With today being Friday the 13th, I figured we’d roll with that theme for today.  As you probably know, Friday the 13th is – according to superstition – a day of bad or good luck.  Honestly, I didn’t know that good luck was a feasible outcome until I just Googled it, but apparently it is, and I’m just a stupid pessimist without even knowing it.  So, in hopes of turning my day around, I’m going to post this video and make all the villagers rejoice because they know they’re smarter than this girl:

2. Did you know that there is actually a term – paraskavedekatriaphobia – for the fear of Friday the 13th? Apparently, this problem is a more specialized form of triskaidekaphobia, which is just fear of the number 13.  Fortunately, though, these phobias aren’t nearly as bad as:

a. Logophobia – fear of words (reading this blog would really suck for those folks, huh?)

b. Electrophobia – fear of electricity (turning on the computer would must have been terrible, but missing out on my electric sense of humor must have been the worst!)

c. Arithmophobibia – fear of numbers (you’ll be happy to note that I’m using a, b, c, and d instead of a numerical listing scheme because I am sensitive to your concerns)

d. Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia – fear of long words (coincidentally, they gave this guy a syndrome with 36 letters)

A few other honorable mentions to to levophobia (fear of objects to the left of the body), geniophobia (fear of chins), chronomentrophobia (fear of clocks), and Gentilcorophobia (fear of painfully bad techno music).

3. Yesterday, I gave a guest lecture/hands-on session for an exercise science class at UMASS-Boston.  I’ve done this several semesters in a row, and this semester’s topic was “Core Stability and Mobility.”  While I think that folks like me who have been in the trenches for a while and attend a lot of seminars need another presentation on core stability like I need a whole in the head, it was cool to speak about the topic to a younger audience that didn’t have as much experience under their belts.  One book I encouraged all of them to pick up was Ultimate Back Fitness and Performance by Stuart McGill.

4. Along those lines, one movement I find us using around the facility quite a bit is the split-stance cable lift:

5. Mike Robertson’s just begun doing a podcast component in his newsletters, and it allows him to cover more material than he would with writing along.  Check out the first installment HERE; I think you’ll like it.

6. About two years ago, I was featured on the front page of the Boston Globe in a picture with Steph Holland-Brodney, CP’s most tenured client, as she prepared for the Boston Marathon.  Almost immediately, I was thrown into a world of international fame  as “the dude with the hard nipple” – and I added to the already-insane media frenzy by authoring a literary masterpiece known as The School of Hard Nipples.  For weeks, I couldn’t even go grocery shopping without being swarmped by paparazzi and adoring fans who couldn’t wait to catch a glimpse of the nipple that had changed so many lives.

Fortunately, Boston won the World Series in 2007 about six months later, and it was about the same time that “The Departed” came out to put Boston in the spotlight.  So, thanks to the Red Sox and Marky Mark, some of the pressure was lifted – and I managed to move forward.

As I learned this week, though, the stardom hasn’t died down altogether.  You see, when I check my website stats, I can find out what people most frequently type in with search engines when they ultimately come to EricCressey.com.  And, would you believe that I average about 3.5 “hard nipples” searches per day?  In other words, random people are typing “hard nipples” into Google, and in many cases, they’re winding up at EricCressey.com instead of many of the millions of adult entertainment sites out there.

I guess I’m just a hard-nippled legend.

Have a great weekend!