Prompted by the outpouring of love for Bob Sapp, Galley Reader H.B. sends along this link to a clip, featuring Ernest Hoost, from a Japanese show:

The “silent library” is a recurring theme in a comedy program called gaki no tsukai yaarahende. This episode features Ernesto Hoost. I
believe Sapp beat him once, though Hoost has been a K-1 champion a number of times.

This Jody Bottum essay about a series of kids books may be the most beautiful thing I’ve read this year:

There’s a kind of negative sound a model rocket makes after you throw the switch or light the fuse, a sort of indrawn breath as the spark disappears into the touchhole.

For an instant the whole rickety contraption—dunce-hat top, stove-pipe body, shark-tail fins—seems to shrink back like one of those wide-eyed girls on the cover of a 1940s Amazing Stories as the tentacles of the space monster stretch toward her scoop-necked blouse. Then with a screech of exhalation, the rocket begins to lift, straining from the metal-tubing frame to climb through the blue sky toward the black of space: faster and faster, too fast to see, a parabolic smoke trail penciling its passage. And maybe, if everything goes right, at the end there’s this little poof and the handkerchief parachute pops from the nose and floats the bombard gently home to earth: a victory, an achievement—a marker laid down, with a surveyor’s precision, for a world in which things work.

Except that it hardly ever did go right. The ignition spark would fail, or the flight would start to corkscrew, or the rocket wouldn’t climb more than a few inches, thrashing against the frame like a demented squirrel until it finally flipped over and burned itself out burrowing into the ground. Besides, metal tubing was expensive, and the frame was probably rusty tiebar, those knobby metal sticks that reinforce concrete, filched from a construction site and strung together with baling wire and duct tape—for baling wire and duct tape were the fallbacks and the fix-alls for every one of the after-school rocketeers: the young inventors, the proto-geeks, the science boys.

You almost certainly knew some of them, if you are of a certain age. They were the ones in your algebra class drawing suspension bridges and cloverleaf freeway interchanges in the margins of their spiral-bound notebooks. They understood all about slide rules and ham radios and those physics-lab gizmos that sparked and hissed and made your hair stand up with static electricity so you looked just like Lon Cheney. Mad! you’d howl, They said I was mad! while the science teacher was out of the room. And the girls would giggle, but the science boys would look down at the careful cross-hatchings in their notebooks, because it wasn’t funny to them. It was real, the way things worked. The way things wanted to work.

Theirs was a world of the kind of stuff army-navy surplus stores used to stock on the dusty tables way in the back: leftover radar parts from Korea and oversized walkie-talkies in olive drab—Press To Talk, Switch NOT Depressed While Receiving—and metal detectors like mop-handled soup plates and Geiger counters and Breast-Plate Microphone Holders for Wireless Set WS-19 and vacuum tubes and radio headphones and manuals on COMSEC and Morse code. Theirs was the erector-set cosmos of Popular Mechanics, with its pictures of moonwheels and frictionless bearings, and its ads for kits to put a sleek fiberglass body—As Aerodynamic as a Porsche!—on the chassis of a Volkswagen Beetle, and its stories about how some credulous banker in Spokane had been suckered again by con men with a perpetual-motion machine.

Part of the attraction may have been the Tomorrowland utopia the technology seemed to promise, with its glimpses of a Jetsonian future: the People-Mover! the Paperless Office! the Self-Cleaning Corningware Stove Top! the Robots That Will Serve Us Coffee in the Sparkling Comfort of Our Space-Age Homes! And part of it was the sheer gadgetry: the fetish of the accessory that made, for instance, a 1960s shutterbug ache for all the telephoto doohickeys and widgets in the mail-order catalogue that came every other month from that We-Have-It-All! camera emporium in New York City.

But an underappreciated element, I’ve always thought, was the language, the nuts-and-bolts poetry in all those pre-computer words: a kind of rhetorical gluttony that might have driven Rimbaud mad—that did drive Kipling mad as he scribbled down stories filled with Scottish engineers and ship’s boilers and No. 12 steam-fitting wrenches and the work of the men who actually make things work. For the American science boys, it was oscilloscopes and cathode rays, diodes and dynamos, capacitors and step-down transformers. Or the great mechanical words they got to use: axial force and momentum, vector and differential, tension and torsion.

There’s more. Enjoy.

Blog Crush on Madonna:

Someone put some pictures from the Madonna concert last night in Los Angeles on their live journal page, and here are a few of the pictures on Madonna being “crucified” during the show while wearing a crown of thorns. The problem of course is that I’m so uptight, and her shocking “in your face” attitude is too much for me and the other stuffy blue bloods at the yacht club to handle. That’s the only possible reason to not love stuff like this. In fact, when I first heard, my monocle popped from eye and fell into my champagne glass and I fainted on one of the peacocks.

It seemed inevitable that Vito Spanafore would meet his demise at the hands of his brother-in-law, Phil Leotardo (pool stick and all). But did you know there were several alternate endings to last night’s Sopranos and not even Joe Gannascoli knew how his character, “Gay Vito,” would fare? Just one of many interesting tidbits in the current New York Observer. Upon learning just how gay Vito would be, other actors, including Tony Sirico (Paulie Walnuts) and James Gandolfini, expressed their concerns and even opposition to it. But, as Gannascoli reveals to the Observer‘s Sara Vilkomerson, it’s one thing to complain about your character and something else entirely to complain to David Chase.

If you haven’t checked out the K1 fight between Bob Sapp and Kimo yet, get on it. Fast.

And afterwards, go watch this clip of the 348 lb. Sapp on a Japanese game/talk show that looks an awful lot like Matthew’s Moopies from Lost in Translation. The giant, shirtless Sapp chases a bunch of Japanese school girls while eating miniature beach balls. I’m not sure what the point of the game is, but he wins.

Then you can go to Sapp’s YouTube page which has tons of his fight highlights.

This is as good as it gets.

The Washington Times is regularly flogged by those in the know (and even those who merely think they’re in the know) as an awful right-wing rag with few redeeming qualities (sports, local reporting). And fairness requires it be said that at times the Times has more than deserved such harsh reviews. Their pro-Bush campaign coverage in 00 and 04 sometimes verged on fanzine-ish. And yet, because a lot of smart and interesting people are always wandering the docks of journalism in search of work, a few of them have turned up at the Times. Tod Lindberg, now of Policy Review, ran their editorial page for several years. The late Colin Walters managed an always-solid books section with very few resources and little money to pay contributers—a tradition continuing under Carol Herman. And a few ace reporters, Bill Gertz for one, have called the paper home. But even this general defense of the paper seems to have lost its persuasive power as other conservative publications have become more prominent in recent years.

And yet … the underdog paper continues to throw out quality work when you least suspect it. A while back (maybe about two years ago, I can’t remember), Daniel Wattenberg became editor of the weekend entertainment section of the paper—called the “Show” section—and it’s been very good. Take this week’s edition. The front page beautifully parodies the goose-quill manuscript style of the DaVinci Code and shows off cinammon-pink etchings of Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou in a style reminiscent of those silly prophecy drawings from “Alias.” The editorial package features three entertaining articles on the subject, all written from a conservative or rather pro-Christian point of view. One is a straight review of the movie by Christian Toto; another is a sharp little reporting piece on the Christian response to the movie by the prolific Scott Galupo (a really teriffic music writer); and the last is a sidebar listing highlights in the boycott battles between Hollywood and believers. Good writing, sharp point of view without nagging, and a sense of humor. It may not be a match for, say, the Washington Post’s justly celebrated and magnificently staffed and funded Style section (or those of its top-tier competitors like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, or the LA Times) but for a fraction of their cost, it’s better than almost every other newspaper entertainment section I’ve read. Of the second-best, it may be the very best.

Remember the commercial for the original Nintendo RBI Baseball? Here it is in all its glory.

This is my gift to you. It’s a short K1 fight between a former ultimate fighting heavy weight and a monster kickboxer phenom. To get a sense of scale, the little guy in the ring is 250 lbs. The big guy–“Bob,” as the announcers refer to him–goes 346.

The fight only lasts about 4 minutes and you can fast-forward past the break between rounds. But you’ll be rewarded for your patience. Back-hands, axe-handle chops, the double-Kong clap–it’s like watching a live-action Street Fighter.