We finally bought a Nintendo Wii!

Yes, we finally bought a Nintendo Wii!

As part of my wife's birthday present, we bought her the Wii Fit+ with the balance board. We used one of these several times at a friend's house and we liked it very much, so it was an easy buy for this year's birthday present for my wife!

She set it up this evening whilst I was entertaining out parrot in the study (she comes out of her parrot tower every evening for a couple of hours time with me, listening to Michael Jackson) when I came down later I had myself weighed by the Wii and I have lost some weight, I am 95kg, 15.5 stones.

I tried some of the exercises, but got on best with the freestyle stepping, doing 800 of these for the first time to see how it went. Well, I think!

We also played some tennis later (against the Wii) and my game is improving enough that I actually won some sets!

If you need exercise and can't be bothered with a gym, buy yourself a Wii, but get the balance board and the Wii Fit+ stuff. It means that you can get exercise, but without the expense of a gym membership that you probably -if you are like me!- would never seem to have enough time to go to attend the gym sessions.

But just switching your Wii on at home? Well, that's easy. Plus there's no need to waste time travelling to and from the gym!

Agenda? Take your agenda and shove it!

Sometimes the RFM board pisses me off. There are some people who use it to push a particular agenda. These usually have naff-all to do with the real agenda of the board, that of Recovery From Mormonism.

We have had people fulminating about the evils of the education system (which one? Some people forget not everyone on RFM lives where THEY do! A bit of cultural imperialism if ever I saw it!).

Others fulminate about the dangers of NOT using the education system and drone on interminably about the evils and dangers of home schooling. (They base this on the fact that a family member home schools and is not doing a particularly good job. –In their opinion, that is… They seem to overlook the fact that it might be their family who can’t home school, or that their opinion of how their family member teachers their child is flawed.)

There are others who just because someone mentions in passing using a so-called alternative health remedy for a minor ailment drag out their own “anti-alternative health” agenda and take over RFM ranting and raving against each and every “alternative medicine paradigm” as if it were the same.

Salt water douche for the nose? Acupuncture, massage therapy, osteopathy, chiropractic, meditation, Yoga, ear candles, breathing exercises, Reiki, Traditional Chinese Medicine, NLP, Vitamins, minerals, Bio-feedback, flower essences, herbal medicine, etc., it is all treated in exactly the same way. With- Hysterical Ignorance.

Actually Several of us on the RFM board have concluded –based on years of observation – that most of these anti-alternative medicine people only ever turn up when someone posts something mentioning alternative medicine in a positive light.

There was an experiment to this end. A post with only a passing positive reference to an alternative health remedy was put on the board. And, sure enough, within a very short period of time a group of people (who were new to RFM) began posting anti-alternative health attacks (mostly ad hom attacks on RFM posters) and the usual suspects on the board who like to think of themselves as experts on every subject under the sun joined in, unaware that they had been dragged in to a bogus debate by a bunch of paid professional sock puppets with an agenda far removed from RFM!

Amusingly some of the posters quoted from some VERY dubious sources: For example a doctor who had LOST a case in which he had libelled another MD, and who had thus lost the respect of his colleagues. Others quoted from a Canadian doctor who had been running a campaign to have any mother whose child died in a house fire caused by the child playing with matches or fire lighters charged with murder. But of course, they were only interested in his crackpot views on medicine, not any of his other equally deluded and dangerous views… And why only mothers, not fathers?)

Then there’s the Darwin ID and atheism agenda and the “debate” this engenders. If you can call being a rude SOB a debate! There are those who think that by quoting great lumpen wodges of barely relevant text from Wikipedia and Google that this proves the point that they are making. It doesn’t. It just pisses others off.

Of course, whenever this is pointed out on the board, toys are thrown out of the pram, and nappies/diapers filled as the poor wee mite loses control of their bowel movements as they contort their little baby faces in to masks of rage!

They give the impression of not really wanting views that differ from their own to be expressed on RFM...

And others seem to have the agenda of always having to be right. They just love to argue. They claim knowledge they can’t have, claiming that YOUR personal experience did not happen! For example: “YOU could not have had to get the police to issue an order to the local Bishop! YOU could not have served in three different countries on your mission! YOU could not have been spoken to like that by a Bishop!” (Well gee, thanks, mate. But I was there. You weren’t.)

I remember one poster who denied on the board that the temperature at 1pm where I live was 90oF. He based this on the fact that the temperature at a place 200 miles distant had been projected to be only 70oF at 6am. (That’s 200 miles distant, and 7 hours earlier, before the sun had risen in the sky, and projected figures only. And in the UK even only 2 miles can mean the difference between sunshine and torrential rain. It’s due to the fact that three different weather centres meet over the UK.)

Even though at least five other posters in the UK confirmed that the temperature had risen to the 90s from as far a field as South Wales and Scotland, he STILL claimed that he was right and that all the posts from the UK were coming from one person. Even though the other posters confirming this were regular posters who had ALL signed in on the board!

Oh. Sorry. That turned into a rant. But I DID enjoy it! Maybe we should rant a bit more, I wonder?!

New study shows black tea helps with stress relief (Sorry, Mormons!)

Drinking tea can help you recover more quickly from the stresses of everyday life, according to a new study by UCL (University College London) researchers. New scientific evidence shows that black tea has an effect on stress hormone levels in the body.

The study, published in the journal Psychopharmacology, found that people who drank tea were able to de-stress more quickly than those who drank a fake tea substitute. The study participants - who drank a black tea concoction four times a day for six weeks - were found to have lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their blood after a stressful event, compared with a control group who drank the placebo tea for the same period of time.

In the six week study, particpants gave up their normal tea, coffee and caffeinated beverages, then one group was given a fruit-flavoured caffeinated tea mixture made up of the constituents of an average cup of black tea whilst the control group was given a caffeinated placebo identical in taste. Both groups were subjected to challenging tasks, while their levels of stress were measured.

When measured both groups showed evidence of similar stress levels, however, 50 minutes after the task, cortisol levels had dropped by an average of 47 per cent in the tea drinking group compared with 27 per cent in the placebo tea group.

Bill Gorman of The UK Tea Council said; "This new research adds to the evidence that drinking tea is good for you. Not only does tea hydrate and offer some protection against heart disease and some cancers, it's now proven to de-stress too. It's great to know that a cuppa, one of life's great comforts, can be enjoyed not just for the taste but also for its health benefits."