I just finished eating a banana, and it was the best one I’d ever eaten. Why? I just finished a 72 hour fast. Prior to tonight (Sunday night) I haven’t eaten any food since Thursday night. Why the fast? Primarily for detoxification purposes and to stabilize my digestive system - I have a lot of gastric issues, with all sorts of foods bothering me, and sometimes it’s nice to punch the reset button on my body. Water fasting is my fast of choice - people who fast without water are in for some serious suffering. I’ve been experimenting with fasting over the past year, and the physiological responses my body undergoes is very interesting. As long as I keep a sufficient level of water in my body, going without food is surprisingly easy. Sure, there are some hunger pangs, but for the most part it’s not difficult for me to fast. On day one and day two of a fast, I find that I’m more mentally alert and can think very clearly. Dropping from 204.5 pounds down to 197.5 pounds is just a side benefit.
I’d like to write a longer entry on fasting at some point, but I have to get an article finished for the Two Inch View before I can eat my first real meal in three days. Mmm. Food.

I’ve owned the kensai.com domain for a very long time - since 1997 - and early on no one knew it wasn’t a good idea to put email addresses in plain text on a Web site, postings in Usenet forums, or sign up for newsletters and forums with your real email address. This was before the era of spam harvesting bots. Over the years the level of spam got to be so high I changed my real email address from jason@kensai.com to jdunn@kensai.com…but even that wasn’t enough to stop all the spam to the domain. The domain is so old it’s practically “spam tainted”. About a month ago I set up the domain email to forward all email to a Gmail account…and the screen shot above is showing how much spam has flooded in over the past month or so. 129,000+ messages…! What’s amazing is that 99.9999% of it is spam, and this shows that Google’s spam blocking is having a hard time with it seeing as 25% of the messages are still in the Inbox and not the spam folder. Overall I’ve found Gmail’s spam filtering to be quite good, although perhaps in this case it’s just given up.