It may be gathered from recent remarks that I fell off the wagon a bit as far as the weight control goes.

The timeline here is that I made WeightWatchers lifetime membership in November 2006. I managed to keep fairly close to goal weight for a few months, but as the birth of our second child approached in the middle of 2007 my weight went up again - many bad habits had returned. I managed to stay within spitting distance (ie about a stone) of my original goal weight before the birth, but all pretense of controlling my eating fell away after I got back to work.

Then I hurt my knee in October 2007. I had been running at quite reasonable speeds just before whatever non-specific event triggered my knee pain, but I couldn't run at all after that. And that was it - uncontrolled eating and no exercise. In six months I put on over two stone from my goal weight, almost three stone from my lightest. I was still twenty pounds down from where I had started in February 2006, but it was a depressing time.

Much as I was helped by the WeightWatchers programme, I find myself blaming it for my weight gain. The reason is that I found it almost impossible to stop from losing weight after I made goal, so I never actually learned to maintain my weight.

Until early 2007 the WeightWatchers points formula drew no distinction between men and women. This meant that I was on too few daily points. Then once you hit goal, the recommended procedure is to increase your points by four, and then add two more points each week that you continue to lose.

Given that I was way below where I should have been for points, following the stabilisation procedure did not stop me losing weight - I was more than ten pounds below my original goal when I finally hit bottom, and I had achieved that by bringing in exactly the bad habits that I alluded to above: buying buns at Starbucks, eating lots of chocolate, scoffing cheese...

I think I would do better with the current programme since there are now more points assigned to men: once goal was reached, I would have stopped losing weight more quickly and been able to find a stable point. As it is I have been counting in a somewhat desultory fashion since late May.

Things are moving, though. I am now about ten pounds down from where I was before my knee surgery and I am exercising regularly, even frequently, again. I am hoping that I can approach a plausible weight rather more gradually and slip into a maintenance mode without radical changes in the amount I eat.

Here's hoping, anyway.

I have mentioned before that basically I play disc golf once a year. Well this time, armed with my own discs, I have been out to play several times over the last few weeks.

There are two courses I have played on so far:

• Orchard Park - this is the one that was just a couple of blocks from where I used to work. It's a fast nine hole course, with very few opportunities to really lose your disc. It has some variety in the holes, but they are generally very open (only one hole inamongst the trees, for example)

• Portland Lunchtime - this is about half a mile from our house in the grounds of the Greater Portland Bible Church. It's a twelve hole course, with a lot of elevation changes between tee and basket. There is also a lot of variety in the holes - a couple of very long holes, a handful of wooded holes

Russell has enjoyed wandering around the course with me too, which is nice. He starts off carrying my bag and throwing a disc, but by the end he's basically playing with sticks. I'm hoping he will grow into actually playing the game.

I also have plans for a disc golf basket so I can get some putting practice in, but I am not at all sure where I would be able to store the thing. It will probably go in the back triangle since there should be no problem leaving it outside.

Anyway, it's a good game. I still confess myself bewildered by a lot of it, but there's enough enjoyment to be gleaned from just walking and throwing that I am not complaining.

The ongoing battle of words with my colleague continues - our Scrabble games stand at 2-2, and we played again today.

It was a tight game: the scoring was very even, and there were really very few open gaps. Both of us made some nice multi-word plays, and made pretty decent use of those high scoring tiles that we actually got.

I was actually behind for most of the game, but in the last four turns I snuck ahead and then opened up about a twenty point lead. The final score was 286 to me, 268 to my colleague.

Good game, though.

I just heard part of an interesting discussion on Oregon public radio about being fat. "Think Out Loud" is a phone-in show, and the guests they had on were each at least 100lb (50kg) overweight - indeed, two of the three were in excess of 200lb overweight.

Several things struck me about the guests and about my reaction to the subject.

Firstly, the guests all used the term "fat" about themselves. They were doing this partly to reclaim the term but also to avoid the word "obese".

I find this interesting because of the way the word "obese" is generally used as contrasted with its medical meaning. Everyone on the show seemed to use "obese" to mean "very very very fat", but the medical definition is "a BMI of 30 or higher", which is really not that fat at all. For instance, I am about 25lb over the nominal recommended weight range for my height and I am on the edge of obesity as far as medicine is concerned.

So, I concluded that the the guests were avoiding the term "obese" because medically speaking they are in fact "morbidly obese", and who wants that as a label?

Secondly, one of the guests said that "at 400lb I can fit into an airplane seat just fine".

When I heard her say this I was, to put it mildly, sceptical. Hostile, even. A later caller called her on it, saying that he travelled a lot and if he was sitting next to a fat person he found that their upper body intruded into his seat space. Frankly, I think he was dead on right - plane seats are too small for the general size of the population, and I have both been overflowed at and done the overflowing. There isn't room.

The final thing that struck me was my reaction to the topic. That same caller that made the observation about large people in plane seats also observed that he is unconsciously prejudiced against fat people, and it struck me that I probably am too. If I see someone very large on the street I will pass judgement on them (quietly, in my own head), for I am a coward as well as a bigot. When I am overweight I am very self-critical too, which undoubtedly adds to me stress level. In others, I think my prejudice kicks in when I see people who are as wide as they are tall.

I justify the bias to myself by saying that being overweight is a choice, that it is a behavioural thing rather than a born thing in most cases. but that doesn't make my judgemental internal monologue any more acceptable.

And I know how easy it is to slide. More on that in another post.

Motorcycles seem to me a very Darwinian form of transport - you are careful, or you are dead. Bicycles too, if I am being honest with myself.

To this select group I can now add the skateboard.

I biked into work yesterday morning. I had come down the forty mile an hour hill that passes my our house and stopped at the light at the bottom. I crossed the light and thought to myself that I saw a pedestrian walking in the road a little way ahead. This is still Vermont, a pretty busy road so I thought the ped was being a little silly.

As I got closer I realised that it was a skateboarder weaving down the middle of the right hand lane. He must have been going at about fifteen miles an hour, a pretty decent speed for a skateboard but hardly moving at the same speed as traffic - I was doing twenty five. So I shouted to let the guy know I was there.

No reaction.

I kept shouting, louder and louder, still with no reaction. The guy had a hoody covering his head. I would not have been surprised if he had been listening to music too.

Anyway, as I swore at the useless little toe rag on my way past, it struck me that here was someone who stood a very good chance of being swept up by the next car that came by. This would not have made me happy of course, but I would have to say that he would have earned it.

It's a strange thing - I have two big posts that I want to write, and having those looming has stopped me posting smaller stuff.

Time to move on I think.

I like Batman.

I've liked Batman for a very long time. I remember how pleased I was with the first Tim Burton film, especially after my despair over the casting of Michael Keaton.

I like the first of the latest Batman series too. "Batman Begins" is a lovely film. It is not without its problems, of course, especially in the area of physics, but the vision behind the film is excellent, very true to the modern form of the source material.

And so it is with some enthusiasm that I look forward to the time when I will be able to watch "The Dark Knight".

The thing that especially thrills me is the realisation that in Christopher Nolan's version of the Bativerse, being physically deformed is not a prerequisite to being a villain.

Burton gleefully uses deformity as a signifier of difference in his Batman films. His Penguin especially is a monster more to be pitied than feared. Nolan, at least thus far, has not gone that road - his Joker is a physically normal man, the mask just make-up rather than an attribute of his body.

The deformity is in the mind.

Since Harvey Dent appears in the new film, there is likely to be some physical deformity in a villain quite soon but at least it is normal maiming rather than a bizarre physical mutation.