Skatin' Death

The Grim Reaper don't even look twice at your "No Skateboarding" sign.

[A note: If you're not following Weird Tales on Facebook, you're missing out on tons of fun artwork, photos and writing. We swiped this image from their feed. Whenever possible, if we re-post their selections, we give credit to WT, and more importantly, the artist.]

Ladies of Sport and a Love Letter to Disco

The real story here is that Typing Monkey publisher S.L. Kreighton has joined Twitter. Please, just ... you don't know what the past week has been like. He reads and chuckles all day, mumbling about Drunk Hulk and Snake & Bacon.

However, he has shared a few items of value with us and we would bebad friends if we didnt' share the following link with you:

 

http://worldinsport.com/2010/11/sportswomen-of-past-homage-with-vintage-html/

It's U.S. Library of Congress photos of Victorian era (and just beyond) women who played sports -- in full Victorian dress. You'll see the Bennett Sisters and many others.

***

In the interest of variety, we also highly recommend reading Dorian Lynksey's convincing argument from The Guardian, asserting that disco lives on in the form of most modern pop music. "Long Live Disco" will either make you nod in agreement or hassle the person sitting next to you with your counter argument. You will lose.



[Photo: Detail from "Miss Isabel Tennant"]

YES!

Daniel Bryan will put you in a "YES!" Lock.

From the Sports Desk: March Silliness

Not one Typing Monkey staffer pays attention to NCAA basketball. None of us could even be considered casual sports fans. Sure we know who's playing the Super Bowl each year and we like to watch a boxing match from time to time, but professional sports, let alone college-level, are not on our radar.

It's just not a thing here.

Holly Allen and Josh Levin's "Let's Go Blue Team!" article from Slate, and the accompanying 2011 NCAA Tournament brackets, are for those of us who have no idea what teams matter on the road to the Final Four.

In a nutshell, they've created NCAA brackets but instead of listing it by the school names, they've provided one based purely on mascots/logos and another even more abstract bracket based on team colors.

Here's an example of some of the face-offs:

Let's not mince words -- that bear is going to destroy the Trojan warrior. The bear is smiling at the thought of tasty man-flesh. And I'm sorry Hamburglar, but that alligator will munch you like regular-size fries. Maybe after that the bear and alligator can just be friends and maybe open a detective agency.

Hurry and fill yours out so we can compare notes and then forget to pay attention to the actual outcomes of the games.

Ooh! My Head

The Typing Monkey would like to wish you a happy new year.

And if you plan on greeting the later hours of January 1, 2011 with a hangover, understand that no matter how bad you feel, you'll never have the same kind of headaches Kazuyuki Fujita had. From Cracked.com comes the story of this mixed martial arts fighter whose greatest gift (and ultimate downfall) was his skull.


[A tip of the party hat to lifelong TMI operative, No. 5, who sent us this year-old link when it was still fresh.]

From the Sports Desk

The athletic endeavors that interest The Typing Monkey aren't covered by mainstream media. (For instance, the underground and possibly illegal Ultimate Sock'em Boppers Fighting League doesn't allow cameras of any kind at bouts.) So we understand your surprise that we're not only linking to a story from an outside media source, but that the story itself is sports-related.

In 2008, a farm-league pitcher named John C. Odom was traded for ten baseball bats. You read that correctly. His contract, and the implied value of Odom's skills, was estimated equal to ten wooden sticks. The story doesn't end there, and it doesn't end pretty. This AP wire story from The Seattle Times has all the sad, lurid details.

You Don't Have to Read This

A Pre(r)amble On Sports and Music
At first glance, house music and the Summer Olympic Games seem to have little in common. But there are some parallels that aren't too much of stretch.

1. Context
The Typing Monkey has never attended the Olympics (well, except for that awkward jaunt to Moscow in summer 1980 -- so embarrassing) but we can imagine how thrilling it must be to witness firsthand some of the world's greatest athletes in action.

Likewise, house can be genuinely exciting when the listener is there, in person, on a dancefloor, with all the appropriate sensory cues the genre was created for.

2. Expertise
A frequent complaint about house, and electronic dance music in general, involves some iteration of the "I could do that" criticism. Any dork can buy a laptop (or a sequencer, drum machine and synthesizer) and make a 4/4 beat with some bass squiggles. But those who are good at it, and have put in the time and effort to get good, are going to leave lesser musicians at the starting line.

Similarly, most of us can run, but we're not about to get up and make a showing at the 100-yard dash time trials. We sit back and marvel at the people who've found they were built to do amazing physical feats.

3. Accessibility
Even non-sports fans can find something of interest at the Olympics. And there's that whole "uniting diverse cultures" aspect to the competition that remind us that a global superpower can lose to a third world nation when we're equalized by our basic human abilities.

In the same way, electronic dance music is a sort of international unifier. Though it has the advantage of being enabled by technology, it's difficult to site another style of music that's been so quickly picked up by so many cultures.

What does all of this lead into? Nothing more than the following review of a two-disc house compilation. (Click the link, or scroll down a smidge.)

... In Order to Understand This:

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Great Summer Games Stuff: A Tribute to Human Rights
(Great Stuff)
Listening to Great Summer Games Stuff is like watching the Olympics on television. If you're a house-music glutton, this compilation mainlines the ceaseless kick drum for the duration of two globe-spanning discs. A more casual listener, like the average Olympics viewer, passively pays attention but perks up when something remarkable happens.

Disc one's first gold medal comes from Turkey's Butch. The track screws with expectations by slowing the beat down and dropping it out entirely, usually by pitch-bending the samples of locale-appropriate woodwinds as if they're melting.

A silver medal goes to Germany's Swen Weber for pushing a brisk hi-hat scuffle to the forefront and countering a buzzing bassline with some sort of marching-band anthem the fades in and out like a passing parade.

Disc two offers more to grab our interest, with an almost-ambient opener from Japan's Tokyo Black Star. [Who is actually French native Alex Prat -- ed.]

Greek techno DJ/procuder Mihalis Safras gets top honors for his contribution that combines a minimal, watery rhythm with a weird guitar break that shouldn't fit, but does -- even when it takes over and drapes cinematic shadow over the proceedings.

Romania's OK Corral do right too, with a playful 8-bit number. They get bonus points for claiming to be from Bucharest, circa the year 2259.

England, New Zealand and Australia all bring the big, dumb fun, with a blaring rave/big beat throwback from Atomic Hooligan, a glorious mess by Greg Churchill, and a track by Tommy Trash that ignores genre divisions the way a good pop construction should.

The connection to both the Olympics and human rights feels tenuous, but if any of The Typing Monkey's theory (see above) holds water, maybe a DJ really can save a life. It's no less believable than the fact that every few years we ignore continuing global strife in order to play a bunch of games.

Reference materials: Click on the artist links in the review, and see if you find something to suit your fancy. Or snoop around the Great Summer Games Stuff tack list for yourself.