This is about as off-topic as it gets, but I can’t resist posting. Y’see, I’m a spectacularly uncoordinated person. I can trip over nothing. If you throw me a ball, the chances of my being able to catch it are frighteningly low. When I was in high school, my physics teacher invented the Carroll Scale of Spasticity for measuring the incidents in which I damaged or destroyed a lab experiment by tripping or bumping things (and he was still telling students about it 6 years later when my sister’s friends were in his class).
So this video is amazing. It makes me feel coordinated. It makes the kinds of things that happen to me look downright mild. This was a live TV broadcast. It’s just eight seconds long. Enjoy!
I’ll state the obvious, it was actually a parody. The source is a trio from Calgary, Canada named FuddyTV. They also created the hilarious Car Dance Party Moscow.
Coordinated, sure. Also maybe a bit gullible, too?
LOL! Too bad it wasn’t real.
Jonathan:
Sure, I won’t argue that. I got taken in.
I blame my genes. Back when we were kids, my older brother had a friend who told him that “gullible” wasn’t in the dictionary. My brother went to look it up, and came back *with the dictionary* to show his friend it was there. Even after we made him read the entry for “gullible”, he still didn’t get the joke.
When you run up a flight of 12 steps and there are really only eleven, upon what do you trip at the top? It is not what we don’t know that hurts us, it is what we know to be true that isn’t.
Of course, the appropriate response to being told that the word “gullible” isn’t in the dictionary is to get the dictionary, and proclaim “hey, you’re right!”
I like that one GDC. Fair play.
For what it’s worth, this actually happened to a friend of mine. A group of us were walking down the street to grab dinner. The next thing we knew–twang–our poor friend Todd was on the ground writhing in pain.
Poor guy. The lamp post was fine.
Forget “it happened to a friend of mine”, it bloody well happened to me! I was walking down the street talking to a friend and blammo, right into a lightpost. Didn’t drop me, though, but it did really hurt.
Ollie, SteveM:
That’s why I was so easily taken-in by this – because I’ve seen similar things happen in real life.
Two examples:
My first week at Google, I was going to lunch with my coworkers. As usual for a new job, I barely knew anyone, and I was very on-edge about fitting in, etc. We’re walking up the hallway, and one of my coworker walked right into a knee-high bench and went flying when it knocked his legs out from under him. My immediate reaction was “Yup, I’m going to fit in here just fine.”
A more painful example happened about two weeks after that. I take the train in to Grand Central Terminal every morning. On the upper level, the walkways have rather elegant brass
signs to label the track numbers, mounted on the floor in the middle of the walkway between two tracks. They’re set facing the tracks – so if you’re walking up the walkway, they’re parallel to you. I was rushing to get to the subway,
and stepped around someone who was walking slowly, and slammed dead-on into one of them. Yowch, but that was painful – the damned thing is made of an inch-thick slab of solid brass!
Well, here’s a tip from one clumsy person to another: try to avoid taking Organic Chemistry. The glassware for those experiments is even MORE expensive than the ordinary chem glassware. By the time the semester was over, I had purchased the equivalent of new editions of the required textbooks all over again (for those abroad, that was more than $150 as US textbooks are phenomenally pricey).
andrea
Andrea:
I actually flunked my first semester of chem lab in college. The first day of lab, while cleaning up, I knocked my entire collection of glassware – every beaker, every pipette, all in one fell swoop. I didn’t have any money to buy a new set, so I couldn’t do the rest of the experiments.
Ah, chem lab. Where I learned to trade my skills in calculation and error analysis for hard stuff, liking weighing things. Really.
Now, let’s see if this Chuck Storm vidoe is any clearer.
Jonathan
Ah, chem lab. Where I learned to trade my skills in calculation and error analysis for hard stuff, liking weighing things. Really.
Now, let’s see if this Chuck Storm video is any clearer.
Jonathan
Someone on radio observed that kids starting school can have quite an age range and therefore different degrees of development.
So if like me, your birthday was early in or before the start of the school year, just the age based development gets you labeled as uncoordinated – picked last in team sports etc.
rdb:
In my case, that’s definitely not it. The real cause of my klutziness is actually fascinating.
When I was in grad school, at one point, I got so stressed that I made myself sick. My hands started to shake, and I couldn’t stop them. That’s a common symptom of stress, but it’s also a common first symptom of ALS, so I wound up getting a bunch of tests done. They did CT and MRI scans of my head, and found a small patch of scar tissue in (if I recall correctly), the left frontal lobe of my brain – the part of the brain that does spatial perception!
Lone, isolated scar patches like that are generally caused at birth, by oxygen deprivation in the birth canal.
The neurologist who ordered the test grilled me, because he was fascinated – he asked me all kinds of questions about whether I could do *this*, or that, or whatever… I’ve got weak 3d perception, I’m completely unable to do dynamic actions that require 3d ability (meaning I can’t catch a ball), and I can’t make any sense out of maps.
The maps thing was the most interesting to him, because most people don’t realize that reading a flat map has anything to do with the same part of your brain as catching a ball. But it does.