Monday, January 31, 2011

Ambiguous Anagrams and Atmospheric Anomalies

How’s the weather? It rained overnight – sustained over 48 hours – and now we glimpse a punctuated sigh of arid relief. Funny how we like to wish for opposites when we are racing for we - homiothermic creatures - abhor extreme weather conditions. I moderated my warm-blooded, body temperature today with the ambient cool winds, afforded by the torrential downpours. You have got to be creative when you face variations in the external variables: weather, stock markets, delivery schedules, late showings, people’s moods and reactions, and misplaced parcels.
I was examining my EDGE wheel-set when I realized that its logo was an ambigram. An ambigram is word-picture that reads the same upside-down. If you remember well, the word Illuminati was featured in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. 
Here is an ambigram of my name that was designed by a secondary school student.

An anagram is a word that can be reconstructed from the same number of letter. Thus, Scrabble is a game of figuring out the highest scoring word for the longest word you can propose while sorting through the ambigram-ic possibilities. Twitter is a derivative, in that you squeeze up to 140 characters in each tweet, within your précis writing ability.

It is always good news when a fellow multi-sport athlete is featured in the newspapers. Here is a winner at last week’s Duathlon.
*****
I could not attend this evening’s TriFam club swim training, as I was preparing for a new workshop tomorrow. Instead, I did a short, intense session of unshod intervals (4:55-5:20 minute/K) with a short CrossFit Endurance training session. Since it was my second self-prescribed session, I did three sets of [push-ups, chin-ups and step-ups (off a bench)]; I topped it off with core exercises that included the Plank, and proprioceptive work (close-eyed, balancing). That took the wind out of me, and I then walked back as a cool-down. I wolfed down several slices of pizza and a generous helping of raw-fish salad as my post-training, recovery meal. Early to bed should see me fresh tomorrow with a lower heart rate, and better muscle tone.

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