Hello pickleball aficionados! If you’re ready to elevate your game both on and off the court, then you won’t want to miss the latest episode of People of Pickleball, where our charismatic host, Mike Sleeve’s Sliwa, sits down with the remarkable Josh Miller, a true powerhouse in the world of sports.

Meet Josh Miller: From NFL Stardom to Innovations in Pickleball

For those unfamiliar, Josh Miller is not just your average athlete. A Super Bowl Champion and Grey Cup Champion, he carved his name in the annals of football history and is now revolutionizing the pickleball scene as a Partner and Founder of HVY Sleeves. With extensive experience in coaching, sales, event management, and media relations, he blends insight and inspiration seamlessly. Plus, as a motivational speaker, Josh’s energy will leave you pumped up and ready to hit the court!

Episode Highlights: Innovation at Its Finest

In this riveting conversation, Mike and Josh dive deep into the exciting journey behind HVY Sleeves, a groundbreaking training tool that’s changing the game for pickleball players everywhere.

Key Takeaways:

1. Training with Purpose: Josh discusses how HVY Sleeves were developed to give players an added edge; perfect for enhancing arm strength and hand quickness, crucial for those lightning-fast kitchen volleys!
2. Agility and Performance: The episode explores the versatility of HVY Sleeves, emphasizing how incorporating leg sleeves into your training routine can build the agility necessary to outmaneuver your opponents, allowing for quicker reflexes and better court coverage.
3. A New Standard for Workouts: But wait, there’s more! Josh shares how these sleeves can transition seamlessly into your gym workouts, adding extra resistance for enhanced endurance training without sacrificing mobility. Because let’s face it, who wouldn’t want a versatile piece of gear that elevates your entire fitness routine?
4. Mindset Matters: With Josh as a keynote and motivational speaker, expect to hear some uplifting messages that inspire not just athletes, but anyone looking to push past their limits and achieve their goals.

Why You Should Tune In

This episode comes packed with actionable insights and motivational anecdotes that cater to players at all skill levels. Whether you’re a seasoned player trying to up your game or a newcomer eager to learn, you’ll find valuable nuggets of wisdom in this engaging dialogue. Mike and Josh aim to equip you with the tools and mindset needed to succeed both on the pickleball court and in your everyday life.

So, whether you’re gearing up for a competitive match or simply hitting the courts for some casual play, this episode of People of Pickleball is your go-to resource for making those game-changing improvements.

Don’t miss out on this episode featuring the remarkable Josh Miller. Tune in, lace up your HVY Sleeves, and prepare to take your pickleball skills to the NEXT LEVEL!

Happy playing, and remember: practice how you play! 🎾💪

#Pickleball #HVYSleeves #JoshMiller #PickleballTraining #PeopleOfPickleball #Fitness #Sports

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Christopher Palma, Penn State

If you have visited an island like one of the Hawaiian Islands, Tahiti or Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, you may have noticed how small these land masses appear against the vast Pacific Ocean. If you’re on Hawaii, the nearest island to you is more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away, and the coast of the continental United States is more than 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) away. To say these islands are secluded is an understatement.

For me, watching the movie “Moana” in 2016 was eye-opening. I knew that Polynesian people traveled between a number of Pacific islands, but seeing Moana set sail on a canoe made me realize exactly how small those boats are compared with what must have seemed like an endless ocean. Yet our fictional hero went on this journey anyway, like the countless real-life Polynesian voyagers upon which she is based.

As an astronomer, I have been teaching college students and visitors to our planetarium how to find stars in our sky for more than 20 years. As part of teaching appreciation for the beauty of the sky and the stars, I want to help people understand that if you know the stars well, you can never get lost.

U.S. Navy veterans learned the stars in their navigation courses, and European cultures used the stars to navigate, but the techniques of Polynesian wayfinding shown in Moana brought these ideas to a very wide audience.

The movie Moana gave me a new hook – pun not intended – for my planetarium shows and lessons on how to locate objects in the night sky. With “Moana 2” out now, I am excited to see even more astronomy on the big screen and to figure out how I can build new lessons using the ideas in the movie.

The North Star

Have you ever found the North Star, Polaris, in your sky? I try to spot it every time I am out observing, and I teach visitors at my shows to use the “pointer stars” in the bowl of the Big Dipper to find it. These two stars in the Big Dipper point you directly to Polaris.

If you are facing Polaris, then you know you are facing north. Polaris is special because it is almost directly above Earth’s North Pole, and so everyone north of the equator can see it year-round in exactly the same spot in their sky.

It’s a key star for navigation because if you measure its height above your horizon, that tells you how far you are north of Earth’s equator. For the large number of people who live near 40 degrees north of the equator, you will see Polaris about 40 degrees above your horizon.

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If you live in northern Canada, Polaris will appear higher in your sky, and if you live closer to the equator, Polaris will appear closer to the horizon. The other stars and constellations come and go with the seasons, though, so what you see opposite Polaris in the sky will change every month. https://www.youtube.com/embed/COHwfKusGbs?wmode=transparent&start=0 Look for the Big Dipper to find the North Star, Polaris.

You can use all of the stars to navigate, but to do that you need to know where to find them on every night of the year and at every hour of the night. So, navigating with stars other than Polaris is more complicated to learn.

Maui’s fishhook

At the end of June, around 11 p.m., a bright red star might catch your eye if you look directly opposite from Polaris. This is the star Antares, and it is the brightest star in the constellation Scorpius, the Scorpion.

If you are a “Moana” fan like me and the others in my family, though, you may know this group of stars by a different name – Maui’s fishhook.

If you are in the Northern Hemisphere, Scorpius may not fully appear above your horizon, but if you are on a Polynesian island, you should see all of the constellation rising in the southeast, hitting its highest point in the sky when it is due south, and setting in the southwest.

Astronomers and navigators can measure latitude using the height of the stars, which Maui and Moana did in the movie using their hands as measuring tools.

The easiest way to do this is to figure out how high Polaris is above your horizon. If you can’t see it at all, you must be south of the equator, but if you see Polaris 5 degrees (the width of three fingers at arm’s length) or 10 degrees above your horizon (the width of your full fist held at arm’s length), then you are 5 degrees or 10 degrees north of the equator.

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The other stars, like those in Maui’s fishhook, will appear to rise, set and hit their highest point at different locations in the sky depending on where you are on the Earth.

Polynesian navigators memorized where these stars would appear in the sky from the different islands they sailed between, and so by looking for those stars in the sky at night, they could determine which direction to sail and for how long to travel across the ocean.

Today, most people just pull out their phones and use the built-in GPS as a guide. Ever since “Moana” was in theaters, I see a completely different reaction to my planetarium talks about using the stars for navigation. By accurately showing how Polynesian navigators used the stars to sail across the ocean, Moana helps even those of us who have never sailed at night to understand the methods of celestial navigation.

The first “Moana” movie came out when my son was 3 years old, and he took an instant liking to the songs, the story and the scenery. There are many jokes about parents who dread having to watch a child’s favorite over and over again, but in my case, I fell in love with the movie too.

Since then, I have wanted to thank the storytellers who made this movie for being so careful to show the astronomy of navigation correctly. I also appreciated that they showed how Polynesian voyagers used the stars and other clues, such as ocean currents, to sail across the huge Pacific Ocean and land safely on a very small island thousands of miles from their home.

Christopher Palma, Teaching Professor, Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Penn State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Whitney Strub, Rutgers University – Newark

Playboy’s decision earlier this month to jettison the nude images in its print edition lays bare the magazine’s own naked truth: it was always really a lifestyle magazine, with nudes simply acting as window dressing.

If it seems counterintuitive for a quasi-smut mag to renounce its own seeming raison d’etre, it’s important to remember that the magazine, since its inception, always held itself at a distance from the world of pornography.

The aspiration of Hugh Hefner’s project was cultural legitimacy – not a globally recognized logo (today, more profitable than the magazine itself), nor the cultivation of a “girl next door” image.

The magazine – at least, how it presented itself – was simply too classy to be confused for porn.

For the most part, it worked.

As a historian, I’ve written about the postwar court battles over pornography and obscenity. And what’s most striking about Playboy’s story is how absent the magazine was from these legal wranglings.

An appeal to masculine taste

Look no further than Playboy’s debut issue, which featured Marilyn Monroe on the cover.

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Its famous opening manifesto announced: “If you’re a man between the ages of 18 and 80, Playboy is meant for you.” Their “articles, fiction, picture stories, cartoons, humor” would all be culled to “form a pleasure-primer styled to the masculine taste.”

Before Playboy, other magazines did feature nude photos, but they were seen as culturally lowbrow: tawdry publications for unsophisticated readers. Other magazines, most notably Esquire, would position scantily clad women next to articles on food, style and other central features of the developing consumer culture, but not quite as boldly as Hefner’s iconic centerfolds.

Still, Playboy treated its own nudity as playful and passé. While it did occupy the “centerfold,” it was packaged as simply another accoutrement of the modern man’s cultural repertoire, which included knowledge of proper cocktail proportions and the finer points of the Miles Davis discography.

The crusade against smut

Playboy’s debut came just one year before America’s moral panic over smut came to a head.

The House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials led the charge with a December 1952 report that highlighted “cheesecake” and “girlie” magazines, crime comics for children and, particularly, the burgeoning genre of lesbian pulp fiction novels, which – as the committee wrote in prose befitting its own targets – were “filled with sordid, filthy statements based upon sexual deviations and perversions.”

Yet even in the midst of this frenzied postwar moral righteousness, Playboy eased comfortably into the mainstream.

A few years later, when Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver launched his own anti-porn crusade, Playboy remained conspicuously absent from the hearings, which drew headlines like The New York Times’ “Smut Held Cause of Delinquency.”

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Possessing presidential aspirations (and finely attuned to the optics of media spectacle, having pioneered televised hearings in his earlier investigations of organized crime), Kefauver decided against subpoenaing Hefner.

Instead, he tacitly pandered to anti-Semitic sentiment by forcefully grilling a predominantly Jewish group of erotic distributors. The white-bread Hefner remained above the fray while smut peddlers like Abraham Rubin, Edward Mishkin and Samuel Roth reluctantly testified before Congress. (Roth would suffer the most, spending five years in federal prison for distributing material not substantially different from Hefner’s. His case also led to the 1957 Supreme Court precedent that still undergirds modern obscenity law.)

‘Skirting’ trouble

If Playboy emerged remarkably unscathed from these sexual-political skirmishes, Hefner nonetheless stayed perpetually cautious, calibrating the magazine to fit shifting contexts.

The pubic hair battles with Penthouse in the early 1970s – when Playboy started publishing more graphic images to compete in the expanding adult market – are most famous. But less remembered are earlier adjustments Hefner made to dissociate Playboy from cultural riffraff.

When Time covered the “horde of [Playboy] imitators yipping after pay dirt” in April 1957, it noted that new nude magazines like Caper, Nugget and Rogue were outpacing Playboy in “the smirk, the leer, and the female torso.”

Yet rather going skin-for-skin with its competitors, Playboy tried to distinguish itself through topnotch fiction and journalism (as well as science fiction, as PhD candidate Jordan Carroll notes in his recent study of the magazine).

According to Time, Playboy ultimately found that the most “effective censor was success”; in response to growing readership and ad revenue, the magazine “toned down its gags and dressed up its girls.”

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Indeed, in one striking 1962 letter sent to Hefner by a suburban Chicago chapter of the conservative Citizens for Decent Literature, the group happily informed him that that it had decided not to include Playboy among its list of 37 magazines that should be removed from local newsstands.

Later, in the 1970s, Playboy would attempt to compete with the more graphic pornography unleashed by the sexual revolution and the weakening of obscenity laws. More recently, it has reshaped its content to adhere to the strict regulations of social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, which forbid users from posting female (but not male) nipples.

Clearly, 2015 is not the first time Playboy has switched up its strategy to respond to market forces.

The bunny supplants the girl next door

If Hefner’s erotic vision was quaint enough to pass muster even with some conservatives in the early 1960s, today it’s as retrograde as Don Draper. As Washington Post columnist Mireille Miller-Young observes, today’s girl next door isn’t uniformly white, thin, heterosexual and presented with a smarmy editorial voice. Instead, she could be a queer woman of color. She might even be publishing her own porn.

While the magazine once walked a tightrope between smut and sophistication, branding always remained Playboy’s real strength.

Today, 40% of its revenue comes from China – where the magazine itself isn’t even sold. Instead, a recognizable bunny logo that appears on products ranging from cigarette lighters to coffee mugs is what persists.

With limitless free online nudity a click away, the cash flow resides in a licensed logo that represents an upwardly mobile, urban lifestyle – much like it always did.

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Whitney Strub, Associate Professor and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University – Newark

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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