Holy crap. Imagine if Larry Bird's last act on the court was to knee Magic Johnson in the balls.
(The analogy almost certainly breaks down in drawing the Materazzi/Magic comparison, but still...)
A buddy of mine e-mailed succinctly: "Did you watch Zidane today? Amazing thing, competitiveness."
How sad.
Via the RossTraining boards, an impressive video. Alrighty, off to bed for me...
Takeru Kobayashi ("who once ate 17.7 pounds of pan-seared cow brains to win $25,000") won his sixth straight hot dog eating title, but from my casual following of this event, it seems like the gap is closing. What really caught my eye though was this (emphasis added):
Other competitors included 100-pound Sonya "The Black Widow" Thomas, of Alexandria, Va., who once ate 65 hard boiled eggs in a little more than 6 1/2 minutes, and local favorite Eric "Badlands" Booker, a 6-foot-4, 425-pound subway conductor from Long Island who holds speed-eating records for pies and matzo balls.
Damn it, now I'll never be able to enjoy that Cool Hand Luke scene in quite the same way.
There's no info about the creator, but Ze is hosting a video titled "Animator" that is definitely worth checking out.
Great Smithsonian piece on our food supply, corn, and fertilizer:
For the great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket rests on a remarkably narrow biological foundation: corn. It's not merely the feed that the steers and the chickens and the pigs and the turkeys ate; it's not just the source of the flour and the oil and the leavenings, the glycerides and coloring in the processed foods; it's not just sweetening the soft drinks or lending a shine to the magazine cover over by the checkout. The supermarket itself--the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built--is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.
There are some 45,000 items in the average American supermarket, and more than a quarter of them contain corn. At the same time, the food industry has done a good job of persuading us that the 45,000 different items or SKUs (stock keeping units) represent genuine variety rather than the clever rearrangements of molecules extracted from the same plant.
You just gotta click through to read the case for the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen being the most important invention of the 20th century.
After a few weeks of receiving the paper version of The New Yorker (rather than the limited online content) I can see why a buddy of mine found my not subscribing inexcusable. Fantastic. Each issue always has at least one must-read article in it, and often more than that. Off the newsstand you'd pay over $200 for a year's supply, but you get get it for less than $1/issue delivered. The highlights of the July 3rd issue were an interesting World Cup piece, a fascinating article on hemispherectomies (brain surgery, exactly what you'd guess it is from the word):
I asked him Mike's question, about all that space left by the missing lobes. In the past, [Dr. Ben Carson] said, doctors worried about this and tried to anchor the remaining brain by stitching it to the dura. They would put all kinds of things in the cranial cavity—one surgeon used sterile Ping-Pong balls. But, as Carson did more hemispherectomies, he realized that the brain's own drip of cerebrospinal fluid could adequately fill the cavity. Sometims the remaining brain moves during the weeks following the surgery, but usually by less than an inch. "It doesn't seem to be a problem," he said. Much of Carson's method is intuitive. "You develop a feel for the brain," he said. "Normal brain feels like a very soft boiled egg. A bad brain feels like a mushy apple."
... and a profile of David Addington (Cheney's chief-of-staff):
David Addington is a satisfactory lawyer, [Bruce] Fein said, but a less than satisfactory student of American history, which for a public servant of his influence, matters more. "If you read the Federalist Papers, you can see how rich in history they are," he said. "The Founders really understood the history of what people did with power, going back to Greek and Roman and Biblical times. Our political heritage is to be skeptical of executive power, because, in particular, there was skepticism of King George III. But Cheney and Addington are not students of history. If they were, they'd know that the Founding Fathers would be shocked by what they've done."
A wedge strategy is where you focus on a highly charged issue at the borders of rationality and emotion.
The emotional content of the issue can create a moral conviction that the issue needs to be resolved at any cost.
Tactics that would otherwise be called into question can then be employed to resolve the issue.
This sets precedent for the future use of those tactics in other arenas.
You'll have to watch it for yourself to get the context (not to mention the funny parts of the show).
We desk jockeys are prone towards tightness pretty much across the whole front. Chest, quads, hip flexors and the various ancillary muscles. Tight calves in athletes are not uncommon (and can contribute to various ailments). I failed the modified Thomas test (you should definitely try this on yourself), and yet the typical "stand and pull your heel to your butt" stretch does nothing for me. I know my calves are tight, and that my chest/shoulder flexibility needs work. So here are the stretches I've found that really work for those muscle groups:
This one is fantastic: lie on your side, bend the leg you are not stretching and brace it against a wall. Stretch the other leg. You can feel this one from the hip flexors to just above the knee and everywhere in between. You can experiment with where to put your upper body, but I tend to think I get a better stretch with my torso closer to my off-leg. Directly applicable to Thomas test-type flexibility. Not that you're doing this solely to ace the test; the test is just an indicator. Criminy, note how I can't even make a straight line, tracing along my stretched upper leg up through my torso.
For the calves, this one is great. None of the other "pushing against a wall" stretches have done much for me, as with them I feel compression in my ankle joint before I can get a good calf stretch going. Not here though! Here it's all calves. Note the critical hard-to-see 2x4 under my toes. You just want to lean in, trying to get your hips to the wall, keeping your legs straight (or thereabouts - position such that you feel it in your calves, not the backs of your knees).
This one's easy to describe. Find a corner, assume this position, and try to walk your body all the way into the corner. You can also do this with a doorway. You can alter the height of your elbows to vary the stretch.
I also like this one as a quick break stretch, as it hits the hips and opens up the chest all at once (and I can't do a real bridge). Watch your back though! When I do this without warming up, my wife cringes, so I go easy with it. I tend to feel compression in the lower back first, which limits the stretch for me. Fine for a quicky, but not as effective as either of the dedicated (non-calf) stretches above.
If you buy used stuff at Amazon, this script alone makes Greasemonkey worth installing. Amazon TotalUsed tacks the shipping price onto the lowest used price so you can see how much savings you'll really be getting (it assumes, of course, that you always boost your Amazon orders of new items to $25 or more to take advantage of free shipping):
Especially handy for me, as I always tend to look at the pre-shipping used price and think "what a bargain!" before being ultimately deflated upon purchase.
18 Tips for Bulletproof Knees. Gotta get past a mildly grisly knee surgery photo to read the whole thing. The timing of #3 and #14 were quite amazing to me, as I just this weekend attended an open house at my NMT friend's practice. She works with a PT who did an injury Q&A, and it was very interesting, especially since I had the guy to myself for part of it, so got some one-on-one attention. We didn't go into great depth (I was only had him to myself for about 20 minutes), but it was very informative nonetheless. We talked about my weak ankles, creaky knees, shin splints, achilles, etc. (basically every lower-leg aliment in the book, it feels like). He was pretty keen on blaming my flexibility. I was kinda skeptical, as I stretch pretty regularly, and have made good strides in my flexibility, but he put me through a few basic tests, and sure enough, I failed. Not miserably, but pretty typically.
Anyway, the first test he had me do was that "modified Thomas Test" in #14! One thing they don't tell you in the article is that you really want to hug both knees as tightly to your chest as you can, and then drop the one knee, keeping the other knee pulled tight. Otherwise it's easier to fudge. Failing this test (as I did) makes some sense with the behind-the-kneecap pain (as I have), as the muscle basically keeps your kneecap "strapped down" too tight (that's my understanding, anyway). Anyway, might be worth trying the test on yourself if you're having similar issues.
(A fun aside: this PT also told a story about a trainer he knew for an NFL team. They'd have open calls, where they'd bring in hundreds of athletes and give them a look. This guy would just go down the line and look at the way guys were put together, and pick a handful out of hundreds to take a closer look at. This was without watching any of them do anything! Like checking the confirmation of a horse. The thing that stuck with me was this line: "Pronators? Forget about it, go home." Dang.)
I promise I'll get back to real posts after just these few more quick links that caught my sportsman's (such as I am) eye:
I should tell you that I was the Anti-doping Commissioner of the International Triathlon Union (ITU) - a relatively new sport within the Olympic Family - for nearly 13 years. I had to act as "prosecutor" on many doping cases (doping = drugs in sport). Prior to that, I helped write the first set of "anti-doping" rules for triathlon in 1988. Before that, I was an elite marathoner (2:18) and triathlete (4th Place Ironman Hawaii) in the '70s and '80s, so I have accumulated a fair amount of "inside information" regarding drugs in sport at the Olympic level. I also own a supplement company and have done extensive research on performance enhancement in pursuit of natural, legal alternatives.
Just got back from watching Cars, and leading it was a trailer for Barnyard (the "trailer 2" trailer is the one I saw). I'll be the first to admit I know next-to-nothing about animal husbandry, but last time I checked there was no such thing as a boy cow. Well, there are, but they're called bulls and they don't have udders. But hey, if you're going to make a boy cow with udders, I applaud going all the way and rendering them prominently. Nevermind that the overall effect makes it seem like the thing, whatever it is, not only has four of the things that a male cow might actually have between its legs, but that (s)he shaves its nether region. Where it finds the time to keep such a complex and multi-pronged set of genitalia clean-shaven is another mystery.
I will allow for the remote possibility that our hero(ine)'s condition is central to the plot, and the trailer masterfully concealed the twist. Heck, maybe it's a remake of... No, that would be giving too much away.