Monday, May 19, 2008

Mailing It In

Sick as a dog today. (Do dogs really get that sick? Where the heck did that expression come from? It's explained somewhat on the 'net, but not the origins.) So the couple things I really wanted to do just didn't come together.

Instead, I'll just link to this and admit that I don't get it. Not that I won't be there, given the opportunity, but I'm not sure what people are trying to accomplish these days. Doesn't designing a ramp specifically to break a record make the record itself kind of inconsequential? Shouldn't you get more air on a bigger ramp? (And regardless of records, Mat(t) Hoffman is a legend—he rode a monster ramp first—and Jamie Bestwick is the best. No amount of Red Bull money will change that.)

Funny that they're doing it in Central Park rather than Woodward or somewhere in Cali—I suppose the hope is that it'll get more media coverage in New York. And I assume it'll get some play on New York 1, as well as on ESPN. Unfortunately I'd guess the newspaper coverage will be minimal. Unless, of course, something goes terribly wrong.

So good luck, Kevin. Hope it means a lot to you.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have to admit I like the idea ... I even like Megaramp ... just not sure about Kevin Robinson.

Anonymous said...

Danny Way has killed vert, you can stick your megaramps where the sun don't shine.

Anonymous said...

I love the language they use to describe it all “Innovational” “Experiment” “Committed family man”. Like any of that matters. What everyone wants to see is someone nearly kill themselves surrounded by lots of corporate hoardings.

Anonymous said...

There are several expressions of the form sick as a ..., that date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sick as a dog is actually the oldest of them, recorded from 1705; it is probably no more than an attempt to give force to a strongly worded statement of physical unhappiness. It was attached to a dog, I would guess, because dogs often seem to have been linked to things considered unpleasant or undesirable; down the years they have had an incredibly bad press, linguistically speaking (think of dog tired, dog in the manger, dog’s breakfast, go to the dogs, dog Latin — big dictionaries have long entries about all the ways that dog has been used in a negative sense).

At various times cats, rats and horses have been also dragged in to the expression, though an odd thing is that horses can’t vomit; one nineteenth-century writer did suggest that this version was used “when a person is exceedingly sick without vomiting”. The strangest member of the set was used by Jonathan Swift in 1731: “Poor Miss, she’s sick as a Cushion, she wants nothing but stuffing” (stop laughing at the back).

The modern sick as a parrot recorded from the 1970s — at one time much overused by British sportsmen as the opposite of over the moon — refers to a state of deep mental depression rather than physical illness; this perhaps comes from instances of parrots contracting psittacosis and passing it to their human owners.

From http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-sic1.htm

Anonymous said...

100% chance he'll flex at some point in this event.

Anonymous said...

"100% chance he'll flex at some point in this event."

agreed. 100% chance he'll also work in how hard he works out, the fact he doesn't eat junk food, or maybe how much of a good karate fighter he is too.


We get it Kevin, you're in better shape than just about all of us. No need to be a dick about it.

Seriously though, hope this turns out alright. Kevin seems to be a good guy and I like that he's never been a "natural" at riding but fights hard for every trick he learned. He was never amazing when he was younger, but fought for it until he was a great vert rider. That's respectable, whether you like his riding style or not.

Anonymous said...

flex and a jock flinch

Russ said...

It just seems that a lot more can go wrong than go right—and as usual, it kind of misses the point. Hoffman's highest air wasn't the coolest thing ever because of the precise height he reached, but because he did it at all. And I loved the Emmett-Brown-on-crack propulsion ideas, like hooking up the chainsaw/weedwhacker engine and getting towed by a motorcycle. Kevin might break Hoffman's "record," I just don't think anyone (with the exception of Kevin himself and the Red Bull people) cares.

Russ said...

Also, I'm totally sick as a parrot.

Anonymous said...

Redbull should pay Sean Burns to drop off the top of the ramp to flat, or get Blackman to 3 off it in an attempt to make this event a little more relevant to where bmx is at these days.

bk said...

he should have to do it with love handles.

Anonymous said...

How about a post on brands that use their logo as an integral part of the design? Like tires, how technical is the designer being when he can place the logo of company on the tread pattern 42 times? Same for grips. I find it amusing when the first criteria for designing new products is where and how often to put the logo on them.