Annals Of Innovation–The Big Bird Race: No, not Kermit’s friend, real Big Birds, which is to say albatrosses. Albatrosses are among the most majestic flyers on the face of the planet, with enormous wingspans and the ability to soar and glide for years at a time without touching land. They are creatures of the frigid skies in the Deep South, and are a favorite of sailors racing across the Southern Ocean. Unfortunately, they are also dying off at a depressing rate, victims of the miles and miles of longline fishing gear floating around in the oceans (the birds go for the bait, get hooked, and drown; and scientists estimate that maybe 300,000 seabirds die this way every year). So, up steps…British bookie Ladbrokes. In conjunction with London’s Conservation Foundation, the green-eyeshade-guys have come up with a very novel stunt to raise money. It’s called The Big Bird Race, and it features eighteen Tasmanian Shy Albatrosses, which were tagged with position beacons and released from three islands off Tasmania, Australia in late April. The birds are migratory and are headed toward South Africa, 6,000 miles away. Like NASCAR racers, each one is sponsored (though without the paint job), in this case by celebs like Queen Noor and former-model (and Mick Jagger wife) Jerry Hall. Ladbrokes is taking wagers on which bird will complete the journey first, and has put tracking maps and all sorts of cool albatross info online. So far $55,000 has been laid down, with all the money going to albatross conservation. According to the New York Times, the first birds are due in this week, and only five remain in the running (some went the wrong way, and some just disappeared, proving that it is, indeed, dangerous to be an albatross). So get your bets down now. “Aphrodite,” Jerry Hall’s entry, is in the lead after briefly being pronounced dead due to what turned out to be a temporary transmitter malfunction. No word yet on what the winner’s cut will be…
All-Out Aphrodite: “Heh-heh. Turning off my beacon really helped me sneak ahead. I just hope they don’t demand a urinalysis after I win this thing…”
Category: Uncategorized
Wetass Video Of The Week–Kiteboarding Brazil: If you’ve never seen kiteboarding, you have to check this out, courtesy of WetDawg. And if you have, sit back and enjoy. Who knew Frank Sinatra would make such great kiteboarding music?
Fortaleza, Brazil: Suddenly, wherever you are right now seems very, very dull…
Ellen MacArthur Is On Her Way–Solo Transatlantic Record Attempt: After two months of waiting around for the right weather, Ellen MacArthur was about to set off from New York early this week to deliver her 75-foot trimaran back to Europe without a record bid. But as she got ready to push off the dock, a custom-order cold front came whipping off the Great Lakes and suddenly there was a decent weather window for a record shot. So off she went Monday night. She’s now more than 500 miles into the bid, and trails current record-holder Laurent Bourgnon by about 14 hours. In 1994 he made the 2885-mile sprint from Ambrose Light off New York to The Lizard at the entrance to the English Channel in 7 days, 2 hours and 34 minutes. Ellen has averaged about 17.5 knots so far, and has endured rough conditions, sleep deprivation, a broken winch and damage to her rudder. But she’s still in the game and sailing hard, racing to stay just ahead of the fast-moving front so she can ride it all the way across the Atlantic. Bourgnon had incredible pace early in his record run, setting a new outright 24 hour record of 540 miles, so it’s no surprise that Ellen is falling behind. But the approaching front is pushing wind speeds up over 30 knots and Ellen is sailing at more than 20 knots so she should start to grind Bourgnon down. Here’s Ellen’s summary of her first night at sea:
“At most 14 minutes sleep…8 sail changes since have left New York and now I have something on the rudder acting like a giant break on the boat, until daylight there is not much I can do .I also broke part of a winch during the night so its not been an easy start. I am just about hanging on to the average speed I need to stay with this weather system.”
Doesn’t sound very easy, does it…?
“I’m sailing fast. The boat’s in great shape. But I must say I am a bit worried about the fact that my left arm seems to be fading away…”
Wetass Bonus Photo: Here’s what it looks like when a massive wave–generated by a typhoon–meets an immovable object (in this case, the breakwater of the fishing port of Ahi, in western Japan). KABOOM…
Caution: Nature At Work…
(Photo: Associated Press)
Wetass Sport #62–Prison Soccer, Inmates vs. Elephants: Yes, elephants. Why? Because if you are a prison warden in Thailand you have two things: bored prisoners prone to gambling and other trouble, and a surplus of elephants. So what do you do? You stage an inmate vs. elephant soccer match during the European soccer championships. Not only that, you give the massive, not-very-nimble pachyderms a little love by using an oversized 20-pound ball. “We train the elephants every day to play soccer, kick the ball, and to keep from stepping on the other people,” said Pattarapon Meepan, 19, son of the elephants’ owner. “They are not the best players, because they are quite slow. But they try their best.” Their best was pretty good. The elephants managed a 5-5 draw. Perhaps it was because the prisoners seemed oddly reluctant to steal the ball out from under a lumbering two-ton animal who would rather be eating peanuts…
“Be careful dribbling around the next guy, Dumbo. He’s in for triple homicide…”
TWC Quick Hits…
Gadget Corner–Underwater MP3 Player Submersible To 200 Feet: For SCUBA, snorkeling, and other, err, water sports. Bonus feature: won’t play Barry Manilow…
Russia’s Vladivostok Opens Door To Chinese Culture By Staging Massive Dragon Boat Race: 60 teams and 600 oarsmen show up…and sack the town after crossing finish. “Haven’t they read the Iliad?” crows pillaging Chinese athlete…
German “Samurai” On Loose In Woods Near Berlin: Scares hikers and bikers off with dangerous sword tricks, eludes capture with craftiness and camouflage. German police can’t decide whether to call in Steven Seagal or Uma Thurman…
Kill Willi: “You say this guy f*cked with my wedding too? Okay, put on your plastic ponchos. This is going to get messy…”
The Zen Of Surfing–Jordan’s (Surprisingly Addictive) Surf Blog: The beauty of blogs is that they place no limits on the eccentricities and infatuations of humankind. I recently came across this blog, updated intermittently by a Californian surfer named–I’m just guessing here–Jordan. It is a mellow excursion into the mind of a surfer, a diary of days carving across waves, and a frequently captivating, almost philosophical, enquiry into the nature of surfing itself. Reading it will drop your blood pressure 10 points. Here’s a journey into a single wave:
It was a wave that looked like the last one above in the set. I caught it outside with no challengers and hooked into the right. It was a really nice, steep drop, but then the wave started to fade, and I thought about just pulling out and paddling back for a better one. But instead, I cut back about 20 yards or so to the center of the whitewater hoping the wave would re-form on the inside. While paddling out at this killer new spot, I saw the inside just going off. So I Huntington Hopped the wave, battled the whitewater, and it started to reform just as I had predicted.
The neat little thing was that now I was back at the center of the peak – like a full on second wave. I didn’t have much speed from all the pumping and bouncing to get to the reform. And admittedly, my legs were pretty thired. I must have hip-hopped it about 20 or 30 yards to get to where I was.
But all of a sudden I found myself gliding along a nice clean head high wave – completely different than the “first wave,” so to speak. But I was low on speed and needed some immediately…I moved WAY up on the board, almost so that my front foot was at the nose, and we started picking up speed very quickly – almost like riding a longboard (god forbid). There were guys hanging out on the inside, and me and [my board] zipped right by them, with me now fully into a longboard pose up near the nose, and a guy hooted and I caught a glance of two or three more watching. That was really cool, actually.
I was caught up in this Peak Experience for too long. And found myself out of position because of my little longboard stunt. The wave peaked as I was mid-face and sectioned in front of me. Had I been back on the board and pumping it, I would have made it – or been able to pull into a nice open barrel – but instead was forced to immediately move to the back of the board in normal stance and straighten out to take the drop – otherwise I would have got sucked up and thrown over a shallow spot on the boil. I got lucky because I didn’t make it all the way to the back of the board in this one second adjustment – the nose almost dug underwater – whitewater exploded head high all around me, and I made it.
Ahhhhh. Makes me really, really want to go surfing…
Nice life, Jordan…
(Photo: Finkelstein)
Update: SpaceShip One Made It Into Space…Briefly: Flew at Mach 3 to an altitude of 62.5 miles, before falling back toward Earth and gliding to the Mojave desert landing strip. Very cool. But also worth noting that the speed needed to reach orbit is, get this, Mach 25. So there is quite a way to go before we’re talking Space Family Robinson…
Is it just me, or does this think look like it belongs in a comic book…?
Annals of Adventure–SpaceShip One: If you are a space junkie, the Mojave desert is the place to be today. That’s where–if the weather is decent–a space plane built by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen and engineering whiz Burt Rutan (whose last trick was to build a plane that flew around the earth non-stop on one tank of gas), will attempt to become the first privately built craft to leave earth’s atmosphere. That’s an altitude of 62 miles, and the rocket will experience a few minutes of weightlessness before gliding back to earth and–hopefully–landing safely. Allen and Rutan are leading contenders in a new sort of space race, a race which has a prize of $10 million. It’s called the Ansari X Prize, and it is similar to the Orteig Prize that inspired Charles Lindbergh to fly across the Atlantic. To win it, a team has to produce a privately financed spacecraft that is able to jack three people into space, return safely to Earth, and then repeat that trip within a two week period. Allen, who throws money into a lot of odd projects, basically opened his checkbook and told Rutan to go for it. So far the project has cost more than $20 million (but who’s counting?) and Allen and Rutan hope they are about to pioneer a new era in non-governmenal space travel. Not sure what the public would use a space plane for, other than the world’s most expensive thrill ride. Still, it’s a very cool project and no slam dunk. In December, a test flight ended in a semi-crash on the landing strip. Space.Com has this thing covered from all angles, so click here if you want enough detail to make a Klingon-speaking Trekkie happy…
Oops: “Goddammit! The Anna Kournikova virus again?! I don’t care if it’s Paul Allen. We’re dumping the Microsoft software from the control system, and that’s final!”
Sizzlin’ Summer Surf Movie-“Riding Giants”: This killer homage to the history of chasing the world’s biggest waves is about to hit wide release. It broke box office records at Sundance 2004, and will no doubt inspire a run on surf lessons and baggy swimsuits. So why is director Stacy Peralta depressed? “I need to go surfing?” he tells Surfer magazine, in a wide-ranging interview about life, skateboarding, surfing and movie-making. Here’s some of what Peralta had to say about “Riding Giants”:
“I knew it was going to be tow-in surfing and I knew it was going to be Maverick’s and I knew it was going to be the whole history of the first big-wave riders, from California to Hawaii to Makaha to Waimea…When we started the film there was a couple of mandates that my editor Paul Crowder and producer Agi Orsi and I talked about. And the Number One mandate was no interviewee will ever say the words: “Surfing is just so bitchin’ but I can’t tell you how bitchin’ surfing is unless you do it.” No one would ever be allowed to say that on camera. If we had to cop out by just telling people they couldn’t understand surfing unless they did it, then we would have failed as filmmakers. We refused to do what has been done in too many surfing films. It’s a cop out.”
And… “There is so much surf pornography out there—watching guys slash and burn on waves over and over and over. To me that is not filmmaking. That is just putting together trick catalogues. Surfing is such a cherished piece of American culture and I wanted to get that across in a movie. I wanted to not just show surfing but to have surfers talking eloquently about it. What’s it like to get caught inside a 25-foot wave? What’s it like to wipe out and get rescued? Surfing is really misunderstood out there in what Sam George likes to call “the civilian world,” and I felt it was my responsibility to get it right.”
This civilian, for one, can’t wait to see this thing. I bet it’s bitchin’. Oops. Sorry, Stacy…
Filming Giants: “Uh, Pilot-Dude? Unless this bird’s also a submarine, you might want to pull up a bit…”
The Earthist Chronicles 