8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back

I received a beautiful book in the mail today by author Esther Gokhale entitled 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back: Natural Posture Solutions for Pain in the Back, Neck, Shoulder, Hip, Knee, and Foot. I wrote recently about having computer-related back pain so the arrival of this book was very timely.

The first thing I noticed about the book is that it is very beautifully laid out with very large pictures and examples of exercises. In addition, there are interesting images of people from various cultures to give examples of proper posture. Gokhale also uses her own kids to demonstrate how children often start out in the world with decent posture. Sadly, like in my case, it's downhill from there.

According to some of the publicity material I received, Gokhale developed an anthropological-based method for pain based on observations of people with low back pain. The Method teaches people how to sit, bend and lie the way our ancestors and other culture with low incidences of back pain do. Okay, this sounded a bit "gobbledygook" and new-agey to me but I have often found that new-agey in terms of dealing with pain relief often works.

I tried some of the exercises in the book which show how to sit, stand, bend and walk correctly and was pleasantly surprised that they seemed to ease some of the stiffness of the computer. The exercises with bands (that I already had in the house) were most helpful and stretched my legs out and felt great! I very much recommend the book if you spend too much time on the computer. If nothing else, the photography and illustrations make this book worthwhile on their own.

Stuart Schneiderman: The Day of the Cougar.

Law Professor John Kang has a new article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender entitled The Burdens of Manliness. You can check it out here.

Update: Reading over a download of the paper, I am struck by the following statement made by the author:

Moreover, I do not feel in the least that women have stolen power from men, and I have no wish to advance the position that discrimination against men to benefit women is necessarily unjust.

It's not unjust? WTF? Of course it is. How can a professor of law say such a thing? Perhaps I am reading too much into Professor Kang's statement but of course it is unjust to discriminate against men to benefit women. Isn't liberty and justice for all the hallmark of our Constitution?

Update: Ann Althouse discusses the Kang article and explains why Kang might have said what he did: "Kang denies that he's a throwback to the "the sensitive troglodyte yearnings of the 1980s Men’s Movement," and I hear echoes of criticisms he must have received on drafts of this article." Althouse described the criticism she herself received as an untenured law professor when she tried to get a feminist professor to see that freedom for all (including men) would be better.

Perhaps it is understandable why Kang has to make excuses and precede the article with some kind of PC talk but it doesn't make it right by any means.

New Book on Pain

I just saw a post on Facebook from one of my favorite authors, Abigail Thernstrom that her daughter, Melanie Thernstrom, has a new book out today entitled The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering. As someone who is dealing with intense computer-induced back and hip pain, I'll have to check it out.

'"High schools are the downfall of American school reform," said Jack Jennings,...'

WSJ: Scores Stagnate at High Schools (via Newsalert):

New data show that fewer than 25% of 2010 graduates who took the ACT college-entrance exam possessed the academic skills necessary to pass entry-level courses, despite modest gains in college-readiness among U.S high-school students in the last few years.

This is kind of interesting: "Only 2% of Republicans had bedbugs, while 12% of Democrats did."

"I realized my husband was of no added value."

Wow, what a statement, but apparently, this is how some women feel about their husbands according to an article in the Dallas Morning News (thanks to reader who emailed the article). In the article, Christine Wicker, author of the best-selling book Lily Dale : The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead, asks why women are walking away from their marriages:

A lot of midlife women in my acquaintance are leaving what appear to be perfectly good and loving husbands. Or thinking about it. Or cheating on them. Or wanting to. Or staying married and faithful but buying their own houses, which they either live in or keep as a bolt hole.

This astonishes me. I grew up believing it was men who had midlife crises that threatened marriage.

I decided one recent morning to list women I knew who fit the profile. In 15 minutes, I came up with 30 names. Some families on my list have more than one walk-away wife. ....

University of Virginia research shows that progressive wives are less happy than traditional wives.

"More traditional women may wear rose-colored glasses, but they also benefit from a sense of male and female roles," said sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, who conducted the research. "They don't expect their husband to act like a woman."

Everywhere you turn, it seems that some women's magazine, Suze Orman or some other cheerleader for the divorced (including the Atlantic magazine article mentioned in the essay) is telling women to throw in the towel and get rid of that guy. Women are told to be unhappy with everything about men. It's no wonder they are walking away from their marriages. The article says that women claim they don't regret it. Maybe they won't. But given the male shortage, especially for older men, I think the guys will be just fine.