Musical Chairs World Championship Is a Real-Life Game of Thrones

Photos: Sol Neelman/Wired

AMESBURY, Massachusetts — Fred Smith, the founder and commissioner of the World Musical Chairs Federation, has set an ambitious goal for himself, and his sport.

Smith, a short, balding and — he says — “beautiful,” man, recently left a career as a corrections officer to make the childhood game of musical chairs a worldwide sport. “This is what I plan to do with the rest of my life,” he said in all seriousness. As if that weren’t ambitious enough, he hoped to draw 8,000 people to the World Musical Chairs Championship. Why? Well, why not?

“I’m doing something no one’s done before,” he said Saturday, perhaps oblivious to the thought that may be because no one’s wanted to do it before.

No more than 1,500 people showed at Amesbury Sports Park on a surprisingly chilly, overcast summer day, and about 500 actually participated. Smith fell far short of his goal of setting a world record, but the best weird sports often take time for their genius to be fully realized.

“It’s definitely a silly game,” said Smith, who also hosts a popular scavenger hunt each September. “But anyone can hone their skills to play musical chairs.”

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Dogs ‘Grip It and Rip It’ in Annual Surf Contest

Barb Ayers and Dude ride an, um, wave at the Loews Surf Dog Competition. Photos: Sol Neelman/Wired

I’ve seen a lot of surreal scenes in the years since I started shooting Weird Sports. Mexican wrestling comes to mind, as does that insane Tough Guy competition in England. But nothing has been so bizarre as seeing a basset hound surf.

Not only can bassets surf, but they’re quite adept at it, simply because of how they’re built.

“Low and heavy is good,” said Barb Ayers, whose dogs love to hang 10. Or is it 20? “It’s especially helpful to be fat and low.”

Ayers is an old pro when it comes to dog surfing, even if she won’t be competing at the seventh annual Loews Surf Dog Competition this weekend south of San Diego. It claims to be “the nation’s original surfing competition for man’s best friend,” and we’re not about to argue.

Dog surfing is pretty much what it sounds like. There are four heats. The first is for dogs less than 40 pounds. The second is for larger dogs. Then there’s a tandem competition, where dogs surf with their human companions. The final heat brings the winners of those three rounds together to determine the “Ultimate Champion.” Dogs and teams have 10 minutes to catch their top two waves. They’re scored on confidence, length of ride and overall ability to “grip it and rip it.”

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Geeks Who Drink Leads the Pub Trivia Nerd Pack

Illustration: Kevin Van Aelst

Illustration: Kevin Van Aelst

It was 10:45 pm, and the sixth annual Geek Bowl went to overtime. A hundred and fifty teams from around the US had trekked to Texas and paid to battle it out in the Austin Music Hall early this year. By the end, two master trivia squads—the locals of Team Dong, and Independence Hall and Oates from Philadelphia—were tied, vying for the $5,000 grand prize. The grueling contest featured questions that merged the brainy and the profane in a way that you’d never see on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. (For instance, you need a deep familiarity with both Italian architecture and gross Web memes to arrive at the answer to one question: “two girls, one cupola.”) And as the teams headed into the final bonus round, the 1,000-plus people in attendance were almost sober enough to care.

Geek Bowl comes from a Denver-based outfit called Geeks Who Drink. John Dicker decided to found the company after playing a particularly lame round of pub trivia one night in 2005. “I knew I’d have to start my own if I wanted it to improve,” he says. Dicker hired a marketing team and a trivia master to design the weekly quizzes. Now Geeks Who Drink runs contests at more than 200 locations in 21 states, with participating bars paying $125 to $200 a week. (Dicker’s quiz guru has since racked up six wins on Jeopardy!)

More bars are joining Geeks Who Drink every week, but they aren’t the only ones trying to commodify pub trivia. “Nashville is dominated by Trivia Time,” Dicker says. “Team Trivia has a stranglehold on Atlanta.” Then there’s Buzztime, which has a deal with the Buffalo Wild Wings chain and runs thousands of quizzes across North America. What began as a way to lure patrons into bars on slow weekday nights has become a cutthroat business.

Independence Hall and Oates got the overtime win easily this year after answering four of the five bonus questions correctly. They recognized Mount Mansfield as the highest point in Vermont and knew that the dollar is the official currency of Hong Kong. The major regret was that they didn’t get to answer the impossibly difficult tiebreaker question: “Multiply the number of years Bernard Madoff was sentenced to serve in prison by the number of UN member states whose names begin with Z, and then subtract the number of years Michael Jordan won the NBA’s regular-season MVP award.”

The answer is 295. If you got that, then there’s a spot in Geek Bowl VII for you.

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Science May Soon Give Us Pills That Make Us Exercise

Photo: Lanier67/Flickr

Science may soon give us a pill that makes us get up off the couch and hit the gym.

Swiss researchers have discovered that elevating the amount of erythropoietin, a hormone more commonly known as epo, in the brains of mice led them to be more active. What’s more, it did so without causing the erythropoiesis, or elevated red blood cell counts, that typically occurs when epo is used to boost performance.

Anyone who follows cycling knows about epo. It is a widely and illegally used performance-enhancing drug. It is more commonly and legitimately used to treat various types of anemia following chemotherapy or kidney failure. In these cases, though, the drug is administered in multiple small doses over time. Swiss researchers, in a study published in The Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, found epo has a far more dramatic effect (.pdf) in large doses.

“Here we show that epo increases the motivation to exercise,” Max Gassmann of University of Zurich said in a statement.

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From Napkin Notes to Reality, TaylorMade Builds a Mobile Golf Workshop

Martin Kaymer on the 16th hole during a practice round for the US Open Championship on Wednesday at The Olympic Club in San Francisco. Kaymer is just one of the pros the golf club manufacturers stand ready to assist with their fleet of mobile workshops. Photo: Ben Margot/Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO — “We’re kind of like a Nascar pit crew,” Wade Liles, the head technician in TaylorMade’s Tour Truck, says of his job. Liles is busy stripping grips from the golf clubs of former University of Nevada golfer Scott Smith, who played his way into the US Open in a series of qualifiers. “A lot of what we do is maintenance, but sometimes there’s something much more drastic.”

Photo: Mark McClusky/Wired

Liles has been at TaylorMade for 25 years, and this truck is his baby. He and his boss sketched out their dream mobile golf workshop five years ago, literally on the back of a napkin. After the truck was built to their exact specifications, the napkin was framed and mounted on the wall.

Every major golf company has a truck like this, a rolling clubhouse and club-building facility to meet any needs a Tour player might have in the run up to a tournament. Changing grips is the most common task, and a tech like Liles can do a set in minutes. But that’s just the start. Want to build up a 3 iron to help with the tight fairways at San Francisco’s Olympic Club? Sure. Looking for a different grind on your wedge to handle the thick rough? No problem. Want a driver that promotes the left-to-right ball flight you’ll need? You got it.

Every truck has its own quirks. In the Callaway van, you see cubby holes for each of the company’s top players, with the gloves, balls, hats and other accessories the player prefers. If Phil Mickelson needs new gear, it’s stowed for him here, right by Ernie Els and D.A. Points. In the TaylorMade truck, there’s a section where custom grips for various players are stowed, to make sure that a player like Martin Kaymer has the heavily corded model he prefers.

Photo: Mark McClusky/Wired

Liles finishes the grips on Smith’s clubs and moves on to his next order, building a backup driver for a player that’s identical in every way to his current gamer. Liles measures the club for length and its swingweight, which shows how the club is balanced. He goes into his storage area, pulls the correct graphite shaft from among thousands on the truck, then cuts it to the correct length.

Then, some fancy magic. The epoxy used by club builders to attach the head to the shaft usually takes 24 hours to set. Liles has designed custom thermal cells that wrap around the hosel of the club and set the adhesive in three minutes. After attaching the head, checking that the loft and lie of the club are correct and putting on the correct grip, the club is done. Elapsed time? Seven minutes.

The tour technicians see some players more than others, just based on how much they like to tweak things. “We might see a guy once a month,” says Liles. “Some we see once a year.” And some they see even more often. Bob Estes, who’s been on the PGA tour since 1988, has been in and out of the van several times, looking to adjust his putter to help him cope with Olympic’s scorchingly fast greens.

He waves to the technicians and heads back out to the practice green. Liles waves back. “We’re just here to help these guys play as well as they can,” he says. “If you don’t take advantage of that, well, I don’t know. It’s just a no-brainer.”

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