Unsolicited Advice

I was perusing a bunch of sports medicine stuff the other day, and I finally remembered to dig up the normal range of motion for the major joints. "Hip flexion: Flex knee and bring thigh close to abdomen," it says. "110-130 degrees." Well, given a few minutes to stretch, I can get my knee hooked around the back of my shoulder, which degree-wise is something in excess of a hundred and eighty. "Internal hip rotation: Flex knee and swing away from midline. 40 degrees." Sitting upright, I can press the top of one thigh to the floor, bend my knee all the way, and hook the arch of my foot over my bicep so that I can get a direct look at whatever part of my foot I've blistered this time. My toes rest just short of my shoulder. Fairly comfortable, actually. "Shoulder vertical extension: Raise arm straight backwards. 60 degrees. Shoulder horizontal extension: Swing arms horizontally backwards. 45 degrees." I crack my back by pushing both ...

If you've ever looked at a photograph and asked, "Oh god, do I really look like that?" the answer is almost certainly no. Nobody looks like they do in photos. Not even professional models. Especially not professional models. Photography is two-dimensional. It cuts both depth and time out of your perception of the subject. It's hard to judge how quickly things curve towards or away from the camera, and it's easy to snap the shutter at the one instant, right in the middle of a movement, that looks bizarre and awkward. You need a lot of practice to light things such that the shadows suggest the shape that's actually there -- or at least the shape you want -- and you still spend a lot of time sifting through proofs and throwing away all the ones that look weird. I routinely get back lots of 300 proofs from a shoot, of which like ten are worth showing to the outside world. Most of what makes people cringe about pictures is that they don't look like the imag...

Quite a while ago, I was gifted a copy of "Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes". I poked at it and made some comments about the writing style here , but I am a terrible person, especially when it comes to things that have no formal deadlines, and it's taken me this long to figure out how to make my draft of the book report into a readable document. I admit to having little patience with these sorts of books. Aside from resisting the urge to snap something about not teaching your grandmother to suck eggs, a lot of them are boring. You can only reword "pay attention to your surroundings and remember to think about stuff" -- which is the actual mechanic of the trick -- so many times before your 300 page magnum opus  starts to get tedious. Konnikova peppers hers with bits of memoir, which to me are the more interesting part. She also shovels in a lot of pop psychology, so if you're tired of hearing about how you can only hold X things in working memo...

I managed to finish Johnny Weir's book some time ago. Seriously, you need to see this thing. It is very pink. And he is wearing one hell of a pair of shoes on the cover. High-fashion ankle-breakers, if I ever saw them. Some of the reviews charge that the book sounds immature in places. A fair cop, but irrelevant. It's a memoir, not a scholarly biography; he's putting these things down as he remembers them happening, and during most of them he was suffering from an inconvenient but common medical condition called 'being a goddamn teenager'. He is quite able to apply hindsight, and sometimes hops back into the present to comment that he'd just done something of consummate stupidity in the story he was telling. He was also occasionally not an idiot at that age. He recounts a moment when he was maybe nineteen-ish, when he had the sudden realization that his crowds of adoring fangirls were fawning and helpful and showering him with presents not because he was bet...

Boston lost its mind last week, when it snowed again. My phone buzzed all day with T-Alerts telling me that buses and trains were delayed by weather. I still don't know why this happens. It's only snowed all winter, every winter, for the past 400 years. I'm pretty sure that Precipitation isn't one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but I never have gotten all the way through the Bible. Maybe it's been updated -- Precipitation, Traffic, Banking Fees, and No Signal. I assume Death is still current. I went to the library, because they had some of my holds in, and secretly, I like walking around in the winter weather. There's a bunch of candids on YouTube of some of the skaters I've been nosing around rehearsing for a show, and in one of them, right as they finish a number, Stéphane Lambiel decides it's time for a little lie-down. He executes what I can only describe as a good-natured fwomp! flat backwards onto the ice. This is about how I feel abou...

I'm a nitwit sometimes. I've been thinking for a while that it's difficult to know whether I'm doing anything right in the dance studio because I can only see myself in the mirror in flashes. I can see that I look roughly right when I do the 180° to start an axel, but after that I'm too busy trying to make myself spin to know what I look like in the air. It dawned on me, after far too long, that my phone has a goddamn camera in it. In my defense, I spent years doing my best not to own a phone with a goddamn camera in it, and nine times out of ten, I only remember this one can do that when I accidentally hit the shutter button and interrupt my solitaire game with a sudden, puzzling view of the floor of the train car. (The other 10% of the time, it's because I've developed an urgent medical need to take pictures of rats.) So now I've some idea what I look like when I do this, and while I won't be posting any of these until I look less like I have som...

For those of you who aren't good at converting words into movement -- and because I'm doing animated ads for Circlet now and need practice at giffing things without being completely incompetent -- here are a couple of animation showing what the feet do for an axel jump. Specifically, this is what my feet are up to. For a counterclockwise jumper, mirror everything. Everything starts going backwards with a crossover. Crossovers are how you get going a million miles an hour, especially around a curve. Ice skates are broadly Newtonian; objects in motion will stay in motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an outside force. Since the walls of the rink curve, you also want to curve, unless you're dead-set on embarrassing yourself by smacking into the boards. To do this, you plant the foot on the outside of the curve on the ice and never lift it  -- a bit counter-intuitive for hockey players who are used to shoving off sideways to get going in a straight line. The insid...