Return of "The Contender"

"The Contender" to begin second season on ESPN

"The Contender" is an unscripted drama about the lives of 16 professional boxers as they compete for the chance to change their lives. The show will air as part of ESPN Original Entertainment (EOE) programming and be executive produced by "Survivor" creator Mark Burnett, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Sylvester Stallone. Casting and production on the series, which will air in primetime beginning April 2006, will begin immediately.

Ecellent! I really enjoyed the first season — much more than I expected, in fact — so I'm happy to hear it will be coming back. As an added plus, I'll probably be able to TiVo the show in the middle of the night, since ESPN tends to show everything half a dozen times.

I Love Lauren Bacall

Bacall: Cruise is sick [How very tabloid.]

'It's inappropriate and vulgar and absolutely unacceptable to use your private life to sell anything commercially. I think it's kind of a sickness.'

Miss Bacall, who was married to Humphrey Bogart and appeared with him in several films, added insult to injury by saying 42-year-old Cruise was not much of an actor.

God, that's good. Lauren Bacall is one tough lady, and she has never pulled her punches. Gotta love it.

Beantown Trip

Posting will be light at best for the upcoming 10+ days, as The Wife and I are making a trip back to New England. Here are the details that I know at the moment:

  1. We arrive in Boston on Tuesday, August 2.
  2. We'll be staying at H's uncle's house in Randolph
  3. There are plans in place to see H's friend Jill and her family Wednesday
  4. Thursday, we will be heading up to Maine to see H's aunt and uncle, returning to Randolph early Saturday, probably.
  5. ...?
  6. We come back home on Wednesday, August 10.

Xtreme Hawai'i

The X-Games kids of today have nothing on the old traditions of our fiftieth state. Check out Tom "Pohaku" Stone. He's a surfer and a woodcarver. He hand carves traditional wooden surfboards. Even more interesting is the so-called lava sled:

Hölua, or heÿeholua (to slide together or as one entity) , refers to the ancient art of surfing mountain slopes and lava fields on a specialized Hawaiian sled, a papahölua, constructed of wood lashed together with coconut fiber that is capable of attaining speeds up to 50 mph+ over rock lightly covered with pili, a grass native to Hawai'i.

Fifty miles per hours?! Gads! Sounds dangerous to me.

Oh, yeah, it is:

He has the scars to show for it.

Wearing just a tank top and shorts and reaching speeds of up to 70 mph on a sled standing only four inches above ground, Stone once ran into a steel post sticking up from the grass during a demonstration in a slope on Maui, tearing an 18-inch gash in his left thigh.

In another crash, Stone broke his neck. It hasn't stopped him.

"You can't even imagine what it's like to be head first, four inches off the ground, doing 30, 40, 50 miles an hour on rock," Stone said. "It looks like you are riding just fluid lava. It's death-defying ... but it's a lot of fun."

So yeah... Any friends I have living in Hawai'i who are still recovering from massive bodily injuries should make sure never to look up Tom Stone, OK? Thanks.

Hello Hockey!

Matt and I are in full blown hockey talk mode for the first time in over a year. (That is, when we're not pondering who would win in the Thunderdome: Tom Cruise or Mel Gibson. It's just not very often you get "But the aliens can't help you in the Thunderdome" and "He can't swing a chainsaw like he used to" in the same conversation.) This upcoming season is already exciting us to no end. We've got rule changes to discuss (We agree almost all of them are Good Things -- Especially the shootout.). We've got (former?) powerhouse teams buying out big-name players as they shake things down to fit under a new salary cap and move the league to a new level of parity. Conversely, our Avalanche are holding on to Joe Sakic and Rob Blake (Yay!), but the fate of Adam Foote is yet to be determined and Peter Forsberg is all but gone (Boo!). We've also got a new head coach we're excited about here in Denver. The Avs are also rolling back ticket prices 20% -- Nice!

There are so many player moves going on, that there's no telling who will be the teams to beat until September.

That's actually kind of fun!

Cool Kids

Really cool invention brings teens awards

Today, the young inventors say, U.S. drivers use about 7.9 billion gallons of fuel each year to run their air-conditioners, which draw power from the engine. By adopting their contraption - which taps into the electrical system, using fans to blow hot air through five Peltier chips and then releasing cold air - they say the country stands to save 3.9 billion gallons of fuel annually, or about $10 billion based on current gas prices.

Furthermore, the product would free drivers from Freon - which despite improvements, remains an ozone-depleting chemical in current air-conditioners. The Peltier chips, which they purchased on eBay for $9.99 each, have a life span of 20 to 30 years and an unfaltering cooling capacity. And like every component in the Space Beast, which can be minimized in size to about 2 inches in width, the chips are recyclable.

Wow. Way to go!