Graham Glass, etc.

Cycling without a helmet

I love to cycle, but I don't like wearing a helmet. The main reason is that I love the feeling of freedom and the wind in my hair. However, my cautious side usually wins and I end up wearing the annoying contraption just in case. So I was particularly interested to read this article which claims that wearing a helmet makes it more likely you'll get hit. Apparently drivers that see you're wearing a helmet assume you're a good cyclist and then drive closer to you than they would otherwise.

US Open Tennis

I don't watch TV at all, with one exception: epic tennis. Today is the start of the US Open Tennis tournament, and I'm hoping for another Federer vs. Nadal final.

I watched the last Wimbledon final between these two lying on my unfurnished living room floor; this time I look forward to viewing it on my super-comfortable couch.

Climb Disco

I've been enjoying indoor rock climbing recently, and thought of a variation that would be fun: disco rock climbing.

The concept is analogous to disco bowling. One evening a week, the indoor rock climbing center would start playing 70's disco, use UV lights to light up the walls (which would have been sprayed with luminescent dye), and illuminate a mirrored ball suspended from the ceiling.

Safety hazard? Just require a waiver form. I'd sign it in a heartbeat!

Indoor Rock Climbing Idea

I've been doing a fair amount of indoor rock climbing recently, and have often admired the grace and skill of the advanced climbers in my club. Unfortunately, I find it hard to remember the particular techniques that they use to make it look so easy.

I think it would be great if a video could be displayed onto the wall that you're about to climb that showed how an experienced climber did the same climb. You could replay the video as many times as you wanted in order to understand the various moves and grips that an expert would use in that particular context.

Technically, you'd have to figure out a way to:

• Allow a club to make videos of climbers tackling each individual climb. This could be done using a simple digital camera with a zoom to track the climber.
• Allow a club to project video onto the individual climbs. Rather than having one projector per climb, a few projectors could be strategically positioned with the ability to swivel them to orient at a particular climb. The projector would use a camera to ensure that the position of the colored rocks in the video is properly aligned with the same rocks on the actual wall so that the expert climber is superimposed exactly onto the climbing wall.

I think that seeing an expert perform a task that you're about to do is very useful, and this video capability would quickly help me improve my climbing ability. I bet the projection technology could be used in a bunch of other areas as well.

Bullrun Rally 2005

The Bullrun rally is a yearly invitation-only take-no-prisoners rally across America. Around 200 cars, mostly driven by the rich and famous who pay a paltry $13,000 each just to participate, drive from LA to Miami passing through checkpoints in Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas, New Orleans and Tampa. The proceeds go to charity, although something tells me that's not the main reason for the event.

Naturally, everything about the rally is extreme, from the cars to the participants to the partying. This year's competitors included Dennis Rodman, Hayden Christensen and Paris Hilton. It's definitely worth checking out the Bullrun home page. The introduction video includes a clip of my friend Rocky Stewart, who tragically died in a plane accident last year.

There's also an entertaining blog by Alex Roy, team lead for Team Polizei.

Playing with the Son of Satan

According to this article, the search is on for another boy to play Damien, the son of Satan. This is particularly amusing to me, since I used to play tennis with the original son of Satan.

Jonathan Scott Taylor, who starred in Damien: Omen II, was a fellow pupil at Haberdashers' Aske's School in the UK and we were both on the tennis team. So yeah, I used to knock balls around with the Devil's spawn!

Wimbledon Classics

After Wimbledon 2005 finished, I decided to purchase some DVDs containing previous Wimbledon classics. After browsing Amazon, I ordered the Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe Legend movies. Both DVDs are great to watch, and contain some amazing displays of tennis at its finest. I highly recommend both these DVDs.

Bjorn Borg still remains the man with the Wimbledon record to beat, winning five finals in a row. He is the Lance Armstrong of tennis. Roger Federer has the skill and youth to beat this record, and it will be interesting to see if he rises to the challenge.

Battle of the Grunts

Here's an interesting article about grunting and the game of tennis. Apparently, more players than ever are making loud sounds when they hit the ball, which other non-grunting players find distracting. One of the worst grunters is Maria Sharapova, whose exclamations are as loud as a small aircraft landing nearby. The article also discusses the emerging counter-grunt culture, in which non-grunters imitate the grunting sounds of their opponents in jest.

Wimbledon Fever

There's only one sports event that I enjoy more than the Tour de France, and that's Wimbledon. I used to play tennis a lot when I was a kid, and loved watching Wimbledon on TV every year. I still have great memories of classic matches between players like Conners, Borg, McEnroe, Agassi and Sampras. Ditto for women players like Evert, Graf and Navratilova.

This year, Wimbledon starts on Monday June 20th at 12pm GMT. The official site is here. I'm hoping that Roger Federer and Justine Henin-Hardenne win the mens and womens singles events, respectively.

Update (6/21/05): Ooops, it looks like my original #1 woman pick is already out of the running! My #1 pick is now Maria "grunting queen" Shaparova.

Tyson Fight: Review

I went to my first live boxing fight yesterday; Tyson vs. McBride. I had no idea how much it would cost nor how long the show would go on for, so my friend and I arrived at the MCI Center in Washington DC an hour before the advertised start to compare scalper prices against box office standard rates.

In the end, the price differences were small, so we bought $250 seats from the box office and were happily upgraded at no extra charge to $500 locations; a good start. When we got to our chairs at 6pm, we discovered that there were no less than nine scheduled bouts, with Tyson's match due at 11pm. You can't leave the MCI Center once you've entered, so we were essentially a captive audience for at least 5 hours! The good news is that most of the bouts were very entertaining; indeed, the penultimate bout starring Mohammed Ali's daughter Laila was the best of the evening. Ali himself got a standing ovation when he entered the arena, and got into the ring to give his daughter a congratulatory kiss after she beat her opponent to a pulp.

In the main event, Mike Tyson started out strong, and although his Irish opponent Kevin McBride was huge, he didn't look particularly muscular. However, several rounds later Tyson tired and brought out the dirty tricks department in a last minute effort to save the day, including an attempt to break McBride's left arm and a head butt that cut McBride's eye. McBride didn't back down, and ended up pummeling Tyson with 14 straight blows. Tyson finally gave up, slumped to the ground, and resigned from the match.

I highly recommend live boxing to anyone who hasn't tried it. It's a lot more fun to be there than to watch from home. I took some high power Canon binoculars with image stabilization, which allowed me to see plenty of close-up detail with any shaking. The next fight I see will probably be at the MGM in Vegas.