If you are here looking for a recap on the Cincinnati Rollergirl bouts against the Hard Knox Rollergirls, I've moved all my roller derby posts to RabidDerbyFan.com. Go there to check out my impressions of the Schooling of Hard Knox bout and other derby happenings in the area!
There are several of these sorts of lists that I've seen circulating lately. I thought I would jump on the bandwagon and post my responses to this list that I saw on the Can You Keep A Secret blog. That blog is written by a Cincinnati area photographer, Sonja McGill. She has some great photos in her posts.
Here are my responses to the list -- I bolded the things I've done and put comments in parentheses. I'm glad I haven't done some of these.
1. Started your own blog (you are here)
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band (saxophone in school bands)
4. Visited Hawaii (duh!)
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Bathed in a river
7. Been to the Taj Mahal
8. Walked on a glacier in Alaska
9. Caught and held a snake
10. Spoke in front of a big crowd
11. Bungee jumped (but I watched Dianne do it)
12. Had a whirlwind love affair that broke your heart (don't know about whirlwind)
13. Found an arrowhead or fossil
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch
15. Rescued an animal
16. Ate sweet breads, glands or tripe (eeewwww!)
17. Seen Mount Rushmore in person
18. Grown your own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train (several times)
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hiked to base camp on Mt. Everest
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort (lots of these)
25. Watched an animal being born
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Learned a foreign language
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Stayed up for more than 24 hours
31. Trained a dog to do cool tricks
32. Been on a cruise (sort of -- day/overnight trip from Greece to Italy)
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors
35. Seen an Amish community 36. Can drive a stick shift car
37. Won over $1000 in a raffle or lottery (I wish)
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person (been to the top)
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Been serenaded
44. Visited Africa (went to Egypt in college)
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight 46. Broke a bone (unfortunately)
47. Started your own business
48. Quit a job because you were totally unhappy
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the Eiffel Tower
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling (snorkeling in Hawaii)
52. Kissed in the rain passionately
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in
55. Been in a movie (made 'movies' growing up with a neighbor)
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Joined a prayer group
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
62. Gone whale watching
63. Received flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving (this isn't ever happening)
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy (I have a couple)
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten caviar (yes, once -- ONCE! Yuck!)
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the changing of the guards in London
77. Broken something extremely expensive
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book (does writing a thesis count?) 81. Visited the Vatican
82. Got a tattoo
83. Been to a coffee shop in Amsterdam (been there, but didn't get coffee)
84. Seen the aurora borealis in person
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating (I guess a fish counts)
88. Had chickenpox (have the marks to prove it)
89. Saved someone’s life
90. Sat on a jury (as an alternate on a vehicular homicide case -- not fun)
91. Met someone famous
(several -- Linus Pauling and Hubert Humphrey are examples)
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
94. Toured the UN
95. Hiked to Machu Picchu
96. Swam in the Indian Ocean
97. Conversed with someone when neither of you spoke each others language (relates to #32)
98. Dirty danced
99. Been stung by a bee (nope)
100. Acted in a play
Readers of the Cincinnati Enquirer probably read this story that reports Pigall's is closing at the end of February. I was surprised to read that story given that the restaurant just received a 4-star rating in the Mobil travel guide.
Hopefully Jean-Robert will open another spot that will be top notch.
In the process of looking around for that news, I discovered the wine me, dine me blog. It's obviously a blog about places to eat -- but it covers the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky area. It is always good to get an opinion about a restaurant. Stop over there to browse the reviews before heading out to eat.
Erika does a lot of Friday Flashback posts on her blog. I don't have the discipline to do that on a regular basis -- and my memory isn't that good. My dad sent some old photos recently that inspired this flashback post.
The first photo is me, just over two years old, sitting on cinder blocks that my dad used to build an addition on to the garage. You have got to love the Minnesota Twins baseball cap. My dad needed the extra space as he ran a bicycle shop and used the addition to store bikes that needed to be assembled. I do remember that part of the garage being loaded with bicycle boxes on occasion.
The second photo is of me riding a bicycle in a parade in Randall, Minnesota when I was twelve. It was a fourth of July parade. This wasn't just any bike. My dad spoked the wheels using many different length spokes so that the hubs of the wheels were off center. If you look closely, especially at the front wheel, you can see the hub is off center in the wheel. When you pedaled the bike it bobbed up and down or rocked back and forth depending on whether or not the wheels were in sync. It was quite a sight! The pole on the back held a sign for Dick's Broiler, a local hamburger joint that we stopped at now and then.
Along with a large area of the US, Cincinnati was hit with a large snow/sleet/ice storm. This was our first major snowfall of the season. There were a lot of closings and the roads were a mess.
Yesterday I decided to stay home and use a vacation day I carried over from last year to avoid the crazy drivers. Overnight we got about a half inch of ice. When I woke up and heard the weather forecast for several more inches of snow, I realized today was a work from home day. I spend most of my time on the computer and phone anyway, so it isn't difficult to work at home. It turned out to be the right decision as Hamilton county declared a level 3 snow emergency -- only emergency vehicles on the road -- to allow the plows and salt trucks space to do their thing.
It took Dianne and me about 45 minutes just to shovel our way out of the house and get to my car to clean it off for tomorrow. I heard on the news that in the last two days we received 7 inches of snow and a half inch of ice. I know that's not much to my Minnesota readers, but it causes a lot of problems in this area. At one point there were nearly 50,000 people without power -- mostly due to tree limbs covered with ice breaking off the tree and taking down power lines.
About an hour after the snow stopped today, the sun poked out from between the clouds and lit up the ice covered trees. I took a couple macro photos of the ice covered trees outside our place (per Erika's request). If the forecast holds, it might not be until Sunday before the ice melts off the trees.
I'm so prolific here on Earl World, that I decided to start a new blog :^)
Regular readers know I enjoy watching flat-track roller derby. Over the last few years I've had quite a few posts discussing local roller derby matches Dianne and I have attended. I know not all my readers are derby fans (although I'm not sure why) and not all the roller derby folks that read the bout recaps are interested in reading my other ramblings.
As a result, the Rabid Derby Fan blog was born. Starting this year I will be posting all my bout recaps to the Rabid Derby Fan site. If you are here looking for derby information, go to the RDF blog and bookmark it. There are a few bout schedule posts there now.
A few days ago I posted about Twitter -- the micro blogging service. Thanks to Hack a Day, I discovered that you can follow Twitter tweets from the unborn. A student at NYU developed a waist band with some electronics that monitors a baby's movement in the womb. The device sends a twitter when the baby kicks. Read more about it here.
You can see the Twitter feeds of the kickbee here. OK, it might not be the most exciting read, but it does have the cool geek factor going for it.
Ping mag, now on hiatus, had a post about a 97 year old botanical artist from Japan. The interview and his work are wonderful! Below is one example of his work. Go here to see the whole article.
YouTube is really amazing. There is something for everyone. Thanks to Boing Boing, check out what you can do with a split tongue.
I've been a blog post slug lately, but you may have noticed Twitter updates (tweets) on my sidebar that provide a few updates. If you want, you can follow my tweets directly on Twitter -- I'm Cincisquirtle on Twitter.
One benefit of Twitter's popularity is that other services now integrate well with Twitter. One example is Facebook that can suck in Twitters and put them in your status. That's convenient so you don't have to make status updates in multiple spots. It's also good since I've become a big fan of Facebook. Send a friend request there if you want to add me. Besides status updates, you'll find photos, news feeds, games, etc.
One problem I have with Twitter is that it can be hard to find people to follow. Sure, it's easy to find tech evangelists like Robert Scoble or Guy Kawasaki, but it can be tough to find friends, specific feeds, or posts about topics. Thanks to Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion I found Twitterholic. It's a Twitter stats site that lets you look at users sorted in many different ways -- date joined, popularity, number of followers, location, etc. Supposedly you can combine these, but I haven't played around enough. I was intrigued by the top Twitterers in the Cincinnati area that you can see here. Not surprisingly, Cincinnati Rollergirl and Enquirer reporter Miss Print ranks up there at #26. There are a lot of personal feeds, but some publications like Cin Weekly are in there too. Check out the site to find some feeds.
On Saturday, Dianne and I drove to Evansville to watch the Dismembered December tournament put on by the Demolition City Roller Derby group and held in the Veterans Memorial Coliseum that was built in 1916. Four teams (Demolition City Roller Derby (DCRD) Dynamite Dolls, Naptown Rollergirls, Slay Belles, and Quad State Terrors) participated in 4 bouts. Congratulations to the Quad State Terrors for winning the tournament! It topped off the day to see them win the championship bout.
Evansville's Memorial Coliseum is quite the historic venue as seen in the fisheye photo above (click on the image to see a larger view). It reminded me a bit of a venue you might see in the movie Hoosiers. The track itself was laid out on masonite panels pieced together to protect the underlying floor. The panels seemed well placed and except for an occasional stumble getting on and off the layer, I didn’t see many skaters having issues with the seams between the panels. The jammers were pretty speedy when out in the open.
The first bout was between DCRD and the Naptown Rollergirls team – a team that was a mix of all their skaters. It was a good bout, but the DCRD team had the edge at the half with a lead of 28 to 18 that they increased in the second period to finish with a score of 58 to 22. The photo at right, such as it is with the natural light, shows some of the action between the teams. I wasn’t keeping a tally, but it seemed Naptown was hurt a lot by penalties. There was one point in the second period where one of the Naptown jammers, Ivanna B. Naughty, had several trips to the box including back-to-back penalties that really slowed the Naptown scoring.
The second bout had the Slay Belles (a pick-up team composed of DCRD skaters and skaters from several teams including Naptown, Radioactive City, and Lafayetter Brawlin' Dolls) pitted against the Quad State Terrors (made up of mostly Black-n-Bluegrass Rollergirls with a few additional skaters like Nastee from R.O.C.K. and Envy Myoni and Celia Graves from DCRG). To say the least, the Slay Belles struggled the entire bout. The Belles were trying hard, but their lack of experience and limited coordination/communication during the jams really hurt them. Quad State got a couple skaters at the front of the pack in every jam to control the pack and effectively shut down any offense. That, combined with solid Quad State trailing blockers that nudged Slay Belle jammers to stop their progress, made things rough for the Belles. In one jam with a skater in the penalty box, Nuk‘em held three Belle skaters back for a few laps by herself (see photo below). Jamming duty was shared by Roseanne Scarr, EMolition, Pistol Whippin' Wendy, and Envy MiYoni. 
The photo at the right shows Juwana Hurt clearing the way for jammer Envy MiYoni. There were a lot of grand slams and at the half Quad State was ahead with a score of 54 to 0. Near the end of the second 20 minute period, one of the Slay Belle jammers finally got lead jammer status and the place erupted with applause. On that jam the Belles managed to get three points on the board. The match ended with Quad State dominating with a score of 115 to 3. Unfortunately at one point in the match Arche Enemy and Rockscar took a tumble together in turn four and Rockscar was hurt and carried off by the EMTs. The announcers later mentioned that Rockstar broke her tibia and fibula. The DCRD page today says her surgery the following day went well. I hope she gets well quickly.
The third bout was the consolation match between the Naptown Rollergirls and the Slay Belles. It was another struggle for the Belles as Naptown came out strong and dominated the less experienced skaters. Unfortunately, skater I Teazem went down hard in turn 2 during one jam. I was coming down from the mezzanine after taking the fisheye photo above, so I didn’t see the spill. The EMTs took extra precautions with her neck and she was carried out to an ambulance on a stretcher. Today the DCRD homepage indicated she is doing well with some head pain. I certainly hope the EMT measures were precautionary and that she gets well soon. At the half Naptown led with a score of 93 to 6 and sadly the trend continued in the second full period so Naptown ended up winning with a score of 177 to 6.
As one would expect in a tournament, the last bout between the DCRD Dynamite Dolls and the Quad State Terrors was the best of the day. However, it was a long day of derby and a lot of spectators left after the Naptown consolation match. Perhaps they were Naptown fans wanting to get back to Indy before it got too late? Quad State continued their recipe for success using jammer speed, pack coordination, and tough blocking to establish an early lead and hold it throughout the match. 
The photo at right shows a typical Quad State configuration with Nuk'em, Nastee, and Juwana Hurt controlling the front of the pack. Considering the group hasn’t been skating together long, it was impressive to see how well they came together and used each others’ strengths to make an effective team. But the DCRD skaters were tough and made the Terrors work for the victory. In the initial jam, one of the DCRD blockers gave Juwana Hurt a solid shoulder in the pack to perhaps send a message – Juwana wasn’t hitting hard in the initial Slay Belles match. Juwana caught up with the pack and sent a tough shoulder block message right back to the DCRD skater. 
You can see the result of another one of Juwana’s blocks in the photo to the right. All the Quad State blockers contributed and really worked hard to control the front of the pack and the inside lines (see the photo below). At the half Quad State was ahead with a score of 46 to 17. In the second period, DCRD did make some adjustments and the scoring was about equal. However the Quad State victory was never in jeopardy and they won the bout with a score of 74 to 43.
You can see more photos I took at the bout in my Flickr set here. Also, Jack King took photos at the event for Quad State and will undoubtedly have some excellent shots despite the lighting.
Overall it was an interesting day of derby that helped fill the off-season dry spell for this crazed roller derby fan. Thanks to the Demolition City Roller Derby group for making the effort to organize and host the event during a busy time of the year. It was a long day, but I found it instructive to see teams with varying skill levels battling back-to-back. It helps me appreciate the skill, techniques, and strategies of the game and how skaters and teams adjust (or not) to changing situations. It really is an interesting (as well as entertaining) sport to watch once you get the hang of what to look for. If you haven’t been to a flat track roller derby match, you have to check out a team near you next season!
Finally, a special thanks to the Black-n-Bluegrass Rollergirls for the invitation to the tournament and to all the Quad State Terror skaters (see the photo below) that made us feel welcome. Congrats on winning the tournament! Look for big things from that group in the 2009 season.
The results of this quiz shouldn't be earth shattering to anyone who knows me. What is your style?
Your Dominant Thinking Style: Modifying |
 Super logical and rational, you consider every fact available to you. You don't make rash decisions and are rarely moved by emotion. You prefer what's known and proven - to the new and untested. You tend to ground those around you and add stability. |
Michele has several knockout rose beds in her garden. They give a lot of red color to the garden that really stands out in the Fall. The photo at right, a fisheye view, gives an idea of how many flowers were in bloom a couple weeks ago. That was taken using the natural light and shade on the plants. There are some insects on the flowers, but nothing like those found on the sedum flowers.
The first photo below is a close up of one of the rose blossom taken using a few flashes to get a good depth of field. I like the soft texture of the rose petals.
The second photo below is of a plant that gives some more yellow color to the garden. It is one cluster of flowers on a Lantana. The cluster is about the size of a quarter and they branch off of some medium length stalks. I was intrigued by how the little rectangles unfurl into trumpet shaped flowers.
I'll admit it -- I'm a reality TV junkie. One of my must see reality shows on broadcast TV is Survivor.
For the past several seasons folks have organized a Survivor pool at work. This year Carla is running the "team building exercise." My Survivor contestant is Jacquie, which is appropriate since she grew up in Minnesota. You can read her whole bio here. She seems like a solid competitor and, more importantly, someone who does not have an annoying personality that grates on the other contenders. Go Jacquie!
There aren't a huge number of free applications for the iPhone that I use a lot. But there are two of them that are really cool.
The first is Shazam. Have you ever been listening to a song and wondered what the title of the song was or who was singing? With Shazam, you simply hit a tag button when the song is playing. The software listens to the song for a few seconds and checks the sample against its database of recordings. Generally within a few seconds it returns the song title and artist along with links. It works pretty well even with background noise. I use it in the car when I'm listening to the radio and I hear a song I want to write up for the Songs in Haiku site. I just hit two buttons and bingo the song is tagged on my list of songs. No need to try and write something down while driving. You don't need an iPhone to use the service. Check out their web site.
The second application is called Trailguru. It's an application that keeps track of bike trails, hiking trails, etc. using a GPS. The iPhone ap uses the built in location services to record a trail as you walk or bike. It also keeps track of stats like average speed, distance traveled, etc. The screen capture below shows a trail that Dianne and I created while walking around the Deerfield Towne Center area. The green flag was our starting point outside of the Polo Grill. We walked along and did some window shopping -- the blue line. The red flag is our stopping point at the car. The Google map photo was taken while the strip mall was under construction, so it just looks like a barren field. But it gives you an idea of what the service does.
Check out these applications.
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