,” I thought. “I can learn some of the language. Yeah, if I really work at, I can be at least fairly functional by the time I go.” Oh you stupid, stupid boy.

Yes, like many a noble yet unlearned ideas I’ve had, I really didn’t have any intentions of giving this my full effort. It wasn’t even going to be a good college try. Half-baked is probably too good a term for my effort. But in my defense, I did look it up on the internet. Isn’t that close enough?

Plus, Polish is one of the most difficult languages in existence. It usually ends up in the top ten of difficult languages to learn on many experts’ lists. The main hope for English speaking people is that most of the letters in the Polish alphabet are the same as ours. It isn’t a completely foreign looking language like Arabic or something Asian.

There are more than 26 letters in their arsenal, however. The extra letters are diacritics. These are existing letters with marks above, below, or through them. One example is the Polish letter Ą. Now you may think that is a variant, or at worse a deviant A. Nope. It is a completely different letter.  They have an A already. This is distinctly a Ą. Why? I don’t know! They also have letters in their alphabet that are not used in native Polish words. They are only in their alphabet for the sake of words that are imported/adapted from other languages and only make appearances when those foreign words become a part of the Polish language.

Polish is also one of those Slavic languages where you’ll find a string of consonants without vowels to break them up. So if you think you are going to pronounce things phonetically, you’ve got another thing coming. To an English speaking person, that many consonants without a vowel break is a code that that can’t be cracked. It’s like driving a car that can go 300 miles on a tank of gas, and the gap between gas stations is 400 miles. The tongue just needs the vowel break. I think the most consonants I saw in a row was four. Wow.

There are also multiple genders in the Polish language. In many languages, every noun and/or pronoun is assigned a gender such as male or female. To me it seems arbitrary, but it does affect how you refer to the noun and/or pronoun with other words. That is why in French you have la and le in front of nouns, for example. Polish has three genders (or more, depending on who you ask).

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about it: A distinction is also made between animate and inanimate masculine nouns in the singular, and between masculine personal and non-personal nouns in the plural. There are seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative. Yeah, I don’t even want to think about it anymore.

Then there are rules that aren’t really rules yet they are rules. They aren’t just suggestions but they bend and flex in so many different directions based on the situation. Situational grammar. How fluid. Even Przemek had a book that he had to refer to from time to time to make sure he was getting his own language right. And he wasn’t writing a thesis!

So I didn’t learn much of the language before I went. I did try, however, to learn some while I was there.  I managed to master a couple of words, but that’s about it. I was often met with the same reaction when I asked a Polish person to teach me to say a word or phrase. It was a shaking of the head, a sympathetic expression, and a hand on the shoulder. They all came together to say “Don’t even try, you stupid American boy.”

It all ended in disaster. They will often give you a word to repeat, and I would repeat it just the way I thought it was said. They would say no then repeat it again. All I could think was, “Wasn’t that what I just said? It sounded the same to me!” Yet they heard a big enough difference to say that I didn’t even get close. What a lingual loser.

Przemek’s wife Gosia did try to teach me some words. One came across to me to sound like MEOWCHOW. I repeated it a few times, and Gosia just stared at me. She then said, “You speak better cat than Polish!”

Ode to a Jilted Lover 05 - My First Attempt

I am not a song writer. I don't compose melodies, which seems to be a major component of songs. But I  do have some ideas for song lyrics. Here's my first attempt at a jilted lover song. It is inspired by the annual Superman festival in nearby Metropolis, IL. I wondered what kind of love could originate from a chance meeting on a hot June day.  I don't have a definitive title, so the working name is The Lonely Life of a Superhero's Gal. Please, review and critique!

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He burst on her scene from the deep of the blue sky,

they found one another on that day, hot as all July.

Some would say destiny, others say fate,

she just hoped that it wasn’t at all too late.

He was her Clark Kent, she was his Lois Lane.

They spoke of various pasts and heroes fast as trains.

Their ice cream melted as they walked the Metropolis square.

The two were the perfect festival pair.

The lenses of his costume glasses

were as hollow as his heart,

but she was sure the S on his chest was real.

Oh how lonely a super hero's gal must feel.

The days flew by, and the comic book ink rubbed away.

Like a flash he was gone, never to stay.

The rescue was good, and superman’s not a bad guy,

but once the work is done he’s gone. It’s the blink of an eye.

She’s a lonely fan in a perilous world,

just another awestruck fandom girl.

The gal of a superhero feels the sting of the one who strayed

long after the dye in the costume starts to fade.