International Kings of Sport

International Kings of Sport

Well I’ve been meaning to post some pics and video of my brother stag do for a while and never got round to it.. Well better late than never!

Deciding what to do ‘as the main event’ for Giles’ stag do was a pretty simple decision as it was a continuation of a theme that’s been ongoing for the past 16 years. Me and Giles had a tradition of trying to drink our age in pints on each others birthdays. To prove that we had done it and quite frankly to help ourselves keep count, we would take a notebook to keep a tally of drinks. Usually it was only me and Giles that believed in the purity of starting at 11am when pubs open. So after we’d exhausted topics of conversation, we’d start filling up the notebook with not only the pints we’d drunk but also the scores of all random games we’d be playing from pub to pub. Influenced by a television programme of the same name, these bi-annual competitions of drinking stamina and pub game prowess become known as International Kings of Sport.

I’d always wanted to do something more like the original TV show, which itself was based on a surrealist concept from the 1960’s called the Flux-Olympiad, it followed the same format as the normal Olympics, with one small difference – the events were just plain stupid. Well no point explaining any further because I can just show you, first up is the..

Long Jump (head first)

International Superman Dive

Rules are pretty much the same as the normal long jump, but instead of measuring from your back foot, you measure from your furthest outstretched hand.. you know the superman dive! Shanks topped the charts on this one with an almighty jump of 5 metres 75 cms, although there was some controversy involving a double movement, but we let him off.

Photo by John, check out his photography portfolio – Cloverleaf Images »

Here’s the video:

100m Sprint (around a 10m circular track..)

100m Sprint (around a 10m circular track..)

In retrospect I’m not sure this was the best choice of event, running round and round in circles with a belly full of beer isn’t that good for your guts.. and the contents of my guts were all over the beach soon afterwards..

Here’s the video:

Photo Finish (the 3 metre sprint)

Photo Finish (the 3 metre sprint)

I actually think this should be an Olympic event, it’s really exciting because it’s always so close you can only tell who’s won by examining the photo finish afterwards. No video for this one I’m afriad the 5D was taking the bursts of photos.

Tennis Whack (with a cricket bat)

Tennis Whack (with a cricket bat)

Simple rules, who can whack a tennis ball up in the air for the longest. We also played who can chuck a tennis ball the furthest, but to be honest the footage wasn’t that thrilling. The two greenies dominated this event, with big greeny just pipping his brother by 4 hundredths of a second.

Here’s the video:

Who was the King?

Who was the King? Hedgy!

Hedgy! – long live the king of sports! I’d like to point out that I came a very respectable joint second with Greeny :)

Well I could go on but I think this post is already quite long enough. If you we’re wondering where you have to go to find such fantastic weather, beautiful (and empty) beaches, the answer is North Wales! Harlech to be precise.

Olympic mascots become self-ware and go on a killing spree around London!

Wenlock - Olympic mascot

Ha ha, only kidding they do look like they were sent back from the future by Skynet though ;)

So finally the London 2012 Olympic Mascots by have been revealed. As you would expect from the 2012 committee, they are not really what we expected! Far from cute & cuddly they are cold & hard, more like a Henry Moore sculpture than a kids toy.

Designed by London agency iris, I read that they only cost “a few thousand pounds”, I think they probably cost a bit more than that! Probably just trying to play it down after the £400,000 logo fiasco.

Mandeville - Olympic mascot

I feel for it’s designer though, whatever you create you’re going to get people ripping the shit out of it (myself included, sorry..) It’s an impossible brief, design by committee jobs always are.. I actually like it quite a lot, everything from the neck down looks awesome, great proportions, clean lines, sweet as in my book. Problem is though, why oh why that eye Olympic Committee?

You can tell by the descriptions on iris’ design boards, that the eye was supposed to be a camera lens, but at some point they decided to stick a cartoon eye on there which looks totally at odds to the rest of the angular design. Pixar have already shown with characters like WALL•E, or even their original anglepoise lamp short, that with the limitations of something ‘less human’, you can get a lot more unique character out of it. Feels like it was almost good, but they fucked it up at the last hurdle..

I actually took part in the original pitch too!

My olympic mascot pitch

Only fair to put my own work up for comparison/criticism. My idea was unsurprisingly the sock monster route. Rather than selling preformed shiny toys to the kiddies, I wanted to make ‘kits’ which were essentially a pair of long sport socks with instructions of how to make your own mascot from scratch! Thought it would be nice thing to do in school as a crafty lesson, give them chance to be creative and add a bit personal flair to their own mascot. The agency I was working for poo poo’d it because it wasn’t ‘commercially viable’, said the committee would never go for it as they needed to pay for the Olympics through some mass-produced piece of Chinese plastic..

Electric Powered Flying Suit

Holy Crap, NASA are working on this one man helicopter/plane concept that Q in MI5 would be proud of. They’re calling it the Puffin, minus a few propellers here and there, it definitely has some similarities:

Puffin

I love the quote on Scientific American’s article – “In my opinion, a mass-marketable version will need conventional seating and cup holders”. Yeah who cares if it’s an electric-powered flying suit, I need a fucking cup holder before I get in that thing ;)

Via: The Adventure Blog.