I am sick as fuck of all these “extreme” sports. There is nothing extreme about skateboarding, snowboarding, rollerblading, bungee jumping, or surfing so why are they called "“extreme” sports?
To me boxing, wrestling, maybe street luge, UFC, and any other sport where there is a 99% chance that you will be physically injured or have other people out to physically injure you may have the right to be called “extreme”, but for some reason they are not.
As far as I can tell, the “extremeness” of the sport is directly related to how the participants dress and what music they listen to, but even that is no good any more because my mom rollerblades and my aunt surfs and neither look or act “extreme”.
So please, media, teens, cooler-than-cool guys, stop saying that your “sports” are “extreme” because they aint.
What’s worse is when you have an unusual, somewhat athletic and dangerous hobby and people keep trying to make it out as an eXtreme sPort!!1!, even when none of the participants think of it as such.
Hiking through the woods or riding your bike is just a hobby.
It’s when you do it in $5000+ worth of designer equipment (mass produced for people who want to show that they’re radical individualists, just like everyone they hang out with) that it becomes an ‘Xtreme sport’.
As it happens, it isn’t. Since I actually live in the country this supposedly comes from, I had the opportunity to listen to a radio interview with the creator of the web page… ooh… about a year ago. He said with his own mouth that he was satirising the exact thing that this whole thread is about 'cos he thinks that it is just as stupid as you do.
And just because you have a championship in something, doesn’t mean that it isn’t all an elaborate joke. There are always like-minded people who want to take the joke that bit further.
But what do I know? I only heard it from the lips of the very person who wrote it.
So it’s for real, and it’s a joke, and the fact that people do it for real is what makes it a joke?
I never could keep up with all this post-modernism and ironic self-reference stuff. If you need me, I’ll be sitting in a corner with Prince Charles, mumbling about the good old days.
Back to the op’s rant, I’d always taken extreme as an adjective applied to a sport, to note that you were indulging in the lunatic fringe of it.
For example, I snowboard. I go to nice safe resorts, and generally board on piste and in snowparks. That is not extreme. But you do get the extreme side of snowboarding, where people attempt ludicrously dangerous manouvres and tricks.
Where’s the problem in differentiating between the normal stuff, and the dangerous stuff?
See, pit rants these days are too pedestrian and mundane. We need x-treme rants (and the logo would have a oversized X in gaudy red and white, with black borders, and ‘treme’ would be italicized, and there’d be flames shooting from the ends, because, you know, pit rants are hot…)
If you don’t participate in x-treme ranting, then you’re just a sheep. You’re all sheeple. Baaah. Baaaah! Follow the corporate consumerist life! I’m different! I rant x-tremely!
I didn’t say that extreme ironing didn’t exist. I said that it was satire. Which it is. To accuse the practioners of being “chumps” (for example) is to entirely miss the point that they think the whole “extreme” thing is stupid too.
For it to be good satire, they have to do it convincingly, no?
Anyway, I like living life to the eXtreme. Even as we speak I’m being an X-treem actuary and doing mad skillz modelling of bad data. As I do so, I say “yo!” to myself a lot and spin my seat in a totally rad fashion. I’m even thinking of undoing my top shirt button beneath my tie.