Angela Potter, a teacher in Waikato, NZ, has a funny definition of "vindictive":
"My ex-boyfriend is an avid and very successful fisherman who asked me to protect his collection of GPS fishing spot co-ordinates [with my life no less]. Not a problem," she wrote on the auction.
And sold secrets tend to make for an angry man - Miss Potter said her ex was less than pleased to find out they had been shared.
Miss Potter said she would never have sold the co-ordinates had it been an amicable breakup, however, the man packed his belongings into her suitcase, which had sentimental value, and fled the country.
"When he refused to return my suitcase that's when I sold his co-ordinates," she said. "I didn't list them to be vindictive. I listed them as a bit of a laugh."
OTOH, she's now dating a new fisherman and says that she has not shared her ex's fishin' holes with him.
We all know that people do sometimes die while attempting to climb Mt. Everest. But it's easy to overlook what happens to those people after they've died. You can't bring a body down from the mountain. In fact, many of the people who have died there had to be abandoned before they were dead because they couldn't walk and no one could carry them safely back to a place they could get medical care. And that means Mt. Everest is littered with dead bodies.
Between 1922 and 2010, 219 people died on the mountain. In death, many of these bodies have become famous — some even serving as landmarks that help climbers gauge where they are and how far they have to go.
Smithsonian.com has a fascinating short piece about the lives and afterlives of the dead on Mt. Everest. This excerpt is about the body whose boots are pictured above:
The body of “Green Boots,” an Indian climber who died in 1996 and is believed to be Tsewang Paljor, lies near a cave that all climbers must pass on their way to the peak. Green Boots now serves as a waypoint marker that climbers use to gauge how near they are to the summit. Green Boots met his end after becoming separated from his party. He sought refuge in a mountain overhang, but to no avail. He sat there shivering in the cold until he died.
MagicPeaceLove sez, "The Virts, a trio of skilled cardistes from Singapore, up the ante of ECM (Extreme Card Manipulation) with a beautifully shot & edited short promo showing off their Extreme Card Prowess. The closing set, an unbroken, 25-second take, is a dazzling display of technical virtuosity with a deck of cards."
Lex sez, "I've just posted an interview with Indie Hannah of the Cai Rollers, Cairo (and Egypt's) first roller derby league.
They're a mixture of local women and international residents, and are finally practising after the project has been over a year in the making. They're had to fight hard to get to this point, and have plenty of struggles ahead of them."
Who are the CaiRollers? Many leagues in far-flung places are conglomerations of ex-pats with little local involvement. Something tells me that's not the case for you...
Nope, CaiRollers are as diverse as the city. Right now, we have about eight skaters, one coach and two volunteers who make up the foundation and are all working equally as hard to get this league going. Skaters include Egyptian natives, Egyptians with dual citizenship who are third world kids having grown up around the world, and some ex-pats from other parts of the world including America and Argentina. Our volunteer--hopefully future refs--are equally as diverse from Africa and America. Our belief and value systems range from Muslim to Christian, Agnostic to Buddhist. We range from teachers and nonprofit workers to female entrepreneurs.
Photographer Jessica Hilltout travelled Africa documenting homemade footballs/soccer balls improvised across the continent. Shown above, a ball from Mozambique, made by Domingo. Left, a Ghanian ball from the Anokye Stars.
Well, this is exciting! The UFC, the owner of which said less than two years ago that it would never include women, now does! Ronda Rousey will be taking her vicious armbar to the UFC in 2013. But she won't be left without an opponent -- rival Meisha Tate has also signed on, and possibly Sara McCann and Cris Cyborg.
This is a big deal for a kickass lady. Rousey is not just a Strikeforce champion, she's also an Olympic athlete, having been the youngest judo competitor in the 2004 games. Since that global debut, she has become the tenth ranked female MMA fighter in the world. The world.
Now, my question is this: Now that the UFC includes both genders, when will we get to see bouts in New York?
Halftime performance of The Ohio State University Marching Band during a game against Nebraska on October 6. A "video game" theme, with music from Zelda, Halo, Pokemon, Tetris, and others.
Ryan is a University of Waterloo Engineering grad student who has invited the world to suggest damnfool stunts that he might perform for the youtubes. In this episode, he looses arrows from a powerful bow while bouncing on a trampoline. It's TRAMPOLARCHERY!
Ebbets Field Flannels makes replicas of vintage baseball jerseys from various leagues (including Cuban and Japanese jerseys), using new-old vintage textiles for their projects. They also do hockey jerseys, hats, and other replicas of bygone-era sportswear.
The Stanley Cup used to be an open tournament which included non-NHL teams. In 1917, the Seattle Metropolitans of the PCHA became the first U.S. team to win the cup when they defeated the Montreal Canadiens three games to one. Several different versions of this barber-pole striped sweater were worn through the years.
The Skate Park house was custom built for a Shibuya, Tokyo couple, integrating a skate-ramp, a piano studio, and many lovely design flourishes. I think the stair-rail looks like it'd be awesome for grinding, too -- or at least soaping.
The owners of this house, a young married couple, made a special request in regards to the design of their house, located in a quiet residential neighborhood in Shibuya ward. They wanted both a skateboard park and a piano rehearsal room to reflect their own individual interests.
There was no need for a car park on the site, so to take advantage of space a private entrance courtyard was designed. The sliding glass panels of the first floor open up onto this enclosed area and allows for the workshop and studio to expand outwards. The studio has a skateboard bowl imbedded into the floor with multiple angles for plenty of different interaction.
The piano room, located at the back of the studio, is raised about 2 feet from the ground to help with the sound-proofing of the room as well as creating an inherent stage performance space. When the doors open up onto the studio, the expanded space with the bowl transform into guest seating and completely changes the atmosphere from a mere practice room to a public concert hall.
Chocolate and high school football are being affected by climate change, according to two stories published on the Scientific American website yesterday. In the case of chocolate, the cocoa its made from is grown in several countries in West Africa, a region heavily affected by higher temperatures and extreme weather patterns. By 2020, there will likely be a 1.5 million ton shortage in cocoa production. As for football, the problem is the fact that, across the United States, cool weather season is kicking in later in the year than it used to. That affects football practice. Specifically, schools are increasingly concerned about the health risks of forcing high school students to get really physical, while fully suited and padded, in today's warmer Augusts and Septembers. So I think it's safe to say that climate change hates fun. It's a fun-hater. — Maggie
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Over at Discovery News, Emily Sohn asks the question I've been wondering for the last two weeks. Why are Olympians today better at their sports than Olympians of the past? Why do speed records keep getting broken? Why can gymnasts do more elaborate routines?
I mean, I have plenty of reasonable, speculative answers for those questions. But I hadn't seen them addressed in a factual way. This is great. And fascinating.
The answer, experts say, involves a combination of incremental technological improvements, as well as a growing population of people attempting a larger variety of sports that they start earlier and stick with longer. The mind plays a big role, too, especially when it comes to toppling seemingly insurmountable barriers, like the four-minute mile of the past or the two-hour marathon of the future.
"There is almost certainly a species limit in terms of physical capabilities, and I suspect we might be in the range of that," said Carl Foster, an exercise physiologist at the University of Wisconsin, Lacrosse. "But every time scientists say humans are not going to go any faster, they've been shown to be wrong. You can take that one to the bank."
Through calculations of maximum power output, oxygen use, heart function and other factors, some researchers have attempted to predict what the absolute limits of human ability will be. Much-debated estimates include 1:58 for the marathon (a five-minute improvement over the current men's record of 2:03.38), and 9.48 for the men's 100m.
Alexis Madrigal on the weird tape that Olympic athletes are sticking on themselves:
It's called kinesio (or just 'k') tape. Athletes use the tape as a kind of elastic brace that they say helps relieve pain. The tape and technique were developed by Kenso Kase thirty years ago in Japan. Since then, many companies have developed similar adhesive tapes and they are in something of a marketing war. Unfortunately, the evidence that k tape does much of anything is scant.
Huh, I never would have thought that athletes, trained to succeed at all costs and given a perfunctory education, would be so easily sold on quackery and the promise of biological shortcuts.
Photographer Jessica Hilltout travelled Africa documenting homemade footballs/soccer balls improvised across the continent. Shown above, a ball from Mozambique, made by Domingo. Left, a Ghanian ball from the Anokye Stars.
Halftime performance of The 
The Stanley Cup used to be an open tournament which included non-NHL teams. In 1917, the Seattle Metropolitans of the PCHA became the first U.S. team to win the cup when they defeated the Montreal Canadiens three games to one. Several different versions of this barber-pole striped sweater were worn through the years.
The owners of this house, a young married couple, made a special request in regards to the design of their house, located in a quiet residential neighborhood in Shibuya ward. They wanted both a skateboard park and a piano rehearsal room to reflect their own individual interests.
Alexis Madrigal on 