From owner-footbag@list.footbag.org Wed Sep 3 14:20:11 2003 Received: from llic.net (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by llic.net (8.12.3/8.12.3/Debian-6.4) with ESMTP id h83LKA6h000509 for ; Wed, 3 Sep 2003 14:20:10 -0700 Received: (from majordom@localhost) by llic.net (8.12.3/8.12.3/Debian-6.4) id h83LKAbh000507 for footbag-outgoing2@list.footbag.org; Wed, 3 Sep 2003 14:20:10 -0700 X-Authentication-Warning: llic.net: majordom set sender to owner-footbag@list.footbag.org using -f Received: from [207.160.174.20] (HELO fogles.net) by foundationcomputing.net (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 4.0.6) with ESMTP id 3922164 for footbag@footbag.org; Wed, 03 Sep 2003 09:53:13 -0500 Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2003 09:56:43 -0500 Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v552) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Subject: [footbag] Funky Chicken now truly fossilized! From: Derrick Fogle To: footbag@footbag.org Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.552) X-Scanned-By: Spam Scanner (MIMEDefang 2.21, footbag edition) Sender: owner-footbag@list.footbag.org Lordy Lordy, look who's forty! That's right, the Funky Chicken has just celebrated his 40th birthday. Now you have to suffer my midlife footbag musings (or hit the delete key). I was introduced to Hacky Sack in July of 1981 in Colorado at the age of 17. More than 22 years later, I still play footbag. Aside from month here or there, and nearly a year when I hurt my ankles so bad, I've been kicking the whole 22 years. I competed for 16 of those years, and ran footbag tournaments and a footbag club for 13 of those years. I've probably logged over 10 Million contacts with a footbag. On that fateful day in Colorado, I was going to a party with my brother. There was a small group of people doing something in front of the house, and I was curious. My brother joined the circle, and invited me in too. I'm even more of a social misfit in real life than I am in the footbag community, so I was amazed when the circle willingly let me in. I was even more amazed when nobody shooed me out of the circle, even though I'm probably the worst person I've ever known as a footbag newbie. I laughed and had fun, and I was hooked. Back then there was nothing but the genuine cowhide 2-panel Hacky Sack, and at $14 a pop, I couldn't buy one right away. But round rocks are plentiful in the Colorado rockies, so I made due with that for a few days until I got my next paycheck. When I lost my first Hack a couple weeks later, I had enough money saved to buy 3 more, and buy I did. Summer vacation was nearly over, and I went for an epic bike ride on my last day in the mountains. I wiped out descending Loveland pass. No broken bones, but talk about road rash! When someone finally came by and stopped to help me out, they started picking up the pieces of bike and other junk I was carrying. I must have sounded completely out of my mind, because I kept telling them, "Don't worry about the other stuff, just find my Hacky Sacks! I just want my Hacky Sacks! Help me find my Hacky Sacks..." I brought Hacky Sack back to Lawrence High School in Kasas that fall. It was almost an instant sensation. It was the first time the hippies and heads had something more fun to do than smoke cigarettes on the smoking patio. We turned the smoking patio into Hacky central. When I moved on to college, I always structured my class schedule so I had a couple hours in the middle of the day to play footbag on campus. I got ahold of a Hacky Sack carrying pouch, and carried my footbags in it everywhere, always tied to a belt loop, or through a hole I made in all my shorts. I still remember the excitement one day when I had a rally of what had to be almost a hundred kicks! Then, I caught wind of some kind of Hacky tournament. I ended up kicking with a group of people in the TD's garage the night before the tourney, and coveted the trophy for Freestyle. Next morning I was scared - some other guy showed up and could do a (gasp) toe delay! I had never seen a delay before; they were a new 'invention' in freestyle at the time. But he bobbled his delays, and I won the show with a huge set of rainbow flying clippers at the end! It wasn't long before I was helping with promotions, selling footbags, and seriously sharpening my skills. At a mid-winter tournament, Andy Linder came down to set a new consecutives record (it was 13,000+ at the time). I had been practicing hard, but had yet to break 5,000. While Andy kicked in a well-lit, roped-off area, I helped set up the tourney, and then got started on my rally out in the middle of the open, poorly lir gym. We both broke the record that night - I came 4 kicks short of exactly quadrupling my old record with a rally of 18,672. Andy had finished his rally of over 21,000 a couple hours before, and I ended up holding up the net games because I refused to try to move over to where he was kicking before. I attended the Nationals that summer, and sold a ton of the deerskin, 4-panel Balywick footbags over the next couple of years. How many of us remember the Nationals footbag golf course, with the small circles spray painted on the ground, and the conduit that stuck up out of the ground in a loop that you had to go through? Gawd, I always did, and still do, suck at golf. Over the next dozen years, I ran the Heartland Regional Championships and helped run the Ozarks Open. I started and ran the FEAT footbag club, and attended all but one or two Worlds and many smaller events as well. I found the key to success in footbag clubs was consistency. I held a 'kick together' twice a week, weather permitting, in front of the JC Nichols fountain in Kansas City. It is the most photographed landmark in the area, and I was viewed by thousands playing footbag every week. And the club slowly grew. But... I ended up moving to follow a new job opportunity. When I left Kansas City, the club died out almost immediately. Then Ida and I started a family. I stopped running tournaments, stopped running clubs, and cut back on competing. All effort through the years spent promoting footbag, building a club, building a tournament series, vanished in less than a year. As far as I know, not a single person I ever turned on to footbag still kicks today. Ironically enough, the handful of people I turned on to kicking that first fall I brought Hacky Sack to Lawrence High ended up being the most involved and longest-playing kickers I've turned on to the game. When I arrived in Columbia, there was a thriving group of Hackers. Showing up with what was then finals-quality freestyle skills was like dropping a bomb in the middle of thier circle. Many of them stopped kicking, and the few that still kicked avoided me (and I learned to avoid them). I kicked alone for a year or two until a couple of BAP-oriented kickers moved to town. I kicked with them, and became more BAP-oriented myself. But I never did like the rigid "pass to the right" and "no tilting" or "no guilting" mentality. Oh, and I despised the self-serving. Drawn to footbag because I was a social misfit, I found myself still a social misfit, even in the footbag community. Me and my ideas rubbed a lot of people the wrong way; poor behavior and bad will ensued. It took me a long time to accept the political undertones of freestyle competitions. While I was never that great technically at footbag, I was also (and still am) a miserable study of community/office politics. My ankle injuries pretty much finished me off. I hurt my left ankle so bad (botched paradox whirl, rolled it), I was certain I would never recover. Some people may remember me limping around Worlds that year, not competing but rather takink care of my toddler daughter while Ida set a new world record in speed consecs. A year later, I was just getting back to kicking when I did the same thing (botched paradox whirl - again) to the right, although not nearly as bad. I competed for the last time that summer at Worlds in Chicago. My second kid was born by that time. We named our son Miles. The name started as a joke because we did so much travelling for footbag, but we ended up liking it best of all. Amazingly enough, retiring from competition is just about the best thing I ever did for my footbag game. Without the need to 'train', I could do whatever I felt like during my kicking sessions. I enjoyed it, and worked completely past my ankle injuries. Because I was never in a hotbed of footbag activity, I did much of my kicking alone, and I've always enjoyed kicking solo. I didn't mind being left alone with my footbag. I shook the BAP mentality out of my head and focused on what I loved the most about footbag: kick-dancing to music. It took me another couple years working on blending the freestyle tricks I could do with the kick-dancing I wanted to do. Then, there was one summer a couple seasons ago where it all seemed to come together. I was mixing funky kicks with strings of tricks, totally in rhythm to the music, and really dancing with my whole body in the process - funky chicken style of course. And with all this, I managed to do something I had never been able to do before - keep the bag off the ground! I played footbag in front of crowds at the local community festivals here in Columbia. I kick-danced to the music, kept the footbag off the ground, and enjoyed playing footbag more than I had ever enjoyed it before. Now, that's gone too. In reality, I started losing the 'magic' before more injuries set in, but the injuries and problems at work really put the whammy on me. My back is permanently jacked up, and then I broke a finger in a bike wreck. Then there was work, too; with the boss' pet projects (running triathlons) taking up more time, and a new person had came to work. She's a young, ambitious girl that totally schooled my ass in office politics. The pressure and depression from work accented with injuries that kept me away from footbag for a couple more months sent me into a tailspin. No, I haven't quit kicking! I still kick religiously once a week, but I'm back to the same form that dominated my career in freestyle competition: 6-8 drops in a 2-minute timespan. My body hurts like hell aftewards if I freestyle solo for 2 hours, but I still do it. I still kick for those crowds at the local festivals. I'm even an official part of the entertainment program now - the pre-band warm-up show at the main stage. I love playing footbag. More accurately, I love footbag freestyling. Nothing gives me a thrill so much as to freestyle in front of that crowd. I probably barely average a 2-add ratio, and spend a good half my kicking time just kicking, but always to the music. I've really developed my kick-dancing, too, accentuating the funky-ckicken stuff, and borrowing a lot of arm and upper-body motions from belly dancers. Between work, kids, and whatever, I only get to kick once a week, but I rarely miss a session. Footbag has been the great passion in my life that I've had to fight for, fight against, and learn from. It has taught me about myself, about others, about good and evil and understanding and acceptance. It has taught me about management, accounting, and business. It has taught me about physiology, nutrition, and medicine. It has taught me about love. 22 years kicking so far, and at my 40th, I'm still in great physical shape. I'm far back from the leading edge now, but I can still kick a good game, and I'm not about to stop. I look forward to my weekly kicking sessions, without the need to train for competition, without other kickers to impress. I'm still teaching myself more about rhythm and dancing with a footbag; I've got a long way to go. I even still work on new moves, but getting old sucks. I really feel the saying "you can't teach an old dog new tricks." I've ended up writing - and deleting - another page worth of blather that started with the phrase, "In the end". But this isn't the end. I'm still kicking. From owner-footbag@list.footbag.org Wed Sep 3 14:21:26 2003 Received: from llic.net (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by llic.net (8.12.3/8.12.3/Debian-6.4) with ESMTP id h83LLQ6h000553 for ; Wed, 3 Sep 2003 14:21:26 -0700 Received: (from majordom@localhost) by llic.net (8.12.3/8.12.3/Debian-6.4) id h83LLQOQ000551 for footbag-outgoing2@list.footbag.org; Wed, 3 Sep 2003 14:21:26 -0700 X-Authentication-Warning: llic.net: majordom set sender to owner-footbag@list.footbag.org using -f Received: from conversion-daemon.mail01.mscd.edu by mail01.mscd.edu (iPlanet Messaging Server 5.2 HotFix 1.17 (built Jun 23 2003)) id <0HKM00701E6443@mail01.mscd.edu>; Tue, 02 Sep 2003 22:09:53 -0600 (MDT) Received: from metroconnect.mscd.edu (metroconnect.mscd.edu [147.153.1.7]) by mail01.mscd.edu (iPlanet Messaging Server 5.2 HotFix 1.17 (built Jun 23 2003)) with SMTP id <0HKM003Z1E8H2Y@mail01.mscd.edu>; Tue, 02 Sep 2003 22:09:53 -0600 (MDT) Date: Tue, 02 Sep 2003 22:09:53 -0600 (MDT) From: Bradley M Kaplan Subject: [footbag] Lost something at Funtastik To: freestyle@footbag.org, footbag@footbag.org Message-id: <4107961.1062562193369.JavaMail.cpadmin@metroconnect.mscd.edu> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT X-Scanned-By: Spam Scanner (MIMEDefang 2.21, footbag edition) Sender: owner-footbag@list.footbag.org Not that I really expect to get it back, but I just bought a copy of Tricks of the Trade 2 at Funtastik YESTERDAY. It was supposed to be a gift for my little brother, but I got home to find that it was no longer in my possession. My bag was parked with a pair of Birkenstock sandals under the event tent next to the judging benches. If anyone has picked it up or knows of someone who did please e-mail me privately. I will gladly pay the shipping charges to get it back. Please, I was there at the end when the site was scoured for clean-up so I know it wasn't left there by myself or anyone else. Thanks, Brad From owner-footbag@list.footbag.org Tue Sep 23 02:16:12 2003 Received: from llic.net (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by llic.net (8.12.3/8.12.3/Debian-6.6) with ESMTP id h8N9GB9C017921 for ; Tue, 23 Sep 2003 02:16:11 -0700 Received: (from majordom@localhost) by llic.net (8.12.3/8.12.3/Debian-6.6) id h8N9GBVr017919 for footbag-outgoing2@list.footbag.org; Tue, 23 Sep 2003 02:16:11 -0700 X-Authentication-Warning: llic.net: majordom set sender to owner-footbag@list.footbag.org using -f Received: from I (brat.footbag.org [209.125.90.60]) by llic.net (8.12.3/8.12.3/Debian-6.6) with ESMTP id h8N9G99D017914 for ; Tue, 23 Sep 2003 02:16:10 -0700 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: brat@209.125.90.2 Message-Id: Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 02:16:07 -0700 To: footbag@footbag.org From: Steve Goldberg Subject: [footbag] ALERT: footbag@footbag.org is going away Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" X-Scanned-By: Spam Scanner (MIMEDefang 2.21, footbag edition) Sender: owner-footbag@list.footbag.org Subscribers to footbag@footbag.org, This list is going away effective immediately. (Read on for details, though; the archives will remain forever!) It has been replaced with the online forum for general footbag discussion at: http://www.footbag.org/forum/ A new forum has been created specifically for discussion of footbag net (which this list was partly used for). It is directly available at: http://www.footbag.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=8 We created the footbag@footbag.org e-mail list in 1993 (!!) as an e-mail-based "online forum" for the discussion of footbag. It was created by Jim Curtis at HP (the original address back in '93 was footbag@hpmpes2.cup.hp.com -- who remembers that?!). Over the ensuing 10 years, close to 10,000 messages were exchanged between a list of hundreds of people. (After the freestyle list forked off in '96, the traffic slowed on the regular list, but it continued going strong for many years.) Back then (almost a decade ago), very few people (especially footbag players :-)) were using the internet regularly. What's more, there was very little software available for building robust online communities. The majordomo listserve was the "state of the art" in online community tools (that's not saying much). We as a community were on the "bleeding edge" of new technology use, and this list and companion website helped propel most footbag players into an online community that allowed us to get where we are today. In the process, however, we burned out a lot of moderators, and made a lot of people angry because of the strict policies we had for managing the list. Most people don't believe this, but literally 80% of the messages we rejected over that period were because of "formatting" problems that would have seriously impacted the utility of the list. Issues from subject lines for proper threading, to From: headers containing bogus information, to invalid content formats (HTML being the worst offender), etc. It was almost impossible to manage all the details because we were using e-mail, and we couldn't control what some crazy e-mail program decided to do, or how people were using e-mail. And of course there was the spam problem, which is of course worse today than ever before. So, all in all, the majordomo e-mail-based forum was showing significant signs of wear, and was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Well -- over the last half-decade, there have been significant numbers of people getting involved in the "online community" space. Free software was popping up left and right for building online communities -- everything from file sharing to photo galleries to directories to FAQ systems to improved forums and communication systems. Unfortunately, before we could take advantage of any of these things on footbag.org, I needed to basically rewrite footbag.org from the ground up, in a way that allowed me to host other software on the system, and to focus on "integration" of that software so that it would truly be part of the single community (instead of making users log in separately, for example, to use certain functions). That effort -- rewriting footbag.org into php -- took me about 3 years off and on, and finally ended last year (I sent a big announcement about that). Well, those days are behind us. :-) I'm very proud to announce one of hopefully many integrations of state-of-the-art functionality to help the footbag community using our footbag.org shared resource: the new, Footbag Forum, at http://www.footbag.org/forum/ This majordomo list will cease to exist (though the announce list will continue -- more on that later). We will be shutting it down very soon. No new posts will be accepted, and everyone is urged to post any thoughts they have on this project to the forum itself, at: http://www.footbag.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=61 The archives will continue to exist forever; we may even clean up the user interface to make it easier to search for old articles as the archives become more of a repository for past discussions than an active online forum. The last thing we want (and we'll apply this reasoning to the forum as well) is for the "institutional memory" of many years of communication to just go away in a single instant. We want to keep these discussions archived so that future generations can see what we used to talk about, way back in the Dark Ages of the internet. :-) But for now, please give the new forum a try. Again, that's http://www.footbag.org/forum Oh -- and in case you're wondering... You don't need to think about your old mailing list subscriptions. We'll take care of removing them once we're ready, and you won't get e-mail from the retired list addresses again. Also, we'll be fixing up the announce list to be much easier to subscribe and unsubscribe from, since it'll be the only public list we support. For those of you with private lists on footbag.org (such as northeast and southbay), those lists will remain for now so there is no change to the way they work. However, you may want to consider using the new groups mechanism on footbag.org to create a group which allows you to have your own mailing lists attached to them. See http://www.footbag.org/groups (creating new groups is an IFPA members-only feature). Enjoy the new and improved forum. And thanks to those of you who have been on this forum since the beginning; it'll be kind of sad but also a big relief to shut this one down! :-) Steve P.S. Thanks also go to all the moderators who've spent countless hours dealing with this forum. From Jim Curtis to Brian Kimball to Derrick Fogle to Allan Haggett, this has been a truly thankless and monumental job. Nobody will know how much work they put into this. And special thanks to Pavel Belchev for work nobody will ever know he did, but I really appreciate it. I'm sure there are others I forgot to thank, but that'll do it for now. (Oh, yeah, and thanks to Mike Stoler for much energy invested in the project to create rec.sport.footbag on the Usenet forum; it still exists today but of course, this new forum is much cooler. :-) So anyone participating in that, be sure to point people to the new forum.) P.P.S. You'll need to become a member of footbag.org before you can post to the new forum; your old list membership will not carry over. If you once created an account but have since forgotten the password or changed e-mail addresses, simply follow the on-screen directions when it's time to log in (it's very clear if you read the directions). If you never had a footbag.org account, now's the time to create it!