Losing weight, tendons and an artful Info-mercial

I stepped on the scale yesterday and saw that I weighed 198 pounds. This morning it was 200. I was under the impression that I wasn't losing weight but that some of my fat was changing to muscle. It appears that I was wrong. Either wrong, or I need to replace the battery in the scale.

Tendons

A physical therapist talks about strengthening tendons in ===>THIS VIDEO<=== I skipped over the biology lesson to get you to the important stuff. The more detail-oriented readers may want to skip back to the beginning.

When Info-mercials are artwork

The Info-mercial. 

Some of the back story 

Niles Kinerk is the real-deal.

He started a business called Gardens Alive in the mid-1980s selling organic gardening "biologicals". That is, lady-bugs, praying mantis, nematodes, milky-spore, mycorrhizal dips for roots and so on. 

He grew the company by aggressively promoting his vision and by shipping high-quality products. By high-quality, I mean the product arrived in the customers' mailboxes alive and viable. Remember, living critters are perishable.

Around the year 2000 he bid on a raft of bankrupt nursery (trees, plants, seeds) companies. A venture capital company had collected the companies like so many Beanie-Babies earlier in the 1990s, borrowed a bunch of money through their businesses and passed the assets through a firewall to the parent company. Then they divested the soiled-doves with the debt but kept the assets.

The soiled-doves quickly face-planted and filed for bankruptcy. The judge required that they be auctioned-off.

One of the bunch put together an employee buy-back offer which the judge accepted.

Most of the rest were scooped up by Mr Kinerk.

At the time, I assumed it was so he could get their customer lists so he could send them Gardens Alive! literature and so he could have Gardens Alive! literature blown into their catalogs.

I was wrong.

Mr Kinerk hired a fellow Indiana nurseryman who was famous for his blunt manner of speaking and for being a leader in organic gardening. That was Ed Fackler.

I was not in the room, but I think it went something like this.

"Niles, they went bankrupt because they deserved to go bankrupt. The pictures in their catalogs look like they were drawn by third-graders with dull crayons and they were shipping crap to their customers" Ed might have said.

Then Ed explained that while that sounds harsh, they never would have fallen into the clutches of the vampire capital firms if they had been thriving. 

"What is it going to take to fix it?" Kinert might have asked.

"It is going to cost a lot of money..." Ed said.

"That is my problem. Figure out what it will take to fix it and fix it fast." Kinert responded.

Ed reached out through his network of contacts and collected horror stories. He made a plan and constructed a detailed list of what needed to be done.

Kinert found the money and made it happen.