Damien Oton, winner of last summer’s Megavalanche, mounted a camera on his helmet and recorded his race down Alpe D’Huez. Buckle in, and enjoy the exhilarating wild ride. Once you start, it’s hard to stop.
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Does your spare tire show no signs of deflating as bikini season looms?
Is the fear of bullies kicking sand in your face beginning to outstrip the horror of transforming into a giant bug overnight?
Do you long to experience lasting health benefits along with an impressively fit appearance?
Friends, we make you this promise: The Amazing Franz Kafka Workout will transform your life along with your physique in just 15 minutes a day.
That’s right, just 15 minutes of daily calisthenics (and some common sense practices with regard to diet, sleep, and hygiene) is all it takes. Even pencil-necked authors walking around with their backs bowed, their shoulders drooping, their hands and arms all over the place, afraid of mirrors because they show an inescapable ugliness, can discover the confidence that eludes them, through improved posture, breathing, and muscle tone.
(Note: the Amazing Franz Kafka Workout will not protect you from the pernicious, eventually fatal effects of tuberculosis.)
The Amazing Franz Kafka Workout is more correctly attributed to fitness guru Jørgen Peter Müller, above, the author of several exercise regimen pamphlets, including the bestselling My System: 15 Minutes’ Exercise a Day for Health’s Sake, which was published in 1904 and then translated into 25 languages.
Kafka was definitely the best known of Müller’s devotees, scrupulously running through the prescribed exercises morning and evening, wearing nothing more than the skin he was born in—another practice Müller heartily endorsed.
The chiseled Mr. Müller was a proponent of regular dental check ups, sensible footwear, and vigorous toweling (or “rubbing”), and an enemy of constrictive woolen underwear, closed windows, and sedentary lifestyles. My System includes some observations that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Kafka novel:
The town office type is often a sad phenomenon prematurely bent, with shoulders and hips awry from his dislocating position on the office stool, pale, with pimply face and pomatumed head, thin neck protruding from a collar that an ordinary man could use as a cuff, and swaggering dress in the latest fashion flapping round the sticks that take the place of arms and legs! At a more advanced age the spectacle is still more pitiable… the eyes are dull, and the general appearance is either still more sunken and shriveled or else fat, flabby, and pallid, and enveloped in an odour of old paper, putrified skin grease, and bad breath.
In an essay on Slate, Sarah Wildman, the descendent of two lean Müller fans, delves into the Müller System’s popularity, particularly amongst 20th-century European Jews.
Just as best-selling fitness experts do today, Müller beefed up his franchise with related titles: My System for Ladies, My System forChildren, and My Sunbathing and Fresh Air System.
The original book is in the public domain and can be downloaded for free from the Internet Archive, where one commenter who has been following the system for nearly seventy years gives it a hearty thumbs-up for its stamina restoring powers.
Even those unlikely to perform so much as a single deep knee bend should get a bang out of the original photo illustrations, which, back in 1904, were as ripe for erotic double duty as the wholesome men’s physique mags of the 50s and 60s.
The 1998 NFL draft was a memorable one. A debate raged around whether the Indianapolis Colts should use their first round pick to select Ryan Leaf or Peyton Manning. Everyone had an opinion about these two quarterbacks, including Hunter S. Thompson. The author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell’s Angels sent a letter to Colts owner Jim Irsay, urging him to select the highly-touted Leaf.
Dear James,
In response to yr addled request for a quick $30M loan to secure the services of the Manning kid — I have to say No, (sic) at this time
But the Leaf boy is another matter. He looks strong & Manning doesn’t — or at least not strong enough to handle that “Welcome to the NFL” business for two years without a world-class offensive line.
How are you fixed at left OT for the next few years, James? Think about it. You don’t want a china (sic) doll back there when that freak [Warren] Sapp comes crashing in.
Okay. Let me know if you need some money for Leaf. I expect to be very rich when this [Johnny] depp (sic) movie comes out.
Yr. faithful consultant,
HUNTER
Twenty years later, we know how things played out. The Colts ultimately picked Manning, who became one of the most productive and celebrated quarterbacks ever. As for Leaf, he played four seasons and exited the sport, considered by some the No. 1 “draft bust” in NFL history. But he’s certainly a good sport. Leaf posted Thompson’s letter (above) on his Twitter stream last month.
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Could it be a case of authorial oversight that all subsequent rules are exclusively concerned with such practical matters as dress and fight duration?
Because doing so might diminish Fight Club’s street cred just a bitsy…
Filmmaker (and popular audiobook narrator) Emily Janice Card has a good deal of fun in Jane Austen’s Fight Club, above, marrying Palahniuk’s tropes to the social mores of England’s Regency period.
“No corsets, no hat pins and no crying,” Tyler Durden stand-in Lizzie instructs the eager young ladies in her circle. Soon, they’re proudly sporting bruises beneath their bonnets and stray blood spots on their tea dresses.
While young women of the fictional Bennet sisters’ social class refrained from brutal fisticuffs, there’s ample evidence of female combatants from the proletarian ranks. They fought for money, and occasionally to settle a disagreement, training hard for weeks in advance.
Their bouts drew spectators to the amphitheater owned by boxing promoter James Figg, and the marvelously named Hockley in the Hole, a seedy establishment whose other attractions included bearbaiting, bullbaiting, and fighting with broadswords and cudgels.
The female fist fighters challenged each other with paid notices in local papers, like this one from “championess and ass-driver” Ann Field of Stoke Newington:
Whereas I, Ann Field, of Stoke Newington, ass-driver, well known for my abilities, in boxing in my own defense wherever it happened in my way, having been affronted by Mrs. Stokes, styled the European Championess, do fairly invite her to a trial of her best skill in Boxing for 10 pounds, fair rise and fall; and question not but to give her such proofs of my judgment that shall oblige her to acknowledge me Championess of the Stage, to the satisfaction of all my friends.
Mrs. Stokes promptly announced her readiness to come out of retirement:
I, Elizabeth Stokes, of the City of London, have not fought in this way since I fought the famous boxing- woman of Billingsgate 29 minutes, and gained a complete victory (which is six years ago); but as the famous Stoke Newington ass-woman dares me to fight her for the 10 pounds, I do assure her I will not fail meeting her for the said sum, and doubt not that the blows which I shall present her with will be more difficult for her to digest than any she ever gave her asses.
Rather than keeping mum on Fight Club, these female pugilists shared Muhammad Ali’s flare for drumming up interest with irresistibly cocky wordplay.
In a chapter devoted to public entertainments, sports and amusements, Alexander Andrews, author of The Eighteenth Century or Illustrations of the Manners and Customs of Our Grandfathers,documents how the Merry Wives of Windsor, a crew comprised of “six old women belonging to Windsor town” took out an ad seeking “any six old women in the universe to outscold them.”
On June 22nd, 1768, a woman called Bruising Peg “beat her antagonist in a terrible manner” to win a new chemise, valued at half a guinea.
In 1722, Hannah Hyfield of Newgate Market, resolved to give her challenger, Elizabeth Wilkinson, “more blows than words,” promising to deliver “a good thumping.” Both parties agreed to hold a half-crown in their fists for the duration of the fight. William B. Boulton, author of 1901’s Amusements of Old London, speculates that this was a practical measure to minimize scratching and hair-pulling.
Over at The Intercept, Josh Begley, a data visualization artist, has posted a video entitled “Field of Vision — Concussion Protocol.” By way of introduction, he writes:
Since the season started, there have been more than 280 concussions in the NFL. That is an average of 12 concussions per week. Though it claims to take head injuries very seriously, the National Football League holds this data relatively close. It releases yearly statistics, but those numbers are published in aggregate, making it difficult to glean specific insights.
I have been tracking these injuries all season. Using a variety of methods, including reviewing daily injury reports from NFL.com, I have created what I believe is the most complete dataset of individual concussions sustained during the 2017–2018 season.
The resulting film, “Concussion Protocol,” is a visual record of every concussion in the NFL this year.
He goes on to add: “This film does not make an argument for ending football. Rather, it invites a set of questions… When we watch American football, what are we seeing?” Or, really, what are we missing? It’s only by “cutting together these scenes of injury — moments of impact, of intimacy, of trauma — and reversing them,” that we “see some of this violence anew” and underscore the sheer brutality of the game.
Tom Petty grew up in Gainesville, Florida, in the backyard of the University of Florida. On Saturday, during a football game against LSU, some 90,000 Gators fans gave Petty a raucous send off, singing “I Won’t Back Down” in unison. Don’t know about you, but it gave me the chills.
BTW, if you’re wondering what the occasional boos are all about, it’s the U. of Florida fans taking the LSU marching band to task for disrupting the Petty sing-along. Or so it was perceived.
Over the years, we’ve shown you various household objects being made–everything from crayons and ink, to vinyl records, old fashioned books and paper. Today, you can get a mesmerizing glimpse into how tennis balls are made. Created by Benedict Redgrove for ESPN, the short film above shows “the manufacturing process of [Wilson] tennis balls for the US Open.” Combined, it takes 24 different processes to make the final ball. And it’s fun to watch.
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Above you can watch what was arguably the first surf movie ever made–the very beginning of a long cinematic tradition that gave us Gidget in 1959, and TheEndless Summer in 1966. And lest you think the surf movie reached its zenith during those halcyon days, some would argue that the best surf films were later produced during the aughts–Thicker Than Water (2000), Blue Crush (2002), Step Into Liquid (2003), Riding Giants (2004), etc. And don’t forget this great little short, “Dark Side of the Lens.”
In 1906, smack in the middle of the aughts of last century, Thomas Edison sent the pioneering cinematographer Robert K. Bonine to shoot an ‘Actuality’ documentary about life in the Polynesian islands. The blurb accompanying this video describes the scene above: “The first moving pictures of surfers riding waves — Surf Riders, Waikiki Beach, Honolulu — shows a minute of about a dozen surfers on alaia boards in head-high, offshore surf at what is probably Canoes. These surfers are shot too far away to detail what they were wearing, but they all appear to be in tanksuits.”
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