Always on the lookout for O in exotic places, I stumbled upon the website of a club in Istanbul, Turkey. Were I a regular reader of Orienteering Online, I would have seen it 3 months ago.

They had a couple of brief articles on the O scene in Turkey, one of which describes a Ship O they set up. The cool thing about the Ship O was that the map was apparently three dimensional, using the different decks of the ship. I think this would add a really cool and fun twist to route planning, and would be a lot of fun. I don't expect anyone to be able to organize this in the US anytime soon. (I guess all maps and route planning are three dimensional, but I suppose this would still feel different).

It is interesting to look at the club's website. I like looking at O pages in different languages. One nice touch of the website is the photo page of all the members. Another observation is, that even tho I can't read the web page too well, it is clear that the webmaster is presenting O as a competitive sport. I've noticed that as an apparent difference between overseas and Amercian O club pages -- the non-American pages seem to present more of a "sport" image. Perhaps this is just my biased perception skewing my impressions. One would think, tho, if we wish to recruit more competitive athletes to the American O scene, we could make the web pages project it more as a sport. But what do I know, I have no talent when it comes to designing web pages, and how to project an image.

Another thought is the Orienteering Online. Seems like a decent 'zine, tho I had no time really to read thru it or see how much content was there. But it does bring up the question of -- could USOF get by with an online 'zine rather than the paper ONA? I prefer paper, but the cost of printing ONA eats up a huge amount of the USOF budget. The same content could be published online, and USOF resources could be directed elsewhere. Just an (obvious) thought, but probably not a particularly popular one.

Finally, the West Point results are in. It is disappointing that they did not appear to acknowledge the problems with the day 2 red course (let alone throw it out or throw out the leg), or the day 1 blue course (well, I'm biased on that one, so I'll forget it). Or, perhaps they did and I missed it. I guess I just don't think we should let mishung controls go, or at least we should be able to opt out of the race for the purpose of rankings.

In other news from West Point, JF put in an amazing result on day 2 M21. The scientist in me wants to explain this result. Is he that good? Was the rest of the field that bad? Did the rest of the field pay a price for running that grueling day 1 M21 course? How grueling was the day 1 M20 course? My guess is that it was probably a combination of all of the above, but most of it from the "he's that good" section. We'll see over the next couple of years. Tune in for the JWOC results (and the rest of the JWOC team may not be that far behind, from what I've seen).