An Exercise and Fitness Routine for those Blah DaysWritten by Renee Kennedy and Terry Kent
Summer is right around corner, but there's 2 feet of snow in my driveway! If you like to exercise outside, or you drive to gym, how are you going to exercise when weather is lousy? Plan a simple, but effective exercise routine that you can do right in your living room. (By way, shoveling snow is an excellent aerobic workout - just be careful and take it slow.)WARNING: Before you start any exercise routine, consult your health care professional. Start this routine slowly, if you can't do 10 repetitions of a certain exercise, then try five. Materials needed: two weights, three lbs each or two soup cans Routine: Day One: Stretching - 10 minutes Upper Body Work Out - 10 minutes Ab Work Out - 10 minutes Cool down - 5 minutes Day Two: Stretching - 10 minutes Aerobic Work Out - 20 minutes Cool down - 5 minutes Alternate these two days every other day at least five days a week. Stretching exercises: http://www.studenthealth.ucla.edu/health/sha/stretch_exercises.htm Ab Work Out: 2 repetitions of 10 each 1 - http://www.netfit.co.uk/abd5.htm 2 - http://www.netfit.co.uk/abd6.htm 3 - http://www.netfit.co.uk/abd26.htm
| | How AIDS Changed Gay Life in AmericaWritten by David F. Duncan
Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America. By John-Manuel Andriote. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. $30.00 The author states that this book will examine "both 'big picture' and its finer details in considering many ways AIDS affected nation's hardest hit community, gay men." He succeeds in presenting many telling details of that impact. We are introduced to personalities, informed about critical events, and acquainted with controversies that might have lain forgotten in old newspaper archive or fading memories if they werent collected in this book. My only criticism of this rich body of material is that it is poorly organized, especially with regard to chronology. The events covered in a single paragraph may skip forward and backward over a decade. Where author may disappoint reader is in his attempt to present "big picture." His historical claims read more like sound bites than serious analytic conclusions. When he asserts that AIDS activism brought about "the transformation of a disorganized collection of despised individuals into a self-affirming community and a full-fledged civil rights movement" and on a later page that "AIDS brought gay community as a community out of closet," he seems to totally overlook gay activism that was well under way before recognition of AIDS. His thesis is rooted in a picture of 1970s as an era characterized almost solely by gays closeted in a ghetto where unending promiscuous sexual activity continued until AIDS ended "party." This sort of broad sweep painting of all gays of 70s with same brush is poor reporting. Though author certainly has no such intent, it could even be taken as support of sort of puritanical agenda that sees AIDS as deserved outcome of an era of moral laxness, even as Gods judgement on homosexuals. It is true, of course, that those who were involved in "party" were at greatest risk but, as we all know, many who were not promiscuous became infected. Nor has promiscuity disappeared from either gay or heterosexual communities as a result of AIDS epidemic.
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