24.8.12 Prices Sneaking Up

“That’s 10 years I told Pooh in 95′ I’d kill you if you try me for my Air Max 95s” – The Game, Hate it or Love it

Even as an English kid growing up in middle class Buckinghamshire, as far removed from hip hop culture as one could imagine, the above rings true even for me. Ok, maybe no one in the Bourne End/Wycombe area was killing anyone but, much like Beats headphones now, people still went mental for Nike trainers. And above all the others, people really really wanted Nike Air Jordans, titled after basketball’s greatest player, Michael Jordan.

If I’m honest, they were one of the first times I really recognised consumerism and fads as a kid (not necessarily the first time I was part of a fad though). These shoes cost a small fortune and weren’t that much different from any other trainer in my eyes. Well nowadays everything costs more and there’s a new basketball megastar call Lebron James and now he’s at it too. His latest Nike signature sneaker is scheduled to break the $300 retail mark.

Now these trainers have a load of performance monitoring gadgets to track performance and height jumped etc, but they are still just shoes! This lead me to wonder how much times have changed (or haven’t as the case may be). Luckily someone has made a graphic depicting the rising price of the shoes:

The Air Jordan’s I first remember people talking about we’re the ones available in 1995 and they were a whopping $125! I bet kids now don’t think that’s that much but that was a ludicrous amount and shows that consumerism based on sports stars selling power has always been incredible.

DC

23.8.12 Boosting to Paralympic Success

Now when the Olympics ended I bet you thought we were done with tales from the sporting world for a while, didn’t you? Well unfortunately (or fortunately if your glass is half full), you’re not. For the Paralympics are just churning into gear and theses athletes are incredible and what’s more, today I learnt the extreme lengths they will go to to get a cutting edge….

The good people at BBC News have written an incredibly insightful and fascinating article on Paralympians cheating to gain an edge.

When the average, fully fit, human body exercises, your heart rate increases and blood is pumped around the body quicker, this increases the bodies ability to use oxygen and perform to a better level. When someone has a severe spinal cord injury, their body doesn’t do this, there is no trigger to increase blood flow. To gain this increased blood flow, the athletes do something known as ‘boosting’.

The athlete inflicts pain on themselves, using methods ranging from cracking toes with hammers or giving themselves electric shocks. This triggers their body to increase the flow of blood around it, hence the boost. It is banned by the IPC (International Paraplegic Committee) since 1994 but can prove hard to monitor.

The most intriguing thing is that it doesn’t just contravene IPC rules, the effects can be much more severe. In extreme circumstances, the spike in blood flow and pressure can trigger things such as strokes and severe blood vessels. Yet despite this, the BBC report cites that an IPC survey at the last Paralympics showed that 17% of athletes had at some point used this,

The Paralympics will no doubt be an incredible testament to the human spirit and be a great advertisement for the athletes. What is incredible is that these athletes, some that have already come so close to losing everything, would risk it all again just for the slightest of edges.

DC

22.8.12 Horse Flying Around

Back when I was in Thailand, I told you all of my struggles with mosquito bites. To be frank, they kicked my ass. It was even worse in Portugal, when I arrived home with an incredible 46 bites over my body. I looked like a dot-to-dot picture. As incredible as that is though, there is something that I have an even worse reaction to – horse fly bites. They itch like hell, the swell and it feels like I have a golf ball under my skin. The only thing is, I’m not quite sure how to differentiate between the two. I mean, in a hot country at night I presume that it’s a mosquito but I’ve never really been sure of how to tell the difference.

NHS Choices has a succinct overview of the symptoms and differences, first describing horse fly bites as:

A bite from a horsefly can be very painful. As well as the formation of a weal around the bite, you may experience: Urticaria, dizziness, weakness, wheezing and Anglo-oedema.

Horseflies cut the skin when they bite, rather than piercing it, so horsefly bites can take a long time to heal and can cause infection.

The main difference with mosquito bites is that the mosquito pierces the skin, usually resulting in an equally itchy bite but one that has less chance of infection. The other main way that you can tell that it’s a horse fly, apart from the horrific infected swellings (a lovely picture), is that horse flies tend to be located around wooded areas or large field areas – yes, that’s right, just as I take up rugby again 3 times a week, I realise that that is probably the source of all of my problems.

DC

21.8.12 Lifting Standards

My former life as an spare time player of rugby has once again reared it’s head. It has been too long that I’ve looked at the bag of my scrum cap and boots and thought it would be excellent to take that up again before I’m too old. Please note, my knees already think that I’m too old. So I picked up my kit bag and headed down for a spot of training and boy was it an ingesting experience.

As we covered many months ago, becoming an expert takes a substantial period of time (10,000 hours to be exact). This Tuesday I learnt that it certainly doesn’t help to take a huge break and then retry. Every aspect was rusty. Now I was no Richie McCaw before, believe me, but I was capable of the basics. Today I really struggled with a lot of aspects despite being in better shape than when I played before. Nowhere was this more apparent that in line outs, both lifting and jumping (which I was always too heavy to do before). My technique was really poor. Luckily I received a number of tips, augmented by further research:

Step 1 The jumper should initiate the lift by sinking to jump. The lifters sink in unison and must drop their butts down whilst placing their hands on the bottom of the thigh (if front lifter) or under the bum of the jumper (if back lifter)

Step 2 As all 3 rise up, it is important that the first things to fully extend are the lifters arms. Much like Olympic lifts, the power should be coming from the much stronger leg muscles driving through, not the arms ‘lifting’. This will also ensure the jumper is as high as possible.

Step 3 With their arms extended, the lifters left should explosively extend with the jumper’s jump. Then to secure the lifter and maximise the height, the two lifters should squeeze towards each other in an attempt to be as close as possible. This forms a nice stable, but tall, ‘A-Frame’.

A quick refresher maybe but there is still a lot of work for me to do before I have this technique down. Most critically, my jumper friends have noted their should be a Step 4, of securely bringing the jumper down, as opposed to just dropping Dave.

DC

20.8.12 You’ve Got to Pick a Pepper or Two

One of the most interesting type of things you can ever learn is an interesting tit bit of information that disproves a widely held belief you had. Today I learnt that my long deliberations when looking at variety packs of peppers in the supermarket, deliberating which combination of colours to buy, was all in vain.

The pepper is part of genus capsicum which comes from the nightshade family (not sure I want to eat them anymore) and are native to central and southern America. Of course it is now a widely recited fact that they aren’t vegetables but actually fruit because of their seeds so that isn’t today’s wisdom. No, as I mentioned, my consternation comes from the issue of variety.

There are a number of different colours of pepper, even as wide ranging as multi-coloured but I’m more interested in the common supermarket variety as I thought there was a marked difference. It turns out that, although orange/yellow/red peppers are all from different seeds (I told you Lucy!!), a green pepper is merely an under ripe red pepper. This under ripening is the reason that the pepper is slightly bitter and less sweet than a red pepper. Typically the most sweet red peppers stay on the vine a lot longer and enjoy some good old fashion sunshine – Think of them as nice and sunburnt!

So the truth of the matter is that when making your decision, all peppers will taste similar so colour is for aesthetic unless you pick the slightly more bitter green pepper. I feel with all of these technical horticulture terms, I will eventually be able to redo my garden and bore everyone to tears with all of the official names.

DC

19.8.12 Appeasement like it’s 1920s Europe

[Yeah, that’s right. Back to back word learnings. It’s been like an English lesson the last few days!]

We all have to do it occasionally, I wouldn’t call it an apology. It’s more of attempt to offset either already completed bad behaviour or future bad behaviour. You know that your actions will cause at best mischief and at worst a complete s**t storm, but we’re all occasionally selfish. So what to do instead of inaction? We do something to propitiate the anger or feelings of another party.

Propitiate verb

to appease or make well disposed; conciliate
[from Latin propitiāre to appease, from propitius gracious]

Admittedly this term was originally meant to describe an appeasement to a deity and is linked to atonement in Christianity and all over the New Testament, but I think a lot of aethiests would say that the closest that they have to a deity is a loved one, be it family, friend or spouse.

So now, the next time you need to go shopping for a few hours to conciliate an angry girlfriend/wife after you stayed out too late drinking, or you need to tidy your room because you wanted to go to a music festival at the weekend, at least you have a word to explain your actions.

DC

18.8.12 Greed is Good

“Greed is Good” – Gordon Gekko (Wall Street)

Sure enough that maxim as promoted by Michael Douglas’ character in the 80s film Wall Street still holds true in some sectors of society today (Although he never actually utters that exact phrase) – Although some areas of the media feel it is their place to beat it out of bankers. There is, however, the common belief that to really get ahead, at least financially, one has to be a little bit greedy. But why is this important now? Well much like some of my other daily word learnings, today’s, once I thought a little harder, became obvious. As a famous sports star was labelled as being somewhat ‘avaricious’ I looked blankly at the article, knowing that I knew a derivative of the word but not quite understand this particular form or even arrangement of letters.

Avaricious – adj

Immoderately desirous of wealth or gain; greedy

My favourite example I have seen quoted on the many reference sites I have checked for the meaning was ‘He sacrificed his career so that his avaricious brother could succeed’. It just sounds like the beginning of an odd action film. Like I’ve mentioned on some of these word learnings before, in a different conjugation or derivative a word can become more obvious. For example I do know the word avarice (it became clear after the research) as it is one of the seven deadly sins – although I must admit that about 5 of the seven deadly sins merge into one for me.

Still the need and desire to place wealth and gain to the forefront – Sure sounds like Gordon Gekko right?

DC

17.8.12 Drop the Bomb

Everybody does it. Your mother always told you she would wash your mouth out with soap or give you a clip round the ear, and I’m sure like mine she had the best of intentions, but everyone does it. Some people use them like punctuation, some people use them and then cover their mouths and blush, and some people just occasionally let them slip out. I’m talking about swearing, and even with the best of intentions, we all get a little too carried away sometimes.

The reason I say this is because today I learnt that, along with the word ‘sexting’, the word f-bomb has been added to the dictionary. Yes, that’s right, the cover up for the word f**k has now been placed in the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Not the Oxford English mind). Apparently America’s favourite dictionary adds 100 new words every year to stay ‘current’. But where on earth did this unique term come from? Who first coined it (I would also like to know who first coined the expression ‘coined’)?

It turns out that it was accredited to the New York Mets (American baseball team) now sadly deceased catcher Gary Carter in 1988. He was describing to a member of the media how he had given up a lot of swear words and to fit with his abstention he said he had given up f-bombs.

The most ludicrous aspect of these additions to the ‘English language’? The president of Merriam-Webster claims that they wont reveal the whole list of 100 new words as they don’t want competitors to copy them – The world of publishing dictionaries is apparently more secretive than working for the government (Right Wikileaks?)

DC

16.8.12 The Height of Achievement

It’s time to be more proactive. It’s time instead of absorbing learnings and blogging on them, to proactively go out and show the world that I am smarter (or have more useless knowledge) now than I did 8 months ago. That can only mean one thing – A Pub Quiz. So I entered the bear pit of the Black Lion in Bourne End’s pub quiz. Of course, in any pub quiz you can’t know all of the answers (fortunately my two team mates knew more than their far share) so of course it has lead to more learnings. Now I could just tiresomely list out all of the answers that I didn’t know, merely serving to underline my ineptitude. So instead I thought I would tell you the most interesting blank answer I had…..

The Oscars are the height of the movie award calendar. All of the Hollywood A listers want to be seen there and the privileged few actually win a golden statuette. But today I found out that those statuettes are actually over an incredible foot tall. In fact, they measure in at a giddy 13.5 inches tall. The statuette is gold plated brittanium and weighs in at 3.85Kgs. Interestingly, you are only allowed to keep your Oscar if you agree that if ever you decide to sell it, that you must offer it back to the academy for $1 first. Otherwise they refuse to let you keep it!

So an Oscar is around the same height as one of my shins (ok a little smaller as I have long legs). But incredible none the less. Incidentally, my team won and now I’m a whopping £9 richer! At least we agreed to split the winnings, if not the answers, 3 ways.

DC

15.8.12 Going Quackers

I tend to be a bit partial to a widely touted ‘fact’ and can sometimes be a little bit of a sucker for believing them even when I have no proof (scientific or otherwise) that it is a fact. Even I, however, was sceptical when I heard the ‘a duck’s quack doesn’t echo’ tale. I mean, surely any noise echoes? That’s just common knowledge right? But still this rumour persists so I had to learn how true it is.

Bupkiss is a word thrown around a lot by middle aged Jewish women, but I’m afraid that is what I have to report back. There is no scientific evidence, ever, to support this myth, in fact there is only evidence that serves to categorically disprove it. As I mentioned, all sound echos as it reflects off nearby surfaces, so if something can be heard then it has to echo. As part of the British Association Festival of Science, Salford Accoustics disproved this theory by using an anechoic chambers. The reasons they gave for the myth were that:

– Duck quacks do echo but they tend to quack very very quietly. As a result the reflecting noise is even quieter, so you can’t really hear it.

– Most importantly, ducks don’t hang around large surfaces for their quacks to reflect off of. When do you ever see a duck by a mountain or by a sky scrapper? They don’t they hang around at the canal by my house!

You can check out the results of the tests and hear an actual duck quack echo if you visit the Salford Univeristy acoustic website (www.accoustic.salford.ac.uk). But today I learnt that ‘duck quack’s don’t echo’ is a complete myth – So stop spreading it!

DC