Life is an adventure, and is full of adventures. On this web site I am sharing many of my adventures. As as kid I laughed myself silly when Moe Stooge finger speared the ocular orbs of Curley Stooge and Larry Stooge. A few years later I groaned in horror when the bad guy professional wrestlers "gouged" the eyes of the good guy wrestlers. During my college years I was uncomfortably enlightened by a paragraph in Hunter Thompson's book on the Hells Angels which describes a favorite brawling technique used by the club members: poking the opponent's eyeball out of its socket. Now I am in my 50's and have, for many decades, sought other forms of amusement and adventure. What is presented on this site is one adult's concept of eye-gouging fun.
What is being presented this site is a collection short video clips of my adventures presented in RealNetworks and Microsoft Media streaming video format. You will need a reasonably current version of a video player to view them. These are free, and the links at the bottom of this page will connect you to the site of each company from where you can download the current player. For each video clip select the "LoBand" button if you are connecting to the internet with a dial-up modem operating at 56K, or select "HiBand" if you using a high speed connection such as cable, DSL, or T1.
The available video clips are:
ALCATRAZ: Sierra Singles members have a slumber party on Alcatraz Island.
FULL AUTO: George and his buddy Chris shoot submachine guns.
RIVER RAFTING: Sierra Singles members float down a river where water fights, rather than rapids, get the participants wet.
SEA KAYAKING: Sierra Singles members explore Monterey Bay.
ORCA CHASING: George and friends view orcas (aka killer "whales") off the San Juan Islands (coming soon).
I have another page where some of my other adventures, as well as those of some friends, are depicted in photo album style. These adventures include: kayaking after orcas in Puget Sound, whitewater rafting and canoeing in the South, and celebrating Bastille Day in Paris. The link to this web site, www.geocities.com/sierra_george is here.
Streaming video is fraught with technical challenges. Your ability to view these video clips will depend upon factors such as: the speed of your connection to the internet; the version of your streaming video viewer; the computational prowess of your desktop pc; the amount of traffic on the internet; and the browser that you are using. What I have discovered so far is that the Windows Media Video files stream well on broadband connections, and that they need to be downloaded to be played when using dial-up connections. If you select the LoBand: MS version of a video it is probably about 1 Mb in size and will take about 5 minutes to download to your hard drive where it can be stored for playback. One trick tht you can perform to mitigate any impatience during the download is to view the video clip in segments while it is downloading; when the buffer is around 10% click on the play button and you can view what has been downloaded so far. Be sure to save the file for playback in its entirety. The LoBand RealNetworks version of the video actually streams on dial-up connections operating at 56KB; however, it plays at 15 frames per second and the scrren image is somewhat large for the download speed which means that the image is somewhat jerky and pixelated.
[The inspiration for this web site name comes from the March 11, 2003, issue of the Wall Street Journal. In a column titled "'Clinton and Dole' Could Use Some Eye-Gouging Fun" the writer, Nicholas von Hoffman, who debated Shana Alexander on "60 Minutes" many years ago, argues that the current segment of this program featuring these two politicians is so dull and serious that Bill and Bob need to engage in verbal wrestling, in the spirit of the World Wrestling Federation, including verbal eye-gouging to keep things lively lest the viewer switch to another channel.]