i rented the huntsville public pool for a private hour

jeff and johnny were the only guys who could make it to the pool that night but i was happy to have a couple of buddies to enjoy the pool with.

wish there had been more.

the public had cleared out but the people moving the ropes were girls. since i'd paid for an hour beginning at 8 i registered a complaint. i had to explain to the guy why we didn't want any girls in the building, without looking gay. i told him what Jesus said about lust and he went away. whatever works. we got in the
pool, all to ourselves, aside from a lifeguard in his seat 300 feet away, at about 8:15.

the diving boards are adjustable, changing their periods of oscillation from 4hz to 0.5hz. unfortunately i didn't notice that and chose one that was on maximum looseness. REALLY messed with my timing, so my first dives weren't photogenic.

eventually i tightened it all the way up, which gave me tons of spring, and tons more time in the air than i was used to. again. since i've been doing full flips with a half twist (keeps your face towards the ground at all times) on a trampoline since 1986 i did one off this newly tightened board. what with the extra time in the air i didn't account for, i had enough time to add another quarter turn involuntarily before meeting the water.

felt like one good whack with a belt. a four foot wide belt square across my back. as i was sinking underwater i thought "i'm in relatively cool water - that should be soothing the sting." nope.

in my mind all week i'd been doing a double flip off the 10 foot board - the first flip with a half twist, then a back layout.

it was my first time off a high dive board so i started with the just bounce and see how long it is until you hit the water. i had time to read a dear abby column before i hit. it's the longest freefall i've ever had. i've done a 150 foot bunjee jump but you're not 'free' there. it messed with my timing because i've been doing full-sized beds, trampolines, and low-dive boards for years. but a few never-rotate feet-first experiments and i was ready.

i had to settle for a single front-flip off the 10-foot board, going feet first. along with a certain piece of standard baseball equipment to protect against inadvertent belly flops, i'd been wearing a nose clip to prevent the inevitable rush of water up my nose (somehow water finds its way into my nostrils, even after my massive chin has run stall for it), but was told by the lifeguard that they aren't permitted as i could get hurt. not that nine-pound-a-gallon water rushing into my head at 30 mph with only a soft membrane stopping it from piercing my very BRAIN could be a problem.

one thing about diving off the high dive board, especially when you're already breathing hard - you go farther down in the water than you're used to, which means that by the time you should be surfacing for another breath you still have eight feet to go up. very unnerving. you start to think "ANY DAY NOW!!!!" when your second upstroke doesn't reach the surface. and fight to keep from involuntarily trying to inhale when there's nothing but water.

that's what i call FUN.

it's also a good idea to know exactly what you're going to do BEFORE you leave the diving board. once off the high dive i realized i didn't know if i was going for a half or a full flip. totally lost it and landed on my shins and the tops of my feet, with my face hitting parallel to the surface. what with paying some doctor in 1993 to cut 16 slits in my corneas i'm not so sure my eyeballs can take as much pressure as they could in 1992 so i worried about popping it, but upon opening my eyes underwater they both proved to be still working. much to my relief.

just can't get enough of this.

the fatigue was much the same try-to-scrape-energy-from-ANYWHERE exhaustion as the 5k i ran in chattanooga 2 saturdays ago with no preparation, except that there wasn't that feeling like your knees were two batons balanced fragile-ly on each other. kind of like hauling hay for six hours in 120 degree humidity, but without the joint pain.

at one point near the end of the evening, jeff had wandered out into the five foot section of the pool, and i'd just dived and worked my way out there too just to stand and take a break from the chore of swimming. jeff comes over and hollars that
he'll race me across the pool. i take him on, and dash towards the other side of the pool (going widthwise - it's shorter). i'm thinking to myself "wouldn't it be cool to beat JEFF HARWELL in a RACE?". we were furiously inching along at 0.024mph in chest deep water (chin deep in jeff's case). i had started with a ten foot lead that i'd stretched to eight feet in a matter of seconds. it's a fluid dynamics fact that drag is proportional to the SQUARE of the cross sectional area, and seeing that i'm a square myself that extends my cross sectional area to be jeff's cross sectional area raised to the fourth power. by that time i realized that i was effectively no nearer the far side of the pool than i was when i started, so i turn to jeff and say "if i expend ANY energy it's gonna be diving." an excellently more efficient use of my remaining effort and staggeringly logical, i thought. he agreed, so the race was off.

i'd started noticing that the force of diving into the water from ten feet was ripping my arms down from the superman break-the-water position to the flag-in-the-wind floppy position by my side. suprising, i know, since it would appear that these oak-beam shoulders of mine could easily rip apart a taft phone book. but without arms creasing the water like the blade of a knife cutting jello that you're pulling
apart on each side with your second and third hand while you cut, that freed my head to hit the water squarely, much the sensation of someone taking a beaver tail and hitting you over the top of the head. that was getting old. i was exhausted to the point of dizziness, johnny was bleeding buckets of safe, AIDS-free blood from his big toe, and jeff was pondering running a quick 10k before bed when he got home.

it was time well spent, a box well checked, and not something i'm planning on doing again soon.

klm

It Must Be True! I Saw It In A Poll! - by Jeff Harwell

For those who can distinguish between useful and useless information (which is probably more people than are given credit), the excessive reliance of news organizations on polling data has long been a major irritant. Especially when such polling data seems to be for the blatant purpose of influencing, rather than reflecting, public opinion.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have much use for polling data that reflects public opinion either. So what if a CBS News/New York Times poll were to reveal that a clear majority of Americans agree with the University of Colorado president when she says that a certain vulgar term referring to women can be used as a term of endearment? Does that mean husbands across the land would be safe in greeting their wives with that term when they get home tonight?

Of course not. Polls do not establish facts or truth. They merely reflect the respondents’ perception of what is factual or truthful. The fact that sixty-eight percent of Americans might believe that Burt Reynolds’ hair is real would not make it so. But it just might convince some who had believed otherwise to question whether their earlier belief was justified. And one can’t help but wonder if that is the intent anyway.

“Perception is reality” is a phrase often used in political discussions nowadays. And I can’t help but notice that it sounds a lot like, “Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth” – a sentiment expressed by Hitler’s propaganda expert, Joseph Goebbels. Neither statement is true in the strictest sense. Truth, lies, and reality do not change no matter how much statements to the contrary are repeated.

Rather than revealing any facts about truth, such statements reveal the ability to influence and alter people’s perception of what is the truth. They go a long way in explaining, for example, why, despite the fact that the economy has created nearly 1.5 million jobs over the last nine months, fifty-seven percent of registered voters thought that it had actually lost jobs over the same period.

Of course, ultimately, the fault for misperceptions like this falls at the feet of those whose beliefs such polls reflect. They have allowed themselves to believe what is not true because they heard the right people say it loud and long enough. Yet, at the same time, those people who have said it cannot absolve themselves of their responsibilities so easily. All else being equal, the people should have the right to expect that what they hear out of the media to be factual – and relevant.

But think about it. Do you ever hear anyone who cites such polling data, either in the papers or on the airwaves, make any attempt at explaining what their listeners should do with the information they have just shared? No, they can’t. Because that would either require an admission (“Now, the numbers I’ve just cited to you have absolutely no bearing on what it’s really like out there whatsoever.”), or a confession (“We’ve provided you with this data so as to merely make you believe things are like we wish they were.”), neither of which would do much for the stature of the “fourth estate” in the public eye.

But in reality, the constant citing of polls itself suggests a cheapening of the value of many of the media outlets. It amounts to the substitution of opinion (remember, they are called public opinion polls) for actual news reporting.

And it’s not hard to see why such would be appealing for a reporter, anchor, or producer with an agenda. The reporting of news is the reporting of facts and events. Facts and events are unalterable, no matter how much one might wish they could be altered in order to convince people that his world view is right.

Opinion, on the other hand, especially the opinion of the masses, is quite malleable. It can be molded in any number of ways – including by simply telling people that most of their fellow citizens believe something to be true, whether it is or not. The nature of humanity is such that, if this is continually reported and repeated – with no acknowledgement that it has little to no basis in any documented factual information – the masses will be drawn to the majority opinion, or candidate.

Ironically enough, if many of the media outlets used the time that they devoted to citing polling data in order to cite actual facts, that alone would almost certainly change the outcome of the polls with which they are so infatuated. The fact that they don’t suggests a change in the mission of the media – either conscious or unconscious –from reporting facts to influencing perceptions. From relaying “the story,” to creating it.

Jeff Harwell

what would you pay to watch someone walk in a straight line?

that's what people in the music business are asking you to do.

churning out stuff for $18/CD that is nothing that any joe blow on the street can't hear once and immediately do himself.

maybe there was some quality in COMING UP with it, but copying it is immensely easy.

we pay someone to do things we can't do ourselves, like fix a leaky faucet, change a timing belt, or remove an appendix. why, then, do we give our money away to hear somebody do something we can instantly copy with no particular skill or even effort?

says me.

kevan moore's ten word marriage seminar

girls: "tell him what's on your mind in DICTIONARY english".
guys: "LISTEN!"