K1 World GP

An awesome day of fights out at Olympic Gymnasium yesterday as Colin and I headed out to take in the K1 final 16. Here is a break down of the good and the bad:

Good:

• Schilt serving up a stiff knee to the chops putting Slowinski to sleep
• Park Young Soo dancing around with his hands at his waist and LeBanner taking advantage of it by flooring him with one punch
• Bonjasky serving up a flying knee to the forehead of Leko. Leko wasn't interested in asking for seconds.
• Hari giving Viney a whomping / KO
• Our seats were great. Thanks to LVJ for helping arrange that.
• the production was quite smooth and professional looking. The arena atmosphere was quite exciting

Bad

• Fujimoto...just terrible. It was an embarrassment for everyone. He was tumbling around the ring like a class of grade 3 students practicing log rolls and somersaults with Mrs. Kroupa (remember that fierce bitch?).
• Sefo / Aerts fight was lame. Sefo was not up to par at all and quit after round 1.
• Mighty Mo and Choi Hong Man. Again, Choi did nothing at all and somehow ended up getting a decision. At one point he did manage to kick Mighty Mo in the nads, but the ref wouldn't stop for a break, even though everyone from Choi to the judges to the ushers up in the crow's nest knew it was low. As Choi walked around with a guilty expression, Mo took a short break and leaned against the ropes, touching his knee to the canvas, at which point the ref called him down and he got an 8 count. What a joke.

Update...I just found a clip of the incident. Decide for yourself. If you can watch this without wincing, then I guess it was fair and square.

• The venue facilities were fucking brutal! Was this really an Olympic venue?
  
• Most of the lower concourse was blocked off, leaving 3-4 closet sized washrooms...lined up out the door most of the time.
• No vendors selling any kind of K1 memorabilia
• only 2 drink / snack vending booths that I saw on our level of the arena. The 3 hour line to get a bag of squid just wasn't worth it.
  
• Drink vending machines opposite the section gate doors making it impossible to get in or out of the gate due to huge lines waiting to buy a pepsi from a machine
• Who knows why, but an unreasonable number of people couldn't figure out how to find their seats. Come on people...the seat numbers are in order for Christ sake. Ushers were doing SFA (too busy noticing obvious low blows) which made for about 5 arguments in our section alone as people were having a hell of a time counting up to 100 to find their chair.
  

Most of the fight clips are on youtube already. Here's a taste

The reverse peep hole

This is an awesome picture taken from Death Valley. Think of it as the reverse image of the photo I posted up a few days ago. It is a fairly large pic, so click on it to view it in its splendor.

Dumb-ass gets Jolted Back to Reality

By now, if you live on the earth, you have seen the video of the chap who rattles on at a Kerry speech and then gets tossed out by the cops and as he tumbles around like Charlie Chaplin, Captain Kirk sets his weapon to "stun" and gives the guy a bit of a perm.

It is all very laughable, but what I am really starting to find hilarious is the growing list of anile comments surrounding the whole thing. Posters seem to come from 1 of 7 camps:

1) The guy was acting like a clown, wrestling away from the cops, and deserved what he got
2) Bush destroyed the constitution of the US, so the cops can do what they want because of the Patriot act
3) Free speech is lost
4) Kerry is to blame because he sicked his goons on the poor, helpless guy
5) Kerry was dodging the guy's questions instead hopping off the stage and helping him
6) Blame the Liberals
7) Blame the Republicans

Let's put this in a different setting and see which of these seem logical...

a) You are in a bongo truck selling fruits, vegetables and fish. The cops tell you to buzz off. You say, "Okay...after I blast this horn for a few more minutes." They start to escort you away. You start yelling and wriggling to get away from them. Well...now you are in a lot of shit. Whose fault is that? Is it Bush's fault? Is it the liberals' fault? Does it now mean that the free market economy is dead? No. It is YOUR fault for being a show off and a dumb ass. (personal side note...I would LOVE to get Spock out of retirement and shoulder roll out from behind a parked car and zap each and every bongo truck driver sitting in front of my house)
b) When you are stopped for speeding and the cops tell you to "stay in the car" do you reply, "No officer...after all that speeding I need to get out and stretch my legs here..."? Only if you want to get tazed.

I guess the kid was just getting carried away on the adrenaline of being cool in front of his classmates...sadly, now this idiotic stunt will open the door to more ass-hattery and probably make that jackass rich as he makes the rounds talking to Oprah, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Maher, Regis, Leno...whoever.

*In this photo - In one of the earliest recorded uses of the stun gun, housewife Helen Needlebaum stealthily zaps her husband with a Tesla coil by tricking him into holding what he thinks is a newly invented kind of soup ladle. When interviewed afterwards as to the reason for the shock treatment, Needlebaum replied, "Well, that jerk said he liked my hair better longer. Bastard. That'll make him think twice."
Hell hath no fury, my friends.

Mastering English

Why didn't I read this article BEFORE I slogged through that masters program? I could have instead just taken a weekend course to become a driving instructor and gotten the same (and in some cases better) results. Read on...

Czech crash victim wakes up speaking English

September 14, 2007 10:25am

Article from:

A CZECH speedway driver knocked unconscious in a crash stunned ambulance drivers when he woke up speaking perfect English.

18-year-old Matej Kus was out cold for 45 minutes after the crash, but when he woke up he conversed fluidly in English with paramedics, even speaking in an English accent.

The teenager had just begun to study the language and his skills were described by friends and team-mates as “basic at best”.

Peter Waite, the promoter for Kus's team, the Berwick Bandits, told the Daily Mail: "I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

"It was in a really clear English accent, no dialect or anything. Whatever happened in the crash must have rearranged things in his head.

"Before his crash Matej's use of the English language was broken, to put it mildly.

"He was only just making a start on improving it and struggled to be understood, but was keen to learn.

"Yet here we were at the ambulance door listening to Matej talking to the medical staff in perfect English.

"Matej didn't have a clue who or where he was when he came round. He didn't even know he was Czech.

"It was unbelievable to hear him talk in unbroken English."

Unfortunately, the speedway driver's new found skills didn’t last and he remembers nothing of the accident or the following two days. He is now keen pursue studies in English.

He told the Daily Mail, through an interpreter: "It's unbelievable that I was speaking English like that, especially without an accent.

"Hopefully I can pick English up over the winter for the start of next season so I'll be able to speak it without someone having to hit me over the head first.

"There must be plenty of the English language in my subconscious so hopefully I'll be able to pick it up quickly next time."

LVJ Rings the Bell

After digging back in to TOEIC after a couple of years since last dabbling into it, LVJ has made the impossible possible and rung up a perfect 990 score. Great great.

Lessons to be learned from this:
1) Studying actually works
2) The old "I didn't hear / understand you" excuse is out the window.
3) Listening to me rattle on about a bunch of bullshit eventually pays off. (in fact, I can't take any credit for her score...unless there were questions about darts, hockey, Saskatchewan or cuts of meat.)

We are something in nothing

A picture of Earth taken from Mars.

" This is the first image ever taken of Earth from the surface of a planet beyond the Moon. The image is a mosaic of images taken by the rover's navigation camera showing a broad view of the sky, and an image taken by the rover's panoramic camera of Earth. The contrast in the panoramic camera image was increased two times to make Earth easier to see. The inset shows a combination of four panoramic camera images zoomed in on Earth. The arrow points to Earth. Earth was too faint to be detected in images taken with the panoramic camera's color filters. "

Browse around the main site if you have time. There are some phenomenal pics on there.
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/

The more I think about it, the more it ties my mind into a reef knot.

Chomp along with Chomsky

"If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion."

Been reading through several Chomsky essays, interviews and books as of late. Interesting for sure. I have been wanting to slog through a bunch of his linguistics and political stuff for some time, but never really had a chance. Now with really SFA to do, reading is a joy.

In fact, I have lots of stuff to blog up these days, but I am just not that motivated right now to sit still and type. This weekend...