Optimum Nutrition: Quality & Selection

Optimum Nutrition is a cutting edge nutritional supplement concern that is getting a lot of attention in the fitness and bodybuilding communities of late, so I thought that I would try to spread some awareness about their comprehensive line of nutritional supplements.

I have many friends who are heavily into bodybuilding, and they are very serious about sports nutrition and they're quite discerning about the bodybuilding supplements that they use. They tell me that they see results when they use Optimum Nutrition products, and I have to take their opinions seriously because these guys spend a whole lot of time in the gym.

Optimum Nutrition offers a really large selection of nutritional supplements, including creatine, glutamine, protein powders, and more, even multivitamins.

If you are into bodybuilding and/or sports nutrition, I suggest that you do some research into the impressive line of supplements that is being offered by Optimum Nutrition.

Pitching

When I played Little League baseball in south Trenton the league I was in was called the 6-11 league, and I don't know why. It was for kids 10-12 I think. That will have to remain a mystery, but I was always big for my age, and when I came out for the team as an 11 year old, the manager, who was named Bob Rahl, put me at first base. There I remained for that year and the next.

My team did not have very good pitching, and we lost more than we won. Since I was the biggest kid I could throw the ball pretty fast, but I had zero control. Still, I was always bugging Bob Rahl to give me a chance to pitch. We usually lost anyway, so what could it hurt?

The last game I played as a 12 year old was a blowout. We were getting shelled by the best team in the league, and in the last inning our pitcher was getting hit around. There were runners on first and second and nobody out The other team had the meat of their order coming up.

Much to my surprise, Mr. Rahl called time and came out to the mound. He looked my way and motioned me over. He handed me the ball.

I warmed up and got ready to face the first batter, who was one of the better hitters in the league. His name was Mike Susko. I threw as hard as I could and he took the first pitch, which was a called strike. He swung through the second pitch, and he swung at a pitch that was around his eyes on the third and couldn't catch up with it.

The next batter was the best player on the league, Paul Tweedley. He had hit a couple of home runs in the game as I recall (I know he hit at least one). I reared back and threw as hard as I could. The pitch was heading straight for his head.

He ducked. The ball flew to the backstop, and the runners took off. Strangely, the ball hit one of the posts holding up the backstop on the fly, and it bounced directly back to the catcher, Steve Zsenak. He threw to third and the third baseman tagged out the runner who was trying to advance, then threw to second and we got the guy trying to go from first to second as well.

I threw four pitches and got three outs, and that was the first, last, and only time I stood on a mound in earnest.

Trenton and Blue Collar Intellect

When I was a kid growing up in Trenton I found myself hanging out with a circle of friends who were, in retrospect, pretty damned smart, well read, and informed. I was turned on to some very cool and sophisticated music, and through an older friend, an ex-Marine named Tom Dunshee, I learned to question the government. I was reading books about the conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy before I was old enough to drive while I was listening to Miles Davis, Genesis, Pat Metheny and King Crimson.

I learned to be tough as well, but not too tough. I know that Trenton is a different place now than it was in my formative years back in the 70's, but I think that it prepared me well for the rest of my life in a number of ways. It was a good place to attend the mythical "school of hard knocks" that people speak about while still feeding your intellectual curiosity.

Many people who grow up in the suburbs with a silver spoon never learn many of the things that my friends and I took for granted as elementary back then, and things that they learned in college are things that we learned sooner, in other ways.

Seeing rich, privileged, insulated people like Bush, McCain, Hillary and Obama rolling up their sleeves and trying to act like "Joe Sixpack" (as if he really exists--all blue collar people are dumb and identical to one another in the eyes of the elite) makes me realize that it is a shame that the working person has no voice in government. College can be great, but it is not the only way to learn, and nobody who didn't go to college is allowed to be a leader of anything, let alone the government. And that is why we are living in a dying economy and fighting needless wars. Many of what they call "the best and the brightest" are subjugated to powerlessness.

When you think about degrees, you have to ask yourself, what good is a business degree? What do you really know that is so important when you have a degree in business? An economics degree sounds very marketable, but, look at the country's present economic condition. It was created and led along by people with degrees in business and economics. The environment has been managed by people with degrees in environmental science. The government is exclusively the domain of people with degrees, for the most part, advanced degrees in law. Is the environment, the economy, and the government a model of the collective health and wellness that is the result of people with degrees exercising their learned expertise?

I think that in many cases the only things that degrees accomplish is that they keep the have-nots having not and preserve decent jobs for the ruling classes.

If you know that your parents can and will pay for you to go to any college that you want to, for as long as it takes you to get the degree or degrees that you seek, you are in a very different position than someone whose folks are just making ends meet. Our government, and corporate management (wait, I'm being redundant, they are the same thing), is comprised of people in the former category, and the rest, the majority, have virtually no voice as they are paid a pittance by the management that they could never be a part of, and this cycle repeats itself generation in and generation out.

Can you get a degree and a job if your parents aren't rich and you have to put yourself through school with student loans while working full time without much time to study? Sure, those people are called teachers.

But you knew that. You're from Trenton.

Trenton Entertainment: Frank Pinto

It may sound strange to some, but I was very much inspired to learn how to play music by Trenton local musicians as much as I was by big rock stars and the like. The local guys seemed just like me, and it was like, if they can do it, I see no reason why I can't do it.

Frank Pinto was a fine songwriter and singer who performed locally when I was coming up in Trenton, and he played an astonishing array of covers as well. He would sometimes distribute a few sheets stapled together of all of the covers that he knew in case you wanted to request something, and he really knew a lot of songs. I always thought that he had a truly good voice, kind of gravelly, soulful, "Springsteenian" if you will. The first time I ever played in front of an audience was sitting in with Frank, who was gracious enough to let a dumb ass like me have the time of my life one night.

Thanks to Frank for the great music and the inspiration.

Inspection Station

I don't know if you still have to do this in New Jersey, but when I lived there you had to take your vehicle to the "inspection station" once a year and wait in a long line while it was inspected in order to renew your registration. I have lived in several different states, and to my knowledge New Jersey in the only state that requires this type of thing.

I once inherited a car from my grandfather. It was a Cadillac El Dorado, and the he kept the car in great shape. New brakes were put on the car, and it was expensive, because they said at the inspection station that the brakes weren't good enough. When I got the car inspected the next year, they still said the brakes weren't good enough. As the driver of the car, I can say quite honestly that I could stop on a dime. I told the guy that the brakes had been fixed and offered to show him the receipt. None of that mattered, he said.

The mechanics said that nothing more cold be done about the brakes. What else could I do? I moved to a state without an inspection station. The nice thing was, I had 49 choice.

Though I love Trenton, the state bureaucracy in New Jersey is very intrusive, and the state taxes the people very heavily. Now that I think about it, I realize that this had a lot to do with why I moved in the first place.

Maybe I'll move back and live in Morrisville.

You Can Take The Boy Out of Trenton...

I haven't lived in Trenton in almost 20 years, but I still have a lot of memories, and much affection, for my hometown. Since I grew up on Market and Broad, my experience of Trenton was not insulated from what could be called the "other side of the tracks" or what have you, so the changes in the town since I left probably wouldn't be all that much of a culture shock to me. I enjoyed all aspects of Trenton and I learned from all ethnicities, and I think that the melting of culture is invariably what America is supposed to be all about.

To tell the truth, I miss Trenton. I have lived in a lot of beautiful places close to nature in the west, and I have lived in what is supposed to be exciting Las Vegas for almost six years now, but honestly, there is more to do around Trenton if you include AC, Philly and New York than there is to do here by a long shot.

It is just the shared experience of a place, its warts and all, that provides a kind of commonality that you can't replace. And it is also hard to make friends as an adult unless it is some kind of business networking or a "work friend," and as time goes on, you realize that people who gave you the time of day when you were a kid and had nothing to offer them financially are real friends.

Moving back to Trenton is something that interests me. I know that most people would counsel me against it, but that has never stopped me from doing things that I wanted to do before. I don't mind taking risks. If my heart is in the right place, the outcome is likely to reflect those positive intentions.

Bernie's Eagle's Nest

When I was in my later years of high school, I used to hang around an area around St. Anthony's church and grammar school that was called "The Lot" with a bunch of kids that were friends and acquaintances. There wasn't really a lot, it was just the corner of an alley and a street near a funeral home, but they called it "The Lot." The truth is, we would often drink some beers in the alleys around there because if the cops came, you had a lot of ways to run down different sections of different alleys and jump fences and cut through yards onto other streets and whatnot so, I guess, no cops would want to go through all of that to catch somebody for the crime of drinking a Gennesse Cream Ale at sixteen or seventeen.

This was all well and good for three seasons of the year, but during the winter, it was mighty cold out there. When I was sixteen, a friend, who shall remain nameless, and myself decided to try to get served in the bar on the corner of Olden and I think it was Liberty called Bernie's Eagle's Nest, largely due to the fact that we were freezing our butts off outside. We did indeed get served and started to hang out there regularly, and we were of course the envy of the underage, frigid lotsters all winter long.

Old Trenton Theaters

My memory is a little spotty on this, but I can remember when I was a little kid there being some old theaters that were still showing movies in downtown Trenton. I can recall the Trent, and the Mayfair, I believe, and the Lincoln. Since I was born in 1960 and they closed in the early seventies or thereabouts, they played what they call the "blacksploitation" films like Shaft and Superfly, and I think they also had Kung-Fu films, Bruce Lee and such. The theaters must have been really special places back in the day before everyone had television. I can imagine that my mom would remember them differently than I do.

I like old theaters and they were one of the things that made a typical American town a typical American town before everything became homogenized and malls destroyed downtown shopping districts and took the movies with them.

NJ State Senators Propose Bill

I noticed that a couple of New Jersey state senators from different sides of the aisle have teamed up to introduce a bill that sounds like something that the citizens of New Jersey would heartily support. The bill, if passed, would amend the state constitution so that the government could not use employee and employer contributions intended for unemployment, disability insurance or other employee needs to balance the budget or to pay for the "emergency of the moment" as Senator Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester), who is co-sponsoring the measure, put it.

Co-sponsor Thomas H. Kean, Jr. (R-Union) had this to say: “Voters would be able to ensure that these funds, paid for by business owners and workers alike, are there when needed by the people and their families. This is good for business and good for workers.”

I for one am in total agreement. Furthermore, if there is a surplus resulting from these contributions that the government has been spending elsewhere, give it back to taxpayers and/or lower their rate of contribution.

Trenton Entertainment: Richie Cole and Alto Madness

Synchronicities abound if you are paying attention, and I listen to a radio station here in Las Vegas called KUNV that plays nothing but jazz during the week, uninterrupted by commercials. I was considering a topic to write about on Trenton Makes The World Takes when I heard Richie Cole's voice coming across the airwaves touting the station.

Richie Cole is perhaps the greatest musician to come out of Trenton. He is an internationally renowned bebop jazz alto man, and he currently tours with The Alto Madness Orchestra. Richie is a prolific writer and arranger, and to give you an idea of the type of respect he has earned worldwide, the University of Madrid in Spain has been offering its students an Alto Madness Orchestra course for several year running. He's listed in Who's Who in America, and he draws enthusiastic crowds wherever he plays.

He was educated at the Berklee School of Music in Boston through a Downbeat Magazine scholarship, so his special talent was recognizable even as a very young man. He has recorded more than four dozen CD's and albums, and he appears to have many more in store for us.

As a person who grew up in Trenton, I have always been proud to be able to say that the great Richie Cole is from Trenton as well. If you have never heard his work, you are in for a treat.

(Image and Info culled from RichieCole.com)