January 25, 2011
Speed Golf is a sport started in California in 1979 by American runner Steve Scott and which involves completing a golf course in the lowest combination of strokes and time. The sport is played in North America, Europe and Japan, and major tournaments are telecast by channels such as ESPN and The Golf Channel. Players run between shots and generally carry as few as one or as many as six clubs. A player’s score is calculated by adding minutes plus strokes, so a round of 90 completed in 50 minutes and 30 seconds would compute to a score of 140:30. The lowest score in competition is believed to have been shot by professional Christopher Smith at the Chicago Speedgolf Classic on October 16, 2005. Smith shot 65 in just 44:06 for a speed golf score of 109:06. Rules and etiquette are generally the same for speed golf and regular golf with minor exceptions. Speed golfers are allowed to putt with the flagstick left in the hole, but are expected to rake bunkers, fix ball marks and conform to the dress code.
Speed Golf is sometimes contrasted with Cross-country BigBall, in which players use soccer balls and baseball bats. Because the course and goals are chosen by the participants, Cross-country BigBall etiquette varies depending on whether the theater is a wooded or residential area. Both sports require substantial physical stamina. Fitness and time savings are obvious benefits of Speed Golf. However, many players also report improved golf, typically shooting nearly the same scores despite running and using only a few clubs. Crowded courses are not conducive to play, so many Speed Golfers head out at the crack of dawn or during the cold days of winter when empty courses await and the temperature is suited for running.
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January 25, 2011
Prole drift, short for proletarian drift, is a trend in which products, styles or other aspects of culture previously considered to be upscale or upper class become popular among working class people. Prole drift can also go the other way, as when things that were once the purview of the working class become fashionable in the middle or upper classes. The term was coined by, American literary historian, Paul Fussell in 1983 to describe the phenomenon of most aspects of high culture eventually joining the lowest common denominator.
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January 25, 2011
A chav is a stereotype of certain people in the United Kingdom. Also known as a charver in Yorkshire and North East England, ‘chavs’ are said to be aggressive teenagers, of white working class background, who repeatedly engage in anti-social behaviour such as street drinking, drug abuse and rowdiness, or other forms of juvenile delinquency. The derivative Chavette has been used to refer to females.
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January 25, 2011
Ambient 1: Music for Airports is an ambient album by Brian Eno released in 1978. Of four albums released on Eno’s own, then new, Ambient label, Music for Airports was the first to carry explicitly the name ‘ambient’ – a term which he coined to differentiate his minimalistic approach to the album’s material and ‘the products of the various purveyors of canned music.’
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January 25, 2011
In the context of the World Wide Web, content farms are companies (or their divisions) that employ large numbers of (often freelance) writers to generate large amounts of textual content. The articles in content farms are written by human beings but may not be written by a specialist in the area. In one of Google’s own promotional videos the majority of the links available were actually produced at content farms. Content farms contain huge number of articles. For instance, Demand Media will soon be publishing 1 million items a month, the equivalent of four English-language Wikipedias a year. Big content farms are expensive resources, sold for many millions.
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January 25, 2011
A fad, sometimes called a trend, meme or a craze, is any form of behavior that develops among a large population and is collectively followed with enthusiasm for some period, generally as a result of the behavior’s being perceived as novel in some way. A fad is said to ‘catch on’ when the number of people adopting it begins to increase rapidly, but they fade quickly once the perception of novelty is gone. Though the term trend may be used interchangeably with fad, a fad is generally considered a fleeting behavior whereas a trend is considered to be a behavior that evolves into a relatively permanent change.
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January 25, 2011
The Monty Hall problem is a famous problem in probability science. The problem is based on a game show, ‘Let’s Make a Deal,’ and is named for the show’s host, Monty Hall. In the problem, there are three doors. A car is behind one door and goats behind the other two doors.
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January 25, 2011
Happy slapping is a fad in which someone assaults an unwitting victim while others record the assault. The ease and general availability of video cameras in mobile phones means that such attacks need not be planned carefully beforehand and are more easily watched and circulated for comedy purposes afterwards. The practice started in the South London London Borough of Lewisham. Initially the attacks were, as the phrase would have us believe, fairly minor pranks … As the craze spread the attacks became more vicious – often serious assaults known in British legal circles as grievous bodily harm.
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January 25, 2011
A robot jockey is commonly used on camels in camel racing as a replacement for human jockeys. Developed since 2004, the robotic jockeys are slowly phasing out the use of human jockeys, which, in the case of camel racing in the Middle East, often employs small children who reportedly suffer repeated systemic human rights abuses. In response to international condemnation of such abuses, the nations of Qatar and the UAE have banned the use of human jockeys in favor of robots.
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