Contentious C

FINALLY! I found a flavor of Dymatize Iso100 that isn't fucking disgusting. The vanilla tastes like chemical-ass vanilla cake icing bullshit. The chocolate is somehow worse; chocolate is typically like pizza, in that even when it's bad it's good. But this chocolate is so unbearably sweet that it's like it's trying to nuke your taste buds from orbit. The Cookies & Cream flavor, however...damn. If you've had Ben & Jerry's cookies & cream flavor, that's pretty much exactly what it tastes like (I make it with 16 oz of milk, which is obviously sweeter to some degree but also diluted relative to their recommendation). So glad I finally found something that doesn't make me dread drinking it, after losing the Optimum Nutrition Performance Whey.

Anyone coming at me with a pair of scissors to destroy my personal property is catching a headbutt. Note to self, consider NFL internship...

TFW a Secret Santa idea actually works out for both parties involved...

Hey, everyone's got opinions about Dune and I have opinions about what's better than Dune! Day 102 (and counting) of Some Movie Crap I'm Doing, Evil Bastards Edition (Only 9 movies listed because 1 is my HALLOWEEN HAVOC pick, and you can read about it there whenever RIPPA actually posts it) Hot Garbage The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane - No. Just no. I like Jodie Foster, and she was good even at a young age, but this whole movie is preposterous and shot like it's an episode of Diff'rent Strokes or something. Martin Sheen plays a pretty good creep, I suppose, but he's another guy with "Go away" heat as far as I'm concerned. It's weird that I can recognize that his kids aren't better actors but I would rather see his kids try to act (though Emilio was pretty great in Repo Man). Anyway, this is shoddy 70s thriller bullshit with a gratuitous nude scene of what is supposed to be a 13-year-old girl (it's actually Jodie's older sister for anyone feeling icky about that; it's still gross even knowing it). 90 minutes of my life I'm not getting back. Failure to Launch - 90 more minutes of my life I'm not getting back. That's the one thing about this whole idea that works well for me: if I'm going to watch shit once in a while, I can at least prioritize the blessedly brief shit. Stuff like this makes it all the more interesting that McConaughey ever figured out what he was doing in front of the camera. I don't know how anyone watching this thought this was the movie they should make, when Zooey Deschanel steals the whole entire thing and they could have written something for that character instead. There's also one shockingly poignant scene with Kathy Bates where you remember, "Oh yeah, there was a time when she deservedly won an Oscar and she was good, instead of just collecting paychecks as someone's put-upon mother." Otherwise, please succeed in launching this into space, Jeff Bezos. Angel Heart - Get out your torches and pitchforks, guys, but you may be watching this with some Lisa Bonet goggles on. I like Alan Parker as much as the next guy, but this just doesn't work. The noir stuff is super dull - it made me think of Rorschach's section of Watchmen in a bad way - the spooky stuff is cliched and racist, and Bobby Paycheck is hamming it up something fierce. The only legitimately good things about this are the way the horror elements are edited (aside from the dumb yellow eye crap) and Mickey Rourke's performance in the last few scenes. Otherwise...ugh. I mean, it's a movie with the most obvious twist in Hollywood history, where dudes are threatening to kill him for "finding"...himself. I mean...really? Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit - Ugh. I hate to say I kind of liked season 1 of the Amazon show, but they really, REALLY need to quit making this rah-rah America crap. They should've quit making it after Red October, honestly, since that's the only start-to-finish good Tom Clancy-based movie. I'm not sure this is necessarily the worst entry in any of these films, but it's gotta be up there. Keira Knightley is really miscast and does a weird American accent, Kenneth Branagh is boring (and I now realize his Tenet character was just a crazier version of this one), and the only remotely bright spot is Kevin Costner mean-mugging his way through the movie. I hope they paid Chris Pine a ton for this, but however much he made, it wouldn't have been enough to get me to play the role. Acceptable Jolt - I wanted to just hate the crap out of this, since the first 3 minutes feature tedious narration and Charisma-as-a-Dump-Stat-on-Legs, Jai Courtney, but then the movie becomes very self-aware of how ludicrous it is and it leans HARD into laughing at itself. I mean, any movie where a suspect flees through a maternity ward by throwing babies at the cops chasing her is actually pretty funny. Most of the rest of it is dumb bullshit, but it at least says to you, "Hello, I'm Dumb Bullshit - come have fun with me!" And so you do. The Lair of the White Worm - Any fleeting worries I ever had about my appearance are now and forever gone due to the knowledge that Hugh Grant once bore the Brow. But this is actually pretty good. Amanda Donohoe is pretty unforgettable in this, and I was surprised that Sammi Davis, who plays Mary, was believable and genuine throughout much of the film. You could almost watch it as a straight movie rather than a B-movie comedy until close to the hour mark. It's really that big, ridiculous leap where the mom gets cut in half that signals to you that things are only going to a silly place from now on. Even then, it's a decent enough silly place, and the hallucination scenes are some pretty crazy stuff, right up there with Altered States. Awesome Island of Lost Souls - Talk about crazy stuff; this is what makes that Criterion Channel membership worth it. I think I've seen chunks of the Michael York Dr. Moreau, and of course I've seen the disastrous Brando/Kilmer version, but this just steps all over all of those, and probably any other adaptation that will get made. I think the old-time practical effects make it even creepier and more bizarre than it would have been, had they tried to do something like this today. Kathleen Burke is pretty great as Lota, Charles Laughton is absolutely revolting as Moreau, and the whole film is shot through with so much unsettling weirdness that it's hard to stop thinking about it. That Devo drew so much inspiration from it is just icing on the cake. Dune - Spoilered just because. The Last Duel - Also spoilered, just because.

And guess who matched me again... Maybe the direct profile message will work... NOPE! 3 hours later, unmatched again! Jesus fuck.

Well, you said the magic word with "Fandango" - none of the Landmark theater chain locations are going to show up on their search. You'd have to go directly to their site instead.

Really? Bethesda Row has been advertising the shit out of it for the last couple of weeks.

Especially when, to look at the dude, there ain't shit about him that's desirable if he were checking receipts at Wal-Mart.

This week was not as balls-to-the-wall crazy as I've done in the past: I don't know if that's because I'm watching too many YouTube videos telling me to just take my 2-3 minutes between compound lift sets, or because I'm hitting a wall. I think more the former, and I'm lazy. But everything is still mostly going up and feels better, especially the things I really wanted to work on: sumo deads, incline bench, shoulders, biceps, triceps. Other than my OHPs, which honestly I have not done a lot of until lately, I'm hitting and blowing past my paltry PRs. I've been eating about 3000 calories a day for close to 2 months now, but my weight gain is tapering off, too - I'm beginning to think my body has adjusted to the increased calories, and my already high metabolism (maintenance for me, out of shape, is probably 2200 or more) is telling me to go fuck myself. The problem here is three-fold. First, as a diabetic, I have a pretty firm idea of what my carb cap is, and if I go much above 300 grams a day, it's bad news time. I already take somewhere in the ballpark of 35 units a day, about 9 of which are post-prandial readjustments, so eating more carbs than this just pushes that extra number even higher, and I don't think it should go any higher. If I make up another 200-400 calories in fats, then...I will get fatter, and I don't want to do that, either. And besides, even if I did eat closer to 3500 calories (or more), I get the worst heartburn of my life doing that, and then I don't sleep because of the heartburn. I think I just have to accept that I will have to try to maintain this as something in between a classic and a lean bulk for the foreseeable future. I'm so sick of chicken. So, so sick of it.

Next week will be short a movie as I'll probably leave my HALLOWEEN HAVOC pick for that thread. Had an extra one this week anyway, so...Day 92 (and counting) of whatever this is, Daniel Craig Retirement Home Edition Hot Garbage Teen Wolf - I couldn't remember if I saw this as a kid or not, but in retrospect, I'm pretty sure I didn't, because my eyes aren't permanently rolled into the back of my head from how stupid this was. I mean, granted, Hollywood made multiple 2.5-hr movies based off of Johnny Depp & a theme park ride, so scrawny TV star as hoops-playing supernatural creature isn't even the 50th-dumbest idea they've made money from. But...ugh, there's just nothing about this that's worth the short runtime. The Stiles character is all right, but what's the deal with the friend who's suddenly scared? No resolution there. And why is his girlfriend named Boof? Was this where a certain term spoken in the halls of Congress originated? I dunno. This is already more words than it deserves. Acceptable Vampire's Kiss - Like the rest of you, I'd seen the memes, so I felt like it was a good idea to see what the whole movie was like. This is...not good, as it feels a little amateurish with respect to direction and cinematography, but it's not the embarrassingly terrible example of film gone wrong that some may claim. I got a very After Hours-ish vibe off it in the first few minutes, but then I realized why afterwards: it was Joseph Minion's follow-up screenplay to After Hours, so, yeah, duh. But you want to know about Nic Cage, right? Well...he's actually pretty good in this. It's totally nuts and outlandish, but it's a credible portrayal of someone losing their mind. You can take those bits out of context and think they're laughable, but taken as a whole, it's some pretty dark stuff that's more effective than I expected it to be. I was laughing at it for the first 20 minutes, but certainly not the whole way through. Let Him Have It - This is a low-budget (looking, at least) British film about a boy caught up with the wrong crowd who ends up in prison for a crime he didn't commit. It's got a really early Christopher Eccleston role, and Tom Courtenay plays his father, but mostly the whole thing turns on the events that lead to such a gross miscarriage of justice. The story itself is effective, and the acting is fairly solid, but this looks and feels more like a TV movie than a feature film, so it's a little surprising it's on Criterion Channel, except for the subject matter. Worth a look if you have the stomach for the material and the low budget. Super Fly - Hey, my first blaxploitation film! Ehh, this was pretty mediocre for the overwhelming majority of the picture. I liked how voyeuristic the camera work was early on, though, and the still-photo montage in the middle of the story was a really solid piece of the movie, one that was frankly more effective with its message than anything contained within the utterly ridiculous plot. There's a lot of interesting social stuff to unpack in it, but I'm about 50 years late to the party to contribute anything there, so if you've seen it, you probably know what I'm talking about. To Die For - This is a really mixed bag. On one hand, Nicole Kidman is actually pretty good in this, one of the first times where her acting did legitimately carry a movie. The style of it mostly works, as it's all so ridiculous that it feels like it could have been an early (and particularly fucked-up) episode of The Office or something. But the little Jerry Springer/Phil Donahue cutaway moments don't really work, and none of the characters other than Kidman's really get enough time to make you give a shit about their choices or their fates. But, I was pleasantly surprised that the movie didn't make me listen to "Dirty Laundry" again, after that was PLASTERED all over the ad campaign for this fucking thing when I was in high school. God. The Anderson Tapes - Here's another "close to Awesome" entry, a little Sean Connery heist that goes crazy and is a pretty clear influence on Soderbergh's Ocean's movies and De Palma's Snake Eyes, what with all the instances of showing you the same thing from multiple angles to reveal the details you missed. The cast is pretty solid, the story alternates from creepy to funny to desperate pretty easily, and the ending is a Burn After Reading-quality finish. I didn't know what to expect out of this, but it's good enough to make me wonder if Connery really did anything better than this in the 70s (I suppose Murder on the Orient Express, but that's quite the ensemble). Sapphire - I...did not expect this to be a pretty fucking good movie. There's plenty about it that doesn't age well, like how it's rather rah-rah for the cops and is straight out of the murder mystery handbook with respect to setting up red herrings and then knocking them down. But man, the rest of what's going on in this is WAY more interesting than you'd expect out of a British movie in the 50s. It's got loads to say about racism, sexism, immigration - just way ahead of its time in being willing to tackle some heavy stuff, the settings are interesting, the cast is solid. Very much a movie worth checking out. No Time to Die - I think we can put to rest any notion of Daniel Craig *not* being the best Bond. His worst movie was the last one, and that's still better than literally half the other Bond movies, so 4 out of 5 solid outings with 2 of them being excellent is a pretty good run. This combines the opening of Quantum of Solace with the emotional punch of Casino Royale and the beautiful visuals of Skyfall, so it has a lot going for it. Of course, it's still 20 minutes too fucking long, and the villain is boring as Hell, so it's got its problems. But it's a good capstone for this set of movies, and it ties things off pretty well. Awesome Paprika - Huh. So...this is a thing. I don't know if I can really appreciate anime that much, and I'm not sure exactly what the problem is. Do all these movies have to be so on-the-nose about how they discuss philosophy, or is that the translator's fault? Because the attempt at a plot & story here are not-so-good, and you get those moments where the characters literally blurt out entire themes of the film. What is this, a Christopher Nolan movie? Haha, see what I did there? Anyway, it's the same kind of problem I had with stuff like Ghost in the Shell, which I didn't find as awe-inspiring as others have. That said, the visuals and vision here are pretty much what put it in this category. It's not just the influences on something like Inception; the opening credits montage has a very "Joi from Blade Runner 2049" feel to it, and the towering giant over the city in the climax made me instantly think of the spider in Enemy, so I wonder if Denis Villeneuve loves this movie. The 39 Steps - My first exposure to this film was a stage version of it that was light on suspense and heavy on the zaniness of the plot, and it was a pretty delightful experience. This, of course, plays things a little bit straighter, but only a little, and it's got a lot of pretty damned clever bits of camera work in it along with oodles of charm in the last 30 minutes or so. But it's also such an early movie - both in terms of the career of the man and also just cinema in general - that you can kind of tell Hitchcock is still figuring stuff out with this. No wonder he just about totally remade this when he did North by Northwest. If you loved that (and I do), you'd be hard-pressed not to like this. Something Else Smooth Talk - If I had to be perfectly honest about the quality of the film here, it would probably go into Awesome at best, largely because the first half hour or so of this feels a bit like a Lifetime movie or an afterschool special in terms of how it looks and plays out. But if you stick with it past that, it just gets grimier and darker and more interesting, and the last third of the film is...it's something else. It's more like a Southern Gothic story; I found myself thinking a lot about "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" as the stomach-churningly inevitable events play out before you and you basically want to put your fist through Treat Williams' face (in a good way, not in the "he's a shitty actor and a waste of space" way he usually manages). Laura Dern is great - maybe too good, actually. The actual ending feels, I don't know, I wouldn't say rushed, but certainly incomplete, like there were things left out that needed to be processed a little more. It gives the last third of the movie a bit of an unreal quality, like it was more of a fully internal struggle taking place within Dern's character, rather than two actual people talking about anything at all. But real or unreal, it doesn't make that sequence of events any less unsettling. Another entry into "Great Movies I Will Never Watch Again"...

Highly, highly fitting that Shatner took a flying penis as his route to space. I expect nothing less from the man.

I fully suspect that Phoebe Waller-Bridge and I love her all the more for it.

The Chiefs defense looks like it's taxiing planes out there instead of making tackles. Say hi to the wild card round, Patrick (or an early vacation).

It speaks to me, too, but in the opposite. I just found out my ex-girlfriend, who has been the only close friend I've kept in my life for the last 9 years, is moving to Boston. There are little annoyances - like no one who will have a spare set of keys if I lock myself out - but mostly it's just the crushing notion of having nowhere to turn if I need to talk. Partly that's my fault, but partly it's deeper. Even if I had other friends (and that base was certainly larger and well-used when I still lived in Baltimore and had old grad school friends), I would still rather go to her first anyway. I still can, I suppose, but...this feels like one of those things that's happening in life and after it happens, everything will just be a little bit "less-than", compared to how it was. OSJ dying earlier this year was like that, too. Do you ever find yourself rehearsing conversations before they happen? Wanting to talk to a particular person about something that just happened? Hearing a joke and wishing you weren't the only one in on it in that moment? That's basically who she is. So, I guess my point is, be grateful if you want to be grateful. But if you want to be ungrateful, be ungrateful, too. None of us have any right or reason to say that the things that might weigh you down are things that shouldn't bother you. You're the only one carrying your burden; only you know the weight. And sometimes that weight is a terrifying thing.

Can we credit shitty coaches with interceptions instead of QBs? Because that one was on McCarthy, not Dak.

Not as concussed as the guy in the booth who read off a clearly incorrect graphic without a second thought, so, good for the Bengals.

Good girl/bad girls... Jesus. Though I have actually been doing the abduction side of those myself. Don't see the point of making your adductors stronger; that's not what they do. I went heavy rather than high-volume (or as high as I had been) on both Push & Pull days, which went fairly well. Was still in the 10/12-rep range for a practically everything with more weight than I have been lifting. Leg day today was OK. I found out the knob who bogarted the deadlift spot last week is named Donny, so if he ever says anything cross to me, I can just tell him, "Shut the fuck up, Donny". But I got my RDLs and sumo deads in (probably need to do more reps on RDLs), then cobbled together enough other stuff to feel good about skipping squats. I didn't get to hit the sled, which was annoying, but I did go back to the squat machine to do something akin to hack squats, and those are hammering the everloving fuck out of my quads & glutes to the point that I didn't really need the leg press or barbell squats anyway. My Nordic curls are starting to get ever closer to being something like actual Nordic curls, too, which is nice.

Next, they should do the size of the microchip Kyrie thinks will end up in his arm if he gets vaccinated.

The Hawks will, pretty soon. Being in Seattle will make it tough, but this offense is too good.

Note to Hardee's: buy out Arby's so Coach McGuirk can shill Coach McGuirk toys.

Fuck it. I found a good choice and already ran it past Rippa, so for this one time during The Spooky Month, I'm tossing my hat in the ring. Plus there are loads of horror movies I haven't seen that would qualify for my daily watching foolishness.

I mean, have you heard their songs? Heard their songs? Because as soon as they had more than one single that charted, I think they already gave us that impression, gave us that impression. I like to think they picked their name because telling yourself to just "Imagine Dragons" is the only way to avoid jamming pencils in your ears, pencils in your ears.

BB2K can now go on the To-Watch list, which is...infinite, but nevertheless. It's Day 82 and counting of Watching Too Many Goddamn Movies, Mediocre Indie Film Edition Hot Garbage Dangerous Minds - Ugh. I'm not sure what's less believable, the notion Michelle Pfeiffer was a Marine or her Southern accent. Her nostrils are certainly tougher than a Marine after all that blow, but that's as close as she gets. A couple of the students have compelling stories, but they're sort of like the kids in Manchester by the Sea - just there to reveal things about the main character. Everything about this movie ended up being done 10 times better by The Wire, so watching this is almost a complete waste of time. Plus, ever since then, I've had the Devil's Mash-up of "Gangsta's Paradise" and "Amish Paradise" in my head, so FML. One & Two - Hey, Kiernan Shipka, Timothee Chalamet, and Elizabeth Reaser: how bad can it be? It can be real, real, real bad. One IMDb review described it as "Kids Go Poof, Movie Goes Nowhere" and I honestly can't do any better than that. The only detail I can really add is that this film was clearly trying - and failing badly - to get across the same message that Fast Color did so well: that the worst thing you can do to yourself is limit your own potential for the sake of other people. Also, there's just something about indie movies these days that is so...samey. They just all look alike, as though the directors went to You Can Make a Film for Next to Nothing'R'Us and all bought the same equipment to shoot & edit with. More on this later. Red Dawn (2012) - I actually don't remember enough of the plot points of the original to know how much this changed or how much it kept the same, but I know the ending is different, and it's shittier. The original had a seriously bleak finish that punctuated not only the impossibility of what the Wolverines were trying to do, but also underscored the notion of the unsung, sometimes unknown heroes that exist in all conflicts. Changing that to, I dunno, try to make a Red Dawn tentpole franchise and do sequels? Fuck right the fuck off. I Am Love - This might be a borderline case, as it's shot well enough and has a little more creativity and vision than the other small-budget movies I watched lately, but it's in Italian, and it's so clear they cast Tilda Swinton just so they'd have someone Western audiences would recognize. It's not like she actually speaks much Italian by the looks of it, as all her dialogue is overly simplified, and the only long speech she gets is a voice-over. So, why cast her at all, except that she's comfortable with nudity and she won an Oscar? I dunno, just like I dunno if this movie is the least bit believable since there are really no good set-up moments that lead to the plot developments. If anything, it feels more like the correct forbidden romance would have been between the two best friends. Plus, they manage to kill off the only three-dimensional character in the whole movie, which leads to a surprisingly "Succession"-like hospital scene. Acceptable How I Live Now - More samey-looking indie stuff, only with even more Muppet Baby goodness in the form of Saoirse Ronan, Tom Holland, and George Mackay circa 2012-3. Luckily, they're all pretty good as you'd expect, so the seen-it-all-before visuals and seen-it-all-before plot are carried off by the quality of the acting. Overall it's pretty mediocre, though, and in lesser hands, it wouldn't have worked. Ronan is one of those people I could watch in anything, though, so there's that. Bill & Ted Face the Music - I think this would have gone into Hot Garbage were it not for the bucket bit and the Prison Yard scene; those were the only true laugh-out-loud bits of the whole film, which was...well, I wouldn't say surprisingly stiff, because Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are nothing if not stiff actors, but disappointingly stiff. You'd think after as much as they talked up eventually doing this film that they'd make more of an effort but...eh. The kids were probably the highlight of the whole thing and, if nothing else, the take-home message of the movie is very much on-point for a Bill & Ted movie. I probably should've rewatched Bogus Journey prior to this, though. Mary Shelley - Even more samey-ass indie films leaning heavily on the actors to salvage what is otherwise not terribly interesting. This actually looks a bit better than the others, but the real annoyance is the dialogue, as they try their damnedest to shovel socially important things to say into the mouth of the world's first famous feminist (though the film very much wants to make the point that actually her mother was the first). The guy who plays Percy Shelley is...irritating at best, and I now have very little hope for the Netflix Sandman show if they cast Tom Sturridge (Lord Byron), who is a good 6 inches too short to be Dream. Elle Fanning has to put this thing on her back and drag it to watchability, but she's Elle Fanning and she does tend to do that. Stephen Dillane is pretty good as her father, though, and Maisie Williams makes an all-too-brief appearance, too. Point Blank - This, much like Thief (which was clearly influenced by this film) was about as close as a movie gets to jumping from the Acceptable bin to the Awesome bin. I just watched this on a lark on Criterion, not knowing what I was getting myself into, thinking, "Hey, John Boorman: how did that guy keep getting directing gigs in spite of Zardoz?" Well, this is why. The first half hour of this is one of the weirdest, most visually compelling noir movies you'll ever see. You really have no idea what is going on, what is real, whether it's some fever dream, anything. It's just strange left turn after strange left turn, followed by crazy shit happening in crazy places. The real highlight is a brawl in the back of a jazz club that you just have to see to understand. My favorite bit in that is watching Lee Marvin take a guy down, then clearly wind up and aim a punch right in the guy's junk regions - he was kneeling and he still managed to get some hip thrust into it. It's fun stuff. But this loses steam once it has to actually tell something like a story, and it feels like a lot of other noir movies do while it's unwinding the plot. It gets weird again by the end, but not weird enough and not consistently enough. Still, very much worth a watch. The Black Cat - It's The Spooky Month! I should be watching more horror movies. I had few, if any, expectations for this, but it's got a surprisingly smart script for a cookie-cutter 1930s studio film. There's a bit of back-and-forth between Karloff and Lugosi about the trauma of WWI that's pretty well done, and the ending scene is actually pretty damn funny, too. Otherwise, it's kind of what you'd expect, what with the hammy acting and women who exist just to be in danger and scream at things. No clue what it has to do with the Poe story, though. Awesome Police Story - This would very much have been in the Winner category if it had *anything* at all like a real script to it. It really makes you wish that Jackie Chan hadn't quite felt the need to do every last thing on these movies, because if it were less cliched and a little snappier, there'd be no dead spots in it at all. The stunts, of course, are still jaw-droppingly insane. Just the audacity it takes to even say, "OK, we're going to build this lean-to village, annnnnnnnnd, then we're going to take some Datsuns and drive them down a fucking hill and wreck it all. The shantytown, the cars, anything that gets in the way, just all of it." I don't know how he walks around in normal pants with balls that big. Of course, on the other hand, maybe he's just crazy, as evidenced by all the outtakes at the end of all his movies. But, this is miles and miles and miles away the best one I've seen him do (not that I've seen that many of them - 4? 5? Something like that.).

And they were just in the SB in 2006.

I'm finally back on my normal schedule after two weeks of hauling boxes and pulling every muscle I didn't know I had. I tried my best to get to 100 reps of everything on Upper day today (except for deadlifts, no way I was trying that). It went...OK. Kneeling lat pulldowns: 40/30/30 with 100 lbs, this was pretty good, but my traps and rear delts were some kind of lit up after. Bench press: didn't get close, didn't think I would due to my shoulders, but I did OK. 50 reps, 25/15/10 with 95 lbs is a lot of volume for me, TBQH. I can definitely push more than this - I'm decline benching 125+ - but I don't actually like doing flat bench regularly. But the pump was good. Seated cable rows: 30/16/16/12 with 60 lbs. Traps just lit up like they were on fire by the last 4-5 reps of the last 3 sets. This is probably a good thing. But 74 is still decent. Incline bench press: thought I might rep out the other 50 here, and my body laughed at me. 15/8/6 of 95 lbs and I barely got the last rep up, pretty much at failure for that. But this felt like sufficient chest work between the two exercises being as strenuous as they were. Straight bar cable curls: 50/25/25 with 30 lbs. Lots of burn, had to take a few quick breathers during each set, but I didn't put the weight down and just kept repping until I hit each number. Overhead cable tricep extension: 40/30/20/10 with 30 lbs. Kind of beat up my elbows, but a really solid pump from this, too. My form is getting better and better on tricep stuff, especially when I remember the "bend your forearms out over your elbows" cue rather than just trying to jerk the weight up. For shoulders, I just went really heavy on cables - did partial ROM with 40 lbs (which is easily the most I've ever tried lifting with my side delts), then some static holds with 15 lbs as a finisher. Oh, and I also managed 3x5 of 245 lbs on deadlifts, all the while making the same face (and sounds) Clark Griswold made when he was trying to smash together the plugs for the 15,000 imported Italian twinkle lights in Christmas Vacation.