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A recent publicity exercise gave birth to an unusual new sport – neon night surfing.

While many surfers try their hand at surfing under the moonlight, this takes the idea to a whole new level.

To welcome Summer, the event took place at Sydney’s famous Bondi Beach with a dawn patrol of 17 surfers at 5.00am.

Specially designed wetsuits similar  to rashy vests featured battery packs that powered neon tubes called “Fibre Flares,” which use a  similar technology to bicycle lights.

With a bit of luck, someone may commercialise these neon wetsuits and create a brand new surfing genre.

Written by Andrew Talati

After reorganising the office, we were left with one big IKEA cabinet that needed to be moved to our storage facility. Given it was about half a kilometer away we could either perilously attach it to the car roof racks which would lead to the total disintegration of the cabinet or walk it over by foot.

So the quickest and safest option was to make the trip by foot which became challenging after 200m. It gives a great all over body workout as you are needing to brace from the core to ensure stability while engaging your links shoulders and arms to provide the movement.

Always remember when you are carrying any loads to be careful to maintain neutral posture, i.e. keeping your hips underneath your shoulders and not leaning forwards as this will place stress on your lower back. This follows on from the same principle of lifting the cabinet from the ground, being careful to bend at the knees and not to allow a rounded back as this again will place stress on your lumbar spine and cause lower back pain. Similarly remember to keep the chest out and your shoulders back as placing a load while having rounded shoulders can place stress on the rotator cuff muscles.

When you look at any furniture removal lists, they always carry in the optimum position to maintain a correct level of posture otherwise as you can imagine within a short period of time and will have low back problems.

And unusual support was taking place in the Chile streets, an urban downhill bike riding called the The Valparaiso Cerro Abajo held in Valparaiso.

It’s great to see the evolution of sports that make the most of their environment to add a new dimension of excitement. While most traditional downhill bike races take place on the side of mountains with a single track course weaving its way through the trees and other obstacles, this urban downhill race involved massive drops from one street level to another, descending steep staircases, avoiding random dogs and moving along at high speeds avoiding many obstacles of this urban landscape.

While one wouldn’t consider Chile to have a race attracting international attention, it shows you that anything is possible when you truly believe.

The video was filmed using a similar helmet mounted camera to what we use to fill but filming our red suits around Melbourne.
One of the most amusing parts of the video is when a representative from the UCI, which is the international cycling Federation was trying to explain to the Chilean writer about the perils of not wearing sufficient body armor to protect himself.

It’s interesting to see the amount of time children spend playing video games versus being outside and exercising. Even when on holidays, playing video games seems to rate higher than enjoying the beach.

It was great however to see parents spending time with the children throwing the frisbee, playing soccer or other each activities.

There is a disturbing trend of children spending more and more time per day either engaged with some computer-based activity the social networking or playing video games. The growth of video game consoles and sharing players involvement over the Internet has seen an increase in this type of activity.

While children find video games lots of fun and mentally challenging at some level, there is no substitute for their parents spending quality time with them either in the park or in the backyard playing games all some level of fit physical exercise.

According to the Australian Bureau of statistics in April 2009 2.2 million or 79% of children use the Internet either at home or during school hours.
The portion of children accessing the Internet increase with age from 60% for 5-8yo to 96% for children over 12.

I’m sure if you asked any child if they preferred playing video games under spending time with their mom or dad, to be confident in saying that the children much preferred the real-life interactions with the parents rather than the artificial environment of the computer or video game.

While talking to a taxi driver in Malaysia he had an interesting story of how his mother extracted latex from rubber trees and the transportation involved.

The process of extracting latex harks back to the traditional methods called tapping, which involves making an incision in a spiral like pattern around the trunk of a palm tree. Every day the tapper will collect the latex that had weeped from the palm tree into a little bowl on the side of the trunk. On average a person tap 100 to 150 palm trees per day.

The most interesting part of this story was that the taxi driver’s mother tapped up to 500 palm trees per day and collected 728 gallons of latex or 25 to 30 L (the equivalent weight of 25/30kgs). The most amazing part is that at the end of every day his mother who was 55 would carry the day’s worth of latex over her shoulders into 2 aluminium buckets connected by flexible timber rod and travel 2 -3 kms to the deposit zone.

On average the tappers would work from the age of 18 to 55 years old with the children clearing the ground around the canopy of the palm trees of weeds and other plant material. This work was very physically exhausting with minimal pay which made this a very demanding type of work exercise.