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Breakfast Links: Spartan Workout, Gore and the Road Less Travelled

Ok, this is madness (no! this is Sparta!! sorry.. sorry..). Take a look at the workout the actors who were training to be Spartans were put through. It was, appropriately, a 300 rep workout done for time. It changed daily but one sample routine was: 25 pull ups, 50 deadlifts - 50 push ups (sometimes on gymnastics rings), 50 jumps onto a 24-inch box, 50 tire drags (dragging a huge tire attached to your waist across the room and back), 50 single-arm clean-and-presses using a 36-pound kettle bell, and another 25 pull ups. Um. Yeah, I could do that for time, maybe 4 days time. I guess those muscles weren’t all a result of convenient body makeup and cgi!

So by now we’re all aware of that news piece flying around about how Gore’s electric bill is like $1bajillion. Gore responds with a whole bunch of bullet points about solar panels and carbon offsets. Seems reasonable, sort of, but what? What are those carbon offsetse he’s buying? Turns out he’s buying those offsets by investing in Generation Investment Management, LLP, which is, fortunately for him, his own long-only hedge fund with a $3,000,000 minimum investment. And how green is it’s investment policy? “Sustainability research plays an important role in forming our views on the quality of the business, the quality of management and valuation.” Important, not defining, not a requirement, important. Awesome, preach it to me, brother.

Sigh, that’s the kind of thing that makes me want to travel and put some carbon in the air. Fortunately for me, I came across this site - nothingtoseehere.net. It’s a blog with at least moderately off the beaten path finds - organized by country. Mostly it’s in England, but it’s got a nice strip of roadside America in there (Wall Drug, which I have seen, and the Lunchbox museum, which I haven’t but want to, among others). Questionably, it has the whole East Village in NYC listed, but you can’t win’em all.

Bonus link (thanks, Ken!) - so 300 made $70million this weekend, 3rd biggest R opening ever. Filmed in 60 days for only $60million, it’s already profitable. Hopefully hollywood will learn that it just doesn’t pay to pay Tom Cruise >$20mil a movie. My review here.