I get my TV from a dish on my roof. The dish points to one of the zillions of artificial satellites that orbit our little blue world. The particular satellite that my antenna points to streams over 300 channels of news, sports, music and movies to my old plasma TV.
Three hundred channels and I can seldom find anything to watch.
There’s lots of content being pumped into my TV every second. The problem is that most of it’s is about as stimulating and substantial as cotton candy. Don’t get me wrong, I like cotton candy as much as the next guy, but I don’t want a steady diet of it.
And speaking of diet, if you’re on one, or need to be then sitting and staring at your TV is the last thing you want to be doing. At the very least you should stand when you watch.
A recent New York Times article posits that the simple act of standing can do more for you health wise than the occasional jog or walk. It’s a simple matter of numbers.
A brisk jog for 20 minutes can burn about 500 calories, but even you do it daily it’s still only once for that day. The rest of the day you’re sitting and sitting burns almost no calories. Standing, on the other hand, requires the use of the largest muscles in your body; your leg muscles. The more muscles you use, even if your standing still, the more calories you burn, and the more calories you burn the fewer calories there are to take up residence on your rear. You can stand for far longer than you can jog, so even if you burn 2 calories for every minute you stand, if you stand for an hour you get rid of a little over 100 calories. If you simply pace back and forth for an hour you burn almost 300 calories. It starts to add up.
Does this mean that you can give up the diet and stand around all day eating donuts?
No. Butt it does offer you another weapon in your battle of the bulge.
Now, the problem is what should you watch while you’re standing there? Lucky for you I have a few answers.
Remember The X-Files? That was one cool shows and what geek — what boy didn’t have fantasies that involved Gillian Anderson’s Dana Scully? Of course, The X-Files had a lot more going for it than the titillation of adolescent male libidos, there was the weird stuff that you wanted to believe in. What made that show and the weird stuff the episodes were based on so interesting was that much of it had nuggets of facts, or at the very least, good conjecture in them.
You can still catch reruns of The X-Files, but maybe you want more to believe in. If that’s the case then maybe you should check out Stuff They Don’t Want You To Know.
This is a fun podcast that include episode titles like Joseph Stalin and the Monkey Army and Are There Living Dinosaurs? The narrator uses a deadpan voice while relevant and often irrelevant video clips and pictures are used to illustrate the dialog.
There are about 20 episodes on the iTunes Store, each is over 3 minutes long. Watch them all while standing and you’ve nuked well over 200 calories.
Get Stuff They Don’t Want You To Know and get to watching.
Once you’re done with those you can then fire up Weird Week. Host, Steve Folland, takes us on a weekly review of the strange, the odd, and, of course, the weird.
This is another great find and it a blast to watch. You should be warned the Steve Folland’s thick British accent can be a bit hard to follow, but it’s well worth watching all 51 episodes.
Big boobs, big dogs, big Gummy Bears and more all appear in the various episodes. Now this is the kind of news I want to watch. Grab Weird Week and see what’s weird this week.
Ok, if you want your non-news with a slightly geekish hue then you should take a look at Geek Entertainment Television, or G.E.T. (GET it! Ha!) (Sorry.)
With well over 70 episodes available covering everything from Net Neutrality to Todd Bridges (Yes, that, “Whachoo talkin’ bout Willis?” Todd Bridges), G.E.T. should keep you happily watching and standing for some time.
Nothing is sacred to the G.E.T. crew, and these vids are all first-rate and fun to watch. Subscribe to this one folks, you’ll want to come back.
OK, that’s a wrap for this week. Stop back next week for more Free on iTunes.
More free stuff below with direct links.
