The Big Picture has shots of the Tough Guy Challenge 2009:

Billed as “the safest most dangerous taste of physical and mental endurance pain in the world”, the Tough Guy Challenge took place yesterday, February 1st, on South Perton Farm, near Wolverhampton, England. Thousands of challengers (men and women) started the endurance race, with hundreds dropping out along the way due to exhaustion or injury - broken bones, dislocations, and over 600 cases of hypothermia. Even the overall winner, James Appleton, was treated briefly for hypothermia.

Did the guy in the Borat suit finish, you think?

The Beast has posted the 2008 edition of their 50 Most Loathsome People In America series. Brutal. “You” have made the list every year:

• 2002 (#3)
• 2004 (#3)
• 2005 (#4)
• 2006 (#16)
• 2007 (#9)

… and finally, 2008 (#43):

Charges: You think it’s your patriotic duty to spend money you don’t have on crap you don’t need. You think Hillary lost because of sexism, when it’s actually because she’s just a bad liar. You think Iraq is better off now than before we invaded, and don’t understand why they’re so ungrateful. You think Tim Russert was a great journalist. You’re hopping mad about an auto industry bailout that cost a squirt of piss compared to a Wall Street heist of galactic dimensions, due to a housing crash you somehow have blamed on minorities. It took you six years to figure out what a tool Bush is, but you think Obama will make it all better. You deem it hunky dory that we conduct national policy debates via 8-second clips from “The View.” You think God zapped humans into existence a few thousand years ago, although your appendix and wisdom teeth disagree. You like watching vicious assholes insult each other on TV. You support gun rights, because firing one gives you a chubby. You cuddle falsehoods and resent enlightenment. You think the fact that 43% of whites could stomach voting for an incredibly charismatic and eloquent light-skinned black guy who was raised by white people means racism is over. You think progressive taxation is socialism. 1 in 100 of you are in jail, and you think it should be more. You are shallow, inconsiderate, afraid, brand-conscious, sedentary, and totally self-obsessed. You are American.

Exhibit A: You’re more upset by Miley Cyrus’s glamour shots than the fact that you are a grown adult who is upset about Miley Cyrus.

Sentence: Invaded and occupied by Canada; all military units busy overseas without enough fuel to get back.

Still, 3, 3, 4, 16, 9, 43. I guess “you” (and I) had a good year.

Anthony Lane’s review of Taken is quite a bit of fun:

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from “California Dreamin',” it’s that seventeen-year-old daughters get into scrapes. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned from “24” it’s that anybody named Kim, with a father schooled in dirty work by the U.S. government, will have a large echo chamber where her brain is meant to be. Kim and a friend leave for a vacation in Europe, where, ignoring the advice of her father, they are abducted with such consummate speed that it might have been simpler if he had FedExed them directly to the kidnappers.

Atul Gawande is always worth reading. Here he makes the case for building on what we have in reforming health care rather than a complete tear-down and rebuild, which would kill people:

Yes, American health care is an appallingly patched-together ship, with rotting timbers, water leaking in, mercenaries on board, and fifteen per cent of the passengers thrown over the rails just to keep it afloat. But hundreds of millions of people depend on it. The system provides more than thirty-five million hospital stays a year, sixty-four million surgical procedures, nine hundred million office visits, three and a half billion prescriptions. It represents a sixth of our economy. There is no dry-docking health care for a few months, or even for an afternoon, while we rebuild it. Grand plans admit no possibility of mistakes or failures, or the chance to learn from them. If we get things wrong, people will die. This doesn’t mean that ambitious reform is beyond us. But we have to start with what we have.

He then proceeded to teach me about the phone system by way of analogy:

The P.S.T.N. [Public Switched Telephone Network] is probably the shaggiest, most convoluted system around; it contains tens of millions of lines of software code. Given a chance for a do-over, no self-respecting engineer would create anything remotely like it. Yet this jerry-rigged system has provided us with 911 emergency service, voice mail, instant global connectivity, mobile-phone lines, and the transformation from analog to digital communication. It has also been fantastically reliable, designed to have as little as two hours of total downtime every forty years. As a system that can’t be turned off, the P.S.T.N. may be the ultimate in path-dependence. But that hasn’t prevented dramatic change. The structure may not have undergone revolution; the way it functions has. The P.S.T.N. has made the twenty-first century possible.

Two hours of downtime every 40 years!

I saw on Neil Gaiman’s weblog that the Coraline Web Trailer is the first trailer he has really liked. I can see why.

instantwatcher.com provides an excellent, minimalist directory of all the Netflix movies that are available for streaming. I’ve been a Netflix subscriber forever, but until now I didn’t realize how many great movies (drama, 4.0 rating or better) were available.

Aptly titled game: Perfect Balance. (via waxy)

An immortal jellyfish is spreading through the oceans. Sounds like a mixed blessing. On the one hand, eternal youth. On the other hand, you’re a jellyfish forever.

Two Rooms is a good game; it’s a nice combination of puzzle solving and dexterity. (via kottke)

This Midas spot cracked me up.

I’ve posted about Parkour luminary David Belle before. He’s back for more action in Banlieue 13: Ultimatum. Twitch has the trailer. The stunt work is incredible, and man, can that last shot be real? I’ve seen Belle jump between buildings before (again, see old posts), but that looks impossible.

(One of my favorite scenes from Banlieue 13 was where Belle somehow shoots feet first through the tiniest of windows above a door. Ah, here it is. At around 0:23 of this video)

T-Nation has an excellent article up, Joint-Friendly Training. It provides a bunch of exercises that work around joint injuries, so you can keep training and getting stronger. Definitely useful for me!