‘175 Grams,’ a short documentary about ultimate players in India, was selected as a winner of the Sundance Institute Short Film Challenge and will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. You can watch it here:
A rep for director Paul Feig confirmed to BuzzFeed News that the actors are currently in negotiations.
Bridesmaids actors Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig, and current Saturday Night Live cast members Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones are currently in talks to star in director Paul Feig's all-female reboot of Ghostbusters, a rep for Feig confirmed to BuzzFeed News. The Hollywood Reporter was the first to break the news.
It would be a reunion of sorts for McCarthy, Wiig, and Feig, who previously worked together on Bridemaids. McCarthy also co-starred with Sandra Bullock in Feig's The Heat.
Feig signed on to revive Ghostbusters in August 2014 and in October, it was revealed that The Heat screenwriter Katie Dippold had signed on to pen the script.
The original all-male Ghostbusters starring Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, and Harold Ramis opened in 1984, just over 30 years ago. It was followed by a sequel in 1989. A third installment of the franchise with original director Ivan Reitman stalled when Ramis, who played egghead paranormal-exterminator Egon Spengler, died last February.
No further information is currently being released by Sony about the all-female Ghostbusters reboot, and a rep for the studio had no comment when contacted about the casting news. Reps for McCarthy, Wiig, McKinnon, and Jones did not immediately reply to BuzzFeed News' request for confirmation.
All social advances, from the abolition of slavery to the recognition of women’s rights, were always broken by the conservatism and traditional values. I propose you today a selection of vintage postcard illustrations of the years 1900 – 1914, from the propaganda used against the women’s suffrage and the suffragettes, where change is presented as a direct attack against the values of the family and the place of man in society, sending husbands back at home to look after the children… These incredible images are from the collections of professors Catherine H. Palczewski and June Purvis.
If you're looking for some holiday giving opportunities...
This post is sponsored by Bridging The Gaps.
Bridging The Gaps, a project of Pudiyador, a Chennai-based non-profit, holds semi-annual youth ultimate camps that bring together children from all socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, and is seeking funding through an Indiegogo campaign to help support their operations.
Later this month, BTG will hold a five-day sleepaway camp for 150 teenage boys and girls. The camp is designed to bridge the gaps of gender, caste, community, color and economic status. During the course of the camp, they overcome barriers, develop life skills such as confidence and teamwork, and learn to celebrate the diversity of others’ experiences.
The majority of the college-aged coaches are from the same communities as the campers, many of whom can only afford to go to camp thanks to financial aid from BTG. Some campers are leaving their home communities for the very first time to attend camp.
Like many youth ultimate camps, much emphasis is placed on Spirit of the Game, self officiating, and co-ed play.
BTG is seeking funding through Indiegogo in order to cover the costs of financial aid for campers and coaches as well as equipment (like discs and t-shirts) for the camp itself. They also want to spread their message and continue to reach new sponsors and partners.
Currently, BTG works with after-school based NGOs and alternative and government schools to send kids to camp. This month’s camp will bring together teenagers from all across India: Auroville, Chennai, Mysore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Surat, Mangalore, and tribal villages from rural Tamil Nadu.
The camp is organized by Liz Haynes, Sangeeta Isvaran, and Manix Narayanan, who all have extensive experience working in sports for community development.
Are you a selfie-taking gorilla or a boss moonwalker like Buzz Aldrin? Inspired by National Geographic The Covers: Iconic Photographs, Unforgettable Stories.
In line with L3.0, here is a new short film featuring the sad adventures of a little robot. Entitled Story of R32, this video directed by Vladimir Vlasenko reveals the story of a robot that became obsolete after the emergence of a new and more powerful model…
Hall of Heroes is a poster created by the illustrator Scott Park, who gathered 80 cult female characters from pop culture into a single image, from Elsa of Frozen to Daenerys Targaryen through Lara Croft, Wonder Woman, Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen and many others… Will you be able to recognize them all? We already talked about his posters with his series on cult cars and cult robots.
Less than a year old, the Girls’ Ultimate Movement (GUM) is a USA Ultimate-backed initiative addressing the gender inequality in youth play, which is Ultimate’s fastest growing membership division. A vocal roll-out in the early summer included a presentation at the US Open and development of five priority action items. Post-club season, it is now seeing on-ground implementation.
A couple of these priority items (check out Ultiworld’s interview with Zara Cardoux, below, to hear details about all of GUM’s works) have visible endeavors going on in our communities right now. That includes a USAU project to staff volunteer Girls State Youth Coordinators in 27 states, a push to develop media resources for girls and women’s ultimate, and a GUM challenge to college and club teams to host Learn to Play clinics for girls in their communities.
New Website and Youth Coordinators
GUM Working Group chair Zara Cadoux said that the media and communications working group, headed by Seattle Riot’s Alyssa Weatherford, would likely soon announce a new website, a girls-oriented space to post pictures, videos, and communicate about Ultimate. The website is still in the planning stages — Cadoux told us that there are many things the group wants to be able to cover — but they will ultimately pick a few content areas that the group can do focus on and do well.
USA Ultimate spokesperson Andy Lee told Ultiworld in an email that researching and creating a web presence is “an enormous and long-term strategic goal of the program” and that preliminary discussions are being had with Weatherford and the GUM Working Group. “[B]ut it’s a little premature to comment on any specific plans or timelines related to that project just yet. It’s accurate to say it’s in the early planning stages, but there is no official announcement on the immediate horizon.”
Progress on the Girls State Youth Coordinators is even more immediate, with applications being accepted by USAU on an ongoing basis and GUM looking to scale-up. In part, that includes moving beyond general youth coordinators and youth outreach and focusing on a female-specific network. “We are looking to have more outreach, on the ground, all-around the country,” Cadoux said. “We’ve been doing a great job doing general outreach and we’ve gotten a lot of boys; the number of youth boys has skyrocketed, and that’s fantastic for youth ultimate. But we’re not seeing that same growth on the girl’s side.”
Cadoux went on to emphasize that falling behind in youth recruitment affects the community later on and at all levels, and should be looked at by everyone. “We all have a stake in this. If you’ve ever played in a recreational league that didn’t have enough women, or the gender ratio wasn’t that great, then you have a stake in this.”
Learn to Play Clinics: Some Thoughts
I had the chance to attend an early GUM clinic when, this past Saturday, the two top Washington D.C.-area womens teams (champions Scandal and regional contenders Backhanded) came together to host a “Learn to Play” GUM clinic in Northwest D.C. About 30 youth girls players attended the event, which is one of seven scheduled GUM clinics according to GUM’s facebook page (Lee told Ultiworld it is hard to know an exact number until groups, like the D.C. one, go through the official USAU clinic registration channels).
“Teams across the country have come together to run clinics” Zadoux said. “So many people have contacted us and asked how to get involved, [we’re hearing] ‘this went really well, we got great feedback, we want to do this again’ . . . potentially, that clinic could morph into a league.”
It was immediately clear that many of the girls were getting their first exposure to recreational Ultimate — any maybe even their first touch with a disc (or at least with an Ultrastar). As players trickled in, the clinic began with relatively relaxed throwing between experienced club players and pairs of girls (there was almost a one-to-one coach to player ratio) before continuing on to a traditional warmup, drill circuit, and scrimmage portion. In general, there were two or three circuits and groups going on at once, which seemed to be separated into one experienced group and two newer pods.
As someone who spends most of his time playing and watching competitive ultimate, it was fascinating to watch people being introduced to the sport for the first time — and we really are in a special sport, at a special time, such that the introduction is occurring with some recently crowned national champions.
I was also eager to hear from parents who stuck around and learned that a lot of the big draws for both kids and parents is far removed from anything Ultiworld does. To them, Ultimate and the coaches that bring the sport to the middle schools offer incredibly welcoming and accepting environments, a bit unlike the other mainstream youth sports. If your daughter isn’t the perfect size, without any physical awkwardness, and hasn’t been playing on a travel club since age 7, then soccer’s not an option. But the ultimate team will be excited to have you around. Maybe it should be unsurprising, but the social and personal elements of the sport were predominant in parents’ minds — far more than the competitive or athletic aspects.
Taylor and June were two middle school girls that stuck around to play, and held their own, in a post-clinic scrimmage with the Backhanded ladies. They were introduced to the sport 3 years ago by a elementary school PE teacher, and now have a middle school club team called Shockwave in Virginia. That includes weekend practices with almost 14 players. Arlington, VA (a DC-suburb) has a thriving youth scene, with about 200 youth league players, 70 middle school players, and 7 teams competing at a recent high school tournament. The commissioner of the Arlington youth league, Betsy Cody, told me that she hadn’t heard of the GUM movement before, but thought it was great that USAU was looking to get more involved with clinics.
I thought both the successes and the challenges facing the clinic were relatively predictable. The clinic was well-organized and carefully planned, with some of the little things (as always) proving the most challenging: Explaining Ultimate in four rules actually takes something like 20 minutes. If anything, the clinic had too much volunteer support — clinic coordinator Emily McAfee said she “had more people offering to help me than I could use [and] had to turn people away “ — which makes it hard to avoid what Tiina Booth accurately calls “the clump.” I thought 30 girls on an early, chilly November Saturday was a good pull, but that was the result of relentless recruitment by McAfee targeted at teammates, schools, youth organizations, and parent/neighborhood listservs; she estimated she reached at least a couple hundred people via email. I thought that might be an underestimate.
By my account, the biggest question and challenge facing the clinic approach to organizing is taking the next step and scaling up. As with all grassroots organizing, it takes more time, work, and effort than apparent to the players. I imagine that GUM will also need exceptionally good communication to transfer work by player-coaches at on-ground clinics into regular playing opportunities (which I take is the job of the state coordinators); frankly, communication between organizers and willing volunteers isn’t always a USAU strength. GUM currently thrives on an intense, almost at times insatiable energy among volunteers to address inequality issues that affect, pervade, and go far beyond ultimate. Institution building is tough work — Cadoux mentioned Riot as the prototype that has gone into schools and developed the leagues and structures to support girls, and they have a gold medal and a thriving ecosystem to show for that. I think one has to agree with Cadoux that we (all of we) will be better off if that work can be pulled off.
Quick Hits and Clinic Reactions:
1. Sign-in:
There was a Scandal player waiting at the road with a frisbee to direct people into the park, a table for check-in, and (despite this being D.C. instead of Brooklyn) bagels and coffee. Once girls had signed in, they got to throw with club players in a laid-back setting.
2. Warm-Ups:
Matty Tsang smartly pointed out that, for younger groups, warming up should be as much about blowing off steam as getting your body prepared. Even after coaching YCC for two years, I’m not sure how to efficiently run a warmup for youth players. But this one, like many, erred too much on talking and regimented plyos and not enough on light playing.
3. Drills, Scrimmage:
The girls got to play against each other, mostly, with a few coaches watching and giving positive encouragement. I liked the balance between different skills; McAfee said she got the template from someone who had done these clinics before, which sounds smart to me.
4. Organization:
Things like colored pennies were plentiful. The coaches split the girls up by skill level (which was a necessity with so many first timers). They tried to keep to a well-defined schedule, which I think worked except for the comment below.
5. Breaks Between Drills:
My number one complaint is that the clinic could have included more playing (of any type). The longest interruption was trying to explain the rules to the girls before they started to play; explaining ultimate is something that is very easy to do and very, very difficult to do well. Backhanded seemed to get a bit tripped up when trying to explain the “contest” part of foul-contest, told the girls that you’re supposed to say “I disagree!” and everyone laughed and seemed to find the idea funny. Regardless, this is a best practice worth investing some thought into (if it hasn’t already been done).
6. D.C. Breeze Presence:
For them this was genius; I doubt it made much of a difference to the clinic. But I heard the parents talking about how fun it was to go to the professional games; getting a flyer with ticket and website information is certainly smart.
7. Giving Away Discs:
Frisbee doesn’t require much equipment, but it does require one thing that isn’t as readily available as a basketball (or maybe even a hoop). It is so incredibly obvious once you think about it, but sending each camper away with a frisbee is huge for making it easy to just keep tossing. Signing the discs was also very cool. Someone at GUM should start a kickstarter page so all of the volunteer coaches turned away (and all of those who haven’t been to clinic) can donate to a free disc fund. McAfee told me they were able to get this set of discs donated by WAFC (Washington Area Frisbee Club) but it was the Backhanded players who paid for the fields and ancillaries (like snacks) — seems unfair given all the other work they had to do to make this clinic happen.
8. Etc.:
In the mid-level scrimmage, a girl (presumably playing for one of her first times) made an incredible attempted layout catch for a score and just barely dropped the disc — but rolled over at the perfect time to shield it and everyone on the field was unsure. Just like the (semi-)pros. All of the sideline observers (including coaches and me), knowing what had just happened, had no idea what to do. We should just give her the score because it was an incredible play, right? Who would be hurt by that? Are we even supposed to enter the role of referee? A spirited head prevailed, intervened, called it a turnover, and the game went on.
**The rest of the interview with Zara Cardoux, focusing on the role of Ultimate media and its coverage of womens ultimate, will be posted as a Deep Look podcast sometime next week.**
Bastian! You have a huge imagination and love seeing the world from different perspectives. You’ve never really loved school, but you didn’t hate it either. You just felt that there were more important things in life. You’re very sympathetic and can easily relate to other people. Overall, you’re pretty awesome. Keep on drawing those unicorns.
A new paper in the Journal of Athletic Training takes the first comprehensive look at injury rates in ultimate, giving a broad look at how often injuries happen, the differences between men’s and women’s injuries, and the most common types of injury.
David Swedler, Jamie Nuwer, Anna Nazarov, Samantha Huo, and Lev Malevanchik coauthored the paper — ‘Incidence and Descriptive Epidemiology of Injuries to College Ultimate Players’ — which is being released in this weeks JAT.
Some charts and takeaways:
General Injury Rates per 1000 athletic instances.Injury Types for Female Players. Black bars indicate game injuries; grey bars indicate practice injuries.Injury Types for Male Players. Black bars indicate game injuries; grey bars indicate practice injuries.
– There was no difference found between injury rates for men and women. However, there were notable areas of diversion in particular injury categories. Men were three times more likely to separate or dislocate their shoulder. Women were seven times more likely to tear a knee ligament.
– Ankle sprains are the most common injury.
– From the paper: “Because 40% of injuries involve running or overuse activity, future interventions should address running form, better recovery methods after ultimate games and practices, and more appropriate warm-up routines.”
– From the abstract: “Injury patterns to college ultimate players were similar to those for athletes in other National Collegiate Athletic Association sports.”
You’re Elmo! But you already knew that, didn’t you? Let’s face it: you love this furry little guy like everyone else on the planet and you were hoping for this result. He’s lovable, huggable, and just so darn CUTE. You may not always have Elmo’s patience or wide-eyed innocence, but at heart you’re a total softie who loves to learn and sing and enjoy life, just like him.
Because even your spirit animal needs a Muppet friend.
With his series entitled Bears, the American photographer Kent Rogowski reveals the strange innards and guts of teddy bears, by unpicking them and then sewing them again with the inside out. When cute and innocent toys are turned into nightmare creatures… The dark side of teddy bears? The complete series can be seen on his website: Bears.
Luke’s Tauntaun: In death, as in life, you were a true friend. You literally spilled your guts in order to save your pal Luke, who, let’s be honest, is a total weenie and would have surely died without your selfless sacrifice. If it weren’t for you the Empire would have won and Luke would have never been able to go on to kiss his sister. You are a true hero among tauntauns. But for real what’s with the smell? Like honestly what IS that? Take a bath. Seriously I can’t even.
