Naked Man Gets Tased in Marathon

Does Naked Marathoning Deserve the Pain of a Taser?

Don’t run naked in marathons.

Brett Henderson was Tased and arrested for running naked in The Flying Pig Marathon. The running man was first Tased when he refused to stop for his crime of indecent exposure.

Mr. Henderson defended his actions in the race, claiming that naked running was encouraged in San Francisco and that other runners in other races had similar offenses, but weren’t arrested.

His words:

This is something that happens and is tolerated in the running culture, along with runners who sometimes (urinate) or defecate during a race. Shouldn't that be considered indecent exposure, too, if what I did was indecent? In fact, running naked was encouraged in a marathon I ran in San Francisco, so I don't know why this was such a big deal.

He further claims that his crime of naked running wasn’t his original intention when starting the race, but that the drawstring on his borrowed shorts came loose and left him literally pantsless. His intention was to finish the race, so he continued running, even without his shorts on. As Mr. Henderson describes it, the other runners hid him from police for quite some time until he was Tased and brought into a police car for no less than four hours.

As was the case in several other Tasing incidents, I am thinking that the punishment—he still has to go to court—does not fit the crime. Protecting any race-watchers from a naked man who tried to keep himself hidden does not in any way warrant the use of a Taser.

As for Mr. Henderson’s words about racing culture, I’m not quite as sure there are many naked marathon runners out there as he claims. 

Good Bye, Chris.

RIP

 

I don’t know what to say. I woke up this morning and learned that one of my friends and one of the best people I’ve known died of a heart attack at a young age.

 

I’m angry right now and worried about his wife, who is only 30 years old. The two had a remarkable partnership, and were really a team. They were the kind of couple who annoyed people on Facebook because they weren’t shy about professing their admiration for each other in public and they never fought.

 

As a teaching team, both went out of their way to help their students. They started an Adventure club, took their students hiking, and introduced their students to the Wii, which is something newer in Korea. The door to their office was never shut to any student or co-worker and he was always happy to help.

 

He was something of a genius and devoted his life to education technology. He could have used his talents at Microsoft or any of the big companies, but truthfully believed in Open Source technologies such as Moodle, and was devoted much of his time to Sloodle, the strange but fascinating educational world in Second Life.

 

There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme, nor reason why this happened to him. He was healthy and truly married to the love of his life. If he had any stress in his life at all, it was from helping others so much, something which he did every single of his life, usually without complaint.

 

I honestly can’t really think of a bad thing to say about him, nor have I heard any bad words spoken about him. I don’t know if that’s because he was lucky enough to be following the right life path for himself, or because he was married to such an amazing woman, but those things made him different and it was hard not to admire him for the strength of his convictions.

 

He loved the Trailer Park Boys, and like most geeks out there, loved to relax with a cup of tea and a video game once in a while; that was his idea of a de-stresser if he couldn’t make it to the gym.

 

I’m only one of hundreds who will miss him. He wasn’t a rock star or a movie star, but a hero to his students and a great partner to his wife.

 

RIP, Chris.

 

University of Chicago to Break Scavenger Hunt World Record

Come join pro scavengers this week as we take home the Guinness

Every year, hundreds of University of Chicago students ignore their schoolwork for four days to participate in the world's biggest scavenger hunt. A dozen or so teams rush to build, find, and "borrow" hundreds of increasingly weird items on the hunt's epic list. This year, participants will celebrate the 25th anniversary of Scav by attempting to break the Guinness world record for largest hunt. The record is currently held by 212 Canadian schoolchildren. Far more than 212 UChicago schoolchildren show up each year, and so they've decided their efforts ought to be officially recognized. 

Even if you're unaffiliated with the U of C, you're still welcome to participate in the mania. While most of the teams are exclusive to residents or alumni of specific dorms, the Federation of Independent Scav Teams (aka the FIST) invites anyone from the Chicago area to come scav with us. You can check out our website or email our listserve (potato AT lists DOT uchicago DOT edu) for more information. 

The FIST uses an online wiki to keep track of items, so telecommuters are welcome if Hyde Park (or Chicago, period) is a trek. Just create an account and then you can claim items you'd like to complete. Past items have included yelling "theater" in a firehouse, building a working steam engine from scratch, building a working nuclear reactor from scratch (seriously: this is why we're famous), bringing an authentic Stradivarius to campus, and setting up a live-action roleplaying game of pong. 

If this kind of madness sounds like it's up your alley, we invite you to join us Wednesday night. Come on down to Hyde Park and help us make scavenger hunt history. The Guinness record tallying will happen at 11pm at Ida Noyes Hall, followed by the list release at midnight. If you can't make it to be counted as one of the official record-breaking participants, we encourage you to get in touch with us via the internet anyway. Shoot us an email, or just sign up for the wiki. We'll see you at Scav. 

(Photo courtesy Scav Hunt's 2010 blog)

What Social Media Did to Charlie Sheen

When We Get A Little Too Close

Crazy as it may seem, I feel bad for Charlie Sheen. Not because I think there is some crazy "agenda" against his awesomeness. No. I just feel sad that he is a victim of today's social networking & media addiction. Even I am to blame.

Fifty years ago stars craziness was kept under wraps, lest their names be tarnished with their peccadillo's, anti-Semites, and hooker addictions. That meant that people were interested in getting to know the "real" person because you were not allowed to look in. All fans were given a carefully crafted facade of who the actors were. They were dressed to fit an image and if their publicists and managers didn't like what they said in interviews it was kept under wraps. If actors had charges filed against them they either went away or were buried so people forgot about them. Not the best practice, but it was the way it was done.

Fast forward to now where people find out news via the Internet faster then the nightly news or even a newspaper could ever deliver it. To a time where many people "break" news via Facebook or twitter, two social networking sites meant to bring people together and interconnect. Now, actors are able to use 140 characters to tell their fans who they are and what they are doing. And they are telling people, at an alarming rate! Ashton Kutcher, the king of Twitter posts links to causes he cares about or even pics of his wife getting dressed. He talks about how he is feeling and what his thoughts are about general things, like movies and television shows. The truly crazy thing is people are listening. They want to know that their favorite stars are just like them, even I have tweeted back and forth with one of my idols Bill Lawrence. I must admit getting a response about what his favorite drink is was kind of cool and I felt connected to him a little more. It's like I got to see a bit more behind the curtain and it made me feel a little special.

Everyone wants to know what its like to be a celebrity. Celebrities seem so close and attainable, why can't an average person have that too? Reality television tells people they can have a form of celebrity. They can be a version of themselves and go to award shows and get all that attention and admiration. The problem with this mentality is that, truthfully, most people will never be able to attain those dreams. They won't be adored by millions or get noticed as someone special on the street. They will continue to be who they are despite higher aspirations. What this means is that people love to hate on the people they can't be. They love to tear down those around them that have attained something they covet. It happens in every day life as well, someone else has the house you always wanted, so when you see them you can't wait to tear them down. You want them to have a hard time or be fat or for their lawn to be infested with grubs. After thinking these crazy things you feel a little better like now you two are even. Heck, if the opportunity arises you may even tell another neighbor about the time you saw the lady from your dream house picking her nose. Why? Cause jealously is an ugly thing.

In this digital age, with our celebrity obsessions and the ability to pass information to large numbers of people, we-as a society-can not wait to break news about celebrities. We also can't wait to tell everyone our own opinion because if you post your opinion, people may read it! They might also "like" it or comment on it. Then you will talk back and forth about your opinion and it will make you feel important. I feel that way too when I make a particularly clever observation, people like it or comment on it, and I feel oddly gratified.

OK, back to how Charlie Sheen fits in to this: He is crazy. He may have shot Kelly Preston in the early 90's. He has been married a lot. He is addicted to hookers, drugs, etc, but that is not what is important. What is? The fact he is a celebrity. People want to hear what he has to say, even if they disagree. He is on a nationally televised show that has fantastic ratings, so a lot of people want to be able to see and hear more about him. While, fifty years ago (or, even in the early 90's) this would have meant that people would have seen the version of him his publicist wanted the world to see, now we see who he is.

What do we see? A train wreck. A crazy guy that obviously has done too many drugs for his own good. What else do we see? A chance to tear a celebrity apart. To share links to videos of his madness on Twitter and Facebook. To post pithy diatribes for or against him. To show such an interest in what he had to say, so in turn allowing him to be booked for more and more interviews. To hash tag winning and make fun of his obvious problems. We saw a chance to make ourselves feel self important by blowing up the crazy things he said into bigger and bigger proportions. By making ourselves feel self important, we made him feel important again, so he was allowed to go on a tour around the country. He was able to sell t-shirts and make tons of money off of the interest everyone drummed up for him. He actually made MORE money because of the fact we wanted to push him off his celebrity pedestal.

Everyone was so wrapped up in interacting-via social media- about the subject of his "tiger blood" and the fact he called himself a "ninja assassin, that they forgot to ask themselves an important question: "Why do I care what he has to say?"  Here was a man that was famous for playing a version of himself on television who said some wild & crazy things in an interview. He was also someone who had just been accused of abusing his wife and holing himself up in a hotel room with prostitutes and cocaine. He was a man whose most infamous quote up to that point was "You don't pay a prostitute for sex. You pay her to leave." I am just guessing most people realized he was not a rational person. The best course of action for someone that is just spouting crazy ramblings is to just ignore them. Just let that person say whatever they want to and not give them the satisfaction of getting a reaction. If you give them attention then they will feed off it and keep going.

When Charlie Sheen started making no sense we should have just ignored him, instead we exploited the topic of the minute for some attention. We allowed him to make even more money because we couldn't just turn off the channel or ignore comments about him on Facebook or stop following him on Twitter. I feel bad for him because I took advantage of it too. I did what everyone else did and hash tagged winning and tiger blood in order to get an extra follower or two. I liked that his publicist was not allowed to hide who he really was from the public anymore. I was allowed to see that a celebrity was just as crazy as every one else. But, may be what I should have done is treat him like everyone else. I should have just ignored all the media attention and not watched the recaps of his videos on YouTube. Maybe, just maybe, if I had just ignore the Charlie Sheen train wreck other people would have too. If he received no attention from his actions may be he would have realized there might be something wrong and that he should seek some form of treatment. Or, may be he would have just fell in to obscurity, and I would have been okay with that too.

Why We're Obsessed with Your Royals- To: England, From: America

Uh, hi, England. It's, um, it's been a while. Yeah, about that whole "revolution" thing and then the War of 1812 (because some of us still remember that one, too), let's just call that water under the bridge, okay? Look, we're not here to talk about some little spate we had 200 years ago, we're here to explain the somewhat nonsensical American infatuation with the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. We know it may seem ridiculous for us Yanks to care at all, let alone so intensely, about the nuptials of your increasingly pointless royal family, so we hope this explanation sheds some light on the issue.

First of all, it's precisely because your royal family has no real power that we Americans can enjoy their fantastically wealthy, alternately scandalous and storybook-perfect lives. See, we didn't like the monarchy so much when it, ya know, ruled us and then threatened our very existence as a sovereign nation, and we suppose that bad blood had as much to do with your parliament as anything else. But now? Now the royals are just wealthy twits (can we use that word, "twits", even though it's really more your slang than ours?) and as you may or may not know, America loves wealthy twits. The wealthier and more ridiculous, the better.

See, we Americans never had any real royals and we don't even have a functioning aristocracy. Sure, we have plenty of dynastic political families and idle rich just poncing about (there we go again, using your parlance), but it's just not the same. There's no majesty in the likes of the Hilton family. Yeah, okay, they're stupidly wealthy and they constantly avoid justice because of their social station, but they're rich because Conrad Hilton was an ambitious capitalist at the rise of the American jet-set ideology that made hotels a, if you will, common luxury. Connie wasn't born to some noble lord who was rich just because he had an ancestor who could swing a sword or read more than his own name. It's different, you see. Less romantic.

So, when some title-holding royal in a European country (well, maybe just Western European country) has a big, public yet somehow respectable romance leading all the way to the altar, we Americans just eat it up because all of our rich, famous people are vapid morons and/or inveterate bastards with nary a strand of regality to them. There's no storybook anything in America. Even our sports heroes owe their prowess to performance-enhancing drugs and the kind of arrogant fearlessness that also compels them to gamble on underground dog fights. This wouldn't be a problem if Americans were taught to be selfish cynics, but many of us grow up being told that love is real, achieving dreams is but a matter of dedication and the world rewards hard work. It's very confusing.

We hope this little aside has served as a proper explanation of why William and Kate's wedding is newsworthy here in the former colonies. Absurd, it most certainly is, but thus is America. Cheerio, England. Give Will and Kate our best.

Comic Book "Infamous Lindsay Lohan" Coming Soon to Stores Near You

Star-Studded Entertainment in Comic Book Form

Ever since OJ gave us the thrill of a lifetime with his SUV chase after “allegedly” murdering Nicole and Ron, we as the American public have been forced to settle mostly for watching the big stars of our times get drunk. (Like David Hasselhoff rolling around on the floor or Alec Baldwin calling his little girl a pig.) A few stars like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton have consistently been in trouble with law, which has given us more to talk about at water coolers across America and of course, there’s always Charlie Sheen to mouth off about. Soon, we’ll have a comic book dedicated to the exploits of Lindsay Lohan.

Infamous Lindsay Lohan, a comic book dedicated to the hard knocks school of life that Lindsay Lohan has struggled with for years, is scheduled to be released as a comic book in stores in September of this year.  Infamous Lindsay Lohan will do more than just list Lindsay Lohan’s convictions and shenanigans, the comic book will examine Lindsay Lohan in great detail, more like a tragedy or tragicomedy than anything else.  

Will Little Miss Lohan have special powers or a get out of jail free card as she has had in the past? (She is featured on the cover in a sexy jail uniform, but just might have a cape in other parts of the comic book.) Only time will tell; the author of Infamous Lindsay Lohan claims he hasn’t even written the last chapter yet. Apparently, he’s just like the rest of us and is just waiting to see what little Miss Lohan will do next.

Lindsay Lohan is not the only celebrity to be getting a comic book; rumors are flying that Charlie Sheen will be getting his own comic book as well. Of course, Charlie Sheen’s comic book will definitely have to be x-rated; central characters in his comic would have to be the girl I like to call “The Marijuana Bikini Model” and Heidi Fleiss. Since many comic books do surpass PG-13 guidelines, I think that any comic book artist worth his or her salt should be able to depict the Charlie Sheen story. I just hope that the artist and writer remember to include his past nastiness with domestic violence in a somewhat serious manner.

Lindsay Lohan’s comic book will be published by Bluewater Comics. We’ll just all have to wait to see how Lindsay’s story ends. 

Mini-Fridge Beer Cannon

Here is an invention that Homer Simpson would love. Just what the dedicated couch potato needs, a mini-fridge that catapults a can of beer right into your hand so you don’t have to get off your butt. And, it is controlled with an iPhone app. They really do have an app for anything!

 

Machete Slingshot

If you are worried about dealing with zombies as many people are these days, then here is the do-it-yourself project for you. This video shows you how to build a machete slingshot! Seriously, some people have far too much time on their hands. You should probably build a birdhouse instead - you'd get much more use out of it.  However, if you are going to star in a zombie movie...

 

Are the Destroyed Russian ATM Machines a Sign of the Zombie Apocalypse?

Russian ATMs Now On High-Alert

I always try to smile for the ATM camera whenever I make a withdrawal; it is, afterall, important for a girl to look her best whenever she's getting her picture taken. The Russian skinhead who has now annihilated two innocent ATM machines, however, keeps his face covered for rather obvious reasons.

I wonder how he was able to run around without anyone noticing that he was carrying around an axe. Maybe it’s a normal thing in Russia?

Via Gizmodo 


Sidney Lumet, R.I.P.

Earlier this week, Sidney Lumet, died. He was one of the most successful film directors of his generation He was the man who made Network, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and 12 Angry Men, He died on April 9. He was eighty six years old.

Sidney Lumet is being remembered as a New York director, and as a film maker who understood the people and the streets of New York. His most remembered films dealt with New York City people or with people who worked in the city of New York. Serpico is about New York City cops and that world of honor and corruption. Dog Day Afternoon is about trying to survive in New York City when one is different and has issues. 12 Angry Men is about men from all works of life coming together to decide a young man's fate and to overcome bias and to understand the differences and the changes. My favorite of his work, Network is about alienation, and attempting to connect, and the failure, the cost of success and the reality that life is not a fairy tale.

It is said that Sidney Lumet never went Hollywood, never sold out, remained a director of New York movie realism.

Sidney Lumet, filmmaker, R.I.P

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