My Contribution

Its OK to stand up and say: "Yeah, that was me. I deserve the credit." People don't like a snob or an egoist, but a healthy appreciation for your own work is attractive.


Joke of the Day: Did you hear the joke about hydration? OF COURSE YOU DIDN'T, BECAUSE HYDRATION IS NOT A JOKE!!!

Clip of the Day
Game of the Day !!!

"Business" World

In the business world, if you are sleeping more than 5 hours per night, you are falling behind.

- Donald Trump


Screw you Donald Trump. Screw you, "Business World". 5 hours of sleep and then back to the rat race? Is that really want? I'll pass.


Joke of the Day: I bought a box of animal crackers and it said to not eat it if the seal is broken. I opened it up and sure enough...

Not Persuasive

"Well, what if everyone did that?" is not a really good reason for me to change what I'm doing: I aim to evaluate my actions in light of the real situation at hand. If EVERYONE was doing what I was doing, the situation would be radically different.


Joke of the Day: I doubt many people got the joke from 2 days ago, so let me make it clearer.
How do you turn a duck into a popular Soul and R&B singer/songwriter? Put it in the microwave until it's Bill Withers

I've Learned

If you are absolutely certain that you are right, you have probably overlooked something. If you think something is definitely one way or the other, then its probably both.



Joke of the Day: Airbrushing in women's magazines. No one looks like that! (The really funny thing is how its tragically Not A Joke.)


Jock of the Day: Me! I finished a metcon workout of 30 90lb Clean and Jerks for time in 2 minutes and 43 seconds with only one 10 second break in between rep 20 and 21 (after I hit myself in the chin with a Jerk haha) !

Nerd of the Day: Me! If I am 75 inchs tall and weigh 200lbs, then 30 reps of a 90lb Clean constitute 17413.92 joules of Work done on the bar and 18078.56 joules of Work on the mass of my body. 30 shoulder presses (same Work as a Jerk) make up 7205.76 joules of work. If I did all this Work (42698.24 joules) in 163 seconds, then I produced an average of 261.95 Watts of Power (.36 horsepower) over that 2.75 minutes.

Losing

The positive side to misplacing something is the joy you get when you find it. You didn't need something new to cheer you up, you just needed to be reminded of how important the stuff you have now is to you. I am thinking of this because I just located the laptop charger I was without for the last 3 days.

I realize that I lose and find things intentionally in 2 ways. I hide $20 bills in strange places around my room and car so that when I find them I will be shocked and feel richer.

I will also set my clocks forward 10 minutes; of course I know that I'm 10 minutes ahead for the first few days, but a month later I will have forgoten and will be plesantly early to my appointments.



Joke of the Day: How do you turn a duck into a popular Soul and R&B singer/songwriter? Put it in the microwave until it's bill withers.

Doo doo doo, do da doot du

The four right chords can make me cry.


Joke of the Day: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? Seventeen.

Real Pain

One great thing about sports is that it allows you to experience different types of pain. The pain response is a deep seated evolutionary mechanism that tells you to PAY ATTENTION, SOMETHING IS WRONG HERE!! Pain has been tuned somewhat by evolution - there are different types of neural pathways, yes. But there is little frontal cortex application to the pain sensation unless we train it. Pain does not get intillectualized, rationalized.... Even if you knowingly do something painful, it feels the same as if the pain had been caused out of the blue.... unless you train yourself! That is a big part of sports... to train yourself to realize when the pain you are feeling is not a helpful indicator to let you know that something has gone wrong.... a marathon runner knows EXACTLY what is going on inside his body. "Painful" track practices or weight-lifting sessions let you figure out what is real pain and what is simply a counterproductive relic of evolution. At the hardest part of a workout, I'll often ask myself, "Is this real pain, or just fatigue?" and ill realize that the intense sensation I am feeling is just that: a sensation in my head. And I'll push through.

I would like to end with 2 of my favorite quotes.

It's not a secret, but it bears remembering: If you do not flirt with pain and exhaustion in your workouts you won't know what to do when they start a conversation with you on the field.

-HH

To be a good athlete, you must get comfortable with Uncomfortable.

-James "OPT" Fitzgarald


Jokes of the Day:
Why did the surrealist cross the road? Seventeen.

Disc Golf

is really great. If you haven't played the course at UCSD, you are missing out.





Joke of the Day:
Two chemists walk into a bar and decide to have a drinking contest.
Chemist #2 says to the other, "you choose the drink and we'll go 1 for 1."
So chemist #1 walks up to the bartender and says " Ill have a H20", gets it, and drinks it down.
Chemist #2 then walks to the bar and says "Ill have a H20 too" , gets it and drinks it down.

Earth Day

There have certainly been many campaigns imploring individuals to "go green". I like Fox's new "Green it, Mean It!" slogan because, well, it rhymes. But has that worked? Really? after all those campaigns, is the crisis averted? No. Despite all these, we still have a BIG problem. Hm. Maybe, contrary to what Walmart says, the "small steps you take to help the Earth" don't make a lick of difference in the face of the monumental problem our planet faces. I am so sick of the "if each person turned off the lights when they left the room, we could save enough energy to power a neighborhood for a week." Its not that this is wrong, but making the emphasis individual change distracts us. Change must be societal and top-down!


Worldwide, an estimated 15 billion coffee trees are grown on 100,000 km² (39,000 sq mi) of some of the most fertile land that exists anywhere on earth. They are labor and resource intensive and they produce NO edible calories while motivating people to cut down rain forest to make way for more. So what should we do? Have an ad campaign imploring us to drink less coffee? Fuck no! We should rip out all the world's coffee trees and plant real FOOD. That's how to actually deal with the problem, that's how to feed the billions of people in the world that live on less than 700 calories a day! Sounds like too big of a project? Sound unreasonable? Well there just isn't going to be a convent solution to the huge fucking problems we face! Global crises don't get fixed by actions that are convenient.


Joke of the Day: Our obsession and fascination with "Celebrity culture" when there are so many more important things in life.

Jessica Alba's Secret to Beauty

...is that she drinks a glass of water as soon as she gets up each morning. Try it - couldn't hurt


Joke of the Day: Why didn't the lobster share his food? Because he's shellfish.

Enjoy Your Cooking

The keys to enjoying cooking are as following:

• Buy quality ingredients.
  
• Avoid firm commitments for a specific time later: sometimes a sandwich turns into a 3 hour stock-making project.
  
• Start with a clean kitchen and an empty sink.
• You need 1 good, sharp chefs knife. You can make do without every other kitchen gadget, but don't use a shitty knife. If you have never heard the phrase "Forged, full-tang", there is a good chance you are using a shitty knife.
  
• Mise en place - even if that place is in the back of the fridge.
• Never be a slave to a recipe book. Think about your professors' lecture on plagiarism: the way to write the 5-page paper is to read all your sources, put them away, and then start writing.
• Taste early and often. Seasoning is a tricky thing.
  
• Do not skimp on butter. It is the secret behind 75% of all the things you have ever eaten and said: "Wow, that is delicious"!
• Clean while you cook. You will enjoy the whole experience more if you don't have a lot to clean afterwords. Thanks to my Dad for teaching me this one at an early age.
• Often, making a dish extraordinary is not that much more work but people skip because, its some extra work. Yes, the dish would be fine with regular onions, but its not that hard to use shallots - why not go the extra mile? Thanks to my friend Markus for teaching me this one.
  
• Don't overlook presentation, even if you are going to devour it by yourself while standing at the kitchen counter. A little garnish can do a whole lot for your own personal happiness.
• Eat without expectation. Taste your creation for what it really is, not what you thought it would/should be.
• Share.

Joke of the Day: A guy goes to the doctor with some serious problems. After a few minutes of the doctor examining the man, the doctor says, "Sir, you are going to have to stop engaging in...um...self love." The patient replies, "Why doctor?" to which the doctor says, "Well sir, because im examining you right now."

Throw on One Leg

--Ultimate related

Next time you go out to practice throwing, try throwing while only standing on your pivot foot for a couple minutes. This drill accomplishes a few things. First and foremost, it quickly shows you how utterly reliant you are on your non-pivot foot step; most people train themselves to throw incorporating that step but it is very limiting to only be able to do things a certain way. It is just intuitional fact that your body will be put in varying complex situations during a game and if you have trained yourself to have very specific, interrelated mechanics, you will not be able to perform when the game situation does not allow you to operate exactly how you trained.

Next, it teaches you balance - a balance very different than you are used to. While throwing 1 legged, I experience a very interesting proprioceptive phenomenon: I can feel the hip torque and its connection to arm movement a lot more. I don't really know how to describe this better; you just gotta try it for yourself and pay attention to the sensations that are different than "regular" throwing.

Lastly, give-and-goes are thrown with the non-pivot foot off the ground and this is a good way to work on the fundamentals that rarely get addressed in traditional Ultimate pedagogy.



Joke of the Day: Why didn't the Buddhist vacuum in the corners? Because he doesn't have any attachments.

Fuck You, Advertisers! Part 2!

Advertisers know that the population is so over-saturated with propaganda (of all kinds). They realize the only way to be effective is to make their commercials funny or ridiculous. They don't even make them funny regarding the product most of the time. In large part, the gimmick is stupid and unrelated. What happened to marketing the merits of your product?

Oh, I know: if advertisers talked about the real, actual benefits of their product, the population would realize how this product, like most everything else sold to the general public these days, is unnecessary, vain, and frivolous. Consumers don't buy products anymore, they buy marketing campaigns.




Joke of the Day: So this guy goes to the store and buys a jug of milk, a loaf of bread and some baloney. He gets up to the cashier and the girl behind the counter says, "you must be single." To which the guy replies, "how do you know that?" The girl answers, "because you're ugly."

Turn Break-Side

In fairness to the people who read this but don't play Ultimate, I will be labeling ideas that only an Ultimate player would understand:

--Ultimate Related


When you catch a straight in cut and decide to turn up field, there are two ways to do this: turn to the open side and turn to the break side. Most people turn open side and I just don't know why. Turning to the break side causes your defender to respect the around break a lot more in addition to allowing you to look at that around throw before the mark is on. I find that when I turn break side to start, I have a much easier time breaking the mark throughout the count.

Josh "Forge" Nickerson on the Air Squids is particularly good at catching a force-forehand in cut and turning right so that he can throw a break backhand. Upon further inspection of his cutting, it appears that if he knows he is open on an in cut he will make his last 2 steps such that his body is at a 15° facing the break side to facilitate this break-side turning. He is really good at it and it is hugely advantageous to our offense.

Just to clarify this advice is not hard fast when you are catching in cuts that are not straight up and down the fiend. On these cuts that swing the disc side to side, it can be good to turn to complement the direction of the flow of the disc. But I should also point out that sometimes its good to pivot against the momentum of a swing to get a easy break off: the D assumes you are gonna pivot with the swing and will run past you.



Joke of the Day: A magician is going down the road, cruising at a decent speed, and then he turns into a driveway.

Interesting

If individuals would try to make out world just a little bit more interesting , we would all have a much better day to day existence. A much funner existence surely.

What am I talking about? Random acts of... interesting-ness.

Do something different.

Wear neon pink sun glasses. Complement your roommate. Make a abstract sketch or doodle and then leave it under the windshield wiper of a stranger's car. Meditate on the grass in the quad. Play the devils advocate in an argument in which you would normally argue the other way. Recommend the great Updike short story you just stumbled across. Yell. Write something crazy on the chalk board 20 minutes before the class and watch people's reactions as they come in. Humor a telemarketer. Actually smell the roses.


I can't put a precise description on my prescription besides this: Do something different, for yourself and for everyone else, just for the sake of pushing the world an inch away from it's droning normalcy.

Joke of the Day: An Irishman walks into a bar with a steering wheel in the front of his pants. The bartender says, "Whats up with that steering wheel?" and the Irishman replies, "It's driving me' nuts!"

Tax Day and a Bonus!

The American tax system is pretty messed up. I don't have any income and its still pretty confusing. The forms.... oh God the forms! Its a system that is cobbled together instead of concise. I understand that the government wants to use the Tax Code to incentivise certain behavior, but this practice (as opposed to using the Tax Code just to fund the operation of the government) leads to a very confusing system.There are people who's only job is to try to understand what the tax law really says!

I honestly think that the fact that people make money on helping people file their returns is messed up.

I'm just upset with the fact that I can't figure it out in the 5 minutes I have between class.


Joke of the day:
A guy walks into a butcher's shop and points to some beef hanging from the rafters. He says to the butcher " I bet you $100 that you can't jump up and touch that meat". The butcher declines saying " No thanks, the steaks are too high."

Fuck You, Advertisers!

Speedstick Stainguard and Axe Dry Antiperspirant commercials which show people being offended by a guy's armpits make me understand what it is like to being "shamed" into buying a product. They make me partially understand the plight of a women when advertising makes her feel like her body is inadequate without a certain product (makeup, shampoo,cloths...). It is a horrible thing to be self-conscious of your own body. The $19-billion /year cosmetics industry sits jauntily on the advertiser's ability to make women feel that they need a product (many products, that is. Have you looked at the myriad of tiny creams and colors and tools in your girlfriend's bathroom drawer?) to be normal.


To those in the world of business that cultivate and then prey on this fear of one's own body - to those who turn a profit by making the masses think they cannot fit in without buying something first - I say FUCK YOU!!! You are as much the reason for the problems in our country as anything else.

What to Say to the Overdog?

There are plenty of good underdog speeches. There are plenty of inspirational halftime speeches for Hoosiers. Just check Youtube. But what should be said to the clear favorite? What should a coach say to the "better" team to make sure they play better - it's actually a very hard question. At least when facing insurmountable odds we know what to say... "this could be the 1 time in 100...".

The most important thing is probably to remind the players of all the times when they have confidently played well - that they've been here before and nothing can take the place of experience. But honestly, I don't know; I've never had a good halftime speech when I was the clear favorite. If you have some good ideas, let me know.

Be a Man, Stand Up for Yourself

The most manly thing I have ever done to stand up for myself was at the annual UCSD Sungod Festival my sophomore year. The line-up included Third Eye Blind, my favorite band of all time. My then girlfriend and I were having some stupid fight, probably about how I wasn't paying enough attention to her, outside the gates to the concert while the day was getting late and the big names were starting to go on. I finally got so mad that I blurted out: "Third Eye Blind is my favorite band of all time; if you make me miss a second of their show because of this stupid fight I might never talk to you ever again".

She shutup and we went inside. The rest of my life, I have been (and am still) shy about asking for what I want but in that movement I was a man: I stood up for myself.




I am not advocating one-sided, pushy machismo... But Third Eye Blind only comes out of retirement to play a free show at your school once.

Caffeine is Fun

I try to limit my caffeine intake; I don't drink coffee daily. I do this not because I think coffee is bad for me, but because when I want coffee to give me a buzz, I REALLY want it to give me a buzz. By not building my caffeine tolerance with daily intake, I guarantee that I can get an amazing buzz off just a small bit. It is for the same reason I do not drink a beer with every dinner - when I drink, I want the alcohol to really hit me. Screw tolerances, I want my drugs to really work!

Humans

If you ever are feeling down about the human race, go hiking by yourself in a place where you can't see any man-made effects. There are still plenty of wide-open spaces left despite human's destructive abuses of our natural resources.

If you ever want a reality check on how fucked we are as a species, go read through the comments on any popular YouTube video. The grammar and sentence structure is terrible.

Play Smart

There is no amount of offensive strategy, cutting schemes, set plays, or audibles that can substitute for the developed skill of cutting and throwing with your eyes open. You must always be looking around the field trying to work with your teammates. The intuition that comes from having played with them enough to sense what they want to do on the field is invaluable.

There is no amount of defensive strategy that can substitute for thinking a step ahead: predicting what the O wants to do and try to take that away.


Its all pattern recognition.

The Most Important Thing Boont Ever Taught Me

Stretching is the quickest, surest, and easiest way to maximize athletic abilities

-Macklyn "Boont" Eick (Former captain. I don't normally cite my sources, but it's his birthday).

There is nothing you can do in the weight room or at the track in 2 weeks (or 2 days) that will prepare you for athletic competition better than working hard for 30 minutes/day with a foam roller and yoga strap.

Specifically related to Men's ultimate, I guarantee, I GUARANTEE!!!, that if you have tight hips and groan (as most men do), stretching for half an hour each night will make your throws (you'll get much lower) and your cutting (you'll have better acceleration and turning) MUCH better.

You See the Old Way Wasn't Working, So It's On Us

Those who cannot forget the past are condemned to repeat it. The problem with some methods of remembering history - history of very large events and very minor day-to-day procedure, is that it turns into a sort of worship for the way things were done in the past. Yes, there are valuable things history can teach us, but we should be aware of falling into the trap of thinking there is one best way to do something - the way it was done before. There are new possibilities all around us if we would just stop and think without the blinders of (likely embellished) collective nostalgia.

The Fosbury Flop didn't come from reading a book about high jump legends.

Why I Drive So Fast

When i think about it, it really scares me that I entrust my life and safety to all the strangers around me on the freeway. I have NO idea if they are sane, crazy, homicidal, drunk, tired, crying, putting on make up, sleepy, or plain clumsy. It is partially for this reason that I drive so fast - to get away from other drivers! I have this urge to pass, to avoid going the same pace as other cars. I figure the less time I'm on the road, the less time I am in danger! I know that when I am driving aggressively, I am focused, tuned in, and hyper-aware. When I am just cruising I am more likely to be spaced out, on the phone, or fiddling with the radio. I've got to assume the same about you: if you are doing a leisurely 65mph, Ill do my best to put you in my dust - for my own safety.



It's that, and driving fast is fun.

The Thrower's Responsibility In Dealing with Poachers April 5 2010

In Ultimate, sometimes a D player will move off his guy and try to poach - looking to get a D on a throw to someone else besides his man.

When this happens, I think it is, in large part, the responsibility of the thrower to deal with the poachers. The poached cutter must get to a space where the thrower can throw the disc - perhaps he yells "Poach!" or waves his hands over his head to notify the thrower, but ultimately, the responsibility lies with the thrower to see the situation and figure out what to do. Yes, sometimes this is a hard throw but getting the disc to a completely open guy is a huge advantage - this is the gambit the defense takes.

I like when defenders poach when I have the disc - I see it as a puzzle. Can I recognize the situation quick enough and come up with a solution before 10 seconds?

If you cannot recognize and solve these "poach-puzzles", you are a big liability to the offense and the D knows it. A good poacher will not let his man run right next to the thrower for an easy reset. That's the point! Getting the disc to a poached guy is necessarily hard for the thrower (if the defender is a smart one). Poach situations are not the time to freak out, but the time for using those Sudoku-solving skills.

Welcome and Introduction

At the urging of some of my friends, I am starting an Idea of the Day blog. It was their suggestion that I have a Twitter account for this purpose but I doubt I will be able to meet the character limit, though I will try to keep these ideas under 140 words. These will not be long discussions or lengthy philosophical projects, though I reserve the right to link to such things.

The topics of these will be an eclectic mix about the world, academics, culture, food, exercise, and of course, Ultimate. If the topic doesn't interest you, fine; i'll see you tomorrow. If you like the idea, leave a comment, and then take it - steal it - and use it in your next dinner party conversation. But please don't cite your source unless you feel like it - I'm not a big fan of intellectual property rights.

The only real model I have is the NY Time's IOTD blog but im sure mine will be different. I have but a rough concept of what this will look like, bare with me - I'm going to refine the format as I go.

You may follow me Twitter (which will link to this blog website unless I have something to say shorter that 140 characters) or on Google Buzz, or through Google Dashboard, or on a RSS feed.

Well, enough with the prologue. By the way, you can thank Justin "FireFace" Elliot and Brooks "Shields" Taylor for the motivation to begin this project.