Just a Smidge: September 2024

Wednesday, September 11, 2024

Breaking Olympic Records

It has been 24 years since Eric Moussambani broke Olympic swimming records at the 2000 Sydney games, and to celebrate the anniversary, Paris brought us a close equivalent this summer – breakdancing.

You guys remember the new Olympic breakdancing, right? The sport where the bronze women's winner from China was named “671” and the men’s competition was basically a gymnastics floor routine, but with better music and comedic stylings.

And the poor guy from Kazakhstan who tried very hard but didn't win a single judge vote in three rounds, but you had to give him credit because he is from Kazakhstan and probably doesn’t have real internet at his house, so it was possible that he hadn’t ever seen actual breakdancing before he stepped on stage.

And then there was Raygun. The viral Australian breakdancer who literally couldn’t breakdance. She also didn’t get a single point from any of the judges in any of her rounds, but the difference was she knew what it was supposed to look like and showed up anyway. We all came to the same conclusion after her performance – incredibly, she is apparently the only female breakdancer in the entire country of Australia.

Well, Rachel “Raygun” Gunn has just been ranked number one in the world by breakdancing’s governing body, the World DanceSport Federation.

If you are saying, that’s insane, I had no idea that breakdancing had a world governing body, you’re not alone. I was right there with you. But rest assured, they are not just a group of teenagers vaping ecstasy like you would suspect. They have an actual reason for ranking someone as the best dancer in the world, after that person virally proved on the world stage that she can’t dance at all.

Apparently, in order for the athletes to focus on training for the Olympics, the Federation stopped holding ranking events in January. Since the world standings are based only on your last 52 weeks of scoring, almost all of the Olympic breakdancers left the games without a current Federation ranking.

Raygun currently has the top ranking because she came in first place at the 2023 Oceania Continental Championships, which was still inside the rankings timeframe, and presumably held in Raygun’s living room.

In spite of breakdancing even worse than I do at weddings, Rachael Gunn proudly declared that she had achieved exactly what she set out to do at the Paris Olympics.

"Some Olympians spend their entire lives training to make history, to carve out a name for themselves. I trained for exactly 37 minutes, and now I'm the most famous breakdancer in the world. My sick moves shut down an entire event. How many Olympians can say that?"

One that I know of, Rachel. If you knew your Olympic history, you would know about Eric the Eel, and the fact that he actually won his heat.

Eric Moussambani was a “swimmer” from Equatorial Guinea. Swimmer is in quotes there for when you Google the video – you’ll see.

Eric got to the 2000 summer games via a wildcard system that allowed people from developing nations to represent their countries without meeting the minimum requirements for their sport. Australia is not a developing nation, so that still doesn’t explain Raygun, but here we are, nonetheless.

Eric began training – and by that I mean learned to not die in the water – only eight months before the Olympics. He started training in a lake, and later in a 12-meter-long hotel pool where he worked. He could only use the pool between 5:00 and 6:00am, and he was there every day, Raygun. Every damn, day. It didn’t help much, but still.

Eric is the only Olympic swimmer to ever make the near-completely useless Olympic pool lifeguard get out of his chair. When Eric arrived in Sydney it was his first time ever seeing a 50-meter pool. Amazingly, he had entered into the 100-meter freestyle event instead of the 50-meter. Surely he had to know 50 was less than 100, so that choice remains a mystery to this day.

Eric got up on the blocks for his first heat and proceeded to turn in the slowest time ever recorded for the 100-meter freestyle, and that includes any youth swim meets you’ve ever been to. He would have finished much faster, but he lost all forward momentum in the last 20 meters and for some reason he took about eight strokes in the last three feet of the race. I’m not making that up.

The Eel was supposed to be swimming against two other men in his heat, but they both disqualified on their starts, so after almost two full minutes in the water , Eric won his one-man heat at the 2000 Olympic games and was inked into the history books for a record that may never be broken.

Eric embodied the Olympic spirit of determination and grit. I’m not quite sure what Raygun embodied after giving it a full 37-minutes of hard work, other than an obvious lack of coordination and skill, but I want to wish her a sincere congratulations on being ranked number one in the world.

Enjoy your free large fries at Arby’s, or whatever prize comes with a World DanceSport Federation top ranking in breakdancing.

See you soon,

-Smidge

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Wednesday, September 4, 2024

The Digital Tipping Point

A long time ago I realized that I had reached what I called the digital tipping point – when I decided that if I had to choose, I would much rather lose my wallet than my phone. I think a lot of us would agree with that.

I know Son Number Two probably would. He’s off in Idaho at his first year of college and taking advantage of all the exciting activities Boise State has to offer – one of the main ones being floating the Boise River.

The river makes up the entire northern border of the campus, and it’s perfect for floating in an innertube, as long as you don’t mind sitting in freezing cold water while the rest of you fries like an egg in a high-altitude skillet.

He called me after he had finished the Labor Day float this weekend. Of course, I had no idea he was calling me, because it was some random number showing up on my phone.

“Bad news, Dad…”

Life360 is still showing us the exact spot in the middle of the Boise River where his phone finally died. It’s presumably still there on the bottom, because the second he dropped it out of his tube he went straight down after it, but it was never to be seen again.

Now, to be an eighteen-year-old off at college without a phone is one thing, but this was an iPhone, and iPhones have that magnetic ring thing on the back. And there are countless companies that sell accessories that will magnetize to the back of your phone. One of the most popular of those accessories is a wallet that holds things like your credit card and ATM card and driver’s license.

He had one of those.

He also HAD a credit card, an ATM card, and a driver’s license.

I never gave any thought to the dreaded third option of the digital tipping point – losing BOTH your wallet and your phone in one tragic river tubing accident. But then, I don’t have my wallet attached to my phone, and I also don’t take either of them with me when I get into an innertube in a river. But I also have a fully developed frontal lobe that controls risk/reward, so I have an advantage there.

When you ship your kids off to college, you are really hoping they receive an education. One of the many things you hope they’ll learn in 2024 is how to better use email. That’s been a nice side benefit of having a son without a phone. His mom and I have Samsung phones, so he can’t just text us from his iPad, because the folks who brought you the “Genius Bar” still think SMS is just a fad and won’t catch on. So, he’s having to manage this with us through email, which has been instructional for him. He hasn’t really mastered Subjects yet, but baby steps.

He's also needing to problem solve. He found out the DMV won’t send your California driver’s license to another state, so he had to find someone here in the Golden State willing to mail it to him. I might charge him for my labor AND the postage.

And he currently has absolutely no way to purchase any goods or services. Kids these days are not big on having cash, so he’s in a bit of a pickle. (Although, if he had any cash, I guess it would be at the bottom of the Boise River too.)

Sixteen-year-old Son Number Three had it all figured out the other night. “Well, he doesn’t need the actual cards! He can just use ApplePay.”

“That might just work…”

“Yep.”

“…if he had a phone.”

“Oh, right…”

He could ask his roommates to front him some cash and Venmo them. But does Venmo even have a desktop-based version? Can you Venmo from an iPad? No one knows, because everyone else’s phones are not at the bottom of the Boise River.

Well, actually, there probably are a few others down there. My wife found a retired guy who runs a Facebook page for the Boise River Float Lost and Found. Apparently, he’s spending his retired years diving below the rapids and collecting the college kids’ lost treasures and selling them back to the kids/parents for a $100 flat fee.

Not in a million years would I pay him even $1.00 to retrieve my son’s phone and wallet for him. This extracurricular college lesson is far too valuable.

I mean, I could give this guy the Life360 exact location of where my son’s phone gave up the ghost, but I wouldn’t. If he randomly found it and contacted me, I’d be tempted to pay him $100 just to keep his mouth shut.