Listening to Shaun White talk with his teammates before dropping in to the halfpipe tonight for his (unnecessary–he’d already won the gold medal) final run, made me wonder what the IOC policy on marijuana was. Yeah, they sounded like a bunch of stoners. Apparently, the USADA is cracking down this year, making all Olympic atheletes provide their precise whereabouts for a 60 minue window each day. Okay for some sports, but pinning snowboarders down to a schedule might be a little, well, ambitious.

The Olympics seems like they’re simultaneously getting less serious and taking themselves more seriously.

And Pot is a “performance enhancing” drug? Yeah. Totally.

Parkour is a crazy amazing type of urban running/jumping/kung fu. It’s been around for a while, basically invented in the 90s by a couple of french brothers. One of them even made a couple of pretty sweet movies featuring it. (I’m hoping the sequel is as good as the first one, anyway.) This amazing stop motion/flip book captures the essence of the sport in a startling and neat way:

They found some 100-year-old whiskey buried in the ice in Antarctica and are drilling down to get it. Yum. You can get me a bottle for xmas. Thanks!

Neat video. I like the
Imogen Heap track too.

Yesterday was Day 1 of National Novel Writing Month and I’m happy to report I’m on track having written 1760 words yesterday! The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000 word novel–that’s just under 2000 words a day–during the month of November. The idea is to plough through, to not over-think things, and write, write, write. I think it’ll be a good exercise no matter if I “win” by completing the full 50k or not. I’m going to win, though!

This isn’t my first attempt at writing fiction, but it’s already my most successful. I think that’s partially because I spent a fair amount of time in October brainstorming my backstory and setting, as well as plotting my story. I didn’t end up with a complete outline of the plot as I had intended, but the work I put in has definitely been beneficial so far.

You can follow my progress on my NaNoWriMo user page or check back here for updates. I’ll put a “Word Count Widget” in the sidebar on the front page once the NaNo folks finally get them working.