Mark Hayward Is My Hero

Japanese fisherman found a living deep-sea Frilled Shark this week. Although science did know about this shark before now, it has rarely been seen alive, and this has got to be the best video footage ever taken of the eel-like “living fossil”. Deep-sea creatures are so cool.

Video:

Or, check out the video here.

I admit it: I have my dorky moments. But seriously… Star Wars is SO awesome. My friend Harper just gave me this link to a great read-between-the-lines reassessment of the Star Wars movies. If you are a web junkie this is probably old news, but it’s new to me, and besides… Star Wars is timeless. ;)

A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope
Reconsidering Star Wars IV in the light of I-III

Having just finished another great MadFest juggling convention I have come to a better understanding of why there was such a controversy over the popularity of the Chris Bliss video that swept the internet a while back. (If you haven’t already seen it, check it out here before you read the rest of this article.)

MadFest is the annual regional juggler’s convention that is held each January in Madison Wisconsin. I have helped organize it to one degree or another since it started. For the last six years I have been in charge of the Public Show.

This year, as usual, we had a fantastic show. We had great jugglers like Luke Wilson (Brittish, living in Germany) and the Dew Drop Jugglers (Minneapolis/St. Paul MN) and we had great variety acts like The Rope Warrior (Chicago) and the Flybar Pogo Stick Demo Team (Chicago/Ohio), and sold out our 1300 seat theater once again. It’s always a challenge convincing people to go to the show, but once they go they are usually astonished at how great it was. For the most part, once people have seen the show they make it a family tradition to go every year. Initially it was frustrating to me that people didn’t seem to believe me that the show was going to be good enough to be worth seeing. I eventually got over the fact that not everyone thinks juggling is as cool as I do, although that never seemed like the whole story. This year I think I have seen the light, and my frustration has changed to a slightly different form: I think that American society no longer believes that live entertainment is worth the trouble.

(more…)

Tomorrow I leave for Madison WI to start the ramp-up to the MadFest Juggling Festival.  I have to go earlier this year than usual because I will be doing a radio interview on Tuesday morning (at 6:30 am… ug) on Z104.  As usual I’m really looking forward to the fest, and a bunch of my favorite people in the whole world are coming, so it should be a blast.

Also, we will once again have the Wisconsin State Yo-yo Contest at MadFest this year.  Unfortunately, this was the year of starting everything later than I should have, so there aren’t many details up about the contest yet, but that should change soon.

Coming out of the Christmas season I have had a realization about the role of the male in contemporary suburban society. A huge percentage of Americans live in the suburbs, and many smaller cities are really more suburban than urban these days. 100,000 years ago the male may have been in charge of hunting or other primitive man duties, and 100 years ago the man may have been responsible for the family income and the major decisions, but now the primary role of the man, in my view, is Stuff Wrangler.

In case you doubt me on this one, here is a list of some of the ways that the modern male is often expected to wrangle stuff:

• carrying diaper bags
• carrying grocery bags
• carrying shopping bags
• handling suitcases
• doing home repair
• taking care of car maintenance
• taking out the trash
• moving furniture
• walking the dog
• cleaning the hairball out of the drain
• killing/removing bugs
• getting stuff from high shelves
• opening jars
• holding the purse in public
• loading the car
• driving the car
• putting lipstick/cell phone/keys/wallet in pockets when going out

This is, of course, an incomplete list, and is not universal, but this is the stuff that I do, my friends do, and that my Dad has always done. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, it’s just that I finally saw the pattern. And to be honest it does make me feel like a man to load the car before a long trip.