OK, I know I should try to post more. The reasons I’m not are the same as mentioned below. Too many other outlets. But I’m open to having others post here. If you want to write articles about current events in bodybuilding, let me know. If you want to write about years past, see my wiki.
There is a documentary currently out that everyone should go see: Bigger, Stronger, Faster. The side effects of being American.
Lots of clips on You Tube too.
Hey, it’s been a while. I just got bored writing “the results of ____ are now available”. And while I could have written about current events, such as who’s the latest to leave the IFBB for the PDI, or who is the latest to be arrested, plenty of others are doing that elsewhere on the web.
But today I have something to write about. The MuscleMemory database now contains over 100,000 entries. And yes, I personally type in almost all of them. Here are the current statistics:
12501 different women with 28883 entries. 27639 men with 71141 entries, for a total of 40140 individuals with 100024 entries.
MuscleMemory currently receives 1.5 to 2 million hits a month from 65000 unique visitors.
Now if each of you would just send me 10 cents…
(My service provider is in the UK, and while it seemed like a good rate at the time, today’s exchange rate is not so good.)
There are many things I would like to do with the website, but just haven’t had the time to so.
All this takes is time and money. Both are in short supply at the moment. Much of my time has been spent working on other projects, one’s that may actually make money. But I do my best to try to put in a few hours each week on MuscleMemory.
If you would like to help, I could certainly use help finding more contest results, especially from outside the US. I could also use help finding people with collections of non-US bodybuilding mags. You’re welcome to write articles for the wiki. I’d even be willing to allow others to write about current events on the blog. And of course, there is a donation button on the front page.
This morning, all sites hosted on the same computer as musclememory got hacked. The hackers used the backup/restore function in an old version of phpbb to replace all index.* files with one of their own.  I’ve restored most of these files, but let me know if you find any others.
I’ve moved MuscleMemory to a new ISP. Besides saving money, I have more resources to play with, more disk space, bandwidth, MySQL databases, php and tomcat. You might not see too many differences for a while, but things should be easier for me to maintain.
One immediate change is that I’ve switch the blog software from MovableType to WordPress. That should mean less spam for me to delete. One nice feature of WordPress is that it allows multiple authors on the same blog. I’m hoping to find others to contribute to the MuscleMemory blog. If you’d like to write about what’s happening in bodybuilding in your part of the world, drop me an email.
Long before they’re posted on the IFBB website, I have the results of this weekend’s IFBB World Amateur Championships held in China. Not only that, I have the results of the Junior and Master’s World Amateur Championships held in Hungary the previous weekend.
How do I do it? I have helpers throughout the world. The China results came from planetemuscle.com forum in France, and the Hungary results came from 村重典昭 (Murashige for those who cannot read Kanji, or don’t have the right character set) in Japan.
Men’s World Amateur Championships
Women’s World Amateur Championships
update: WABBA World’s up too
Pat Arnold, of misc.fitness.weight fame, as well as the person who first brought the andro products to market is in the news, and not in a good way:
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In raids led by the Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation division, search warrants were served on the Champaign, Ill., offices and home of chemist Patrick Arnold, who authorities believe produced the steroid that came to be known as “the clear” in the BALCO case.
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Even before BALCO broke, Arnold was suspected by anti-doping officials as the man who resurrected the steroid norbolethone, a drug that was manufactured in the 1960s but never marketed to the public. The substance was discovered in the urine sample of an athlete in 2002. Based on e-mails and documents seized in the BALCO case, authorities believe norbolethone was the first generation of “the clear” distributed by Conte to elite athletes.
Fannie Barrios has died. No word on the cause, but on the GeneX Forum they say it was not unexpected.
Chris Jalali remains in intensive care in a Las Vegas hospital a week after the USA Championships. The talk on various forums is that diuretics is the cause.
On a happier note, Ted Karnezis has sent me photocopies of contest rank sheet of all the major AAU contests from the 1990s. I’ll be able to fill in many gaps in the database. It just may take a while, as I’ve started a new job.
Gordon Wong died on May 24, 2005. He was 63. More information at Graphic Muscle
Paul DeMayo died yesterday. He was 37.
I’ve added a new feature to MuscleMemory: Wiki .
A wiki is a community document, where everyone can contribute. You can create new pages, or edit already existing pages. Perhaps the most popular wiki is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia where anyone can write about any topic. Here are the bodybuilding topics already covered there. Hardly anything at all.
The MuscleMemory Wiki will be about bodybuilding, of course. The goal is to have biographical articles about all the major figures, historical and current. But other topics can be covered, nutrition, training methods, politics, etc. Its up to you. If you have a favorite bodybuilder, feel free to create a wiki page about him or her, or add to an existing page.
The wiki will also allow you to write about yourself. If you are already in the MuscleMemory database, you can create a wiki page to tell about yourself, list other contests not covered by the database, even about your achievements in other sports. Once you’ve created a wiki page, email me, and I will link it to your name in the database so that a Wiki icon appears on your contest page.
To create a new page, you just append the topic name to the URL in your browser, for example
http://www.musclememory.com/wiki/index.php?pagename=TopicName
Capitalize each word, but don’t add spaces. For example
http://www.musclememory.com/wiki/index.php?pagename=ArnoldSchwarzenegger
If that page does not exist, a new one will be created.
Note that you must register and log in to edit a page. To create a new account, just enter a name and password (at least six characters) in the login form.
This wiki will be successful only if everyone contributes.
Two recent deaths:
Charles Durr Jr died on May 2, 2005. He had won the 1996 AAU Mr America contest, but was then disqualified for failing the drug test. He then sued the AAU. Some believe this is why the AAU decided to wash its hands of bodybuilding.
Don Youngblood died of a heart attack yesterday.