Tonight I'd like to talk about one of the more annoying things about practicing juggling - sweaty underwear. I sweat a lot when I juggle. During my practice I develop some strange sweat patterns on my shirt ranging from smiley faces to playboy bunnies. I don't particularly enjoy the shirt getting wet, but it's not horrible. I simply change shirts. I can live with that.

That's where the underwear comes in. My boxers get completely drenched in sweat during my practices. Because I generally wear my underwear under my pants, all the heat exerted by my ass and crotch gets trapped in layers between me, my underwear and my pants. That's a very unpleasant feeling.

The other notable thing about sweaty underwear is that it remains wet as long as you don't change it. So sometimes when I have to go do something immediately after I practice, and I don't have time to change my underwear will remain wet for hours, to the point where it actually makes me cold.

Does anyone else get that? Any solutions for the problem, other than blowing underneath your underwear in attempt to cool yourself off?

Posted by Vova at 10:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (28)

A while ago Peter Bone wrote about confidence as a major factor in juggling progress. Here's what he wrote:

"...It comes down to confidence. If you believe you can do something then eventually you'll be able to do it - given enough practice time. Anthony Gatto is as good as he is because he's insanely confident to the point where he actually thinks he's superhuman or something (seriously, he once said he sees things in slow motion). Some people never learn a trick despite practicing it a lot more than someone else who learnt it much quicker because at some level they don't think they can do it."

I definitely agree with that. You really don't have to be so delusional that you believe to see things in slow motion to be confident though. How's SEEING things in slow motion supposed to help one juggle anyway... but I digress.

You know how sometimes you run an X ball/club/ring pattern and everything is going fine, UNTIL you start thinking, "hmmmm, this has been a long run, I think I'm getting a little tired... and when I get tired my throws become inaccurate..."? Before you know it you make a horrible throw, everything collides, and you just stand there watching everything fall around you feeling like a complete douchebag. I know stuff like that happens to me a lot, when I start questioning my ability to do a certain move or run a certain pattern.

Confidence leaves the juggling to muscle memory, and makes sure your mind doesn't interrupt and screw things up. Nothing helps my juggling more than thoughts like, "the pattern's looking fine, everything's falling right into my hands, it seems easy, now all I gotta do is just keep doing what I'm doing now".

The problem is that it's hard to be confident in something you haven't done before. What I often do is try to break moves down to elements that I've done before. I have on multiple occasions tried to do something thinking of it one way and failing and then thinking of it in a different way and succeeding. That's even more true when working on combos.

Breaking moves down and learning the smallest components of them before trying the actual moves helps a lot with confidence. That way when you try to do the move you don't just chaotically throw stuff all over the place and hope it lands where you want it to land. Instead you know you can do all the components and all you need to do is put them together.

So don't think of it as whirlwind - think of it as a single, double, quad and three 360s with catches inbetween. Don't think of it as 97531 - think of it as one way the hell up there and a 7531 underneath. Don't think of it as (8x 6) - think of it as (6x 4) with 7.

Stuff like that helps me a lot with my juggling. Try applying that to yours, it might help you.

Posted by Vova at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (20) | TrackBacks (1)

Irreducible complexity is one of the ideas I've heard used to attempt to dispute the theory of evolution many times. Someone's even brought it up here. Here's how the argument goes. Suppose a biological system consists of multiple parts and the only way the system is benefitial to the organism is if all the parts of the system are present and none of the parts are benefitial to the organism unless all are present. The creationist's argument is that such a biological system is not able to have evolved from a simpler predecessor, and thus must have been created by an "intelligent designer" AKA god.

Irreducible complexity is a very standard example of utilization of a God of the gaps concept (if we can't explain something - God did it). Two of the most famous examples of "irreducible" complexity are the human eye and the blood clotting mechanism in vertebrates. Both have been proven to be "reducible" and viable evolutionary pathways for both have been proposed. Simple google search reveals some articles on those: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coagulation

Though most creationists seemed to have abandoned the "irreducible complexity" argument, some still use it and get away with it mostly because people aren't fully informed of the evolution of the eye and blood clotting. That's upsetting... very much so.

On the other, juggling-related note, I encourage everyone to go to the WJF website and check out the preview of the WJF 2006 video.

Posted by Vova at 07:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (45) | TrackBacks (1)

I was born on September 15th, 1987 and a week ago was my 19th birthday. For some reason people choose to make each other feel extra special once every year on the anniversary of their birth. That makes me feel a little uncomfortable every year, as it seems somewhat arbitrary to me that people would honor ME on the day of my birth. I can understand being honored, when I actually accomplish something that's worth honoring, but I had nothing at all to do with me being born. Not that the event of me being born is significant enough to honor anyway.

Honestly, most people that are close to me make me feel special on a daily basis, and they certainly didn't need to make me feel any extra special on my birthday. But they did.

I'm sure most people are probably familiar with feeling extra special for their birthday. Once you get past the awkwardness of it all, it feels quite nice, actually.

I got quite a few emails from my fans all over the world wishing me a happy birthday. Thanks for that, I did in fact have a happy birthday.

Then I got a pair of pink boxers from Sweet Bazoongas AKA PinkPanties AKA Lindsay. I'm wearing them right now and they're nice.

On Sunday Sue, Olga, Mark, Barry and I went out to celebrate my birthday, which was awesome. Early morning we went to Ronald Reagan's Presidential Library and then a restaurant. Sweet Bazoongas kept me up late the night before, so I was a little out of it, but I have to say the Presidential Library was so cool, it exceeded all my expectations. We took some pictures while we were there.

Here we are at the Air Force One part of the museum:

http://www.galchenko.com/BakalorsGalchenkosAF1.JPG

Reagan's role in the fall of the Berlin Wall is in my opinion exaggerated, hence there was a whole section of the museum dedicated to the Berlin Wall:

http://www.galchenko.com/VovaBerlinWall.JPG

Part of the Berlin Wall department was devoted to East Berlin, which gave Olga and I the opportunity for this picture:

http://www.galchenko.com/O+VSoviets.JPG

The Berlin Wall part of the museum also featured a bunch of silly quotes by Russian communists, which I hope were taken out of context:

http://www.galchenko.com/SovietsQuote.JPG

I believe that's all the Ronal Reagan museum pictures that I have.

After we were done with the museum, we went to the restaurant, name of which I forgot. That was fun. We talked about spinach and e. coli among other things.

Once we were done with the food, we went home and then I went to the Promenade to street perform. That didn't go as well as it goes in the summer... but hey, it's better than nothing. I don't think this picture is from that day, but it's a picture of me running 7c in my street show:

http://www.galchenko.com/VovaStreetShow.JPG

The coolest thing I got for my bithday this year was an email from my parents about the day I was born and the dreams they had/have for me. That made me teary-eyed. {Insert an offspring-parents love cliche here}. When I was younger and living with my parents, I suppose I was taking a lot of what my parents were doing for me for granted. Not seeing them for a few years put how much they influenced my life in perspective for me.

So that's it for my birthday. Big thanks to all who helped make me feel extra special on my birthday, and an even bigger thanks to those of you who make me feel special on a regular basis.

Posted by Vova at 12:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (21)

So I didn't really get enough sleep last night, and I have a headache, so I didn't feel like practicing today. Instead I decided to tape this 3c move I made up the other day. Well... I thought I made it up, but then Norbi said he'd suggested that I do a move similar to the move I made up. So it's really like I half made it up. The move I'm talking about is probably the most challenging move I've ever done with 3 clubs. I call it the behind the back madness. I taped it from 3 angles, but I think I like the "back" angle best. My back is just too sexy. Check it out:

http://www.galchenko.com/btbmadness(front)001.mov
http://www.galchenko.com/btbmadness(side)001.mov
http://www.galchenko.com/btbmadness(back)001.mov

Posted by Vova at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (32)

Hey everyone, I videotaped some juggling the other day. I didn't have much time, so I didn't tape much, but there are some new things I'm working on, most of which were suggested by you.

Here's the URL: www.galchenko.com/sept06.mov

Posted by Vova at 03:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

Here comes a juggling related post. I don't post much about juggling, because there isn't really much to say about it, I suppose. Recently I've thought of something juggling-related to talk about though. We're going to talk about talent and specifically talent for juggling.

In this post let's define talent as natural aptitude or skill. I assume when people say "he/she displayed a talent for juggling" they mean he/she displayed some kind of innate capacity for juggling or acquiring juggling skills.

I would agree that there are variations to how fast people acquire different skills given the same circumstances. The problem is that almost never do two people attempt acquiring the same skill under the same conditions (such as same interest in acquiring the skill, equal practice time available, equal sleep time available, same prior encounters with the skill, etc.). That's why it's hard to tell how much of the variation of how fast people acquire skills could be attributed to different learning circumstances and how much of it could be attributed to natural talent.

As far as I can see, talent is grossly overrated. I've done many things since I was little, including juggling, math, physics, languages, playing piano, acrobatics and etc. I feel like in all of those fields I reached results directly proportional to how much time and effort I put into them. I really like juggling and I intend to continue to put a lot of effort into juggling, and I feel like there's no limit to how good I get at juggling as long as I keep practicing.

So I feel like anyone could get to being at least as good as I am right now if they put in enough work and effort into it. They may have to put in a little more or less work, than me, but not much more or much less.

What do you think?

Posted by Vova at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (34)

Countless times I've whitnessed fundamentalist christians saying things like this to show how "absurd" the idea of evolution is:

"Could I convince you that I dropped 50 oranges onto the ground and they by chance fell into ten rows of five oranges? The logical conclusion is that someone with an intelligent mind put them there. The odds that ten oranges would fall by accident into a straight line are mind-boggling, let alone ten rows of five."

Dropping 50 oranges on the ground is supposed to be analogous to evolution.

Too bad the analogy is flawed. Dropping 50 oranges provides for random arrangement of oranges, while evolution is far from random. To use dropping 50 oranges as an analogy for evolution is to demonstrate complete ignorance of evolution. Evolution starts with random gene mutations, which is probably what misleads people to believe that evolution is random. Evolution is based on the concept of natural selection. Natural selection is the process by which organisms with favorable gene mutations are more likely to survive and reproduce than those with no favorable gene mutations, or with unfavorable gene mutations.

A better analogy to evolution would be dropping oranges on the floor with slots for oranges arranged in lines and rows, where dropping oranges would represent random gene mutation and the floor designed to have oranges fall in the slots would represent natural selection.

Posted by Vova at 01:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (62) | TrackBacks (1)