Herculodge

Review of the Invicta Russian Diver Quinotaur

(Re-post)

The Invicta Russian Diver Quinotaur 4578, named after the Greek Myth, a bullish sea monster with five horns, retails for $675. Amazon sells it for $250. I found mine on eBay for $200 plus $10 shipping. 

Featuring a swiss-movement, rubber strap with silver stainless steel cylinders, and a 52 mm bezel (58 mm if you include the crown), the Quinotaur is a large, bold watch. I recommend this size watch for men with wrists at least 7.5 inches. My wrists are slightly more than 8 inches and I use the strap's third punch hole. 

The watch feels very comfortable and has solid, well-built feel. There's nothing cheap about the materials. 

If you're looking for the Wow Factor without being garish, this watch fits the bill very well.

I do have a slight dislike for the little chain that dangles between the crown and the bezel and I'm tempted to have a jeweler remove it, if that's possible. 

In terms of bang for your buck, the Quinotaur gets high marks. The Invicta price is good. For comparison, I like the Nixon 51-30 series, which sell on eBay for $300-330 with metal strap. For about $100 less, the Quinotuar delivers a lot of wow. 

It feels good wearing it. I feel bigger, younger, more muscular. My bench press is up these days. I'm happy to help my neighbors carry a sofa up a flight of stairs. I'm back to popping off beer bottle caps with my teeth. No steroids. Just a manly watch.  

Some Manly Watch Alternatives

If the chain and Russian diver theme don't suit your tastes, here are a couple of alternative recommendations:

The Nixon 51-30 platinum steel with red numerals and 50 mm bezel, about $300 on eBay.

Another Invicta you might like is the Force Master with 53 mm bezel, selling for $232 on Amazon. 

Herculodge Reader Gives Thumbs Up to the Electrohome Lunchbox Utility Radio

(Re-post)

Referring to an earlier post about Val's Electrohome Lunchbox Utility Radio, Peter K, writes:

Been looking for a table radio for years. I opened the box at CTC just out of curiosity with little hope of finding something more than the gammut of cheap crap radios the shelves are full of. Looked good! Sounded good at home, with better AM reception than most my radios and as good as my $500 Sony. Much better than the BOSCH $229 workshop radio which I tried and was ready to buy from Amazon. Outstanding styling, color and cabinet texture! Heavy duty wire and 3prong plug. Handle on top for moving around, very solid construction! Can even be used with batteries. Big con is no earphone jack or input, I guess you can't have everything. I love this thing, had it for 3 months and just bought a second one. This little "Lunch Box" is a best kept secret. Peter K.

Referring to an earlier post about Val's Electrohome Lunchbox Utility Radio, Peter K, writes:

Kevin Ranks the Tecsun PL-310 the Best "Pocket" Radio

When I asked if the $150 Sony SRF-T615 was the best pocket radio one could buy, Kevin responded by writing, "I would add that, in answer to Jeff's provocative title question, the new Tecsun PL-310 is probably the best pocket radio around. However, you need a decent-sized pocket for the PL-310, while the T615 is so small it will slip into any ol' pocket ya got."

10 Qualities of a Good College Composition Instructor

 

1. There’s no one-size-fits-all way to teach. You must find a teaching method that is compatible with your own personality.
2. Students are smart. They can smell B.S. a mile away. Be authentic and have a real passion for what you do. Your students can smell not only B.S. but boredom, lethargy, and complacency and if they detect this in you, they will eat you alive.
3. Follow Oscar Wilde’s edict: “The first duty in life is to assume a pose.” By this, he does not mean be a phony. Find an identity, a larger-than-life character, for your students to hang on to. If you don’t, they will project their own image of you and what they project is never as effective as the identity you create. Always be in control of the message.
4. Related to Principle #3, leave your pedestrian personality at home. In class, be your most exaggerated self, one filled with huge passions and a gargantuan appetite for your subject, so that your enthusiasm with be contagious.
5. Know your students don’t want to sit in class and hear you talk about composition. Therefore, you must impose your will on them and find a way to persuade them to believe that what you’re talking about is the most compelling point of their attention. This requires immense energy and preparation. Not all are cut out to go muster the sheer will that can dominate their students’ attention and imagination.
6. Related to Principle #6, always assume your students are bored with your subject and their minds are on other things: food, relationships, job, whatever. To win their attention, always use a grotesque, hyperbolic anecdote (painting yourself as a hero or an innocent victim) and find a way to transition the story to your lesson plan.
7. Always assume your students know nothing. Just because they’re in freshman composition, for example, doesn’t mean they know how to write a paragraph or distinguish a clause from a phrase.
8. Always remember that your vocabulary of 200,000 words is bigger than the average American’s, which is about 20,000 words. Write down or explain any “vocabulary” word you might use.
9. Whenever possible, make them fearful of their ignorance, for example telling them that a composition with as many as 3 comma splices or fragment sentences will be discarded at the university level and that these errors are considered so egregious that students guilty of these errors will be escorted off campus by the college police.
10. Never accept late essays. Tolerating late essays always encourages other, more grievous irresponsible behavior, which will contribute to classroom chaos.      

You’re a Victim? Gosh, Herc, You Disappoint Me

 

Well, Herc, I’ve been putting up with your indulgences for some time now but today you’ve outdone yourself, arguing, rather pathetically I might add, that watching what we eat is futile because we live in an Agricultural and Technological Age in which food has become the great Comfort Mamma rendering us helpless before the alter of overreatting.

Herc, I’ve got news for you. Food has always been a source of comfort and people have always loved to eat. Please don’t try to paint yourself as a helpless victim in the face of your modern food temptations. If you wish to blather up some pretentious anthropological, psycho-babble about why you’re a glutton who is resigned to being thirty pounds overweight, so be it. Just don’t come crying to me.  Go tell it to your mamma. 

Your Snarky Ombudsman, Max

 

Amazon Selling the JBuds J3 Micro Atomic Earbuds in "Certified Frustration-Free Packaging"

Speaking of planned obsolescence, I bought the JBuds for $20 two years ago. Then several months ago I paid $30 for the JBuds J2, which were reduced to $13, presumably to make way for their new $30 buds, the J3 Micro Atomics, which come in "Certified Frustration-Free Packaging." I feel compelled to buy this new model just so I can experience the satisfaction of an easy-open package. But I'll wait until the J4s bring the J3 price down to $13. 

Do We Live in the Epoch of Inevitable Fatness?

When I do my daily hour of power yoga, I imagine myself weighing forty pounds less than I actually do, a ripped 190 pounds, performing my routine on a cliff looking over the Pacific Ocean. I am tanned and chiseled. Hip trip-hop plays in the background. I do the voice-over, of course. My workout is on DVD and sells millions.

My power yoga workout is extremely hard to do. My dentist tried to follow it, but he almost fainted and he had to stop. Others who thought they were in great shape could not follow me through my routine.

I started the yoga five years ago. Before that I had been going to the gym since I was twelve. I’ve always worked out, have always been in shape. However, in my early thirties my metabolism slowed down significantly and I no longer hovered around the 200 mark. As I write this I am forty-eight years old and I weigh in around 230. I’d love to get down to 210. But I eat too many calories a day, about 3,200 a day, perhaps more. If I could keep my calories around 2,500, I’d probably be at a weight I’d be more happy with.

As vain as I am (and I consider myself extremely vain), my vanity cannot match my love of food, my strong emotional attachment to it, and my compulsion to eat it. I know I am not alone. Most of us are consumed by our appetites and are helpless to our proximity of relatively affordable, calorie-dense food.

I recently heard a scientist on NPR say that our stage in agricultural, industrial society is actually harmful to our evolutionary development. We’ve hit this Epoch of Inevitable Fatness. Our bodies are not compatible with the food abundance that results from living in an agricultural society. All the nutritionists, personal trainers, self-proclaimed experts, dieticians and so on are feebly fighting against the tide. Some of them tell us to reject agriculture, to go back to our Hunter and Gatherer lifestyle, but this isn’t practical for many of us.

Here’s another powerful force that compels us to eat more than we should: In our Agriculture Age, we find ourselves at the same time living in the postmodern Technological Age where alienation, anonymity, and uncertainty compel us to look to food as the Great Comforting Mother.

Of course, all these forces notwithstanding, not all of us are doomed to a life of corpulence. There are those genetic freaks who are skinny and there are those who make their living at being skinny so that they have motives for limiting their caloric intake that go deeper than the rest of us.

But it seems we devour diet books the way we devour food because these diet books are merely a frenzied albeit feeble attempt to reverse our current place in evolutionary history: The Epoch of Inevitable Fatness.

My power yoga DVD remains where it belongs: in the recesses of my vain imagination.

 

For $130 Price Category, Barry Recommends the Etymotic Research HF2 Earbuds

Thanks, Barry:

I have not tried the $80 Klipsch S4 earbuds but with a name like that, they would be worth looking into. But I recommend the Etymotic Research HF2's. They are pricey (around $130 at Amazon) but have the best natural sound I have heard to date. They do not utilize any sort of "megabass" but count on the tight seal that a good earphone should make in your ear. They have a unique eartip that is comfortable and provides a great seal that gives you a natural bass and provides excellent noise isolation. When manufacturers add this fake bass it it to cover the outside noise as opposed to making the earphone correctly. It also colors the sound. Also, the hf2 have a microphone to support the iPhone. Check out some of the other reviews on the net and their website.

Men's Journal Recommends Klipsch S4 Earbuds Over the Shure SE110

Men's Journal recommends Klipsch S4 earbuds over the Shure SE110. Both buds go for about $80 and $70 respectively. 

Is the $150 Sony SRF-T615 the Best Pocket Radio You Can Buy?

The Sony SRF-T615 isn't cheap, but I did hear some good buzz about it a year ago. I haven't heard much about it since, but this is my fault since I don't check out ultra-light radio message boards. 

Update:

Gary has provided us this excellent link, via DX.Ca, of ultra-light radio rankings.