[The other day I promised a second article that addresses Men's Health issues (oops, I keep capitalizing that phrase for some reason). Here it is. The first one is here.]

Professional blasters, be they powerlifters, weightlifters, or strongmen, have a common saying: “Don’t talk about it: BLAST about it.” That’s good as far as the gym door, but when we find ourselves among weaklings who wouldn’t know a chest fly from a pistol squat, it helps to have a vocab as jacked as your delts.

And so, I have compiled a list of three bad-ass power words to impress in the boardroom… and the bedroom. Or wherever you choose to have intramarital sex.

On October 12, 2004 at 8:43 p.m. Central Time a man disembarked from a plane at O'Hare International Airport carrying the most deadly virus that humanity had ever seen. He was carrying it in his bloodstream. Not, like, in a bag.

The good part was that it was very hard to transmit. Someone had to say, "Yah mo b there!" to the carrier after he said something about a grapefruit festival in Woodstock, Illinois. The virus did not care what, exactly the carrier said to prompt that reply from the other person. It could be an invitation to the festival, obviously, but it could also be a general comment about there being a grapefruit fest in Woodstock (there is not) and then the person hearing about it would have to express interest in going to it using precisely that statement. Once "the phrase that slays" was uttered, (as the evil bioscientist who concocted the virus called it), the carrier would turn an ashen gray and his eyes would fill with pus. The person who said "Yah mo b there!" would not become ill from this encounter, since it takes another two weeks for the virus to become transmittable. But once the carrier wound up at the hospital all covered in pus? Oh man, look out.

About fifteen years ago a woman I know had a boyfriend who moved to Chicago without a job. She helped him network by calling another woman I know, a consultant at Arthur Andersen, to flat-out ask her to find him a job.

“Well, what does he want to do?” the second woman asked.

“He wants,” she said, “To be a businessman.”

That’s fantastic. That two people could be so naive --the boyfriend with the vague yet driving ambition, the girlfriend with the blunt execution of it-- strikes me as hilarious, sad, moving and hilarious again all at once. Not finance, accounting, marketing, or banking. He simply wanted to be... a businessman. 

I’ve hydromated my current homebrew (pictured) at 7.88 % ABV. The recipe came with no target OG, so when fermentation slowed and I racked to the secondary, I was pleasantly surprised to see the calculation come out as: “Do not drink three of these in a night.”

Don’t worry about the jargon. ABV is obvious. “Fermentation slowing” means an abeyance of yeast activity. “Racking to the secondary” means “filter beer from big bottle to slightly smaller big bottle so it declouds and whatnot.” OG = original gravity. “Abeyance” means "slowing, receding" and “hydromated” is very probably not a word. It just sounds cool. I measured the beer with a hydrometer, which is a thermometer-esque buoy one floats in beer to figure out how much booze is in it. Original Gravity minus Final Gravity times Something Else (mysterious, I use a special lazyman website) equals how strong your beer is.

I’ve only recently gotten into high alcohol beers. The insider term for normal 4 to 5% ABV that I (heh heh) grew up on is “session beer.” For the vast majority of us, that distinction is redundant. Since the noble experiment of Prohibition ended in 1932 until about 2008, beer meant session beer. For seventy years, it was all roughly the same, all roughly as strong.