For your viewing pleasure: 20 Nike commercials, plus one.

Jim at Beast Skills has done it again: fantastic muscle-up tutorial. Make sure you not only watch his embedded video of Andreas Aguilar at the 1991 World Professional Gymnastics Championships on the rings, make sure you watch all the way to the dismount.

• Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots? Michael Pollan delves into the answer and implications (sorry, this one's a couple weeks old).
• I'm a computer guy, and let's face it, most of us spend too much time at our desks. Hence, this T-Nation article: (De)-Constructing Computer Guy.
• Dusty Rhodes linked to this Mark Sisson piece, Is There Any Safe Meat?, and that started me exploring Mark's site. Lots of interesting stuff on there. For example, I had previously posted some soy links, so was interested to read Sisson's take: 10 Things to Know about Tofu. I also really appreciated this nugget from his recent wine & chocolate post: Like chocolate and coffee, wine is one of those "marginally nutritious" issues that is endlessly debatable and ultimately not a huge factor in health, in the sense that there is probably some benefit to be gained from reasonable consumption thanks to the antioxidants, but don't expect any miracles. It's important to put these sensational stories in perspective...

The folks at UltiVillage have put together a 2006 World Ultimate Club Championship trailer, which features a ton of excellent highlights (it took place in Australia, if you're wondering about that intro).

Wow, this looks like a gold mine: the Bigger Faster Stronger complete magazine archives are now available free online.

Last time I linked up some unicycling videos I had no idea who Kris Holm was. Now I do. Gave me vertigo in spots. Quite a combination of fabulous control and complete insanity.

Jason Ferruggia has been on fire lately. These three are must-reads (some profanity):

• Things That Suck
• Don't Believe Everything You Read
• The Supplement Scam

Those brought to mind another rant of his that I vaguely recalled, so hunted it down for you (and for me): Stretching The Truth.

Crossfit hosts two interesting rowing videos featuring Angela Hart: Tabata Wattage Rowing and Row Stroke Rating. The wattage video seemed like more of a warmup than a workout, but the stroke rating video was very illuminating. It perfectly illustrates how the problems with my times (and maybe yours) might be aided by reducing my stroke rate.

• John Hackleman puts Chuck Liddel through some great workouts.
• Two running links: Art De Vany on sprinting, and an interesting piece on Clyde Hart (Michael Johnson and Jeremy Wariner's coach).
• Yet another good video attached to the CrossFit WOD. This one is Greg Amundson's warm-up. As a bonus, at the end they show you the Samson Stretch, which is a fantastic stretch. If you put your front foot far enough forward you get a great hamstring stretch on one leg, and a great hip flexor stretch on the other leg. And you feel it in a bunch of other places as well.
• A ballboy's story. Don Mattingly: "Great to meet you, Matt. I have a very big job to ask of you. I just unpacked all my bats from spring training and I don't know if it was the altitude of the flight from Florida or the humidity down there, or what, but all my bats came up short. The game starts in about two hours and I need you to find me a bat stretcher."

Another excellent Crossfit video linked to from the WOD: the air squat. I really must resume my hamstring stretching program.

The New Yorker is running a piece on Parkour titled No Obstacles. I only skimmed the first page, as I'll read it full when my print edition arrives, but this paragraph leapt out at me:

The video of Belle that traceurs seem to find most compelling, judging from how often they mention it, is one in which he crashes into a cement wall. I have found it on YouTube, using "David Belle fall" as the search term. Belle is attempting to leap over a double-wide ramp that leads to an underground parking garage. The ramp is enclosed by cinder-block walls, about three feet high. Belle arrives at a run from the left. He lowers his hands but they appear to miss the first wall entirely; he seems to be looking at where he means to land. Incredibly, while aloft, he turns, so that his shoulder, not his head, strikes the opposite wall. Ten feet beneath him, at the bottom of the ramp, a cameraman is lying on his back in order to shoot from below. Belle manages not to land on him. His first gesture is to see if the cameraman is all right. Then he begins walking briskly up the ramp. Toward the top, he turns and can be seen to be grinning.

I hadn't seen that video, so did a quick search and found it easily. Then I went back and watched this popular video of Belle. It's much harder to watch without cringing now, as you really appreciate how death-defying the building-to-building leaps are. A similar slip—a slip I now know he has in him—at those heights... Shudder.

Anyway, happier thoughts: I really like this commerical and this one.

Google just launched My Maps, which provides a nice interface for creating your own custom maps with shapes, placemarks, etc. Idris posted the idea of using this as a tool for creating field maps.

Cool idea, I'm going to do this for our various pickup locations. I just played with this for five minutes, and it's really nice. You can draw fields. You can stick in placemarks, which users can click on to get the "directions to here" command. One thing: when you share the link, make sure you use the "Link to this Page" link. If you use your "My Maps" link then stuff like the Zoom and View (map, satellite, or hybrid) are not shared with the user, and the tool just zooms in as close as possible while still displaying all your custom objects (which is no good around here, since we live in the sticks and Google doesn't have imagery at that resolution).

Anyway, here's the result of my five minutes of fiddling.