Muster

In 1989 Thomas Muster, a young tennis pro, had just finished a five-set win over Yannick Noah in the semi-finals of the Lipton Championships and was fiddling with his gear near his car. By which we merely mean he was checking his junk. By which me mean his balls and stuff. TENNIS EQUIPMENT, alright !?! 

Not like this

It was then that a drunk driver decided to park his car where Muster had parked his. Without respecting tradition and, you know, waiting till Muster had vacated the space. When you're drunk, you really think out of the box. The crash rammed the bumper of Muster's car right into his left knee, tearing out more stuff than you'd learn about in a week of med school.

People deal with crippling accidents in various ways. When told they may never walk again, many lose all heart and become shadows of their old selves. Some stoically plough on, reconciling themselves to to their fate. A few bravely meet the challenge head on, heroically battling till they triumph against all odds. And then there's Muster, who treated the whole affair as some sort of minor nuisance.

Muster, seconds after the accident

Almost immediately after getting discharged, he and his coach built a chair that allowed Muster to sit in it and practice hitting balls around on court. Unable to get him to treat it with the respect it deserved, the injury suffered a crisis of confidence and sulked off pronto. Less than 6 months after his knee was twisted off, Muster was back PLAYING PROFESSIONAL TENNIS. In less than an year, he was in the Top 10. And that wasn't the end of it. By the time he retired from the sport, he had won a Grand Slam, earned a reputation for being well nigh unbeatable on clay courts and been A WORLD NUMBER 1. The turnaround was so amazing that he had to deal with (unfounded) accusations of drug abuse from various players. Our take on it is that he's Austrian, and if he's from the same cradle as another famous Austrian .....

That's right, he's probably a frickin' machine.

A Thought On Craigslist

I wonder if anyone has ever looked at the environmental impact of sites such as Ebay and Craigslist. Considering that reusing stuff is the best way to cut down on environmental impact, and that that's precisely what both these sites do, their role in helping save the environment must be quite substantial. Reusing electronics, especially, must be keeping an impressive amount of harmful chemicals out of landfills and water bodies.

This seems to hold particularly in the case of Craigslist which encourages local trading and thus keeps shipping to a minimum. It would be really interesting to see someone do research to try and quantify this impact.

Toilet Humour

I generally refrain from simply copying and pasting from other sites but sometimes I find something like this and, well...

This was an actual letter sent to the Indian Railway Department in 1909 by a certain Mr. Okhil Sen:

“I am arrive by passenger train Ahmedpur station and my belly is too much
swelling with jackfruit. I am therefore went to privy. Just I doing the
nuisance that guard making whistle blow for train to go off and I am running
with lotah in one hand and dhoti in the next when I am fall over and
expose all my shocking to man and female women on plateform. I am got leaved
at Ahmedpur station.
This too much bad, if passenger go to make dung that dam guard not wait
train five minutes for him. I am therefore pray your honour to make big fine
on that guard for public sake. Otherwise I am making big report to papers.”

(lotah - a vessel or pot for carrying water; dhoti - a garment wrapped around the lower body)

Bullish

You know how, in martial arts demos, there is this one section where some guy lies down on the floor, someone places a plank on his belly and then someone else rides a motorcycle over the whole lot !?! And then the crowd goes bananas and he's declared the absolute shit !?! You know why he's praised !?! Because he's had a fucking motorcycle go over his belly. Seriously, it's kind of an achievement. Try it sometime. Now remove the plank and use a truck. What's that !?! You'd die !?! You wuss. Meet Antonio.

Antonio was minding his own business - playing on the street with the other kids like his parents taught him to - when a parked truck backed up over him. Let's take a minute to go over that. The brakes didn't fail. The driver wasn't speeding. A truck that was parked on the side of the road BACKED UP over the 11 year old boy. That's not just bad luck - that's a personal dare from Satan.

The accident left him with broken legs and broken ribs. Also, a pierced liver and injured diaphragm. And a punctured lung. Look, just think of an organ, it was probably screwed. He was in a coma for days and in the hospital for almost an year. The doctors overseeing his recovery insisted he WAS dead. They even left various odd bits and pieces of infectious equipment in him to make sure...

"Yeah, he's a goner."
"Only a matter of a day or two, folks."
"OK, he's holding but he won't be off the life support."
"Alright, but he'll never walk..."

"HE'LL NEVER PLAY, HE'LL NEVER PLAY!!!

"...AAAARRRRGHHHHH!!!"

Honestly, we'd have been impressed if he were just the fucking referee.

Two decades after staring down Death, Antonio Rodrigo "Minotauro" Nogueira has won the UFC heavyweight title and the PRIDE heavyweight title and along the way, earned the right to use a fantasy character nickname without being laughed at as a deluded nerd. Rather unsurprisingly, he's known for the ability to take massive amounts of punishment early on and then turn it up and beat the crap out of his fatigued opponents. We're not sure why his opponents even try. How the hell do you plan on winning a fight against a guy who shrugged off an assault by a truck as a kid !?!

On The Bus To Granville...

I was on the 99 to Granville on Sunday morning. In front of me were seated two fairly young men, who were holding an earnest conversation. About religion. One of them was a believer, the other was a staunch atheist. I'm not really religious, but I found myself siding with the believer - mostly because the atheist was a bit too smug. And as happens so often in these cases (to me, anyway), I started arguing my case - silently, of course, all in my head. Then the two of them got off and I focused my attentions on a baby who was trying to eat an Adidas shoe.

Not an Adidas shoe

I mulled over the argument over lunch and found myself fairly intrigued and disturbed in equal measure. The atheist's argument had been that belief in God was wrong because it was unscientific - that is, science did not support or verify the presence of a God. Also, God's decrees, as enforced by various organised religions, were, he claimed, the reason for all the wars and general misery in the world.

I have a problem with that view. Firstly, if God doesn't exist, then the decrees were written by people. And well, if they were written by people, they would have been written and enacted anyway, regardless of whether they were attributed to God or not. 

Of course, decrees that do not have divine backing are less likely to carry weight. However, that works both ways. Just at the bad decrees are more likely to be ignored if they come from just a human source, so are the good ones. And that was, more or less, what disturbed:

Without divine backing, does morality carry any weight !?!

When someone steals and gets away with it, he has committed a crime - but only because the fairly arbitrary laws of the land say so. Did he do wrong, though !?! If you believe in God, the answer is simple enough - yes, he did, because God says stealing is wrong. But what if there is no God to say so !?! Then it's just the opinion of some humans (most specifically the guy who was robbed) against that of another human (the thief).

Another question. Atheists claim belief in God is wrong because there is no scientific basis for His existence. But if we are to use that as the yardstick for concept validity, then, well, what is the scientific basis for justice !?! Or, for that matter, morality itself !?!