Trick shot

A trick shot (also trickshot or trick-shot) is a shot played on a billiards table (most often a pool table, though snooker tables are also used), which seems unlikely or impossible or requires significant skill. Trick shots frequently involve the balls organized in ways that are unlikely or impossible to appear in normal play, such as balls being in a straight line, or use props such as extra cues or a triangle that would not be allowed on the table during a game. As an organized cue sports discipline, trick shot competition is known as artistic pool.

Competition formats

Billiards trick shots are the subject of increasing international competition, both amateur and professional. There are world championships, such as the WPA Artistic Pool World Championships and the World Snooker Trickshot Championship (which has not been held since 2006), and made-for-TV events, such as Trick Shot Magic and the World Cup of Trick Shots, often televised in both the US and the UK and providing enough prize money that some professional players specialize in the discipline.

Dude Perfect

Dude Perfect is a sports entertainment group who got their start on YouTube. Most known for their trick shots, they are also involved in comedy with their "Stereotypes" series, in which they poke fun at common stereotypes, mostly in the sports world. The group consists of the twins Coby and Cory Cotton, Garrett Hilbert, Cody Jones, and Tyler Toney who are all former high school basketball players and college roommates at Texas A&M University.

The group commented that their shots typically relied more on American football skills than basketball.

History

The group was betting on sandwiches via basketball shots in their backyard, which were eventually recorded on camera, and a video of trick shots at Toney's ranch was eventually released on YouTube. Within a week, the video received 100,000 views. When asked about the name, Toney stated,

Afterwards, a trick shot video from the Christian summer camp Sky Ranch was released, which, as of June 2015, has over 13.9 million views. For every 100,000 views the video received, Dude Perfect pledged to sponsor a child from Compassion International. Afterwards, ESPN's E:60 contacted the group for a segment, and on the third floor of Texas A&M's Kyle Field, Toney converted a shot, which traveled 3.9 seconds, which was a world record at the time. The shot prompted television appearances on ESPN's First Take, Pardon the Interruption, Around the Horn and SportsNation. Eventually, Dude Perfect introduced the Panda mascot, who "developed a cult following at A&M basketball games" when taunting players of the opposing team.

Dude

Dude is an American English slang term for an individual. It typically applies to males, although the word can encompass any gender.

Dude is an old term, recognized by multiple generations although potentially with slightly different meanings. From the 1870s to the 1960s, dude primarily meant a person who dressed in an extremely fashionable manner (a dandy) or a citified person who was visiting a rural location but stuck out (a city slicker). In the 1960s, dude evolved to mean any male person, a meaning that slipped into mainstream American slang in the 1970s. Current slang retains at least some use of all three of these common meanings.

History

The word may have derived from the Scottish term for clothes, duddies. The term "dude" was first used in print in 1876, in Putnam's Magazine, to mock how a woman was dressed (as a "dud"/dude). The use of the word "dudde" for clothing in English goes as far back 1567.

In the popular press of the 1880s and 1890s, "dude" was a new word for "dandy" – an extremely well-dressed male, a man who paid particular importance to how he appeared. The café society and Bright Young Things of the late 1800s and early 1900s were populated with dudes. Young men of leisure vied to show off their wardrobes. The best known of this type is probably Evander Berry Wall, who was dubbed "King of the Dudes" in 1880s New York and maintained a reputation for sartorial splendor all his life. This version of the word is still in occasional use in American slang, as in the phrase "all duded up" for getting dressed in fancy clothes.

Perfection

Perfection is, broadly, a state of completeness and flawlessness.

The term perfection is used to designate a range of diverse, if often kindred, concepts. These concepts have historically been addressed in a number of discrete disciplines, notably mathematics, physics, chemistry, ethics, aesthetics, ontology, and theology.

Term and concept

The form of the word long fluctuated in various languages. The English language had the alternates, "perfection" and the Biblical "perfectness."

The word "perfection" derives from the Latin "perfectio", and "perfect" — from "perfectus." These expressions in turn come from "perficio" — "to finish", "to bring to an end." "Perfectio(n)" thus literally means "a finishing", and "perfect(us)" — "finished", much as in grammatical parlance ("perfect").

Many modern languages have adopted their terms for the concept of "perfection" from the Latin: the French "parfait" and "perfection"; the Italian "perfetto" and "perfezione"; the Spanish "perfecto" and "perfección"; the English "perfect" and "perfection"; the Russian "совершенный" (sovyershenniy) and "совершенcтво" (sovyershenstvo); the Croatian and Serbian "savršen" and "savršenstvo"; the Czech "dokonalost"; the Slovak "dokonaly" and "dokonalost"; the Polish "doskonały" and "doskonałość."

Mystery meat navigation

Mystery meat navigation (also known as MMN) is a disparaging term coined in 1998 by Vincent Flanders, author and designer of the website Web Pages That Suck, to describe a web page where the destination of the link is not visible until the user points their cursor at it. Such interfaces lack a user-centered design, emphasizing aesthetic appearance, white space, and the concealment of relevant information over basic practicality and functionality.

The epithet "mystery meat" refers to the meat products often served in American public school cafeterias whose forms have been so thoroughly reprocessed that their exact types can no longer be identified by their appearances: like them, the methods of MMN are clear to the producer but baffling to the consumer.

Flanders originally and temporarily described the phenomenon as Saturnic navigation in reference to the Saturn Corporation, whose company website epitomized this phenomenon. Flanders writes, "The typical form of MMN is represented by menus composed of unrevealing icons that are replaced with explicative text only when the mouse cursor hovers over them".