Written by Lars Hancock

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So I’m currently training my wife in a fitness contest she will enter next month. I know what you’re thinking, this is a lot like hiring Cory Snyder as your batting coach, or Derek Anderson as your QB coach, or hiring Lebron James and Maverick Carter’s band of idiots to do, well, anything. And you’re probably right.

But I’ve always been good with theory, a living embodiment of the maxim “those who can’t do teach”. On a side note, don’t ever spout that statement off around a teacher, because I’ve done that on accident before, and boy howdy that didn’t turn out well for me. Professional teachers are a completely different thing, and are people I respect immeasurably. Here, I’m talking about sports and sports alone.

One session, I decide on an exercise with a medicine ball. She is to do a situp with it, toss it to me, and then I toss it back and she does another one. Well, my first throw back is just a bit outside, slips through her fingers and hits her square in the mouth. A look of horror comes over her, and she runs to the ladies room with her hand over her mouth. Oh shit.

I’m sitting there for what seems like an eternity going through all the horrible things that could have just happened there. Chipped tooth was the first thought, which is bad but repairable easily. What if I knocked the whole thing out? Being a lover and not a fighter, I was voted Least Likely To Knock His Wife’s Tooth Out by my high school class (which I think was correlated to my Least Likely To Have A Wife Giant Dork award), and here I may be. At this moment, the guilt is destroying me.

Luckily she emerges with a non-Appalachian set of teeth from the bathroom, but she has a fat lip. Apologies have been emanating from my mouth incessantly from that point. But you know what? She didn’t Lebron the rest of the workout – we finished strong (minus the medicine ball) and we’re on schedule.

Afterward, we were talking about friends of ours, whom we both coach through various situations in their life relating to their health. As a general law of humanity, people get into habits that they just can’t break, and tend to obsess and overindulge. We have many friends that are so fanatical on their diet and exercise plan that they are literally destroying their bodies – consume less than 1000 calories a day while exercising for 2-3 hours at a time. That sort of behavior fuels a vicious cycle, where you don’t see good results from your weight/figure and then either (a) go more extreme, or (b) quit. Trying to coach moderation and a counter-intuitive eat more, exercise less, and lose weight mentality is tough, and trying to break those habits is tough too.

The key to success is trying to find a healthy obsession to take the place of the old one. I changed my life doing this, obsessing on my caloric intake, and have been able to maintain a healthy weight for a number of years now. I have friends that have made the program work as well, but it does require some sacrifice, some faith, and a little luck as well.

On that note, I am writing this to encourage everyone to get on the Cleveland Indians’ bandwagon. Cleveland’s support for the team is like Mel Turpin’s diet – just completely wrong. Yes, we’ve been through the cycle with them before, investing a lot of time and energy supporting the Tribe and not getting the payoff, which has burned us out on the team.  Last year’s hot start and subsequent collapse has everyone in cautious wait and see mode with this year’s team, and that is absolutely the wrong attitude. Cleveland, we need to step up and support this team – the game attendance is shameful, and the lack of buzz about the team is disheartening. The players notice and beg us for support, and to date we refuse to show up on a beautiful clear night to root on a first place team.

May they burn us again? Potentially. But I can guarantee you they will never win a title if we don’t support them. You think Dolan is cheap in pursuing free agents now? Keep putting 12,000 people in the stands and see what sort of team we get. Come July or August when Cleveland needs that extra outfielder and/or first baseman to push us over the top, are they going to make that investment when nobody is at the games supporting the team? Hardly. The time to step up is now.

Look, Manny Acta is a fantastic manager. He’s getting a lot of blood out of the turnips he’s been given. His lineup moves have worked spectacularly, and his teams never quit. This team is damn fun to watch, and the Jake is a fun place to watch a game. Forget how much Casey Kotchman and Johnny Damon may suck, the pitching is good to excellent, and there is always a chance to win. And 22 out of 38 times, we’ve managed to do such.

Tonight we are playing the Marlins at 7:05. Cancel whatever plans you had, and go. Call your friends and have them meet you there. Make this viral – fill the place up, and once you get in the Jake when it is loud and rocking like the late 90s, you’ll be obsessed on the Indians again. Tweet it, facebook it, do it. #IndiansSellout is the goal. Because if we back this team, we can, in fact, build a winner here.

Anyway, off to the questions.

Lars, when will the Chinese invade? –Cerebral_DownTime

One if by land, two if by sea, three if Baerga, and four if inside your electronics. Expect the Old North Church to hang four lights in it soon.

Over 98% of all microchips are made in China in factories, ultimately, controlled by the state. Do you know when you buy a computer if there are back doors or malevolent code embedded in your microchips that will allow the Chinese government to take control of your device beneath any anti-virus system you may have? Nope, and there’s a macroscopic chance that, in fact, there is similar mechanisms inside just about any technology device, including the ones that our government and military use. Let that sink in for a second.

There is a hacking competition that occurs annually where Americans no longer are even remotely competitive. The Chinese are light years ahead of America on the cyber front, and if and when they decide to go to war, they will annihilate our cyber assets like they’re the French army. China pours billions of dollars – dollars they actually have – into their hacking assets, which have developed this incredible offensive capacity. Our fancy battleships can fire as many torpedoes into D-4 as we want, once China cripples the infrastructure that supports this nation, we’re a sitting duck, and we will beg to be under their control to stop the mass chaos, rioting, starvation, and anarchy a world without computers will create.

So when will it happen? Our debt to them is almost unrepayable, and when they decide to “foreclose” on our assets as a nation, they will do it with authority. Make no mistake – the Chinese government is not content to leave “well enough” alone. As we continue to borrow money and drive our own economy down the toilet with out of control spending and rampant entitlements, this gap will worsen, and then China will flip the “fuck America” switch and that will be that. I anticipate this happening in 10 years if not sooner.

Better hope Cleveland sports wins a title before then, or we may never see it.

Tell jb he's old enough to start eating at real restaurants and since he's no longer single he can evolve past the FUDU Diet if he'd just put forth the effort –Fire Marshall Bill

I have a friend who literally did not eat a single vegetable before he turned 30.

That’s the thing that separates the “single guy” diet from the “married adult” diet – the adoption of the vegetable as a viable candidate for sustenance. Young single guys have an incredible metabolism, from going to the gym, playing sports, staying out all night, and generally being active. You can survive, and thrive, on a diet based strictly on chicken wings, Arby’s Beef ‘n Cheddars, and beer. You need protein, and aren’t about to use a seafood fork on anything because that’s just not how you roll.

Sadly, however, most of us at some point become domesticated. There’s no point in drinking to 2 AM because you already know who you’re sleeping with that night. A weekend playing football and carousing in Put In Bay is replaced by trips to Home Depot and Bed, Bath, and Beyond (if you have the time). Continuing to eat like a guy makes you fat and out of shape, plus it offends your wife, who really wants to use that fancy little seafood fork she has.

It is by necessity therefore, that you have to shift your diet. Piles of vegetables take up space on your plate without adding calories, which is pretty much the only way to satisfy your man appetite without becoming Gerard Warren. Your wife will want to remain svelte too, and as such she’s not going to have a 96-oz steak, she’s going to have vegetables. The sooner you come to grips with the taste of vegetables, the better off you’ll be.

Confession: I actually enjoy Brussels Sprouts now. Love them. I remember as a kid mom used to serve me these boiled piles of frog testicles that tasted like farts. All our moms did this horror to us, and made us eat them, which is why we only ate pizza when we went to college. If you roast them so they get some caramelization and crispyness on them, and toss them in a sweet and acidic dressing (maple and hot sauce for example), they’re quite good. Embrace change, eat sprouts, and you’ll find you actually enjoy them.

Put anything under the broiler or on the grill, tossed with a little olive oil, and maybe some balsamic vinegar or lemon juice to finish, and it will be good. You have to do this, it isn’t optional. So just man up and eat like a woman. Or a domesticated man. It’s for your own good.

We are at war with Islamic extremists a.k.a Taliban, Al Qaeda which hide-out in Afghanistan; a country we have occupied for 10 years costing American lives, billions of dollars, and stretching our military to the brink.

Our country is suffering from a heroin epidemic with devastating effects on our society. Domestically we are in a war against drugs, costing us American lives, billions of dollars, and stretching our law enforcement, courts, and prison system to the brink. Afghanistan is the world's #1 supplier of opium. Karzaid's brother is the #1 opium dealer there.

We are in the middle of a recession. So during this recession we are waging a war in Afghanistan which supplies the dope of which we are waging a war against while borrowing the money from China? –Pod’s uncle

What part of that doesn’t make sense to you?

First and foremost, Afghanistan shouldn’t be a country. Afghanistan is what happens when racist white people take a map and draw arbitrary lines, ignoring tribal differences and national differences (Iraq is another example of such a failure) to create a “country”. There is no national identity, and nothing that galvanizes those people around a common cause.

Our continued insistence of maintaining these arbitrary lines is part and parcel to the problem. To be powerful enough to run such a place requires someone like Karsaid, who has ties to the underworld and opium production which is the only thing really unifying Afghanistan as a nation. Very similar to the Daley monarchy in Chicago, to get all the local thugs who control the regions to cooperate, you need a bigger, more corrupt thug.

Why wouldn’t we want to divide that area into its national boundaries? You could create functioning governments representative of the people that could get popular support, and operate in a true republican fashion. Instead, there anarchists will play on racial, national, and cultural divides, and continue to destabilize the government for their own purposes, making the unification of the effort impossible, costly, and downright Quixotian.

So instead, our government supports a corrupt government, who’s backbone is necessarily in the drug trade, and therefore supports the drug trade. And we risk the lives of our soldiers to do such and increase our debt to China which increases the risk of our entire system collapsing, or them getting pissed and invading us.

All to respect the arbitrary lines some racist drew on a map in 1922.

So to answer your question, we’re destroying our country with this frivolity because we don’t have the balls to do what is right, and make the appropriate changes to the nations to construct them as they should be, likely because our elected officials are ignorant of the history of the area and the true root of the problem to begin with.

Please email questions to lars.hancock@yahoo.com ,tweet them @ReasonsImADrunk, or DM them to me in the forae to LarsHancock.