Saturday, December 25, 2010
Snowballs: Vonn Pow, Tracy Exits, Boa Wins Injunction
..... Vail, Colo. (Ski Press)-Even with a fresh gold medal and another World Cup title, few things are as sweet as a fresh powder morning. Three-time World Cup Overall champion and 2010 Olympic gold and bronze medalist Lindsey Vonn enjoyed 11" of fresh snow on Vail Mountain Friday, April 2, 2010. Vail has supported Vonn throughout her ski racing career and Vonn now represents all five of Vail Resorts? mountain resorts, including Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone and Heavenly. (Photo: Tom Green). Tracy Leaving as Women's Alpine Coach Park City, Utah (Ski Press)-After two successful seasons that included four Olympic medals and multiple Audi FIS World Cup titles, veteran U.S. Ski Team coach Jim Tracy will step down as the team's women's alpine head coach. The former women's head speed coach from 1996-2004, Tracy returned to lead the U.S. women's alpine program following the 2008 season. Tracy's career with the U.S. Team spans over two decades, including working with the men's downhill team for 10 years. "Jim was brought back two years ago to lead the team to a great performance at the Olympics in Vancouver. He leaves knowing that he accomplished that mission," U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association Vice President, Athletics Luke Bodensteiner said. "He has been an amazing coach for the women's team, leading them through some of the greatest landmarks in U.S. skiing history." "I'm stepping aside having been a part of something very special with the women's team over the last two years," said Tracy, who came back to the Team two years ago when then head coach Patrick Riml left to take a position in Canada. "I have had many great friendships and great times and I wish all the best for the athletes as they move forward." Boa Technology Granted Injunction Against Rong Jou China (Ski Press)-Boa Technology Inc. announced that the Regional Court of Munich, Germany, granted a preliminary injunction against Rong Jou Ent. Co Ltd., a Taiwanese company doing business under the name A TOP. The court prohibited Rong Jou from importing, selling, or offering for sale in Germany certain reel and lacing systems shown at the 2010 ISPO Trade Show that infringe Boa Technology?s patent rights under European Patent No.1213981. ?We are very pleased the court has granted this important injunction,? said Gary Hammerslag, CEO of Boa Technology Inc. ?This ruling confirms the importance and strength of our patents that protect our innovative technology. Boa Technology Inc. has developed unique closure systems for footwear and other products for premium brand customers and we are committed to enforcing our patents to protect many years of investment and the superior image associated with our products.?
A Christmas Birthday in S�by, Denmark
In the living room, the tree is lit with candles. Faded songbooks from another generation are passed out, and we all clasp hands while shuffling in a circle around the evergreen while we sing. I doubt I?ll ever stop being anxious that my hair will catch on fire.
Travel chaos eases as weather relents
Most main roads relatively clear and Eurostar services returning to normal as freezing conditions begin to recedeThe travel chaos that hit Britain during icy conditions earlier this week eased as the weather relented today, giving many travellers a belated opportunity to get away for Christmas.Most main roads were relatively clear, although motorists were told to expect ice even on gritted routes as subzero temperatures continued.Temperatures are likely to fall below -10C (14F) in central and western England tonight, and airlines and rail operators have warned of continuing delays and cancellations.Forecasters said parts of Scotland and possibly north-east England were the only places likely to see snow falling on Christmas Day, although heavy snow may be more widespread on Boxing Day.Andrew Howard, the head of road safety at the AA, warned drivers: "When you get to -10, even if the road has been treated, you really need to treat it as untreated."The AA has advice for drivers on its website, pointing out that stopping distances are 10 times longer in ice and snow.This morning, the west coast main line operator Virgin Trains said some services were subject to delays of up to an hour, with trains to and from Glasgow Central and Manchester Piccadilly most affected.National Express East Anglia and Stansted Express services were running to a reduced timetable, as were services operated by the Northern Rail train company.The East Coast train company axed eight London to Leeds services and ran amended services on other routes. First Capital Connect, London Midland, Chiltern, Merseyrail and Scotrail were among other companies cancelling some services.Bob Crow, the leader of the RMT transport union, said: "It's a scandal that the private train operating companies can simply chop 25% of their services, install a 'special' timetable and avoid financial penalty."This racket shows that the private rail franchise system is rigged in favour of the train operators and means that they can provide what services they like, when they like, leaving passengers out in the cold while the train companies are laughing all the way to the bank."After major disruption to Eurostar trains this week, the company said in a statement that it expected to run a "near normal" service today, adding that passengers should arrive at the normal check-in time for their trains.British Airways said it was hoping to operate all its long-haul flights at Heathrow airport, along with most short-haul services.Where possible, the company was flying larger long-haul aircraft to European cities to increase its seat capacity, and was also hiring extra aircraft to help fly as many passengers as possible.A BA statement said: "In an attempt to free up even more seats, we are continuing to encourage customers who hold bookings to or from Heathrow up until the end of New Year's Eve to either re-book for a later date or claim a full refund if their journey is not essential."Other UK airports cancelled some short-haul flights because of continuing bad weather in Europe. At Birmingham airport, flights to and from Brussels and Paris were affected, while Aberdeen and Edinburgh warned passengers to expect delays and cancellations.Much warmer temperatures are expected in some parts of the UK by the middle of next week. Steven Davenport, a senior forecaster at MeteoGroup, the weather division of the Press Association, said: "This is certainly the coldest December since 1981, but where it stands in the all-time cold Decembers rather depends on what happens in the next few days."This December has the potential to be the coldest since 1890 when the central England temperature [an average for the month] was as low as -0.8C."But a system is moving in from the Atlantic that will bring less cold air. This could lead to heavy and prolonged snow on the night of Boxing Day and into next Monday, but after that temperatures in south-west England, and possibly London, could be as high as 10C by Wednesday."WeatherTransportJames Meikleguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Giant Snakes
© David Hamlin/NGT&F A "super snake" is a serpent of our nightmares. A massive, writhing cold-blooded tube of 10,000 muscles, capable of delivering 9,000 pounds of pressure, growing to lengths of over 30 feet and weighing over 300 pounds.Giant snakes – such as the green anaconda or reticulated python – have a slow metabolism that burns 7-10 times less energy than humans. Because of this, super snakes can go over a year between meals. But when they attack, these powerful predators constrict their prey, possibly delivering over one ton of pressure to suffocate victims.Patroling the swampy habitats of South America, the anaconda is the largest and heaviest snake out there. Their skin is covered with nerve endings – as sensitive as human fingertips – interpreting vibrations. Anaconda's have four rows of teeth on their upper jaws and can feed on prey weighing 100 pounds or more. They don't pull their victims into their mouths – they open their mouths almost 180 degrees and lift up and over their meal. And during this death swallow, a unique set of 100 razor-sharp inner teeth bite into the prey, propelling their mouths forward.The longest serpent in the world is Asia's reticulated python. It's a highly aggressive species with predator superpowers, like excellent nighttime vision, strong swimming skill and deep heat-sensing pits that help them track prey through forests and swamps.Photos: Scientists Brad Moon and Maria Munoz capture an Anaconda for testing in Southern Venezuela.© David Hamlin/NGT&F© David Hamlin/NGT&F Learn all about these massive serpent species and tune into Super Snake! on Friday, December 17th at 10 PM et/pt on Nat Geo WILD!
Canadian Halfpipe Team in their Best Season Yet
When Justin Dorey and Mike Riddle went one-two and Rosalind Groenewoud took first for the ladies at Copper Mountain?s Grand Prix, skiers everywhere looked up. This was the first time freeskiing was included at the Grand Prix, and this AFP points-earning event was crucial to a successful season. The Canadian dream team of pipe rippers dominated at Copper, and they?re building quite the reputation for themselves as medal contenders at major halfpipe events. But is raw talent taking them to the top? Or does training as a team make them stronger individually? Working as a team seems to be the key to their success. ?It?s pretty cool having this group together,? Paynter says ?We try to make it as fun as we can, and I think having that kind of energy of all those people together training at the same time is just a really good environment for progression.? They spend summers coaching at Momentum Ski Camps and Camp of Champions on the glacier in Whistler, then the team heads to New Zealand to get their shred on. Winters are focused on events like the Dew Tour, X Games, and the FIS World Championships in Park City. ?We don?t really have a home mountain,? says Matt Margetts. ?We?re travelling so much.? Prior to contests, the team works together, too. ?Grand Prix was the first event of the season, but the whole team was in Copper for a few weeks before that,? Dorey says. ?So we got some pretty good pipe shredding in before the contest.? So where did the team come from? Paynter, a former Olympian and mogul skier, was coaching the Alberta Park and Pipe team when they started focusing more on halfpipe. When a number of their skiers, like Mike Riddle and Matt Hayward, started doing well, young prodigy Rosalind Groenewoud joined the team. Shortly thereafter, skiing?s mega-star Sarah Burke came on board, too. ?She liked the idea of a program with coaching, and having a group of people to train with,? Paynter says. With enough skiers who could compete beyond the national level, the group broke off from the Alberta team. ?At that point, we couldn?t stay on the Alberta team if they were focusing on Canadian events. We were off at X Games and World Cups, so there was too much of a split between our skiers and the kids moving up from the clubs. We said ?let?s just keep going,? and formed our own program,? said Paynter. ?We?ve been on our own ever since.? Right now, they?re an unofficial team. But that leaves room for certain freedoms. ?The athletes run the program.? Paynter says. ?For me as a coach, that?s kind of the best way to do it, work directly for the athlete, you don?t have an association dictating your every move. It?s been a struggle to raise money to afford to do it, but no one tells us what to do.? As far as the Olympics are concerned, Dorey says the team is confident. ?We?ve been thinking about the Olympics for a while now, and it?s finally starting to come together. We?re all pretty sure it?s going to get in, so we?re just waiting for that final announcement to set a plan.? And if this season is any indication, the Canadian team will be definite medal threats. --Sally Francklyn
Friday, December 24, 2010
Tasmania's cheekiest devil
Provocative and irreverent, the gambling multimillionaire David Walsh has built a breathtaking art gallery ? billed as "subversive Disneyland" ? on his vineyard outside Hobart in Tasmania"Please see reception if you are planning a pool party or a ritualistic orgy." The advice is typical of David Walsh's irreverence. Walsh is the owner of eight designer glass-and-steel guest pavilions and a vineyard outside Hobart, Tasmania. Instead of the "Do not Disturb" sign, guests can hang a "Don't fuck with me" sign on the doorknob.The luxurious riverfront pavilions, a restaurant and live music events are ways in which Walsh has been attracting visitors to stay on his 3.5-hectare estate, Moorilla, for longer than a swift tasting. He had a museum of antiquities on site for a while, too. Nobody came, he admits. Yet his new idea is to create Australia's largest private art gallery. Sex, death, myth and religion are the central themes and its very air threatens to be thick with ripeness and decay.Walsh, a mathematics whizz, is probably the state's richest man, having developed a gambling system that successfully and repeatedly beats the house. He's now taking his biggest gamble yet ? building a new museum in the bowels of the earth to house his considerable personal art collection. Billed as a "subversive Disneyland", the A$76m (�47m) Museum of Old And New Art (Mona) will open to the public on 21 January just after Mofo, a music festival curated by ex-Violent Femmes bassist and fellow Tassie resident, Brian Ritchie.One of the stand-out exhibits will be a piece by Jannis Kounellis (Untitled) featuring rotting sides of beef which will be fed into the artificial digestion tract of Cloaca, a separate work by Wim Delvoye. Cloaca is a machine that reproduces, with gross exactitude, excrement. Handily, you will be able to fortify yourself for the assault on the senses beforehand at the museum's underground bar.Walsh, 49, is an old rocker in a T-shirt, jeans and shades, who was raised by his mum in a council house on the other side of Mount Wellington, the peak that dominates the colonial port. He dropped out of university, but has since built up a successful winery, brewery and tourism business ? as well as a A$100m art collection.Moorilla is on a private peninsula in the Derwent River, 15 minutes outside Hobart. It was originally established by Italian immigrant Claudio Alcorso in 1958. Walsh used to look at the place from his old house across the water and, in the 1990s, he acquired it along with the riesling, gew�rztraminer, chardonnay, pinot noir and cabernet wines it produces. He's since added Moo Brew beer and fine dining at the Source. But Mona ? his "unmuseum" ? is central to Walsh's vision.The museum has been created by excavating a giant hole in the sandstone bluffs of Moorilla. From above, it is barely there ? its entrance is via a shaft cut into a floor of a remodelled heritage villa on the cliff top. But approaching from the water it looks formidable ? a fortress with impenetrable bunkers of sandstone-coloured waffled concrete and panels of rusted steel. There's nothing bijou about it ? Mona is similar in size to both Queensland's and South Australia's state art galleries.Walsh hopes a good chunk of Tasmania's 910,000 annual visitors will make a pilgrimage to his temple to secularism. The best way to arrive will be up the River Derwent from central Hobart on the new rivercat service, docking at the foot of a flight of stairs cut into the cliff. If it feels like arriving on a Greek island, that's deliberate ? Naxos was the model. You ascend to this antipodean acropolis, negotiating a children's playground, a Sunday market and walk across a tennis court before reaching the museum entrance ? Walsh's aim is to challenge ideas about what great museums should be like right from the outset.Australia can be a very conservative place, but Tasmania's cheap living and craft traditions have made it an attractive home to artists and other nonconformist downsizers from the mainland. The island state is reinventing itself from a place dedicated to shredding old-growth forests for paper into somewhere that cherishes its pure, natural beauty. Once-shameful convict-period prisons have been declared Unesco world heritage sites, and luxury eco-lodges seem to open each year.After you have climbed the steps to the villa entrance, you descend again to a subterranean canyon. From here, Walsh's architect, Nonda Katsalidis, has built three gallery floors extending out of a rock face. The ceiling, a grid of concrete coffers (deep recesses), reads like a brutal take on classicism. Concrete piles driven into the living rock are dripping caryatids. A rusted-steel staircase snakes between floors.Moving through the windowless voids is deliberately bewildering. A personal audio device is both the only guide to the art and a way for Mona to track you ? it can tell how long you stand in front of each work. Walsh thinks he will swap around the 10 most popular and least popular pieces each week.A circular tunnel leads under the foundations of a second historic house to a separate pavilion built to house Sternenfall, Anselm Kiefer's 6.5m-high stack of lead books.The collection combines Walsh's antiquities (he has ancient coins worth more than any of his paintings) with Australian and international contemporary works and he is happiest creating dialogues between the periods ? Egyptian mummies will be on nodding terms with YBAs.One gallery is especially devoted to sex and death, with a bordello-red velvet curtain and peep holes to objects through a gold-leaf wall. If the virtually-all-glass guest pavilions are about exhibitionism, this is about voyeurism. "It's the opportunity to mess with your head," admits Walsh, as is the gallery bar: "I like the idea of people having a couple of beers and looking at the art, having a couple more and changing their mind."Mona's labyrinth is rich with myth and mortality. Even in the roomy cinema, a Christian cross of black seats is set out among the red. There are artworks like Julius Popp's Bit Fall, a delicate waterfall where words appear digitally in the tumbling raindrops. Then there's serenity in Wilfredo Prieto's Untitled (White Library), where a gallery is entirely lined with thousands of white books. Every page is blank. It's one of David Walsh's favourite pieces.Walsh reckons Mona might outdo the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra in terms of visitor numbers but he adds, not entirely convincingly, he's not bothered if visitors don't come at all. That's not the point, he says. "It's fun to make a big, complex, elaborate joke ? it's about subversion, but it's not too serious. It is a counterpoint to the Met and Moma. I'm not trying to bestow wisdom. It is just me doing stuff." He also says he doesn't care if rising sea levels drown his temple to secularism in decades to come.That's not convincing either, of course: Walsh is keen to raise hell and debate and to show how art can reveal what we try to hide about ourselves. He's planning more architecture ? a warehouse gallery in Hobart's docks and more accommodation at Moorilla itself, taking his spend on the estate to A$100m: "Eventually I want to build a hotel and make it a cohesive whole. Everything is a function of Mona: Moo Brew, the pavilions, the function centre. I'd like the hotel entrance to be via a shaft through the rock from the waterfront. But I need a lot of people to come first."Those with sensory overload can retreat from Mona to the guest pavilions with their sybaritic bathrooms and the peaceful prospect of the wide Derwent and the hills beyond. But even here, there's no escaping Walsh's obsessions entirely. Beneath original artworks ancient and modern, and the giant photo-murals of naked couples making out, you can browse books such as Blasphemy: Art that Offends while grazing on dishes whose ingredients include abalone, periwinkle and smoked oyster oil.On the floor of one pavilion is a large black rug on which writing, picked out in red, reads: "Apropos of nothing, it's nice to have you here. Thanks, we need the money."EssentialsMona opens to the public on 21 January. The boat service to Moorilla begins on 23 January, and costs A$15 return from Brooke Street pier on Hobart waterfront. There is limited on-site parking, but people with disabilities can arrange this by calling +61 3 6277 9900.Mona's guest-pavilion rates range from A$490 to A$950 per night, including breakfast in the Source restaurant or in your pavilion. Entry to Mona is free (mona.net.au). Qantas (qantas.com) flies daily from London Heathrow to Hobart via Melbourne from �960 including all taxes and surcharges. Valid for departure 16 April - 20 June 2011TasmaniaAustraliaAustralasiaFood and drinkArchitectureWineguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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