everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Year: 2021

  • The week that was

    The week that was

    Australian canoeist Jessica Fox found a perfectly stretchy, waterproof material to fix the tip of her kayak at the Tokyo Olympics: a condom.

    After asking the UK government to ban its cigarettes, Philip Morris is pivoting to asthma inhalers which it views as a growth market.

    London Bridge may not be falling down but it did get stuck.

    In a sign that we have completely saturated terrestrial advertising, a Canadian startup is sending a satellite into orbit and is selling space on it for advertisers.

    Two North Carolina men who were mourning the loss of their brother at the spot where their brother was struck by a train, were killed when they were struck by a train.

    In a plot twist that didn’t surprise anyone, Batman’s sidekick Robin came out as bisexual.

    The Mesa County officials responsible for maintaining the security of elections are under investigation by the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office for a breach in security of its election system.

  • The week that was

    The week that was

    Due to the drought, the Northern California town of Mendocino is running out of water and is considering bringing it in via a tanker train. Greenville, another NorCal town, was reduced to ashes by the Dixie fire, the third largest in the state’s history.

    While the Yankee Stadium grounds crew was busy cornering a cat in the outfield, Washington Nationals center fielder Victor Robles somehow managed to play much of an inning with a praying mantis on his hat.

    An owl was hit by a maintenance vehicle in Central Park and New Yorkers are in mourning.

    65,000 rubber ducks were dumped into the Chicago River to raise money for the Special Olympics.

    Quick-thinking trash workers in Ohio reunited a grandmother with $25,000 in cash that was thrown out by her grandchildren who were clearing out expired items from the refrigerator. Why was grandma storing hard currency in the freezer? Maybe you should ask my grandmother who stored her manuscripts in the oven.

    Somebody thought it would be fun to post a cover of rapper Flo Rida’s Low, also known as “Apple Bottom Jeans. ” They invited others to post their versions as well. The internet delivered.

    That is all 😀

  • The longest marathon

    The longest marathon

    On March 20, 1967 Japanese runner Shizo Kanakuri crossed the finish line on a marathon he started over 50 years prior with a time of 54 years, 246 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes, and 20.3 seconds. Guinness World Records recognizes this as the longest time to complete a marathon.

    But I’m getting ahead of myself.

    In 1912 Japan sent its first team to the Olympics, held that year in Stockholm, Sweden. Japan’s team consisted of only two athletes, a sprinter named Yahiko Mishima and Shizo (this year Japan’s squad has 552 athletes).

    Back then, the road from Japan to Sweden took weeks. First on a boat then aboard an arduous weeks-long train trip across the steppes of Siberia. By the time Shizo and his teammate arrived in Sweden, they were not only exhausted but also out of training. The only time they could workout was by running around station buildings during brief stops along the way.

    When race day arrived in Stockholm on July 14, 1912 it was an unseasonably warm 32°C (89.6°F). Long distance running as a sport had not evolved to where it is today so the preparations were, shall we say, unorthodox. Nike’s famous waffle sole had not yet been invented. Shizo wore Japanese tabi on his feet and the cloth was all that protected him from the gravel path. And because it was thought that perspiration contributed to fatigue, he refused to drink any water while running.

    As you can imagine, Shizo passed out from heatstroke and took refuge at a nearby villa to recover. After spending some time recuperating there, he decided to drop out of the race and caught a train back to his hotel and eventually returned back to Japan.

    Because he never informed race officials that he dropped out of the race, Olympic officials marked him down as missing.

    Meanwhile, back in Japan, Shizo went on to run in the 1920 and 1924 Olympics, established the famous Tokyo-Hakone-Tokyo College Ekiden race and is known as the father of the Japanese marathon.

    Fast-forward to 1962 when a Swedish journalist happened upon Shizo and informed a very surprised Swedish National Olympic Committee that the missing marathoner was very much alive. As a marketing promotion, several Swedish businessmen invited Shizo to Sweden in 1967 to finish his marathon at 76 years of age. That’s the photo above.

    Upon Swedish Olympic Committee representatives reading out his official finish time to the gathered press- 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes and 20.3 seconds- Kanakuri was asked if he’d like to say a few words about breaking a world record for slowest marathon ever run. Thinking for a moment, the elderly athlete shuffled to the microphone and said,

    “It was a long trip. Along the way, I got married, had six children and 10 grandchildren.”

    THE CURIOUS CASE OF SHIZO KANAKURI’S 1912 OLYMPIC MARATHON RUN

    Hat tip to Tyler Kennedy for the pointer to this wonderful story.

  • Human Pictograms

    Looking back at the human pictograms used to illustrate 50 Olympic sports in 5 minutes I realized the inspiration is from an Japanese game show I wrote about earlier, Kasou Taishou.

    via NBC Sports
  • The week that was

    The week that was

    Researchers at MIT are working on an app that can successfully detect Covid-19 in asymptomatic individuals by processing recordings of an individual’s cough.

    A Louisiana family was briefly one of the richest families in America when their bank mistakenly transferred $50 billion into their account.

    Philip Morris asked the UK government to ban cigarettes within the decade.

    Citizen, a mobile neighborhood watch app that used to be called Vigilante, will pay New Yorkers $25/hour to livestream crime scenes.

    The Eastern District of New York sold off Martin “Pharma Bro” Shkreli’s one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.

    Viewers of Olympic women’s field hockey were left hanging when, in the final minutes of the Argentina v. Spain match, the broadcast inexplicably cut to a cameraman focused on a cockroach on the sidelines.

    A dispatch from rural New Zealand reports that the case of the “suspicious pair of footprints” has been resolved.

  • Simone Biles

    Much has been written about Simone Biles’ decision to withdraw from the team and individual all-round competition at the Tokyo Olympics. Despite the negative coverage accusing her of quitting it is instructive to look at her (and her team’s) responses in the press conference.

    When reporters trained their questions on Biles’s emotional state, she spoke just as comfortably, talking about mental health in the same terms as fitness and recovery programs—another variable in the champion’s pursuit. She described the danger of pressing through and competing in her state, saying she didn’t want to “do something silly” and hurt herself. She called Osaka—another sport-defining Black woman—a source of inspiration. “I say put mental health first,” Biles said in response to a query about how she’d advise other athletes in similar circumstances. “Because if you don’t, you’re not going to enjoy your sport and you’re not going to succeed as much as you want to.”

    Simone Biles and the New Language of Greatness
  • Your Robot Future

    Your Robot Future

    Two versions for you. One a dystopian robot beehive and the other, a thin veneer of joyful play hiding a powerful and increasingly sophisticated machine.

    Exhibit One the Ocado beehive

    Robots used by the UK online-grocer Ocado zip back and forth across “the grid” delivering good to human packers who box everything up for shipment to the customers. Each robot is about the size of a washing machine and are optimized to run back and forth at great speed, missing each other by the thinnest of margins. Of course, when they don’t which causes all sorts of problems.

    Exhibit Two Boston Dynamics dancers

    Two videos, the first from January where the Boston Dynamics Atlas machines run thru a number of dance moves to the 1962 hit Do You Love Me? It’s a slick PR stunt to make these machines more lovable but it also had the practical benefit of pushing the team to improve their robot.

    Now that Boston Dynamics is part of Hyundai, they have been put to use dancing to the likes of K-Pop boy band BTS. Here’s their most recent video where a group of Spot robots are dancing in unison.

    Again, these robots can do much more than just dance. As Google Image search queries have, over time, taught the algorithm what a cat or dog looks like – teaching Atlas and Spot to dance and move with grace will help it integrate seamlessly with humans further down the road.

    Are we witnessing the first steps towards Westworld?

  • The week that was

    The week that was

    The people of the Isle de Jean Charles in the bayous of Louisiana became the first federally funded community of climate migrants.

    A startup in Amsterdam introduced an electric two-seater car that can run entirely from sunlight collected on its solar-paneled roof.

    A woman in Tulsa was located and arrested when she left a comment on the police department’s Weekly Most Wanted Facebook post inquiring about the reward for her capture.

    Ford created a premium fragrance to be used in the new electric Mustang Mach-E GT to give owners a hint of that fuel and tire scent muscle car drivers crave.

    The Western New York gardening group is having trouble discussing “hoes” on their Facebook page because their posts are constantly flagged by Facebook’s moderation team.

    Scientists in Australia are changing the language around shark attacks in order to dispel a “culture of fear” around the threatened species. From now officials will use the phrase, “negative encounters.”

    The WHO started using Greek letters to avoid the stigma of associating a the name of a disease with the place where it was detected. This left folks at Delta Airlines grumbling, where they now just call it “the variant.”

    The San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a pilot program for new municipal trash cans designed by Gucci. They cost $20k each.

    Poland had to send home swimmers from their Olympic team when they were told they brought six too many.

  • The week that was

    The week that was

    With rising oceans and cataclysmic floods upon us, it only makes sense that Jeep is thinking about adding to their iconic 4-wheeler an underwater mode.

    Confirming that global warming has arrived, Car & Driver published a review to see which convertible, left in the sun, has the hottest seat.

    A Moscow-based company is proposing a traffic stoplight design with a more information-rich design.

    Because of its high cost of living, New York City was ranked as one of the hardest places to live in the United States. True to form, an Upper East Side establishment notched a Guinness World Record for its $200 black-truffled french fries.

    An unopened Legend of Zelda game from 1987 was auctioned off for $870,000. Not to be outdone, an unopened copy of Super Mario 64 went for $1.56 million. NFT that!

    A Wyoming rancher was rescued after spending two nights trapped beneath his overturned ATV four-wheeler. He survived on several bottles of water and cans of beer which luckily landed nearby.

    An Episcopal church in New Mexico announced that it paid off the medical debt for all of New Mexico.

    Engineers at UC San Diego have designed a new type of biofuel cell that harnesses energy from the sweat of your fingertips. This technology could make it possible to charge your wearables without a battery pack.

    A military paratrooper trainee, whose parachute failed to open correctly during a high altitude training exercise, sustained only “minor injuries” after a 15,000ft fall took him through some trees and the roof of a house in California, crashing into the kitchen in a burst of insulation and roofing material.