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Freaky Forensics Friday

A strange and magical thing has been happening over the past few weeks. I've been getting email. Not the regular sort of email, mind you. I mean, I always get email. But the emails lately haven't been the usual old 'buy \/1agr@ 0nl1n3!!!1!eleventy' and 'Hot local singles want to rub peanut butter on YOU!' and 'FINAL NOTICE: Student loans overdue -- Vinny the Knuckles now handling your account' (Okay, to be fair, most of them are still that kind. Especially the student loans ones -- those people are relentless. Luckily, I was able to score Vinny some Viagra, and set him up with this nice local girl who's into long walks, jazz fusion, and extra-crunchy Jif. That oughta buy me some time.) No, the emails I'm talking about have come from people -- actual, honest-to-god people -- writing to me, specifically. About this site. Seriously. They're not from the FBI or anything. I know. It's weird. "If I can warp sully ruin shape the mind of just one young student, then I'll have done something meaningful here." Even more specifically, these fine folks have been writing to ask permission (unlike some shifty jackholes) to use one of my posts. And adapt it into a monologue. To be performed in high school. (Why do I suddenly get the feeling that the next email I get will be from the FBI?) Actually, it's not quite so scandalous -- but it is pretty cool, and until today, somewhat mysterious. Here's the story: In the past couple of weeks, I've received three separate requests from high school students to use the contents of my 'Oh, I Need a Clue, All Right... I'm Just Not Sure It's This One' post as a humorous forensics piece. For those of you unfamiliar with these sorts of high school competitions and trying to reconcile the apparent paradox of 'humorous forensics', I can tell you that it doesn't involve wearing a Groucho Marx mask while doing an autopsy. Nor fingerpainting knock-knock jokes on the wall with crime scene blood spatter. Nor giving David Caruso an atomic wedgie and dumping him in Biscayne Bay. (Not that it shouldn't involve that last one, if there were any justice in the acting world. I'm just saying it doesn't.) Instead, high school forensics has to do with public speaking, in its various forms. Giving extemporaneous speeches, debating hot topics, performing dramatic readings, and... if all of that sounds dreadfully dry and distasteful to you, 'humorous interpretations'. The last one being the only one, of course, that couldn't possibly assist you in any respectable sort of career down the road. Which is what makes it. So. Damned. Cool. As cool as forensics gets, anyway. The whole team is only a half-step above being the 'tuba kid' in band, anyway, so why not have some giggles? Story of my life. And as it so happens, I was myself a forensics fool, back in the day. My muse was a young Bill Cosby, who wrote a bit about a smart-mouthed Noah talking to God about some damned fool boat he was supposed to build. I even made it to the 1987 NCFL National Tournament, as a junior. (Sadly, the 'C' in NCFL stands for 'Catholic'. And backsassing Biblical belligerence doesn't go over too well with the yardstick-wielding nun crowd. So while I made it to the tourney, I daresay I barely made it back.) Now, it seemed, there was a new generation of fresh-faced young orators ready to take up the cause. And instead of Cosby's words, or anyone else's, they were asking me to provide the material to propel them into the prestigious national spotlight. (Insofar as it qualifies as a spotlight. Two decades ago, I experienced the 'prestige' of traveling to Buffalo, New York to compete. This year's competition? In Albany. Somebody needs to teach these Catholics how to shake off the habits and have a little fun. Sheesh.) Naturally, I was quick to agree to each of the requests. If I can warp sully ruin shape the mind of just one young student, then I'll have done something meaningful here. The children are our future. Ye gods help us all. My only question was... why? Not that I found it completely outside the realm of possibility that someone other than myself would be willing to repeat my words in public. Mostly, sure. But not completely. But they were all asking about the same post, which is now a little more than five years old. And at the time of the requests, I wasn't actively writing here, and hadn't for months. Google had likely forgotten all about me. The Blue's Clues bit was nearly as old as they were. Flattered as I was, I couldn't for the life of me figure out why the sudden hubbub was bubbling. Until today. Today, I found a video on YouTube starring a young lady, Chelsea, who asked for permission a few months ago to adapt the piece. I'd forgotten all about it, but the existence of the video -- and Chelsea's super (as in gold medal-winning in the state tourney super) performance -- easily explained the renewed interest. And was pretty interesting for me to watch, actually. The words in the piece are mine -- but the inflection, the gestures, the flair is all hers. I've never done any scriptwriting, so this is really the first time I've seen anything I've written interpreted onstage. Mis-interpreted, sure -- at family reunions, staff meetings, interventions, holding cells... but acted out, in front of an audience? Pretty damned cool. So I wanted to share the video below, for anyone interested in seeing Blue's Clues (or my/Chelsea's twisted take on it) come to life. Belated congratulations to Chelsea on her win, and many thanks for choosing a piece of mine to perform. Frankly, I hope it inspires more requests from forensics folks -- finding this version of an old favorite made my day. I wonder if there's any future in writing custom monologues that high school smartasses would appreciate? Come to think of it, I wonder if that's what I've been doing here all along. Dear lord.

OSM meets Rebecca Adlington, the swimmer who went to Beijing unknown and came back a star

The comedian Russell Howard said it best when he summed up what we all love most about Rebecca Adlington. 'She's so normal it's fantastic, she looks like she could work at Greggs! You know, "I've gotta go bloody fast, I've left pasties in the oven!"' As a fan of comedy, no doubt OSM's Sportsperson of the Year would roar her head off at that. It is Adlington's 'Greggs' appeal that the British public relate to; her expression of delight after winning two Olympic gold medals was so human it won over a nation. The unpretentious 19-year-old from Mansfield is instantly likeable.On the morning of the photoshoot, Adlington arrives straight from the pool wearing a Team GB tracksuit, her hair wet from a 6am training session. She is not precious about her appearance. She slings her coat over her lap, apologises to the stylist about the state of her hair - 'It was in such bad condition after Beijing I couldn't get a brush through it' - and gets down to the nitty-gritty of showbiz gossip from the previous night at the Cosmo awards. There was Kim Cattrall ('Stunning in real life, not at all wrinkly'); drag queen Jodie Harsh ('At first I thought it was Jodie Marsh!'); and Trinny and Susannah ('They never grabbed my boobs, but I haven't got any anyway'); all were there to collect awards. Adlington's was Ultimate Sports Superhero, which meant having to negotiate the dreaded red carpet. 'I don't know how to pose to save my life,' she says. 'Someone said cross your legs, but my shoes were so high I'd have ended up wobbling and looking like a prat. You know how celebrities do that thing where they keep the same face on every single photograph? They never seem to get the whole... [contorts her face into a series of gurns] whereas I always get that photo where I'm mid-sentence and looking awful.'As Adlington chats away, the stylist applies the curling tongs and there is a loud sizzle. 'Oh my God, is that my hair? I'm gonna leave with one side bald! Oh well.' Then, spying a large curl in the mirror, she lets out a delighted squeal: 'I feel like Sandy out of Grease!'Adlington confesses she is a bit nervous about being photographed in a swimsuit. Why? She's an athlete, she's bound to look gorgeous. 'Are you kidding?' she screams, 'I've got massive bingo wings, look. I've got this armpit hanging out which is my pec muscle, it just, like, hangs over because it's so big. I've got man shoulders, I'm not toned at all. And after Beijing I've put on a bit of weight.'Most people can reel off a list of things they dislike about their appearance, but they're either lying to make you feel better, or they really are unhappy. Adlington is neither, just honest. She yanks up her T-shirt and grabs a handful of her stomach. 'Look, I don't have a flat stomach. I've got the tyre. All the other girls on my swim team are skinny. Like literally nothing rolls over. 'I do get a bit insecure,' she continues, reflecting on all these new demands to be photographed. 'The worst thing is the photographer, because you feel like they must have shot so many gorgeous skinny people and then they've got to work with someone that's not.' In fact, the resounding verdict around the studio today is, 'My God, hasn't she got great legs?' and 'Doesn't she look gorgeous?' She does. Serene and beautiful, but wonderfully unaffected as, sweating under the hot photographic lamps, she asks for a tissue. 'If you don't want to see something really disgusting, look away now,' she says, wiping the sweat from her underarms with a grin. Adlington has been famous for only four months, but she has been swimming for 15 years. It started when she dived into a pool on holiday, aged four, and paddled about like a natural. So her parents took her for lessons at the local pool in Mansfield - due to be renamed after Adlington next month - along with her two elder sisters. It was Rebecca who showed the most promise, swimming competitively from the age of nine. By the time she was 12 she had joined her current coach, Bill Furniss, at the Nova swim club in Nottingham, making the 20-mile round trip from Mansfield twice a day. All those years of dedication and hard work, yet before Beijing you had to scour the internet to find anything written about her. Swimming is rarely big news - even when she won 800metres gold at the world championships in Manchester in April this year, there followed just one national newspaper article. But Olympic medals are different, and after Beijing, with golds in the 400m and 800m freestyle, Adlington was instantly hailed as Britain's most successful swimmer in 100 years. How, then, does she reflect on her achievements? 'You know when I wake up in the morning I think, "Is it 5.20am already?" rather than, "Oh I've won two Olympic gold medals." It's something that will never quite sink in. The weirdest thing is just the fact that you can say, "I've won an Olympic gold medal". That is the scariest thing in the world. I'm just a 19-year-old girl. Everyone keeps saying it's really special, but I don't see myself as being special. It's like how you don't think you're beautiful but someone else thinks you're stunning.'Adlington says she misses the Olympics, the camaraderie of being in a gang of friends. At times she makes it sound more like a holiday camp than a highly pressured environment for elite athletes. 'I loved it out there. The hardest thing was having to leave after we spent five weeks together. You found yourself picking up people's accents and phrases - you do though! Like if someone's being an idiot the guys called them a tool or a weapon, so when I got back home I start calling everyone a tool. When we got back together for the Olympic parade in London we had such a laugh on that bus, just being back together again was brilliant.'But when it comes to her own performances, the memories are more sober. 'You know I was so nervous. Especially for the 800m. It is my main event, closest to my heart. Winning the 400m was an unexpected bonus, but to get a medal in the 800m, that was always my goal.'Before the race I got really emotional. I thought I was going to throw up, then I thought I was going to cry, then I thought I was going to pass out. I had to lie down on the floor. Then I got in the call room 15 minutes before the race and suddenly I was fine. Michael Phelps was racing in the 100 fly and we were all watching it on the TV. It was so close at the finish, everyone was like, "Oh my God!" He won it by 0.01 of a second. I can't even click that fast.' Wasn't her own 400m final, against the American Katie Hoff, similarly close? 'Oh no,' she says, casually, 'that was 0.07 seconds.'The battle for the 800m title was more than just a second gold medal for Adlington. Breaking Janet Evans's 19-year-old world record was a physical experience more intense than anything she had ever endured. 'It was the most painful race in my whole entire life,' she says. 'I put every little bit of me into it, mentally and physically. When I finished my body collapsed, probably because I pushed it a little bit too far, but I was so wanting to do it and so up for it that the adrenaline just took over. Afterwards my body hurt, it had never been so sore. And you're drained. It wasn't just the pain, it was the nerves, all week I'd had them. People don't realise how tiring that is. You can't eat properly because you're so nervous. I lost 2kg in two days just from the heats to the 800m final.'Early in 2005, when Adlington was 15, she had been forced to curtail her swimming when she and her elder sister Laura contracted glandular fever. The disease was not new to the Adlington family: the oldest daughter, Chloe, had gone through it five years before and suffered so badly she had been forced to give up swimming. While Rebecca battled with the disease and its after effects of chronic fatigue syndrome, the virus entered Laura's brain and she lay in intensive care fighting for her life. 'It was a rough time for us. Laura had encephalitis [swelling of the brain], I had my final year of GCSEs and wasn't feeling too hot. My mum was really worried. In those situations family comes first and swimming has to come last. So for a couple of months I focused on my family. My mum and dad were constantly at the hospital, Chloe did everything else - looking after the house and driving me to training, while we kept the rest of the family updated with phone calls. If there was any news, good or bad, or even if Laura just woke up and spoke to us we'd be ringing round to tell everyone.'Adlington's coach, Furniss, wanted her to keep swimming so, with the agreement of her doctors, he created a pared-down regime. 'You have to keep the feel of the water going otherwise you lose your technique,' Adlington says, 'but every time I got in the pool I felt like I couldn't go anywhere. I felt as though I hadn't slept and yet I was sleeping 12 hours a night. I felt heavy all the time, like I was 40 stone. Bill was extremely good with it all. He never said, "Oh, she's ill, I'll leave her," he took a step back, made me go easy and got me right. It was hard, but I didn't ever complain because I'd seen what both my sisters went through, I was just grateful that I didn't have to give up swimming.'Everybody agreed that swimming was the best thing for her, but Adlington's parents could not help but worry. 'You have two of your children with a similar type of viral infection,' says her mum Kay. 'You ask yourself all sorts of questions. We monitored Becky's training very carefully: if her appetite waned, if she couldn't sleep, if she was irritable. We didn't want to scare her, though, we didn't want her to feel this was the start of what Laura had. But she must have asked herself the question, "Will it do this to me?" In Laura's case the virus attacked both the front and back of her brain, which made it more complicated to treat. The doctors pumped her full of everything they could. It was up to her then. It was agonising.'We carried on with as much normality as we could. School allowed Becky to drop one of her lessons so that after morning training she could come home and have a proper breakfast, and dry her hair. Before she was ill she just used to have her cereal in the car and go to school with wet hair. That sounds awful, doesn't it? But we were always on the go.'Adlington's parents shielded her from the worst of Laura's illness, insisting that the other two daughters didn't visit her in intensive care. 'They didn't want us to see her there with all the tubes,' Adlington says. 'It was a terrifying time. But it was hardest on my parents.' That is not entirely true. Adlington had been tipped as a medal hope for the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, but her illness left her unable to compete, which was a tough disappointment to take.In true Adlington style it isn't long before she starts cracking a few jokes. 'You know, when Laura started getting better we were a bit nasty,' she says with a smile. 'Where the illness had impacted on her brain she was doing some hilarious things. Like she thought there were little men dancing on the end of her bed, or that the drip in her chest was a baby, or the thing you wee through - the catheter! - she thought she was leaning on a pen and she kept trying to move it. It was funny, but it was also scary.'Pulling through those events must have made her stronger. 'It did,' she says, 'it definitely made me stronger and I wouldn't be the person I am today without those things happening to me.'With the final photograph taken, Adlington skips off to get changed back into her tracksuit, but keeps the Fifties-Style make-up on. 'I love it!' she says. 'I definitely want my hair like this for Sports Personality of the Year.' Following on from her OSM accolade, Adlington cannot wait for the BBC awards night in Liverpool on 14 December, at which she is a favourite for the top three. She can barely contain her excitement as she talks about the outfit she plans to wear; it is her effusiveness that makes her such a genuinely appealing candidate. She has already chosen her dress and her shoes: all she needs now is the trophy. ? Watch a video of Rebecca Adlington collecting her OSM award.Rebecca AdlingtonSwimmingOlympics 2008Sport featuresguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

For kids: a different kind of gold medal

Nobel Prizes honor men and women who've made the world a better place.

To do in LA: Go see Dave Hill Tuesday night.

If you're in Los Angeles, you may want to head over to alt-comic Dave Hill's live show tomorrow night, Tuesday, October 21, where at 10:30pm local time, he says... I will be exploding like a motherf#@ker all over again over there at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Hollywood. If you see just one thing that is explosive in nature tomorrow night, you should totally see my show because it is going to be incredible to the point where it makes all other things previously thought to be incredible to suddenly seem, like, not really all that incredible if you think about it (with the exception of Olympic figure skating great Oksana Baiul's gold medal-winning performance at the 1994 Winter Olympics, something we still talk about to this day). My guests on the show tomorrow night will be actress/singer Lucy Lawless, whom you no doubt remember from such programs as "Xena: Warrior Princess," "Battlestar Galactica," and a ton of other programs besides those ones I just mentioned; and also singer/songwriter/actor/man-about-town Loudon Wainwright III, whom you no doubt remember from the radio and also the popular films "The Aviator," "40 Year-Old Virgin," and "Knocked Up." There will also be snacks, fire, small animals, knives, smoke, and dancing. I really hope you can make it. You can get tickets right here. Previously on BB: * Dave Hill, Jedi Master in training. * Dave Hill returns to Fashion Week '09 * Dave Hill is a very funny guy (videos)...

$100K Loebner Prize Turing Test This Sunday

The 18th annual Loebner Prize Turing contest will be held this Sunday at the University of Reading. The Loebner Prize is for $100k and a gold medal to the author of the winning computer program which can satisfy the Turing test. The Turning Test comes from Alan Turing and his notion of whether or not a computer's responses are indistinguishable from a human's responses. Turing generally wondered if a computer could actually think and came up with his ?artificial? intelligence test. Although the $100k prize has not been awarded yet, a bronze medal and $2k prize is given to the best AI contender each year. Six judges will question six computer programs behind computer screens for five minutes to try to determine if a human or a computer is behind the screen. If they can't tell that the responses come from a computer or human then the computer program has passed the Turing test. Although, many people aren't fooled by chat boxes or AIM bots, already they can be so powerful that some are easily fooled by them and even fall in love with them or are seduced by them to give up their private info.

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