Chess Boxing

The future chess boxer will be a grandmaster and a professional boxer. Chess boxing could even solve the problem in the Middle East. I want to hold a chess boxing match between an Israeli and a Palestinian, and the winner will get to decide what happens to Israel.
--Iepe Rubingh

There really aren't enough sports that originate from a Dutch performance artist bringing things from a distopian French-Bosnian comic book to life. This is what Iepe Rubingh did with chess boxing, taken from Enki Bilal's comic book. I heard about this hybrid of chess and boxing from the excellently titled ESPN article "By Hook or by Rook," but information may also be found at the World Chess Boxing Organisation. It starts with four minutes of chess, and after then the chess board is moved out of the way, the competitors box for two minutes. The two disciplines alternate for a total of 6 chess rounds and 5 boxing round. You win by checkmating your opponent, knocking him out, or by referee's decision or having your opponent exceed the 12 minute time limit in chess.

While I do not necessarily agree with Iepe's ideas about the Middle East, which seem more divisive than unitive, it seems to me that chess boxing is the perfect catalyst for change in the suburban American high school (on television). Think of the groups this unites--the jocks, the chess nerds, the art snobs, the comic book guys, and if you add ring girls, the stereotypical dumb but pretty blondes. What else besides the say-no-to-drugs assemblies brings all these diverse elements together?

A Win for Carolina is a Win for You

I got an interesting email this morning from Southwest Airlines. It said:

After a season of flying pucks and power plays,
Face-offs and checks, passes and breakaways,
Your team ruled the ice with their hockey sticks
And clinched the championship game for 2006!

In recognition of Carolina's big victory, we slipped 2 bonus credits past the goalie and into your Rapid Rewards account. With these bonus credits, you'll be skating toward a Rapid Rewards Award in no time!

Now I only need to take ten round trips plus one one-way flight over the next 22 months instead of eleven round trips plus one one-way flight in order to get a free flight. While I may not end up using this gift, I think this is a pretty cool thing for a company to do.

Amazon.com is looking for what films we want to be released on DVD for the first time. At first I was surprised by which of the 30 films was leading in the voting so far, but to honest once I looked at the competition, full of lesser films by interesting people, I found no reason to disagree and checked the box to vote for Gymkata. While I seriously doubt I would buy the DVD of Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas kicking Parmistani butt from that pommel horse that just happened to be in the town square, it would be nice to know I could get it from Netflix.

On the Amazon page for Gymkata, I noticed a couple of interesting things. First, while I guess it's on every Amazon page, the "Add to Wedding Registry" link for Gymkata seems really wrong. Also, like on every page, they tell you "what do customers eventually buy after viewing items like this?" There were two items listed for Gymkata. 4% of people eventually bought the posthumous Johnny Cash album American V: A Hundred Highways while the remaining 96% of people who view pages like Gymkata eventually bought Godless: The Church of Liberalism by Ann Coulter.

Which online personality test are you?

I'm so glad someone took the time to create this.

I'm The James Bond Villain Personality Test!

I live in a fictional world of spies and blonde women with ridiculous names, and I like to give people plenty of options. Although whether they're villainous is not optional.

Click here to find out which test you are!

Kim vs. Lee

According to the 2000 South Korean census, there were 45,985,289 people residing in South Korea, and 9,925,949 (21.6%) of them had the family name Kim. (From what I can decipher from this Korean page, it appears that the Wiki page is wrong.) 6,796,227 (14.8%) were named Lee. Park was the third most common name with 3,895,121 (8.5%).

It is therefore not surprising that when it comes time to select the rosters for national athletic teams, these three names would be well represented. Of the 30 members of this spring's World Baseball Classic (WBC), there were 8 Kims (23.3%), 5 Lees (16.7%), and 4 Parks (13.3%), and of the 23 men on the Korean side in this month's World Cup, there are 8 Kims (34.8%), 5 Lees (21.7%), and 2 Parks (8.7%). However, I did notice something very surprising when I looked at the starting line ups for these teams.

In the WBC, the most common Korean starting line up had all five Lees in it, and in fact, the clean up hitter, first baseman Hee-Seop Choi, was the only one of the first six batters not named Lee. Only one Kim started. One Park was among the starting 9 hitters, and one of the starting pitcher was Chan Ho Park.

In the World Cup, when South Korea took to the pitch for their opening match against Togo, again just like in the WBC, all five Lees started while only two Kims started. (One Park started.)

This is admittedly a small sample size, but still, it makes me wonder. Are people named Lee more likely to be the elite of the elite Korean athletes? Do Kims do well enough to make the squad, but choke under the presure of the finals? Is there something that can explain this?

Personal growth

I am becoming more of a citizen of the world: I just watched and enjoyed a very exciting scoreless tie in a soccer match. Trinidad & Tobago, the smallest country ever to qualify for the World Cup, took on the prohibitive favorite Sweden in Group B action. The Trinidadian goalkeeper got injured in pregame warm-ups, and so the 37-year-old back-up Shaka Hislop was forced into action. And he played spectacularly. After a scoreless first half, Avery John got sent off with a red card during the first minute of the second half, and so T&T had to play one man short for the final 44 minutes. But they managed to fend off the many advances of the increasingly frustrated Swedes to preserve the draw. It was truly exciting.

Fight the real power

It is perhaps not a landmark case of the Supreme Court, but I found Nix v. Hedden to be an interesting one. In this case from 1893, Associate Justice Horace Gray, writing for a unanimous court only twenty days after the arguments of the case, determined that the tomato is a vegetable and not a fruit. In this case, four members of the Nix family sued Edward L. Heddon, tariff collector for the port of New York, over duties collected on the Nixes' tomatoes. They claimed that since the Tariff Act of 1883 levied a tariff on imported vegetables, the tariffs they were forced to pay on their tomatoes--clearly a fruit and not a vegetable--were collected illegally. But who cares about that? We can generate revenue for the government.

To some degree, this case does not really bother me all that much. Sure there is the whole problem of a perfectly good scientific definition of a fruit being ignored by the government, but if the government is going to place a tariff on importing lettuce why not a tomato? This just underscores the importance of getting words right in legislation.

However, there is a governmental tomato regulation that does realy bother me. In 1937, Congress passed legislation allowing farmers to band together to form marketing committees for the promotion of their products. Thus we have the organizations that give us the "Got Milk?" and the California Raisins ad campaigns. One of these committees is the Florida Tomato Committee, which regulates tomatoes grown south of the Georgia border and east of the Suwannee River, with the exception of small ones like cherry tomatoes and tomatoes grown in greenhouses. The FTC wants to get nice, plump, round tomatoes to your kitchen. The problem arises though with their emphasis on roundness.

There is a variety of tomato that goes by the trademarked name UglyRipe. They aren't smooth and round, having creases and lobes. The Florida Tomato Commission does not approve of this, because, y'know, tomatoes are supposed to be smooth and round. Therefore, under the power to regulate interstate commerce given to it by Congress, the Florida Tomato Commission, drunk on its own power, prohibits the exportation from Florida of the UglyRipe tomato. It's legal to grow it in Florida, it's legal to sell it in Florida, but it is illegal to export it to other states.

Something must be done about the Florida Tomato Committee.

This post takes place between 11:00 PM and 12:00 PM

Starting in January, I decided it was finally time to get caught up on 24. Way back when it started, I was very excited about it, too excited in fact. After I found the first four episodes wanting and then missed the fifth episode, I gave up on it. It soon became apparent that this was when it started to get good.

I just finished season four on DVD. What can I say? It contains this exchange:

Tony: This morning, Jack and Audry were planning a future together, and now he's responsible for her husband's death and he may have to torture her brother.

Michelle: And yet every move he's made has been the right one.

So, yes, I did have to pause the DVD so that I could laugh at this, but I also have come to like this show a lot precisely for its, um, Überspitzenkeit. Well, this isn't the only thing, or really even my favorite part of the show--the more subtle inner workings involving the president are consistently much more interesting, I think, than Jack Bauer running around. However, the show is great at eliciting laughter at just how absurdly awesome it can be.

In January, not only did I start watching season one on DVD, I set my DVR to record season five so that I could catch up to it. Now, I have it all of it ready to watch. Can I do it all in one sitting? Is there any other way? Why do they even bother airing it one episode at a time. They did start by airing the first four hours on back-to-back nights, and then aired two two-hour episodes later in the season, but really, shouldn't they just take two weeks out of the May sweeps and air nothing but 24. Do they still call it "non-stop Fox"?

All Snakes Considered

From Friday's All Things Considered: [F]or Monte Coles, an amateur pilot in West Virginia, the title became a reality when a four-and-a-half-foot snake hitched a ride in his small plane." Click here to listen to the interview with Coles.

In other SoaP news, I have figured out what will happen. This August, after the rabid internet fans have filed in for the midnight showning, after the cheers for the "And now our feature presentation," the first frames are Ashton Kutcher pointing directly into the camera and yelling "Punk'd!" followed by the bittersweet moment when we realize that we are about to see the supersecret final Merchant-Ivory collaboration. In the film, written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Meryl Streep plays a woman trying to deal with the Zimbabwean government trying to take away the plantation that has belonged to her recently deceased husband's family for generations when a when an scientist played by Colin Firth shows up saying that a very rare species of snake has been found living in the plains of her estate. Soon however, Streep suspects Firth may be hiding something.