SELF IMPROVEMENT IS THE BEST YOU CAN EXPECT?

Yes, self improvement is the best you can expect.

What else would you want?

If you make a mess and clean up after yourself?

That’s improvement. Sounds easy enough.

Or you try something different, maybe a new approach to an old problem, and it works out better than expected.

What do you call that? Starts with an ‘I.’

 

On an individual level, based on the attention generated, weight loss and money are what people need the most help with in America.

You’ve heard of the latest short cut for weight loss, the quick fix, the injection that curbs hunger and urges to eat anything you’ve heard is hard on the body?

The main food culprits of fat: Possessed food and refined sugar off the top of my head. Booze, soda pop, what else?

The latest saying I’ve heard: “If it’s made in a plant don’t eat it, if it is comes from a plant eat it.”

Or sign up for a series of shots, take the new pill form, of weight loss miracle.

Not long ago the fad was gastric bypass, stomach staples, and the other invasive stuff.

Now it’s much easier. Get a shot, take a pill, and watch what happens.

 

You Need Role Models? Me Too

You can’t trust a fat man or woman celebrity to stay on track once they get famous.

Just when you’re used to seeing XXL and how nice everyone is to them, they drop that familiar weight and turn into run of the mill celebrities instead of body shaming scolds and canvases for new fashion.

Who’s your favorite fat to thin story? All of them are full of hope.

Thin to fat?

As a baby boomer, a baby boomer blogger, my favorite guy who started thin and went the opposite direction?

Elvis.

That he died so young is troubling.

Current example?

Russell Crowe.

From sleek Roman to fat German, he did it all. And then?

From Google AI:

 

Russell Crowe recently lost around 55-57 pounds by cutting back on alcohol, changing his lifestyle, and using health treatments for inflammation and pain from old injuries, allowing him to exercise more effectively, he revealed on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast in late 2025.

After filming Nuremberg, where he weighed 277 pounds, he dropped to about 222 pounds, crediting a wellness company, Ways2Well, for helping with injections and IVs that reduced inflammation and pain in his knees and shoulders.

 

 

Your blog boy here also dropped a load from 270 to 199.5 with help.

For me it was chemo and radiation for neck cancer, and self improvement, which is also called being alive.

If you’re reading this you are also alive and undoubtedly improving by the moment.

Do you ever ask yourself why that matters?

If you don’t, then you might look for some of that self improvement.

Consider this: what is it that would make you feel more alive, more lively?

How often do you feel it?

The right answer is, “Whenever I read BoomPdx.”

I feel it in the writing part, which is a reason for such production from a single writer blog.

Call it a writing feeling.

 

Measured Improvement

The guy in the blue coat is the historically shitty person Russell Crowe played in last year’s Nuremberg.

If WWII had gone the other way, the blue coat would have been considered an ardent art collector and gourmet.

As Hitty’s right hand man, he would have been part of the planning that included huge stadiums, world class museums of looted art, and a bigger blue coat.

What is it about monumental jackasses that need to build huge edifices to themselves and insist it’s for ‘everyone?’

This is Goring after he stopped gorging.

 

From Internet Movie Data Base:

Hermann Göring was put on a strict diet by his jailers so he would be fit to stand trial.

He ultimately lost 65 pounds (29.5 kilograms).

 

They wanted him slim enough to stand trial, and not break the rope when they hung him?

But, he never swung, instead chomping the poison pill he’d kept hidden.

At least that’s the story. The Bad Man did Bad Things.

Highlights from the Holocaust Encyclopedia:

 

He (Goring) became Interior Minister of Prussia. Prussia was Germany’s largest state and included the capital, Berlin. Göring instructed the Prussian police to fire on anti-Nazi protesters.

He (Goring) created the Office of the Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizeiamt), which answered directly to him. It could arrest people it considered to be threats to Nazi rule and imprison them indefinitely in concentration camps.

Under Göring’s direction, the Nazi regime barred Jews from owning or participating in any business. Jews were forced to relinquish their assets and valuable personal property. German Jews were ordered to pay a fine of one billion Reichsmark.

In February 1939, Göring directed Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the German Security Police and SD (Sicherheitsdienst, the SS intelligence service), to establish the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. Its mission was to get rid of all the Jews in Germany through emigration or forcible removal.

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Nazi leaders concluded that it was not feasible to remove all the Jews in German-controlled areas. On July 31, 1941, Göring ordered Heydrich to develop a plan for achieving the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Heydrich’s plan called for murdering all the Jews in Europe.

In the last years of the war, Göring increasingly ignored his duties. He preferred to lead a lavish lifestyle on his estates, which he filled with precious art and jewelry that he acquired through corruption or looting.

 

Short Cuts For Real Improvement? No

1.

If you are the new guy on a team with plans for the future that includes scapegoating huge swaths of people?

That also includes anything resembling what has been condemned as a crime against humanity.

You’re on the wrong team, the wrong side of history, and if that matters to you, leave.

If not, you risk being the scourge of your family tree, the one with the crooked cross in the closet.

You’ll eventually have to explain how you weren’t that bad, you were just following orders.

 

2.

 

If you and the fellas decide to go down to the lunch counter and treat people poorly, find new friends.

You’re not following orders, you are following your granpappy’s misguided idea on who can sit where.

There’s not enough ‘attaboys’ to erase your face from a picture like this.

 

3.

 

 

When you and your study group decide to visit the U.S. Capitol, and you run into these people, simple tourists interested in architecture and wall treatment?

Make other plans.

In each case there are two sides, and not fine people on both sides.

There is right and wrong.

Check your values, your personal believes, check with your mom and dad.

Then don’t go.

 

PS:

There are things you do that you’d like to be known for, so you do them consistently at the highest level you’re capable of doing.

Like building bridges.

 

PSS:

Then there’s that one thing that sticks.

Self improvement is all about the message you tell yourself, bridge builder.