No Mas presents “Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No”, an animated short by James Blagden about Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis (who died last year) who pitched a no-hitter while tripping on LSD playing against the San Diego Padres on June, 12th 1970.

In celebration of the greatest athletic achievement by a man on a psychedelic journey, No Mas and artist James Blagden proudly present the animated tale of Dock Ellis’ legendary LSD no-hitter. In the past few years weve heard all too much about performance enhancing drugs from greenies to tetrahydrogestrinone, and not enough about performance inhibiting drugs. If our evaluation of the records of athletes like Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens, Marion Jones, and Barry Bonds needs to be revised downwards with an asterisk, we submit that that Dock Ellis record deserves a giant exclamation point. Of the 263 no-hitters ever thrown in the Big Leagues, we can only guess how many were aided by steroids, but we can say without question that only one was ever thrown on acid.

via MetaFilter

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“El Vetica”, a marvelous new type geek t-shirt by our pal Mike Monteiro, is now available in the Mule Design Studio Feed Store.

Celebrating the career of Mexico’s only typographer/luchador. El Vetica, also known as El Kernudo, fought out of the small town of San Serif. He held the Mexican Inter-Continental belt for an unprecedented 7 years, from 1977–84. He also starred in several telenovelas, most notably Las Esposas do Luchador and El Santo e Super Amigos.

See Previously: Keming and Other T-Shirts for Type Nerds

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St. Louis’ Riverfront Times has a special report on World Champion Anvil Shooter Gay Wilkinson shows us how to shoot an anvil 200 feet into the air.

via Boing Boing

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In the future, dictionaries will use this video to help define the term WTF?

Deep in the forest lived Billy and his charming companions. They peacefully honed their bodies and listened to music there. But a wave of development came upon the forests. One who would turn all to road. Kagamine Rin had come. Billy must stop the construction before all is turned to road.

via Nerdist

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Carla and Henriette Hochdorfer present their amazing indoor cycling skills at the European Junior Championships Indoorcycling 2009. Now that’s some fancy fixie riding.

via Chip Beale

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guest post by mikl-em

Wikipedia:

Yoga (Sanskrit) refers to traditional physical and mental disciplines originating in India.

Wikipedia:

Alcohol intoxication (also known as drunkenness or being drunk) is a physiological state occurring when an organism has a high level of ethyl alcohol in their bloodstream, or ethyl alcohol is otherwise causing a physiological effect.

“Drunk Yoga” is like the Taoist 69 of these two contrasting pursuits. Where structured disciplined health & spirituality meets intentional self-poisoning inarticulate inhibitionlessness. It is a doomed love affair that is both offensively repugnant and utterly rubberneckingly irresistible.

You can review the full range of these on FunTuna.

Strangely “Downward-Facing Dog” is NOT on the list–I guess I lost that bet.

The same Drunk Yoga images are popping up a lot of different places now. It’s actually unclear who posted them first, but kllproject.lv was early on (and may be the originator); the site has also continued on from the original dipsomaniacal yogic-diptychs to feature another set of drunk yoga, cat-yoga(!!), and more. See examples below…

It also probably won’t shock you that a YouTube search for “drunk yoga” guarantees minutes of schadenfreudtastic delights.

via Violet Blue

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photos by Trapped in Suburbia

The Play More Notebook, designed by Trapped in Suburbia, is a clever little notepad that has sports ball patterns on the back of each page, that when crumpled create tiny paper balls that can be used to play games at your desk.

via Whitezine

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photo by Barcroft Media

Extreme inline skater Dirk Auer set a world record skating down the 860 meter Mammoth roller coaster at the Trips Drill theme park in Stuttgart using specially designed inline skates. The attempt took 60 seconds, with speeds up to 56 mph.

via Neatorama

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Chris Hardwick shows off his Extreme Office Parkour skills on G4’s Web Soup.

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guest post by mikl-em

“Chessboxing” is a real activity, an actual sport, where contestants both (surprise!) play chess and box with each other. The World Chess Boxing Organisation (WCBO) is the international governing organization for the sport.

From their FAQ:

Chessboxers go through alternating four-minute long rounds of chess and three-minute boxing rounds with a one-minute break in between. A maximum total of 11 rounds are fought out—six rounds of chess and five rounds of boxing. The fight begins with a round of chess. Each player has a respite of 12 minutes during the game of chess, which means the maximum duration of the whole chess game is 24 minutes. A K.O. or checkmate can lead to an early win, and the fight can also be cut short if a player exceeds the chess time limit or the referee decides the fight has to be aborted. If the game of chess ends with a tie, it is settled with the points earned in the boxing rounds. If the boxing fight ends with a tie, the player who had black on the chessboard wins.

The sport has its origin in a 1992 comic book by Yugoslavia-born French author Enki Bilal. Froid Équateur (French for “Cold Equator”) was the final installment of his Nikopol Trilogy, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi graphic novel series which was made into a movie and a video game.

The real life sport began in 2003, and the first world championship match was held in Amsterdam in November that year. Nowadays there are Chessboxing matches, clubs and championships across Europe and Russia. Even FIDE, the World Chess Federation, indirectly recognized the sport when they posted video of the Federation’s President participating in a chessboxing match (though his opponent doesn’t seem to thrown many punches).

Personally I’ve long been hoping for more weird hybrid sports events. The Decathalon is old news, of course, as boring as breakfast cereal. The Triathlon (consisting of swimming, cycling, and running) is straight-forward and well established.

But it’s the winter Biathalon (rifle shooting & cross country skiing) and the modern pentathlon (combining pistol shooting, épée fencing, freestyle swimming, show jumping, and cross-country running), both Olympic events, that start to approach the kind of thing I have in mind. I’m sure they makes sense to someone (but hey, so does curling, to someone), but for me these are harbingers of an absurdist bizzaro future that may never be.

Now with Chessboxing, we are one step closer. Float like a butterfly, sting like a rook. I for one await our motorcycling / paddleball-playing / knife-juggling / Connect Four-master overlords with remote control at the ready.

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guest post by Kevin Evans

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guest post by Burstein!

In light of the awesomtastic bike trick video of Danny MacAskil currently making the rounds on the internet, it is worth reflecting on the storied and great history of bike tricks. There is a video of archival film featuring bicycle tricks whose description identifies the rider as Thomas A. Edison, however in fact, there is evidence that this is not the case.

The Edison Cataglog of Rutgers University have been organizing and publishing the 5 million pages of documents left behind by Edison. Within these documents are a series of kinetoscope films made by Edison Motion Pictures, and some (if not all) are documented on IMDB. According to the Edison Catalog and IMDB, the rider is not Edison but rather a certain “Neidert.” This has some corroboration as Eugene A. Neidert has been documented in the December 26th, 1893, edition of the New York Times [PDF] giving a “clever exhibition of trick riding.”

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Inspired Bicycles presents a great video featuring Danny MacAskill doing some amazing bicycle stunts around Edinburgh. I agree with Andy, it’s a lot like Parkour for bikes.

While this video is making the rounds across the internet, Danny’s earlier work is just as impressive. Also both videos were shot by Dave Sowerby who himself is no stranger to bicycle tricks,

via Waxy

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guest post by Dave Schumaker

Last month, the Burj Dubai – a skyscraper under construction in the United Arab Emirates, topped out at 2,684 feet. This makes it the tallest man-made structure ever built. Construction on the skyscraper began in 2004 and is expected to be completed later this year at a total cost of $4.1 billion dollars. When finished, the Burj Dubai will have 160 floors!

In May of 2008, an Englishman and Frenchman snuck into the unfinished building and were arrested while attempting to BASE jump from the structure. Unbeknownst to authorities at the time, the same Frenchman had already completed a successful BASE jump from the building with another partner! Current TV has a great interview with the jumpers, as well as fantastic footage from their jump.

You can check out the Burj Dubai on Google Maps. Also, Gizmodo had a good photo gallery featuring pictures of the Burj that were taken by a reader last year.

via Current

graphic modified from Burj Dubai website

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“Can Throwing”, it’s kind of like Parkour for recycling.

via Justinsomnia

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Yesterday’s Bernal Heights Hill Soapbox Derby 2008 was shut down by the San Francisco Police Department and the organizers ended up moving to another hill in San Francisco. Telstar Logistics has the full report with photos.

According to Telstar Logistics the organizers of the event have decided that in the future they will no longer be giving advance notice or information about the derby, making it a true underground event, something that is pretty rare these days.

photo by Telstar Logistics

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The 14th annual Soapbox Derby takes place this Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! November 2nd at 1pm on Bernal Heights Hill in San Francisco. There will also be a Soapbox Derby 14th Anniversary Party on Saturday, Novemer 1st at Benders in San Francisco featuring Thee Merry Widows and The Lowdowns.

See out Telstar Logistics’ write-up for additional coverage of Soapbox Derby 2008.

Here are my photos from Bernal Heights Hill Soap Box Derby 2007.

UPDATE 1: There is a rumor that the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center is asking the police to shut down the event.

UPDATE 2: As it turns out the Soapbox Derby was shut down by the San Francisco Police Department and moved to another hill in San Francisco.

poster by Lucky Mule

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Adam Kimmel presents “Claremont” an amazing HD video by Ari Marcopoulos featuring two bearded guys in powder blue suits skateboarding at high speed down Claremont Canyon in the Oakland and Berkeley Hills.

via Jason Kottke

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The Big Picture has a gallery of beautiful photos from the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics which takes place in Beijing, China through August 24th.

See Previously: The Big Picture, A News Photography Blog by Boston.com

photo by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

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The US Air Guitar Championships National Finals take place this Friday, August 8th at The Grand Ballroom (part of The Regency Center) in San Francisco. The winners will go on to the Air Guitar World Championships in Oulu, Finland.

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