Ambi-texterous

All sporting eyes may be on London these days, but the what- up/RFLMAO brigade are looking no further than Times Square where, yesterday, our nation’s texters supreme had a Go 4 the Au at the 6th annual LG U.S. National Texting Competition.

Eleven competitors, ranging in age from 16 to 24, vied for the title and, perhaps more important, the $50K grand prize. (What do you make of a sport where the masters’ division starts at 25?)

Wisconsin’s Austin Weirschke pulled something of a Michael Phelps, and won for the second year in a row.

In case you’re no more familiar with the particulars of texting competitions than you are, say, with those of dressage or water polo:

The competition tests three skills: speed, accuracy and dexterity. There are three rounds to the competition: texting while blind-folded, texting with hands behind their backs and Text Blitz, where phrases are shown to the contestants for a length of time and they have to copy it as fast as they can before the next one. (Source: Boston.com)

While no one that I’ve seen is contesting Austin’s win, the contest itself is not without controversy. The source here is the use of physical keyboard, rather than touch screen.

This is no surprise – LG is, after all, the sponsor, and they’re a QWERTY kind of provider. Plus when they started the competition back in the day, there were no smartphones, and texters were all texting on cell phones. (Remember hitting the abc button three times to make it go “c”?) So when LG came through with the slide-out QWERTY keyboard, it was a real breakthrough.

Now, most smartphones use the touchscreen approach. Even the LG phone used in the championship lets you go touchscreen if you want.

LG did include a touchscreen component to last year’s competition, but touchscreen screwed up the flow of the contest, and slowed the contestants down. Speed rules, so this year’s contest went back to pure keyboard.

Thus the LG contest is being pooh-poohed in some quarters. One quarter – not being self-serving or anything like that – is Swiftkey, which makes keyboard software for Android devices that accelerates typing. Their CMO, Joe Braidwood said that:

…he thinks the competition is outdated and joked that "it's like forcing people to ride push scooters when they could have motor bikes. You can't have a modern day race with an old school device." (Source: ABC News.)

And, in fact, the Guinness World Record for fastest text message on earth is held by someone who used Swiftkey-like keyboard software. But to keep things on an even keel:

Currently the Guinness World Records has two records for the fastest text message ever sent -- one for a message sent on a touchscreen and one sent on a phone with a physical keyboard.

I am unlikely to win either one.

I’m a reasonably fast and accurate typist, and a reasonably slow and inaccurate texter.

I use a touchscreen for texting, by the way. When I got my first smartphone a few years back – a Blackberry – I thought at first that I would want the physical keyboard. But when I saw what it looked like, well, push scooter to moped works as an analogy. So does ‘it looked like you were carrying around a typewriter.’ It was too old-school looking even for me. But perhaps I would be a more fluent texter if I did have an old QWERTY physical keyboard to punch around.

As it stands, I find that I really have to pay attention when I text. And paying attention is something that I usually don’t bother to do until after I’ve hit the “send” button and find that the word “head” went through as “dead”. I’m always sending out errata texts “miss” = “loss”, “clown” = “nightgown”.

QWERTY or touchscreen. I’m not apt to win any texting contest.

My typing, though, is pretty okay.

That’s thanks to the touch-typing course I took at Worcester’s Classical High the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in high school. The course mostly entailed monotonous, repetitive typing exercises:

A-S-D-F space Semi-L-K-J

rug jug bug rug jug bug

While I never became a speed typist – you could only go so fast on a manual typewriter before the keys would jam –  this method did get you familiar with the keyboard without having to look at it, and with using all those fingers and thumbs. No hunt and peck for me, my friends. Too bad there’s almost no such thing as transcribing a handwritten manuscript anymore.

While I am a touch typist on a keyboard, I absolutely do need to look at the touchscreen when I’m texting. Perhaps if I were willing to practice more. Perhaps if I treated texting more as a sport. Which, according to LG's Director of Trade and Experiential Marketing, Carl Brown, to his contestants, it is:

"The thing that surprised us the most is how these contestants really look at texting as a sport. They train for it, they recruit texting buddies," Brown said. Turns out texting is more like the Olympic games than we thought.

If you want to congratulate Gold Medalist Austin, you can ping him on the contests FB page.

Ah, the thrill of victory the agony of defeat. (Or, rather the agony of de-thumb.)

Bye-bye, birdie.

I have not been paying a ton of attention to the Olympics.

With my sisters and nieces, I watched the opening ceremonies. The shrieking and OMG-ing you heard coming out of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, that evening may well have been us. We were hoping, to the end, that The Titanic and/or Elton John’s “Goodbye, England’s Rose” would be included in the show.

Alas, producer/director Danny Boyle had not tapped us for advice on his extravaganza. Pity.

The best part of opening night was, of course, the fashion critique during the parade of nations. (Germany, Ach du Scheiße, what were you thinking with that Care Bear color scheme.)

So let the games begin!

Which they did.

Admittedly, I have been keeping something of an eye on it. So I know about Michael Phelps, Gabby Douglas, local athletes Aly Raisman – sorry about the bronze, kiddo – and Kayla Harrison, and the near miss that the US men’s basketball team had with Lithuania.  As of this typing, I just watched Murray beat Federer for the men’s tennis gold. And on any given day, I have a rough sense of where “we” stand at the mo’ vs. China.

But I’m not glued to the TV, and I don’t observe the spoiler alerts.

Still, the story about the badminton scandal did manage to capture my attention.

Who even knew that something that had been casually played on many a summer’s evening in our back yard was actually an Olympic sport?

I assume that Olympic play is a tad more serious than our version, which had no real rules and no real scoring, and was played on a “court” that slanted down at about a 30 degree angle.

Still, it was always fun to pull the red and yellow Wilson box off the closet shelf and head out to the Back 40, a dog-leg off the main back yard, where we played. Or, rather, played at, badminton.

Even if you had no one to play with, you could always take out a racquet and see how many times you could bounce the birdie without dropping it.

Every year, we seemed to lose a birdie or two. Someone gnawed on the red-rubber tip. The nylon “feathers” got torn. The birdies lost their bounce. My father would go out and find some replacements. And we would resume our summer of  fun.

This was not, of course, our only summer sport.

The best of the rest was seeing how far you could hit a golf ball with a baseball bat. Answer: a lot farther than you can hit a baseball.

Alas, no one who played in our back yard became an Olympian in badminton or anything else.

But while we were pursuing other pursuits, serious badminton players were being groomed, most of them in Asia. And, for some reason, Denmark. (The US has never medaled in the sport.)

In this year’s Olympic edition, some of the women badminton-ers went so far as to throw their games in the preliminary round robin in an attempt to game who they would face as they advanced.

It’s not clear to me how you can prove that someone’s deliberately throwing a match, as opposed to just having a lousy, terrible, awful, miserable, rotten very bad badminton day. Especially, if I read things correctly, two of the teams disqualified for dogging it against each other.(After you, Gaston. No, after you, my dear Alphonse.)  But apparently the cognoscenti in the audience figured it out and starting booing during the take-a-dive matches. And the  Badminton World Foundation saw enough to make them disqualify two South Korean doubles teams, as well as teams from China and Indonesia.

It punished them for "not using one's best efforts to win a match" and "conducting oneself in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport" in matches Tuesday night. (Source: Huff Po.)

The International Olympic Committee approved the move:

"We applaud the federation for having taken swift and decisive action," IOC spokesman Mark Adams told The Associated Press. "Such behavior is incompatible with the Olympic values."

Ah, yes. The vaunted Olympic values.

Maybe things have gotten better of late, but I do seem to remember that in the heyday of the Soviet empire, a lot of the subjective sports (e.g., gymnastics, figure skating) were pretty controversial, with the Eastern Bloc judges voting, more or less, as a bloc.  And I do believe that judging controversies continue to plague some of these subjective sports – especially figure skating. There’s something to be said for the sports where you head’s up win or lose. Like speed skating. Track and field. And, errrr, badminton.

I guess the Olympic torch of controversy has passed to badminton, of all things.

Well, at least it’s raised awareness about the sport.

And perhaps will inspire some backyard shuttlecockers to go for the gold.