I was thinking the other day about the people that I know. My acquaintances and friends have a wide variety of interests and skills but two of them in particular have truly outstanding expertise in their respective fields of interest.
The first is a friend of mine named Paul Pilkington who I worked with for a couple of years at my last job. He, at the mature age of 42, is a phenomenal runner. In his prime he was able to complete marathons in just a little over 2 hours and even now still completes them in less than 2 and a half hours. An incredible athlete.
The second is another friend who I’ve known for over 6 years (we’ve worked at 3 different places together) and who is an awesome Unreal Tournament player. For a time he held the all time first place ranking on the UT servers for death match (he goes by the handle ]|[Beowulf]|[ ). I personally have probably spent over a couple thousand hours playing first person shooter style video games and he simply walks over me and nearly everyone I know (even when we stack the odds against him). One time we were able to barely defeat him and Fast Eddie (another great player I know) in a LAN game of capture the flag even though we had about a dozen players on our side. An awesome player.
So, tell me fellow Dopers… who do you know that stands head and shoulders above the greats in their field?
My brother is better than any other electronics tech I’ve ever encountered (myself included). One of the major consumer electronics companies held a US-wide competition a few years back, involving both tests on theory of ops and actual timed troubleshooting problems with live equipment. My brother’s specialty is audio electronics. He competed in the video division and still won.
They wouldn’t let him compete in the next competition. Cowards.
My fiance was an excellent curler in his youth; he had to make a decision in his teens if he wanted to make the commitment to becoming a world-class curler or not (he chose “not”). If he had taken that route, who knows? He may have become an Olympic medalist. (BTW, in case anyone doesn’t know, I’m talking about curling, the sport, not curling, the hair style.)
Had a ringer named Patrick walk into our bowling league as a subsitute one day. After he bowls 3 games over two hundred points he reveals he could have gone pro if he hadn’t decided on higher education.
I have two friends who are amazing linguists. They can actually sit down with a book in an unfamiliar language and puzzle it out based the languages they do know. One of them is reading Beowulf in Anglo-saxon.
And then there is Brandi, the girl with no flaw. She was a petite red haired beauty, bright smile, bright personality, straight A student, gorgeous soprano voice, and a black belt in karate! Well she did have one flaw. The boyfriend. She was snagged by Patrick. Guess she had a thing for bowling. <chuckle>
My friend Tina is an utterly amazing poet. Lots of people can write fairly decent poetry, but her stuff is so consistently brilliant and so perfectly structured that I am often just floored by her output. She also has this incredible ability to take a fairly sweet, romantic poem and just rip your heart out with a cruel twist in the last line.
I’m a very good poet. She’s brilliant. I love her to death and hate her just a little. [;-)}>
My boyfriend’s friend is absolutely amazing at maths. He is an emergency in the Maths Olympic Team and has the blazer to prove it! At university, he’s an outlier (I think that’s the name), where the university doesn’t count his scores in their statistics because they’re so high that they distort the average. (On a midyear test, he scored 97 where the average was 25-50) This guy is just incredible. He’s more knowledgeable than most of his lecturers in the subject … eventually, you learn that if he says something and the textbook says something else, you ignore what the textbook says and learn from the master.
The boy is a Senior and is about to graduate from a music conservitory with BA in Classical Trombone. He has been playing for about 12 years now and he’s the best at what he does. While he was in high school he was first chair all-state in the Jass and Concert Bands and marched in the 1996 Olympic Marching Band. He then got a full scholarship to the school he’s attending now. Upon arriving at the conservitory his freshman year he was required to audition for most of the performing groups on campus - he auditioned for all of them instead. He got first chair in every group, displacing a couple of seniors. Since then he has won every performing award available at the University and has became a charter member of a new branch of an existing musical fraternaty. Along with the brass Quintet he plays in, he has just been invited to play, in private audience, for Pope John Paul II. And on top of all of this he just got accepted to play in a profeshional orchestra for this summer.
She decided one day she wanted to be a singer so she calls me up and sings Silent All These Years by Tori Amos. I used to sing back in the day so I agreed to evaluate her.
She has the most amazing pure alto voice. Her phrasing is impeccable. Never had a single lesson,never sang in a choir,no experience at all but she can blow my soprano away.Her next move was to learn guitar…she’s had her acoustic since X-Mas and has almost every Beatles/Dylan song mastered.
I agreed to be her lyricist
GB…was that a wrestling reference?
The only person that comes to my mind is my dad. He grew up in a poor family, and academically went light years. He ended up graduating top of his class at MIT (they even tried to create a student of the decade award for him because he was considered one of the most brilliant students to ever attend the school). The product of his masters thesis was implemented in Nuclear Reactors world wide. Got his PhD./ScD. in Nuclear Engineering/Physics in 1 year. And has the most researched PhD. thesis in MIT history. Some people have extreme drive whereas others have extreme intelligence. He’s the only person I’ve met with both. I think he’s from an alien world. A strange critter - he often annoys me - but I gotta love him. I don’t think he’s ever learned how to relax tho. It’s really a forign concept to him.
Mrs. Rastahomie can sing the paint off a wall. She can out-sing <insert the name of a famous soprano here>. She once sang part of an opera in Latin and had everybody in the room in tears- and nobody knew what the hell she was singing about! Whenever we’re at a family gathering and she starts singing along whith the radio or whatever CD is playing, the whole room goes silent just to listen to her.
One of these days I’m going to get her a gig singing the National Anthem at the local minor-league hockey rink.
Someone who is damn good? That would be my new best friend, Mandy. She is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I have been going through some very hard times (I just moved to a new city, where I knew no one, knew nothing) and she has helped me a lot. I lvoe her
My boss. She’s an amazing at efficiency. We call her “the alien” because no one can account for all she does. She’s very efficient at work (never has to work late) but it’s her outside hobbies that stun us. She’s an amazing and gifted quilter who completes complicated projects in the snap of her fingers. She has an incredible eye for color. Lately everyone in our office has taken up beading and she’s fabulous at that, as well, and fast. The projects she can complete in an evening defy explanation. She’s a fine cook, has a great yard, reads voraciously. If you bring up anything around town or the state, she’s heard of it, been there, tried it, is well-informed.
She’s got a handle on the space-time continuum and she bends that sucker at will. When we ask how, she just laughs and denies nothing. An alien, I tell you.
She was snagged by Patrick. Guess she had a thing for bowling. <chuckle>
At university, he’s an outlier (I think that’s the name), where the university doesn’t count his scores in their statistics because they’re so high that they distort the average. (On a midyear test, he scored 97 where the average was 25-50) This guy is just incredible. He’s more knowledgeable than most of his lecturers in the subject … eventually, you learn that if he says something and the textbook says something else, you ignore what the textbook says and learn from the master. 