Alternative TV

A little tribute to the Outdoor Life Network. My roommate Joel is an insane outdoorsman: he camps, rock climbs, and is an awesome mountain biker. He also loves watching OLN. I had never heard of this channel before, but I’ve gotta say it’s quite entertaining.

Tonight we saw a swimming marathon, in which the athletes swam for 28 miles. Yes, totally insane.

Then there was some crazy downhill mountain biking.

Now we’re watching this supertruck off-road race taking place in Mexico. It is ridiculous. There are like no laws so the fans line the dirt road, mere inches away from these trucks that come screaming along at like 70 miles an hour. It is jaw-dropping to behold. And it gets crazier: parts of the race take place on the highway, a little two-lane affair. But it isn’t blocked off, so there are normal civilian vehicles still driving on it. So the trucks have to zoom at 100+ mph around and between cars going half their speed — in both directions. It’s like a video game. Hoooooly crap.

Umesh and I took a break from work today to go toss disc at Memorial Glade. The clocks on Sather Tower have been undergoing renovation for the past couple of weeks, and today we saw two guys scaling one of the faces, detaching the minute arm. It was really cool to see this massive metal vector slowly drifting down, accompanied by two spider-men.

Anyway, no one else was using the middle of the glade, so we had fun doing some crazy throws (not awu-style, of course :), but ultimate-style ones: inside-outs, runners, floaters and stuff) and running around making melodramatic catches. When we finished throwing, two dudes sitting on the side of the glade asked us if we could keep playing. We were like, “Huh?” and then explained that they were betting on us. “Huh?” we grunted again, and they clarified by displaying their bottles of alcohol and explaining that when I dropped the disc, one guy drank, and when Umesh dropped, the other guy drank. It was pretty funny. We joked that if they had told us about this earlier, we wouldn’t have tried so hard :)….

Still, man, that’s what summer is all about: two guys sitting the grass, drinking at four in the afternoon, betting on whatever is going on. Somehow I feel like even though I’m not doing any work, I’m still working too hard :).

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