Yesterday, Mel and I went to an amazing event in Los Angles. Inspired by Drew Barrymore’s debut as a director “Whip It“, I took Mel to see the real thing. For those of you who don’t know, there is an actual real league of roller derby. In Southern California there is a premiere all-female roller derby league called the L.A. Derby Dolls. The skaters have strict rules they have to follow in order to score points. About 10 referees make sure nothing gets out-of-control. The sport can get brutal as we were witness of some hard impacts and gnarly slams. You can find an official picture gallery of injuries on the Derby Doll’s site. Although there is a strong feeling of competition you will also experience a very loving and friendly vibe among the contestants. A band plays at half-time and it’s a really cool experience.

Image source: laderbydolls’ photostream

If you are interested in watching some of the Fifa Soccer World Cup matches in a sports bar in Los Angeles, there is a nice collection on the web of places you can do that. The site is called WorldSoccerBars.com. Although the domain name is currenly quite misleading as it only covers cities in the US, it has potential to grow in the future. Check out what Los Angeles has to offer. Note: most of these bars are general sports bars with tons of screens broadcasting several different sports simultaneously. In most cases they are not specialized ’soccer’ bars..

Let me know which one is the best….

The image above was found on spiegel.de and shows the results of computer simulations created by German and US scientists to determine where the oil from BP’s mess is heading next. This result is based on four different scenarios as initial point to create the computer simulation. Most likely, the oil will drift around the Florida keys and the Trans-Atlantik stream will bring it up along the US east coast all the way over to Europe. But it will arrive in Europe far less concentrated compared to the images we are receiving through the media today. Of course, these are results from complex computer simulations, involving the hard to predict variables such as the weather. As the hurricane season 2010 has just started beginning with June 1st and scientists expect to have a strong season this year, what will actually happen is difficult to determine. I can image that the simulation hits it pretty close though.

Good bye Florida Keys. Nice to met you. Anyone want to rewrite Hemingway’s “The old man and the sea”? Let BP’s CEO Tony Hayward be the old man who will not deal with a giant marlin, but deal with a giant mess instead.

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Here is a really neat google map visualization of the PB oil spill that allow you to overlay the current predicted size of the oil field with a location in the world of your choice. This helps understand the dimensions of the disaster in terms of area. Try mapping the oil against your location on ifitwasmyhome.com. This site was created by Andy Lintner.