can I touch it?
I probably shouldn’t be this excited (it reveals my inner dork) but below you can see a photo of me with US Women’s Olympic Soccer Team member, Stephanie Cox and her gold medal:
When I finally worked up the courage to ask, she let me hold the medal.
I have a sprained ankle
And it really fucking sucks. I’d like to give a big shout-out to the clumsy hack who came three feet under the net last night so I could land on his foot after coming down from a block. Thanks man!
Ocho Cinco sticks it to the man
Chad Johnson, a wide receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals, got fined last year for putting Ocho Cinco on the back of his jersey (his number is 85). This week, he legally changed his last name to Ocho Cinco. Take that NFL!
the legacy of Athens
Fresh off the splendor of the Beijing Olympics it’s heartening disheartening [editor's note: sorry about that, posted before my first cup of coffee] to see the legacy of Athens’ Olympic games.
Four years since the Athens Games, a Greek tragedy is taking place. Incredibly, many of the 22 Olympic venues now lie abandoned, as a sad and litter-strewn reminder of sport’s greatest festival.
Gypsy camps have sprung up in the shadow of stadiums where the world’s finest athletes once battled for gold. Graffiti is scrawled over the outer walls of many sites, and it has been reported in Greece that upward of $1 billion has been spent simply to maintain these ugly wrecks.
The Games will never return there. They will not be allowed to, if for no other reason than that the level of public outrage at the grotesque waste of money on oversized venues with no future is extreme.
Russian Sex Doll Rafting
the five weirdest olympic sports
These are or were actual events.
1. Solo Synchronized Swimming
2. Horse High Jump
3. Horse Long Jump
4. Motor Boating
5. 3000m Steeplechase
synchronized swimmers kissing is the new hot
(via buzzfeed via retarded’s blog)
Obama, McCain to Quit, End Campaigns on High
“We’ve all met people we like at first,” Mr. Plouffe continued, “but after a little while they get on our nerves, never return DVDs, constantly mooch money and food, and increase the tax on capital gains. Senator Obama prefers to avoid that shift in perception. He wants to be remembered as being one of the most charismatic and exciting candidates of all time.”
Bela Karoli Watching Gymnastics
Agility weiner dog
This 10 year old miniature Dachshund participated in an agility dog demonstration yesterday at The Great Darke County Fair.
Read more
More dancing with vehicles
Speaking of outrageous,
An Act of God
In the mailbox today was a magazine addressed to one of our neighbors over on the ridge. Ordinarily I’d leave it for the mailman with a note about redelivery, but Insiders Betting Digest insisted on following me home.
The instant I handed it to Jon, he cried out, “Jesus! Thank you, Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus has entered my life! He wants me to be a gambler! Jesus has . . . touched me . . . and put his hand on my wallet!
“This is an act of God!”
We’d been talking for a good long while about how we were ever going to achieve our goal of amassing wealth without working (”making money in the kitchen in our underwear,” as a friend puts it), and online sportsbooks figured prominently in a vision that shimmered before us as a kind of Promised Land.
Truly this postal misdelivery was providential.
Olympic Condom Consumption
The Sydney Olympics ran out. Athens doubled the number. So organizers of the Beijing Games are hoping 100,000 condoms will satisfy the needs of Olympic athletes.
Lavinia Milosovici ‘92 Olympics Floor Exercise (Perfect Ten)
You can’t get a ten, apparently, anymore. (via)
India wins air rifle gold
India has won its first individual gold medal.
Bindra’s victory eclipsed everything else on Indian TV channels which hailed it as a morale booster for a country with few global sporting stars.
People poured on to the streets in several cities, strangers hugged each other and exchanged sweets and congratulatory messages after the victory.
As the shooter fixed his gaze on the final target, the moment condensed the hopes of an entire nation starved of a solo Olympics gold.
um
better red
Referees awarded more points to contestants in a Judo competition who wore red.
The study, published in the August issue of Psychological Science, was conducted by the researchers presenting 42 taekwondo referees with videos of blue- and red-clad competitors sparring.
The two sets of clips were identical except that the colors were reversed in the second set so the red athlete appeared to be wearing blue and vice versa.
After each video the referees were asked to score the performance of each competitor, red or blue.
The psychologists said competitors wearing red were awarded an average of 13 percent more points and the points seemed to increase after the blue athlete was digitally transformed into a red athlete and decrease when the red competitor turned blue.
Some Olympic Opening Ceremony fireworks were “faked.”
What is fake or real in this digital age anyway? We all were watching traces of the ceremony itself (or my case it was a recording–an image of a trace of the thing) unless, of course, you were in Beijing. Point is, a Beijing newspaper revealed that some of the fireworks were digitally created so only those who watch through television saw them:
What they did not realise was that what they were watching was in fact computer graphics, meticulously created over a period of months and inserted into the coverage electronically at exactly the right moment.
The fireworks were there for real, outside the stadium. But those responsible for filming the extravaganza decided in advance it would be impossible to capture all 29 footprints from the air.
As a result, only the last, visible from the camera stands inside the Bird’s Nest was captured on film.
And,
Gao Xiaolong, head of the visual effects team for the ceremony, said it had taken almost a year to create the 55-second sequence. Meticulous efforts were made to ensure the sequence was as unnoticeable as possible: they sought advice from the Beijing meteorological office as to how to recreate the hazy effects of Beijing’s smog at night, and inserted a slight camera shake effect to simulate the idea that it was filmed from a helicopter.
But can we say, as the Telegraph did that they were “faked,” since most of the world saw the ceremony that way? The privileged few, by contrast, tell a different story, it’s enough to make a guy wonder.
10th annual sauna championships
Finns dominated the world sauna competition.
“The main rules have not changed since the beginning of the competition 10 years ago, we have six men or women sitting inside the sauna (on each round) and the winner is the last one to leave,” Arvela said.
“There are no world records … we cannot control all the factors like the temperature of the sauna or the water thrown into the stove,” Arvela said.
When the championship started in 1999 five countries and 60 contestants participated.
Anyone watching the opening ceremony?
Honestly, I’ve shit my pants six times already.
Albert Speer Jr.
Albert Speer Jr., son of Albert Speer, Hitler’s personal architect, is the lead architect of the 2008 Beijing games.
In her biography, the British historian Gitta Sereny depicts Hitler’s architect as unique in the Nazi elite.
He was recognisably human: young, intelligent, educated, lacking (as far as the evidence suggests) any racist views, a gifted architect rather than a political thug. And yet he followed Hitler zealously.
His son, who barely knew his father, has worked as an urban planner for more than 30 years, and his 100-strong office in Frankfurt has advised governments in Libya, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Yemen.
He follows in the footsteps not only of his father, but also of his grandfather and great-grandfather, builders from southern Germany. Of his plans for Beijing, he said: “I want to make a leap into the future but at the same time preserve old structures in the city centre.
“We propose the building of a central train station, a new transport gateway, in the city’s south as well as an ecological model city.”
Police Free 26 Cheerleaders from Elevator
A group of 14- to 17-year-olds attending Texas Cheer Camp in Austin decided to see how many girls they could squeeze into the elevator around 6 p.m. Tuesday, campus police said.
I personally would have left them in there for another 25 minutes so they could reflect on what they had done.
football pron
Christmas came early this year. For the second time, the Dallas Cowboys are the featured team in HBO’s preseason documentary, Hard Knocks.
I could totally swim faster than that.
Not.
Dennis Crowley and [Christian Bovine] spent all day doing 5 different Olympic Events: 100m freestyle, 100m dash, 110m hurdles, long jump and the rings (in gymnastics) and compared ourselves to Olympic athletes. This was to see just how amazing these athletes are in comparison to average Joe’s like Dennis and [Christian] and as an excuse to do Olympic events all day.
At 5-in-5.com: five projects in five days.