D. T. Hill Sounds Off....

> The Day After......
>
> Looking back, what an experience. It was like it was yesterday. Oh it was.
>
> 5am - waking up. Eating some breakfast. What did the book say, Enough for
> energy but not enough to make you sick...what the @#!# is that? A wheat peanut
> butter sandwich, two cups of coffee and a protein bar later, I find my self
> loading into the Van. I have it all. Speedo, swim cap, goggles, shoes water
> bottles, energy gel. Perfect. I have everything.....well unless I get a flat.
> Oh shit, no tube, I forgot. Off to walmart. Find a tube, and back on my way.
> Parking Downtown, no prob, find a good spot, throw on backpack, jump on bike, on
> my way.
>
> Pre-race prep. set up the bike, get out towel, lay everything out ready for
> that quick transition. Lots of people walking around in speedo's, but keeping
> the shorts on. 10 minutes to go, everything ready. Gotta leave area and make
> way to swim. Better pee first. Ahhhhhhh that felt good. Back to transition
> area, take off shirt and shorts. Speeeeedo. Oh s%^*$, I have a big pee spot.
> Walk to swim with cap over piss spot.
>
> Looking at all these swimmers. I can almost hear their thoughts....stay calm,
> stay focused, push it but stay within yourself, good technique, In my mind I am
> thinking, "don't die, don't die". I spot a fat woman, I know I can beat her.
> stay close to that and build your confidence.
>
> Time to swim, men under 35 in water. wait they are all jumping in. well that
> is ok, I get to swim with the old guys and the women. Ok, there is my fat girl.
> That group leaves, ok, all women in the water. Shit, I am hurting now. Women
> leave, and there goes big mama. Ok I will beat some of these old men. Ok I am
> in the water, horn goes off. I am already last. Crap. Stay calm just swim.
> As most of the crowd goes out of site I see a couple of the first group hanging
> on the side. Losers. I can do this. 9 long minutes later I come out of the
> water, feeling winded but happy to be alive. Hurry get your bike. Well hurry
> is a strong word. Put on my shoes get on my helmet take a drink of water and
> off I go. With the staggered start I am 116th out of 120 to get on bike. Gotta
> catch up. Off I go.
>
> Ok make it through the first hill and you get a nice downhill break, around this
> corner is a big hill....wow, 20 people walking with bikes up hill. Low gear
> power up and start passing. Hey what is that up there, thats big mama. Here I
> go, cya big mama as I catch and pass her. Over the top, time for a break. Get
> me a drink. Here comes some fast guys on the left, they have some nice bikes.
> They are pedaling hard, that one looks good, and she....wait that is big
> mama...hold up. I gotta get going. Here I go down the hill, up a hill, bye big
> mama, down the hill, big mama gotta alot of momentum coming. Alright gotta put
> some distance between me and this group of 30. Shift down and go. 30 minutes
> later I am passing the bengals stadium, passing an occasional woman, tired old
> guy, and otherwise unattractive fat kid.
>
> Time to run. Put the bike away, get a drink, oh shit, my water all spilled out.
> No time, gotta go. Start to run, what is that, someone is crossing the finish
> line. Holy crap, no worries only 3 more miles. Legs feel suprisingly good.
> Nice and easy. 1/2 mile in a couple passes me...no worries, they are runners,
> another guy, and then a girl. Don't stop, keep running, but then the thought
> hits me. Where is big mama. Not quite to the turnaround I start to feel it.
> Not sure if it was a strange sixth sense, or the earth moving from the shear
> weight and forces that she placed upon the earth. Making the turn I saw it.
> Dressed in Gold with tight black running pants....Big Mama was on the move. I
> gotta go. Push that pace a little bit keep it going...keep it going. only 1.5
> miles and then it happened. I could hear her breath, the smell of sweat being
> released from places that haven't seen the light in years. Ok let her go, but
> stay close. NO way she can last. Last mile Big mama still in sight. One big
> climb up the bridge, across and back. that is it. Big Mama hits the hill 100
> yrds ahead, not paying attention to the weight limit, I fear for my life. Being
> on the same bridge as this woman. The runners coming the other way have the
> look of death. One guy encourages me, say keep it going buddy, you are almost
> there. I tell him to F@#$ off. Doesn't he know I am dying and getting beat by
> the blob. I am now pushing it, harder and harder.....or am I. Big mama is
> opening up. she is pulling away. Across the bridge, to the turnaround. 500M
> to go. I start to run faster. All down hill from here. I still have her in my
> sites. My mind drifts back 6 weeks earlier.....sure Lawler, I'll do a triathlon, but
> after I get back from my golf trip of drinking for 4 straight days. The endless
> training, except for the week I was in Italy. The no drinking except the last
> week while I was in Toronto....It has all culminated into this last 500 meters
> and now it was time to shine...by the way, I wonder where she got those big
> tights. I didn't know the made them that big. I wonder if she made them from
> someone's old parachute?...oh wait, I wasn't paying attention, I am almost done.
> Where is the hefty ho, the big bitch, the fat feline???? OH my god, she must
> of finished....it was then I saw people scrambling. The free food stand for the
> racers was under assault. big mama was extracting her revenge. It was a race
> against time, could I finish and still find a morsel of food left after she
> devoured what was rightfully mine, across the finish line, the announcement of
> Barry Beagle from Union Ky, but I didn't hear a thing. This was personal, I
> wanted a sub sandwich and my nemesis was standing in the way. She turned, with
> two subs in her hand, and a pickle hanging from the corner of her lower lip, she
> saw the look in my eye. It was then I knew that I had accomplished my goal, As
> Big mama backed down, and I claimed my sub, half banana and 1/3 cup of Gatorade,
> I knew that I was now officially a triathelete..
>
> 1hr 35min 36seconds............

Audio-Visual Entertainment

1. Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
2. Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.
3. Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo. See what happens when you give a Walkman to today’s teenager.
4. The number of TV channels being a single digit. I remember it being a massive event when Britain got its fourth channel.
5. Standard-definition, CRT TVs filling up half your living room.
6. Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.
7. High-speed dubbing.
8. 8-track cartridges.
9. Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.
10. Betamax tapes.
11. MiniDisc.
12. Laserdisc: the LP of DVD.
13. Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations. (Digital tuners + HD radio b0rk this concept.)
14. Shortwave radio.
15. 3-D movies meaning red-and-green glasses.
16. Watching TV when the networks say you should. Tivo and Sky+ are slowing killing this one.
17. That there was a time before ‘reality TV.’
Photo credit: smin via flickr

Photo credit: smin via flickr

Computers and Videogaming
18. Wires. OK, so they’re not gone yet, but it won’t be long
19. The scream of a modem connecting.
20. The buzz of a dot-matrix printer
21. 5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.
22. Using jumpers to set IRQs.
23. DOS.
24. Terminals accessing the mainframe.
25. Screens being just green (or orange) on black.
26. Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it.
27. Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID.
28. Counting in kilobytes.
29. Wondering if you can afford to buy a RAM upgrade.
30. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.
31. Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load.
32. Joysticks.
33. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.
34. Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.
35. Recording a song in a studio.
Photo credit: ghbrett via flickr

Photo credit: ghbrett via flickr

The Internet
36. NCSA Mosaic.
37. Finding out information from an encyclopedia.
38. Using a road atlas to get from A to B.
39. Doing bank business only when the bank is open.
40. Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.
41. Phone books and Yellow Pages.
42. Newspapers and magazines made from dead trees.
43. Actually being able to get a domain name consisting of real words.
44. Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it.
45. Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.
46. Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.
47. Archie searches.
48. Gopher searches.
49. Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet.
50. Privacy.
51. The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them.
52. Correct spelling of phrases, rather than TLAs.
53. Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.
54. The time before botnets/security vulnerabilities due to always-on and always-connected PCs
55. The time before PC networks.
56. When Spam was just a meat product — or even a Monty Python sketch.
Photo credit: Chris Devers via flickr

Photo credit: Chris Devers via flickr

Gadgets
57. Typewriters.
58. Putting film in your camera: 35mm may have some life still, but what about APS or disk?
59. Sending that film away to be processed.
60. Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.
61. CB radios.
62. Getting lost. With GPS coming to more and more phones, your location is only a click away.
63. Rotary-dial telephones.
64. Answering machines.
65. Using a stick to point at information on a wallchart
66. Pay phones.
67. Phones with actual bells in them.
68. Fax machines.
69. Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.
Photo credit: ansik via flickr

Photo credit: ansik via flickr

Everything Else
70. Taking turns picking a radio station, or selecting a tape, for everyone to listen to during a long drive.
71. Remembering someone’s phone number.
72. Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.
73. Actually going down to a Blockbuster store to rent a movie.
74. Toys actually being suitable for the under-3s.
75. LEGO just being square blocks of various sizes, with the odd wheel, window or door.
76. Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater.
77. Relying on the 5-minute sport segment on the nightly news for baseball highlights.
78. Neat handwriting.
79. The days before the nanny state.
80. Starbuck being a man.
81. Han shoots first.
82. “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.” But they’ve already seen episode III, so it’s no big surprise.
83. Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC.
84. Trig tables and log tables.
85. “Don’t know what a slide rule is for …”
86. Finding books in a card catalog at the library.
87. Swimming pools with diving boards.
88. Hershey bars in silver wrappers.
89. Sliding the paper outer wrapper off a Kit-Kat, placing it on the palm of your hand and clapping to make it bang loudly. Then sliding your finger down the silver foil to break off the first finger
90. A Marathon bar (what a Snickers used to be called in Britain).
91. Having to manually unlock a car door.
92. Writing a check.
93. Looking out the window during a long drive.
94. Roller skates, as opposed to blades.
95. Cash.
96. Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet.
97. Spending your entire allowance at the arcade in the mall.
98. Omni Magazine
99. A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.
100. When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same.

Thanks to YouTube, minor leaguer Josh Womack is rising faster in internet notoriety than he is the pro baseball ranks, but hey, everybody has their one thing, right? For us, it’s Donkey Kong. For Josh, it’s wicked cool bat tricks.

Roy Hobbs’s Epic Dinger in The Natural. “Go pick me out a winner, Bobby.”



The “Run Dummy!” Scene from Bull Durham. “I give you a gift, you stand there show up my pitcher?!”



Cerrano’s Blast Against the Yankees in Major League. “You no help me now, f*$# you Jobu.”



Hamilton “The Babe” Porter Calls His Shot in The Sandlot. “Low and outside, just like I like it.”



The Baseball Scene from Naked Gun. OK, so not exactly centered around the home run, but seeing how this is one of our favorite scenes in movie history no way we’re leaving it off. “Hey Look! It’s Enrico Pallazzo!”

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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/24869.html

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