Where Safety Is Replaced by Possibility

The adrenaline hits the moment you decide to take that leap of faith.  At that moment you not only need to trust your equipment, more importantly you need to trust your body to handle the forces of reaching terminal velocity. Throughout the ages, man has looked to push his body beyond what are accepted at the time to be most extreme measures in order to release what is possibly the most addictive drug, a simple natural chemical known as the hormone epinephrine or adrenaline. Don’t fool yourself; this drug is known to produce an addiction on par with heroin, to the point where soon a person needs this feeling to live. Cliff diving, bungee jumping, big mountain skiing, skydiving, tow-in surfing, hang gliding, and BASE jumping are examples of how risking your life for an adrenaline fix can also be called a sport. And it's just amazing to think about the people who actually attempted these sports first.

While bungee jumping can be traced back to the Aztecs, the New Zealander  AJ Hackett was the first commercial jumper. Laird Hamilton is known as the co-inventor and the poster child of tow-in surfing, which is the utilization of jetskis or zodiac boats to tow surfers into waves ranging from 70-100 feet. Andre-Jacques Garnerin  became the father of skydiving when he made parachute jumps from a hot-air balloon in 1797. These are just examples of the iconic figures who made a decision to defy physics, and to a certain extent nature, but like all great evolutions there have been countless other innovators along the way. The world of extreme sports has been altered, elevated, and expanded by individuals willing to progress the definition of what is humanly possible until these athletes are literally threading the needle of life. A lot of these individuals, like for example Shane McConkey who was recently the central figure of a Playboy article about how Extreme Sports are exploding into the mainstream, die pushing the envelope. However, currently no living human personifies this necessity to try to push the limit and progress extreme sports and what is possible like Jeb Corliss.

First off, how fucking cool is it to have your job title be Professional skydiver and BASE (Buildings, Aerials, Spans, and Earth, the four categories that make up this sport) jumper? As man who loves his job, he  continues to push his profession by adding different elements.  He's jumped off everything from the Eiffel Tower to Seattle’s Space needle. He's almost died many times, broken countless bones, and has an admitted suicide wish and so he continues on like a fiend in search that last hit. In fact, he risked a steady paycheck as the host for the show Stunt Junkies when he was arrested for attempting to BASE jump off of the Empire State Building. He was restrained, arrested, fired from the hosting gig, and got three years’ probation, but it would've been worth it to him if he'd at least gotten off. From an early age he had a typical male desire to fly without the constraints of technology and yet he's gotten closer to self propelled flight than any human. High risk, high reward appears to be his only M.O. 

He was also banned from the Empire State Building for life, which is fucking hilarious. Nobody's done that since King Kong. If you want to comprehend how epic he truly is, check out this video:

 A little something to close the week with a tingle. 

- Kyle

A Moveable Feast for the Eyes: Brain Farm Cinema

I've spent many a blog raving about Travis Rice and THE ART OF FLIGHT and his Supernatural Contest. And he's the best snowboarder in the world right now, there's no doubt about that. But perhaps I haven't given enough attention to Brain Farm Cinema, the production company blowing minds with the visuals, camera trickery, and cinematography never seen before much less in extreme sports videos. But that's just it, they're transcending tradition, they're shooting the most visually stunning images on the planet (which makes their relationship with Rice that much sweeter - it's like Terence Malick and Martin Scorcese combining to shoot a movie starring Leo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp and Daniel Day Lewis) while eschewing the mainstream limitations usually put on such skilled artists. Other cinematographers kowtow to the Hollywood line for a house in the Palisades while Brain Farm is happy shooting simply the most amazing shit on the planet and going home to the life-affirming Tetons in Jackson.

For a little mid-week eye orgy, here's their new reel:

And check out their site to see what they got next that you can get your grubby little paws on. Happy Thursday.

- Ryan

Ryan's Rant #1: L.A. Parking Enforcement

There comes a time in every man's life when he needs to use whatever public forum is available to him to rant about the perceived injustices of life that have smacked him in the face. It used to be a dusty bloke in a shaggy turncoat standing on a box previously filled with soap and screaming about the coming of the devil or the taxation of the Brits or how the south had to defend its land from the carpetbaggers and emancipators of the north (Happy Emancipation Day on Monday). At another time it was made up of hip post-modernists creating their own underground 'zines about being put upon by a parental generation of false-faced WWII survivors with their pathetic housewife dresses and sad lies. Today, we have the blog. God Bless.

But this is going to be my outcry against those bastards at the LADOT Parking Enforcement Division. A hideous conglomerate of otherwise unemployable mutants devoid of feeling or hope, destined to be little more than the smegma under the foreskin of the man's ugly choadish proboscis with which he tries to fuck every single one of us. And Jesus, my friends, did he fuck me yesterday.

L.A. in general is a hideous city in which to have a car and yet, in brilliant CATCH 22 fashion it's impossible to live here without one.

The streets are pocked like Dresden post carpet-bombing, a foul pothole-filled ever-cracking infrastructure left untempered as a nod to the car manufacturers who hear a bell ring everytime an axle breaks on a jagged road left to disintegrate under the sun and the earthquakes and the pressure of 10,000,000 cars every hour on the hour.

The traffic is second in the nation only to D.C. for miserableness and even then, while D.C.'s freeways look like a used parking lot, in los Angeles even the surface streets are clogged at all times. Add to this the many ex-pats whose plates from Illinois and Iowa and North Carolina explain why they drive so slowly, looking for the street they can't find while the people behind them swear and honk on the sisyphean struggle to ever get anywhere on time and you find a daily commute foul enough to make a man into a snarling beast.

But the parking - ohh, the parking in this city must be the worst in the world. Every lot is a pay lot; you must pay to go to the mall; you must pay to go to your doctor; hell, some people even have to pay to visit their talent agent. And these private enterprises put plenty of money into the hands of their developers, the 1% who can afford large swaths of land but there is no alternative unless you want to park on the streets. And parking on the streets invites the wolf that is the LADOT to come by and try and balance their budgets with your very blood, sweat and tears. The Los Angeles GMP (Gross Metropolitan Product) is $735.7 billion as of 2010, which puts it above the GDP's of at least half the COUNTRIES in Africa and in the top 3 metropolitan GMP's in the world. And yet the city still has a $272,000,000 dollar deficit. So yes, they're trying to cut city pensions, public programs, stuff like that (god forbid they tax an extra .3% on all monies that come through the city). And like a crackhead who prefers to rob the measly earnings of the poor bastards trying to make it out of the projects instead of the substantial haul they'd get robbing a nice house in the suburbs, the city is trying to fix the problem by enforcing parking infractions with an iron fist.

A little sampling:

• Last year I got a ticket for an expired meter. I had put enough in for half an hour, then ran into the post office where the one employee was a septuagenarian with gout and coke bottle glasses. It took me exactly 31 minutes. I came out to find what could only have been a meter maid joyfully sitting next to the meter as it ticked off its final minute. 
• A few months ago I got a ticket for not having a front license plate. It was true, I didn't have a front license plate. It was on the ground in front of my bumper. It was obvious to all but the most simple-minded that some bastard had hit my bumper and, to make matters worse, knocked off my plate and drove off. Yet I got a ticket.
• When I renewed my registration, I paid a hefty fee for several parking tickets, which I had believed included both of these since they occurred far before I paid my registration fees. Take note, this will come to haunt me.
• A month ago they put up temporary cardboard signs on my street. My wife and I pay an annual fee for the right to park on the street in front of our house so this was frustrating but I parked a few blocks away. Nothing happened. Signs went down. This happened again and, again, nobody parked on the street. Nothing happened. Weekend came and went. Everybody parked there Monday. Nothing happened. Then home from work since ours is a working-class neighborhood, we all parked there again. Tuesday we awoke to the sounds of heavy trucks, machinery, and a petty sonuvabitch having ticketed all the cars which had parked there the night before. When I went to confront him, he pointed to the signs, which had magically reappeared that morning. This is either negligence (because they should have checked the night before) or entrapment (if they were doing this intentionally) but either way it was their mistake. I explained to the guy that blindly following illegal orders is illegal in itself, pointing to the Nazis but he just blinked and slunk back into his Prius, no doubt already a sad, broken man. I was ticketed and am fighting it. Others were towed, missed work, all sorts of hideous occurrences.
• Finally, yesterday the unthinkable happened to me. These top tickets were not included in the $600 I paid to the DMV in August. The above, though I'm fighting it, is on my record. Which adds up to 6 unpaid tickets. Enough for some smug bastard in his little white van that he drives around, scanning license plates in working class neighborhoods like Hollywood, to call in to the station that I'm scofflaw. He booted my truck. Then towed the fucking thing as I stood on my porch, briefcase under my arm, watching it disappear. The bastard asked me if it was locked as they bent in front with the towing harness, to which I replied"Fuck you," then set off my car alarm from my keychain.

Yes, those sons of bitches towed my truck. I called the DMV who tried to help me (what? the CA DMV, helpful? Egads, things can change!) and explained that LADOT sometimes takes months to get the tickets to the DMV so if you think you're bringing yourself current with your registration renewal, think again. Then there's the fact that you can't contest these tickets. I mean you can, putting it into review and all this good stuff but once your car is towed you can ask for a tow/impound hearing to get your car out if and only if their count is wrong. So instead of the old adage innocent until proven guilty, this is guilty until proven innocent.

Even more, according to that county treasurer who said a big problem with the city is unpaid parking tickets, there are bastards out there with 20 or more citations - and yet I, who pay my tickets when my registration is due (it's just easier) get towed.

Even more, the law states a scofflaw can be booted OR towed - yet for some reason they decide it's appropriate to do both, thus costing me not only the money for the tickets but for the towing, the inconvenience of going around this miserable city to get my shit out and, as well as for what eventually amounted to me missing a day of work.

After the research I went to one of their offices, on 3333 Wilshire where they told me something the towing fuck (Office Alvarado is his name, by the way) didn't, namely that I needed my registration to pay my tickets. Which was at my car but then they finally gave me the impound lot address so another drive cross-town in the miserable L.A. heat to my car where I waited half an hour to get into my car, get my registration and back to the office and then back to the impound, totalling a missed day of work, $1100 dollars, and a chunk of my sanity I've been fighting dearly for in this mad city.

I admit, this is my fault. I shouldn't have assumed the city was together enough to assign tickets to the DMV when I got them, even up to 2 months after. I shouldn't have assumed that the violations bureau cared about the average person or could even change the wheels once they were in motion. I should've researched the little-known law where 5 late parking tickets can land one's car in impound, or the fact that they no longer boot cars.

But here's the problem - they're setting me up for failure. Parking lots are exorbitant across town (and one has to wonder how much collusion goes on, as most of the lots have near-similar prices - yet nothing's done.) And there are meters but often they're full. And the local neighborhoods have permit parking only, yet mine is not only poorly enforced but allows anybody to park on my street all day, like those damn music school kids (BTW, nobody can get a career in music off going to music school, I guarantee you that, waste of money) so my wife can't park her car in spite of the special permits we buy. And there are more signs every day. But to cap it off, there's no decent public transportation. As I tried to get across town I ended up waiting nearly 40 minutes for my local bus. In the murderous heat. Perhaps instead of investing all this time and money (extra patrols, extra meters, upkeep of old meters, signs) they should invest in infrastructure that would take LA from a city of drivers to a New York-esque city of riders. Parking fines make up $136,879,000 of annual city income (per last year's city budget/revenues). About $23 million was spent on updating and upkeeping these meters. $10 million or so is appropriated for processing parking citations. About $80,000 on new and temporary signs as well as $74k for towing services. But the pay for officers and their brand new Priuses and the judges to adjudicate any of these cases and other personnel costs  is buried under hundreds of other budget items. All told the LADOT's budget is about $491 million so even if they only spend 30% of that on officers, processing people, towtrucks, and judges for parking citation contests that amounts to about $147,000,000 and the city is actually LOSING money on parking enforcement.  

I CHALLENGE LADOT PARKING DIVISION TO PROVE ME WRONG.

So what's the solution? First off, fire these scavengers, these low-level hired parasites, schultzstaffeln with badges and inflated pride in spite of the disgusting maggots they really are. Then, take all that money budgeted for parking enforcement and invest in expanding the subway lines. Or even more, keep some of them but ENFORCE the subway lines. I ride the subway all the time. I always buy my ticket. Never has there been anybody checking my tickets and even more, the turnstiles just turn. So why pay any money for this? I'm a sucker but I do my part because I want to see more infrastructure like this. While they're wasting time enforcing parking laws, hundreds, maybe even thousands of people are riding the subways free everyday. So expand the subways and enforce the requirement to pay a buck fifty to get anywhere (like every other subway system in the fucking world). Expand the bus routes. This will ease up the number of cars fucking up our streets and parking in our neighborhoods. They can say they don't get enough riders to warrant this but nearly every time I board a bus I'm packed shoulder to shoulder with people from most walks of life (maybe not equal along socioeconomic lines, but that's neither here nor there). Then disband those parking enforcement losers.Waste of money and resources. Or if you complain about putting them out of jobs, maybe rehire them to fix the roads. Or plant flowers in Compton. I love that it's communism if we go back to WPA-era projects but if we keep parking enforcement in order it's just good business WHEN IT'S NOT. Hire them if you insist, I don't care. Just put them to use doing something good for humanity instead of punishing people trying to keep their heads above water in this cracked metropole by being heartless dicks 24/7. My wife comes home to put her cat to sleep, distraught, parks where she shouldn't because she's blinded by grief, we see the woman ticketing and run out to move the car before street sweeping only to have her say she can't do anything, she's already written the ticket. What, is the meter maid a fucking robot?

Want some more reasons why this system is fucked? Check here, seriously the LADOT Parking Enforcement bastards are corrupt little weasels, the living embodiment of everything wrong with this city.

Rant done. That felt good. God bless. Fuck the man. LADOT, like the rest of LA City Government, is an exercise in wasted resources as well as a punishment for real, hard-working citizens of the city of Los Angeles.

- Ryan

Why Today's American Literary Fiction Sucks

This year the Pulitzer committee has decided not to award a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the literary award often given the most acclaim and attention by the learned intelligentsia in the country (second to the Nobel, of course, which hasn't fallen into American letters in almost 2 decades and of which there is little hope of an American victory anytime soon). The committee is claiming they just couldn't get a majority. And this is the 11th time this has occurred in the 95 years or so since it was founded as the Pulitzer Prize in Novels (changed to Pulitzer in fiction in 1948 so it could include short story collections). And there have been a few controversies over time, like when the president of Colombia decided FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS was offensive and the book couldn't get the award or when Thomas Pynchon's GRAVITY'S RAINBOW won the Pulitzer fiction judges and then was quickly rejected by the rest of the board who accused the fiction judges of claiming it had to be good since nobody could understand it.

The finalists were "Train Dreams" by Denis Johnson, "Swamplandia!" by Karen Russell and "The Pale King" by David Foster Wallace. Their descriptions are as such (per the Pulitzer website):

• Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): A novella about a day laborer in the old American West, bearing witness to terrors and glories with compassionate, heartbreaking calm.
• Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (Alfred A. Knopf): An adventure tale about an eccentric family adrift in its failing alligator-wrestling theme park, told by a 13-year-old heroine wise beyond her years.
• The Pale King, by the late David Foster Wallace: A posthumously completed novel, animated by grand ambition, that explores boredom and bureaucracy in the American workplace.

 The three novels show in their subject matter that the Pulitzer judges are looking for something new, something quirky, some fresh take on American life as the Pulitzer in fiction for the most part is supposed to be about an exciting new vision in Americana. And the judges claim they just couldn't agree on one but I have to wonder if the biggest problem is that they might be hamstrung by a simple fact, that right now America doesn't know what its voice is but what it has been for the past few decades is just pathetic.

Before you jump up and start haranguing me, yelling "No, I think Michael Chabon is just dreamy" or "What about INFINITE JEST" let me explain. There are some great works out there and certainly America will always be a force in fiction. But we practically invented post-modernism and ever since then we've mostly rested on our laurels, to the point that literary fiction is, at best, simply the reverse negative to post-modernism and at worst this "post-post-modernism" some people are claiming because, well, there's nothing else to call a fiction tradition that has seemingly no identity.

Last year I set out to read a good chunk of Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winners. For the most part I found myself enthralled with all the Nobel winners. I read a few Americans who I already love, Hemingway and Faulkner and Steinbeck. And I also discovered J.M. Coetzee whose novel DISGRACE is a brilliant meditation on displacement in a place in the middle of a clawback of white rights as Africa reclaims itself from its colonizers. And Jose Saramago's amazing comic parable about death and life, DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS. And Derek Walcott's Caribbean epic poem OMEROS and Albert Camus' THE REBEL and so on and so forth, all these brilliant works tapping into issues of humanity and history and great lofty importance with international concern. But as for the Pulitzer Winners - ehhh...

As hard as it is for me to put down Cormac McCarthy, THE ROAD was nothing too special - just a simple story of a man and his son walking for nothing, having nothing, and ending up nowhere. It's as if the book is so simple it tricked people into thinking there's more to it than the nuts and bolts of walking down the road. BLOOD MERIDIAN and the Border Trilogy are much better but herein lies another shortcoming - like the Academy Awards, you get the feeling the Pulitzer gets awarded to people for inferior books to the ones which should have won but were skipped over for one reason or another. While the Nobel is for a body of work, at times the Pulitzer seems to be an award for a snub or a one-off and the difference between a great writer and a one hit wonder often comes down to how lasting and profound a great writer's work is.

Let's go to the 2001 winner, EMPIRE FALLS. Smalltown man too afraid to leave his shitty situation spends most of the time driving around wining to himself about his failings but at the same time is simply too much of a pussy to do anything. Or AMERICAN PASTORAL by Phillip Roth about a high school athlete who goes on to live the American Dream but he doesn't pay attention to anything happening around him and his daughter goes crazy because he's so damn boring. Or MIDDLESEX, a beautiful novel but nothing really happens, the plot serving as little more than an excuse to talk about the history of Greek-Americans with the catchy tune of hermaphrodites to keep one from falling into complete boredom. And so on into hyped books like Franzen's FREEDOM, a novel full of disgustingly boring people which steals any and all of its interesting elements from McInerney's BRIGHTNESS FALLS and Tolstoy's ANNA KARENINA.

I read excerpts from Shteyngart's SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY and there it was again - this nagging, sad, neutered American literary voice. Given to incessant navel gazing (where a person just thinks and overthinks and rethinks about himself without getting anywhere; something people seem to think is "literature" when it's little more than simple-minded self-indulgence and an inability to commit to any great revelation or belief), a worship of the weak anti-hero (almost the anti-Hemingway, whose characters were so brave and bold and strong in spite of their weaknesses, often these current heroes are weak and pathetic in spite of the strenghts they used to have), reverence for old-time baseball (give it up, people, baseball's over) and nostalgia for white suburban high school athletic stars.

The point I'm trying to get at is that American literature is in a little bit of a rut. There are some great books out there, absolutely, but most of the attention and demand and, therefore, innovation go to super market thrillers or YA novels. From literature, people for some reason seem to be happy with the staid, slow self-centered thing, a result of the last few generations trying to come to terms with the fact that they're much bigger cowards than the great American writers of the early 20th century and much less cool than the hip post-modernists of the 60's and early 70's.

So perhaps this is a good omen. I love Foster Wallace. And have heard a lot of good things about SWAMPLANDIA. But perhaps this inability to come to an agreement is a sign that the tides are finally turning. There were 3 such indecisions (and thus no award) in the 70's, as the postmodernists segued into this clipped-ball prose of whatever the fuck they want to call this scene that came after and has just held on (possibly starting with Roth's PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, about a little Jewish bitch given to excessive masturbation), like a booger that won't let go of the bottom of a desk. One indecision occurred in '64 as postmodernism took over the traditional modernist and romantic inclinations of American literature. 2 in the 50's, one of which occurred between Hemingway and Faulkner awards because, let's face it, who the fuck could compare to those two? Even Steinbeck had petered out by then.

So perhaps this is a good thing. A changing of the guards. Maybe, and God let this be true, American literature is tired of being a sexless, emotionless, weak little bitch, constantly whining about how things are so tough and it's not their fault that they just couldn't be as cool or tough as the others because in the end they don't want to be tough anyway and it's not their fault that they're so damn boring and why do I have to be so bound up emotionally and afraid of action or inaction or seeming stupid or seeming tough and overthinking because that's what I do and I just want to go birdwatching ...

Fucking annoying. We need fiction again with tough men and women, fighting the losing battle valiantly, preferably with a lot of booze to steel the nerves like authors Steven John, Cormac McCarthy (especially earlier on), and Richard Wirick specialize in.

Maybe American literature will finally begin to say something that changes the country and makes the rest of the world take notice. Other than the anti-dictatorship/anti-capitalist message of HUNGER GAMES, of course. Maybe again the Pulitzer prize will be awarded to a book that will be great not only in America but throughout the world, that I could proudly put alongside all the international authors I'm rapidly falling for. And maybe then those of us struggling to be literary writers will again have a goal towards which we could truly be proud of trudging.

It's up to you to demand better literature and not be bamboozled by the rot that's been presenting itself as American lit for the last few decades. The world needs a new Hemingway, goddammit. Though Steven John, with his THREE A.M., certainly is another good step in the right direction and a good way for you to start us moving in this direction.

- Ryan

I ran so Far Away to Try to Get Away: The Running Website You Need to Check Out

In SHAME Michael Fassbender spends all the time that he's not either a)staring at his naked sister, b)having sex with slores in alleyways, or c) making out with dudes, running and walking throughout Manhattan. It's supposed to evoke a man contemplating life as increasingly the only time we get to revel in our own thoughts, "clear my head" in the parlance of our times, is when away from the conveniences of computer or tv or car and moving and vibrating at too high a speed to consult our smart phones. The depiction of navel gazing and internal conflict is an old trick, movies have been doing it for years. Like Tom Cruise in FAR AND AWAY dropping off his upper class wench Nicole Kidman at her aristocratic parents' house with a bullet in her bodice, then running off, running from all the troubles and the class system and his inferiority and then SMASH to explosion as the transcontinental railroad is built. Or Forrest Gump after Jenny Leaves him.

And it works. You got some shit eating at you, the best thing is a long walk or run. As your body works, falls into autopilot your brain is free to roam, make its own connections, go where it needs to.

On the other side, as a man you need to be in shape. Or really good with an arsenal. Can't stress this point enough, people. My brother and I, the cartilage is rotting out of our knees and still we run every day. Not only to stay fit, healthy body makes a strong mind and better in the sack and all that. But also in case the Russians attack and we gotta get all RED DAWN. Or what if the tsunami strikes and you need to sprint for higher ground. Or your girlfriend gets held hostage by terrorists hijacking a building and you need to be able to run up and down, fighting dudes while sustaining epic beatings in a hail of bullets and blood.

So yeah, some of you can probably run on a treadmill. Or have one of those fancy watches or whatever to measure distance. Or access to a track and no qualms about running in circles for an hour. Good for you. For the rest of us, we're stuck coming up with routes we guesstimate to be sizable enough to make impact but offer the variety of a good outdoor tour. But we can't really measure them, have trouble knowing how far we're going and if you don't know if you ran 2 miles or 5 (an easy mistake without any guides), how the fuck can you know how hard you're working, how good of shape you're really in? There's a solution, my friends. A website where you can measure anything, whether that crosstown urban jog or that trail run or even the loop through your neighborhood. Map My Run.com

Save a few routes. Mark your progress, keep it up with Twitter, support other people and they can support you and all sorts of connected "we exercise together virtually" shit. I just use it to measure all the winding, obfuscated trail runs I make here in the hills of L.A. Why not? Weekend's coming up. And next thing you know it'll be summer and you'll need the energy to run around on the beach all day, get after it all night, , keep your job on a few hours of sleep and somehow keep your head clear and your lungs from collapsing under the weight of smokey rooms and too much booze.

Get running, bitches. Run so far away.

- Ryan

How Neymar makes Messi look messy - Battle For World's Best

Lionel Messi is being hyped as the greatest sportsman to have played anything on this planet. But he might not even be the greatest soccer player currently playing, let alone the greatest athlete ever.

Ok, so I’m an American and we Americans are passionate about Baseball, Basketball, and Football. But our passion doesn't compare to how the rest of the world feels about Futbol. I've been to World Cup Games and Qualifiers, International Friendlies, Champions League, MLS, and Premier League games and have to say that diehard non-American-football fans decimate even the most passionate of us. Even being a man who breathes Ravens Purple, who's still affected by what happened in the AFC championship game (The Ravens were the better team), I admit my obsession doesn't begin to compare to that of the true futbol hooligans. I want to add that Green Street Hooligans is a watered down version and if you want a closer view of a true soccer fanatic watch The Football Factory.

Because of this passion, arguments can get heated pretty damn quickly. Lionel Messi, the midget magician, is currently the focal point of world sports with a Q rating higher than Lucky Leo DiCaprio. So why all the fucking attention? On March 7th, he scored 5 goals in a match, becoming the first player ever to do this in a Champions League game. Of course the hobbit followed up this monumental achievement a few weeks later by becoming the leading scorer in FC Barcelona History, one of the most prestigious soccer clubs in the world. He surpassed the previous record of 232 goals held by Cesar Rodriguez. By the way, Cesar achieved this in 13 years while Messi achieved it in a meager 8. Finally, last week Messi became the first player since Gerd Muller in the 1973 campaign to score 60 goals in a single European season. This man is like iron and could be truly the best player to ever play the game. This is why he is finally in the same discussion as the elite.

So Messi has been compared to Pele who is believed to be the best player to grace a beautifully manicured football pitch. Following him would be Maradona. Then everybody else. After Messi retires, as long as he works to lift his game on the international level he should be in the same discussion as these two, no doubt. There are starting to be rumblings over whether he is the greatest athlete of all time in any sport and while it depends on how he finishes his career, he's on the right track. Right now the best athletes in the history of professional athletics are listed below by their sports.

Futbol: Pele

Basketball: Michael Jordan

Hockey: Wayne Gretzky

Baseball: Babe Ruth

Football: Jerry Rice

Swimming: Michael Phelps

Golf: Jack Nicklaus

Tennis: Roger Federer

Can you possibly compare any of these athletes to each other? MJ transcended his sport en route to becoming a world icon and currently Messi is doing the same, rare even for the majority of athletes listed above. He's becoming a household name in the US, which is difficult seeing how there's such a negative stigma regarding soccer over here. Does that mean he's a better athlete than Gretzky, Pele, or Jordan? I don’t fucking think so. Is he currently the best soccer player in the world? I think so (sorry Cristiano Ronaldo), but of course there will always be doubters. For example, Pele doesn't think Messi is even the greatest futbol player today, let alone best ever. He believes that the best player in the world is a 20-year-old Brazilian who many are already saying is the second coming of, well him. After watching his highlight reel, I can understand where Pele's coming from. Honestly, I’ll probably get stoned for saying this, but Neymar might be a better overall player. Sure Messi is dominating in one of the toughest leagues in the world, but Neymar is dominating not only the Brazilian league, where he plays for Santos, but turning heads in all of South America and the rest of the world. Now, if he played on BCN’s squad, which is the best in the world even without Messi, he could potentially be a once in a lifetime player. As Bayer Leverkusen’s Coach Robin Dutt stated, “Without Messi, Barca is the best team. And with him, they are in another galaxy.” Imagine Neymar being the focal point of this team.

So what exactly has Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior done? He made his pro debut at 16 in a tough Brazilian league. He and his mohawk have set south America on fire. In 2010 he came in third for South American Player of the year at the ripe age of 17 and last year he finally won the award. He made his debut on the senior team at the age of 18 in a friendly against the US and of course he scored. Currently, he has 95 goals for his club and hasn’t even hit his prime. Let me also remind you that he's 20 and while he couldn't order a capirinha in an American bar, he's already causing havoc on other international squads.

There is no denying that Messi can put the ball way better than anyone else in the game. He might also be the toughest player to play the game as he bounces off defenders double his size like off rubber. But Neymar has some of the most amazing foot skills to grace the pitch. He's quicker, faster, taller, and more athletic than Messi and the fluidity that he plays with is one of the most beautiful things you will ever see in any sport. When watching him, my mind instantly envisions Beethoven playing the piano or Michelangelo painting. I can only compare him to such prodigious figures because, like these legends, he was simply born to do what he does. I think of the quote in Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon explains to Minnie Driver that he was just born understanding "how to play". I’m sure at some point Neymar worked at it, sure, but just watching him you can see he was born knowing how to play...futbol. Don’t get me wrong. I think Messi was born this way too, though he's also needed to work way harder than Neymar to get where he is. In fact, the only person I've truly seen play like Neymar is when I watch highlights of, well, Pele. Does this kid have the toughness and drive to go from young prodigy to a worldwide phenom like the perennial all-star Messi, though? God let’s hope so. If you have no clue who this kid is, you need to educate yo'self and watch this video below.

 Seriously, get your eyes on Neymar now so someday you can tell your grandkids about watching the rise of the greatest international athlete of the 21st century. Sorry, Messi, you're great. But Neymar has the potential to be the greatest.

- Kyle

My God, Man - The Rumpelstiltskin App

Rumpelstiltskin was a dirty little bugger with a penchant for teaching women to make gold out of straw in exchange for the woman's first child. Straw into gold? That's absurd, you say. Straw can't be made into gold, the alchemists be damned. But is it any more absurd than somebody writing some code for a simple cellular iPhoto picture sharing app with no commercial revenue and selling it 18 months later for $1 Billion dollars to an 8-year-old web company run by a 27-year-old kid rumored to have Asperger's?

I'm talking about the sale of Instagram, the top-selling iPhone app with 12 employees that just sold Monday for $1,000,000,000 to Facebook in a deal personally nurtured and finalized by Mark Zuckerberg himself. Over the company's 18-month gestation they'd already gotten venture capital injections of $7MM and subsequently $50MM but now they've cashed out. Facebook is even spinning them off into the first independent company owned by Facebook instead of integrating them into the social network like they've done with previous acquisitions Facebook has made over the past few years. The computer millionaire is far from a new thing. Bill Gates made Microsoft into the juggernaut it is by throwing absurd chunks of money at every little company, software developer, competitor, and even somebody who just might be a competitor down the line (recently Microsoft has been shelling out millions to buy various patents from AOL including Netscape, Microsoft's onetime web rival; MS claims a lot of the purchases have been more to prevent competitors from buying the patents, which could not only give MS' rivals a competitive edge but also allow them to possibly sue MS for copyright infringement). But the web and software BILLIONAIRE, the hottest new trend in silicon value, is a drastic and monumental development in the world of American commerce and further proves that all great American gold rushes begin and end in the San Francisco bay area.

Yet to speak to my point Monday about the great magnet, about all things flowing together with some sort of illogical logic, in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal the article about the sale of Instagram landed on the same page as the obituary for Jack Tramiel.

Jack Tramiel, a Polish Jew born in 1928 whose education ended at 5th grade when he was sent to Auschwitz. A Holocaust survivor who then came to America where he joined the U.S. Army, learned how to work on typewriters and then founded a company in 1954 called Commodore importing typewriters. A typewriter importer who visited Japan where he discovered electric calculators and started making them until Texas Instruments beat him at the calculator game but he roared back, combining technology with his typewriters to come out with the Commodore 64, one of the first personal computers and considered by many to be the best-selling PC of all time.

After 30 YEARS of toil, experimentation and evolution, as well as for a period becoming THE name in home computing (long before Microsoft's user-friendly software began a revolution and around the time that Mark Zuckerberg was weaseling his way out of his mother's womb), Tramiel left the company because it was doing $1B a year in business and in spite of the fact that he'd essentially begun the PC craze, survived the holocaust, and, as he said "made more millionaires than anybody else", Tramiel could see he wasn't the person to run such a big company. He went on to run Atari, America's first gaming console, and rolled out the predecessors of our current portable game consoles, namely Lynx (even if his decisions eventually lead to Atari's demise) before retiring. It took 30 years and basically perfecting the price/need point of the personal computer before this man's company hit $1 billion in sales. And now a company with NO ANNUAL SALES and a year and a half existence is sold for $1 billion.

I'm not trying to ask whether that makes sense. Facebook was founded and still, to a certain extent, enjoys popularity because of the ease of sharing pictures. Instagram is an asset in this mission to dominate the picture-sharing world but could possibly be a threat if left to its own. Also, with a valuation most likely to near $100 billion dollars Facebook can make some big purchases without sweating whether they bring back immediate returns - or any returns at all. The point I'm trying to make is about the paradigm shift in business and revenue but specifically how America, once the land of mining gold, then the land of trade routes, and finally the land of mining and refining oil is entering a new creation of instant of wealth by mining - what - possibility? The interweb?

Tramiel started off importing physical products. Then he hired men to improve on these products based on his vision. Then he vertically integrated his products, buying chip suppliers to create a computer the world had just begun seeing as possibly a device everybody could own and benefit from. He was the first person to make technology and, thereby connectivity, accessible. And after all that he probably never saw such a payday.

There's a theory called Moore's law about how computing power will double every 2 years - though some people think it's closer to 18 months while others think it'll slow to every 3 years in 2013. It's based on the physical specs of shrinking transistor size but it seems to define everything today. When I was a kid we had an IBM compatible, dos, with flat, disgustingly pixellated games with slow response times. I remember my favorite, Tankfire (or maybe Nightfire?), in which you literally typed in the angle of your tank's canon - you couldn't move it up and down but had to put in approximate vectors - and then shot it at your opponent's tank. This could take half an hour if they kept moving.

2 years ago, while on a train during snowmageddon from DC to NY my wife and I met a recent mother whose husband bought an iPad 2 on the day their son was born since that was the day it came out. The novelty, she said, was the fact that for him the iPad is his zero point. Just imagine what they'll have when that kid is 30? There'll be computers that tap into our brains and senses directly, apps that allow us to communicate telepathically with our friends, maybe even in the same room, why not? We have cars that drive themselves and drones patrolling the streets and companies with no revenue and 18 months of existence pulling in 10 figures.

Not to say this is the standard. Online gamer Zynga had an IPO of $10 with a high of $14.55 and I last saw it trading at $11.41. Groupon came out at $20 a share, rose to $31.14, and now, about 5 months later is trading @ $13.85 and dropping due to misreporting of revenues on GroupOn's part. MySpace was purchased for $580M or so by NewsCorp just as Facebook was poised to decimate it. Now Facebook is being valued by some estimates at $100 billion and MySpace sold for $35M and is being turned into "the future of entertainment" by none other than former boybander-cum-popstar-cum-moviestar-cum-businessman Justin Timberlake.

So herein lies the rub. Tramiel had a physical product and while he had to have his finger on the pulse of consumer needs, he had 30 years to develop that sense and could make a physical product that, no matter what, could at least be sold for parts. But today's wealth is created online with virtual companies, a true wild wild west gold rush and just the same you could spend years building up a small gold sluicing operation with nothing to show for it or you could just be camping on a creekbed when you notice flecks and next thing you know you've discovered Gold Canyon which would eventually lead to the discovery of the Comstock Lode.

It's a fast-changing world. Moore's Law applies to the rapid development of physical computing power but we're dealing with something more complex than that. It's the amplification of computing power added to the rapid development of interpersonal culture as abetted by that computing power, a perfect storm of mechanical innovation and cultural renaissance that is combining to speed up not only how fast we compute but how fast we can share ideas and art and in turn speeding up evolution of art and culture. Like the recent South Park episode where they talk about Meme-ing and how Tebowing is already such old news. What the ramifications have for future society is unknown. Generation shifts are happening in half a generation, speeding up incrementally. Wealth is therefore being shifted and created at a rate reminiscent of the first dot.com bubble but while that was based on a relatively old idea of consumerism, this is based on the new concept of connectivity, on selling advertising based on all the hundreds of millions of eyes that are viewing the top websites at any given moment.

The new straw is the web connecting all of us. And as people figure out new ways to weave this together, gold is appearing at absurd rates. In a fraction of the time it took to shoot an autochrome about a century ago, my wife can take a picture, stylize it to be old-timey or black and white or any of a couple filters, then share it with her friends all over the country, hell all over the world.

In the end, it makes one wonder where the next innovations will lead. The last few generations since the 60's have been increasingly self-centered so it's no wonder that the greatest usages of technology and creations of wealth have been about making the sharing of one's personal life easier. And the upside is we may be able to go from impressionism to cubism in a few years because of the wide reach and accessibility of influence so who knows where art will be in a decade. But how much navel-gazing can we base an economy on?

For now, let's all just sit back and applaud the great electronic gold rush in the 10's. Whether it'll have the ability to sustain or not is inconsequential. All that matters is - the fact that I really need to come up with some fucking apps. To hell with blogging. How about something that allows you to insert genitals into any picture - imagine, virtual t-bag or vagina-mouth made easy?

- Ryan