sports

Merely an excuse to mention the World Cup.

I'd been trying to find an excuse to mention the World Cup here, other than the Green Goal thingie.

And here is an amusing, feeble (though legit) excuse.

Frog Chorus Keeps Ukraine Soccer Players Awake

Ukraine's World Cup players complained on Tuesday that frogs were disturbing the sleep of the squad at their lakeside hotel in Potsdam.

Central defender Vladislav Vashchyuk told the Sovetsky sports newspaper that frogs in the Templiner See lake were keeping the players awake at night ahead of their Group H opener against Spain on Wednesday.

"We have agreed we will take fishing rods to hunt these frogs," said Vashchyuk.

Hartmut Pirl, manager of the hotel where the squad are staying, told Reuters he had not had any complaints.

"There are frogs that croak. This is a nature reserve," said Pirl.

A ready excuse for getting spanked by Spain, or a genuine gripe with nature? The world may never know.

Bio-Skate

As Sarah mentioned, this week's InterActivist co-owns Comet Skateboards. I first learned about the company from this video that aired on Current TV.

Check it out if you want to see their solar-powered factory, learn how they make their sustainable 'boards, and watch some skaters tearing it up at over 50 MPH.

Soccer’s biggest to-do goes green.

This article says that more than 30 billion people -- out of a world population of 6.6 billion -- are expected to tune into the upcoming soccer football World Cup. So that just goes to show you how popular soccer football is.

The event kicks off (ha!) on Friday in Germany and my fiancé would be happy to tell you when all the games are being played, which team is playing which, what their chances are of moving to the next round, what color each team wears, the name of every player on every team, and precisely how to work, eat, sleep, plan a wedding, and watch six hours of soccer football every day for over a month. Me -- all I've got is the green angle.

Says the World Cup environmentalness website:

How the Olympics are becoming a sustainable business

This month, as the Olympic flame makes its torch-uous journey to Turin, Italy, most people’s eyes are fixed on the upcoming games. But our eyes are focused a little farther down the track. In our role as sustainability consultants, we’ve joined the field of those helping the London 2012 Olympics committee work out how to […]

XX Winter Games coming up in Italy

So did you know the Winter Olympics are only a few months away? Because I didn't. I've read about the enviro-hell that is Beijing 2008 and the enviro-heaven that is London 2012, but it totally didn't occur to me until now that the luge (my favorite sport to say) will be broadcast to you and me in February. Torino 2006, baby!

Oh good. They appear to be looking out for the environment.

Sorry -- perhaps this doesn't belong on Gristmill, but I don't have a blog of my own, and I feel like the world (environmental and otherwise) needs to be made aware of the mascots of Torino 2006. Watch the video to be inspired amused vaguely uneasy.

"Neve": she is a gentle, kind and elegant snowball; "Gliz": he is a lively, playful ice cube ... They are the symbol of a young generation that is full of life and energy.

Until their cute little heads melt from global warming! Sigh ...

Mountaineering teams organize to clean up the world’s highest mountain peaks

A few months ago, gutsy French test pilot Didier Delsalle landed a helicopter on top of Mount Everest in 75 mph hour winds -- no, not crashed -- quite obviously the highest landing place on earth. He was the first to successfully summit Everest by copter.

And just to make sure it wasn't a fluke, he did it twice.

The previous highest helicopter landing was some 9,035 feet lower, at about 20,000 feet, the record set in 1996 by Nepalese pilot Madan Khatri Chhetri while rescuing climbers. And that's one of the great things about this: the tangible -- though still amazingly dangerous -- possibility of being able to rescue mountaineers on some of the world's highest, harshest peaks.

Delsalle's feat also raises the prospect (and could significantly lower the cost) of cleaning up what many call the "world's highest garbage dump."

In recent years, international teams of eco-conscious mountaineers have organized enormously expensive expeditions to clean up some of Everest's over-50-year legacy of trash, augmenting infrequent government Sherpa-led garbage-retrieval expeditions.

But now another team aims to clean up, at the very least, parts of the Himalayas' 14 peaks above 8,000 meters (about 26,200 feet). This week it's off to the earth's 10th highest mountain, Mt. Annapurna. The high-altitude sanitation engineers also have plans in place to launch a cleanup of their own on Mt. Everest next spring.

If there was ever a job in the trash business I envied, it's this one.

Now your $9 ballpark beer comes in an eco-cup

It's a single piece of news, but a revolution in its own right: starting Friday, the Oakland A's will serve drinks in compostable cornstarch cups, and provide compostable cutlery too. McAfee Coliseum staffers will dig the items out of the trash at the end of each game -- pausing only briefly to wonder if they should have taken that internship with Dad's friend's company instead -- and ship the whole beery, mustardy mess to a composting facility.

It's all part of stadium manager George Valerga's plan to reach a 75-100 percent recycling rate. And the San Francisco Giants are considering composting too. OK, OK, California did pass a law requiring special-events venues to increase their recycling. But hey, whatever it takes to make America's ballfields greener. Let's go A's!

Indoor ski slopes are the desert’s hot new thing

A while back, I wrote about indoor ski slopes blooming in countries including Japan, England, and the U.S. of A. Seems it's an upward trend: The United Arab Emirates has just joined the herringboning hordes. Yes, that's right, the world will soon have its first desert skiing area, thanks to enterprising developers in Dubai.

Will we end up in a world where all the snow and ice is gone, and the only way to ski is indoors, in the desert? Will the desert still be the desert? And in the meantime, how much power does it waste to run these mounds of gluttony?

Suddenly I feel like Andy Rooney.

Paper beating scissors

For those who despair about the environment, who wonder, say, whether the world will ever take sufficient action to counter climate change, I give you ... the 2004 Boston Red Sox.

Down 3-0 against their arch-nemeses, the New York Yankees, the Sox rallied tonight to win the seven-game series, becoming the first team in the history of Major League Baseball to overcome such a deficit.

To a lifelong Red Sox fan -- someone conditioned from birth to always dream but never achieve -- someone, um, like myself, coated in the scar tissue of the devastating losses of the past -- a victory like tonight's can't help but give one rose-colored glasses. (At least for a night.) Who says we can't tackle climate change? Maybe the solar revolution is upon us. This is the dawning of the age of Green-arius. I'm only partially joking.

As Tyler Kepner wrote in his piece posted on the New York Times website immediately after the Sox win:

It was actually happening. The nerd was kissing the homecoming queen. Paper was beating scissors; scissors were beating rock. Charlie Brown was kicking the football. The Red Sox were beating the Yankees for the American League pennant.