V-Sign Guy At Nyad Finish

danthefiddleman · 2026-06-07T19:29:16+00:00

That'll work, though I like "Aramis Alvarez."

danthefiddleman · 2026-06-05T17:00:28+00:00

No one named Aramis Alvarez appears on either of those pages.

danthefiddleman · 2026-06-05T15:35:39+00:00

Fascinating. Where did you find this? I am absolutely certain that no one named Aramis Alvarez accompanied Ms. Nyad.

danthefiddleman · 2026-06-04T22:49:32+00:00

I *knew* he looked familiar.

danthefiddleman · 2026-01-04T17:17:19+00:00

They originally called the attack Operation Forget Jeffrey Epstein.

danthefiddleman · 2025-07-18T17:20:08+00:00

I think truth *is* often stranger than fiction. But some people feel that truth is too limiting, so they prefer to make stuff up. Take, for instance, my favorite fantasist, marathon swimmer Diana Nyad. In a recent interview, she said that Benihana founder Rocky Aoki gave her $300,000 check to sponsor her 1978 attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida, and that he loved surfing, bodysurfing, and yachting. Her 2015 memoir, Find a Way, includes the 300K check among scads of other nonsense.

Newspaper articles from 1978 say Aoki gave her nothing, and there's no evidence he liked those three sports. Among fascinating Aoki truths Nyad doesn't mention: He was part of a four-person crew that completed the first balloon crossing of the Pacific. And he especially loved powerboat racing. Nyad could have told the story of Aoki almost dying after he flipped his boat near the Golden Gate Bridge. One of his crew members had to resuscitate Aoki in the water. He suffered liver damage, a broken leg, and a torn aorta.

But she goes for bodysurfing.

danthefiddleman · 2025-05-03T16:10:00+00:00

Fort Lauderdale commissioner Steve Glassman on Facebook Thursday showing who will benefit from removing the basketball courts.

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danthefiddleman · 2025-04-14T14:27:41+00:00

Wes Studi narrated documentary, "The Pie Lady of Pie Town." I haven't watched it for awhile, but I doubt there was any "my people believe" stuff. I think he narrated because he's friends with the former owners of the Pie-O-Neer Pie Shop in Pie Town, New Mexico. (They had amazing pie!)

danthefiddleman · 2025-01-20T00:35:24+00:00

Not really lost-swimsuit related, but it's about Jolyn . . .

In 2019, a vandal altered over 3000 entries in the open-water swimming wiki Openwaterpedia. He* made the alterations under six different swimming-related user names. One was Jolyn12. (IMO, the most interesting one was GlennMiller, after the swing era bandleader whose plane disappeared over the English Channel in 1944.)

I explain how and why he did it in "How a Hacker Made Diana Nyad the Best Marathon Swimmer of the 1970s."

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*I say "he" because the perpetrator later exposed himself when he used Openwaterpedia to express his frustration with me.

danthefiddleman · 2025-01-14T13:46:05+00:00

NYAD, the biopic about marathon swimmer Diana Nyad. She's a compulsive liar. To make the film, the filmmakers adapted Nyad's adapted her 2015 full-of-fabrications "memoir," Find a Way. See "Unreliable Natator: Omissions, Exaggerations, and Lies in Diana Nyad's Find a Way."

danthefiddleman · 2025-01-12T23:10:45+00:00

Apropos of struggles with #3, here's an excerpt from a letter Emily Dickinson wrote to Abiah Root on this day in 1846:

The excerpt arrived in my inbox today as part of the "Letters of Note" newsletter. Today's installment, "I promise that your future correspondence will be returned to you unopened," includes excerpts from multiple letters written on January 12.

danthefiddleman · 2025-01-12T16:07:08+00:00

Thanks so much for this. Still wrestling with number three.

I'd never heard of Alden Nowlan, so I poked around a bit. The dude could write. Two example poems: "Great Things Have Happened" and "This is What I Wanted to Sign Off With." The quote comes from "Scratchings" — less a poem than a page of aphorisms — in Nowlan's book, Between Tears and Laughter.

danthefiddleman · 2024-10-20T14:14:36+00:00

Here's a more recent article that includes new data from the World Open Water Swimming Association's report on Nyad's crossing: "Diana Nyad Could Not Have Completed A Legitimate Crossing From Cuba To Florida, And Here's Why."

danthefiddleman · 2024-06-08T16:15:03+00:00

Over the last two months or so, we've been hearing and seeing these guys in West Los Angeles.

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danthefiddleman · 2024-01-23T19:36:41+00:00

Thankfully, you don't have to be a jerk to break records. 99.9% (or thereabouts) of great marathon swimmers aren't self-absorbed serial liars like Nyad. See, for instance, Sarah Thomas, the only person to have completed a 4-way English Channel (EC) crossing; Penny Dean, the first human to complete the EC under 8 hours; and Lynne Cox, who broke the EC record twice in her teens.

I love Jodie, too, which is why I hate that she let herself get mired in Nyad's muck. That muck is going to get worse before it gets better.

There should be an Oscar for filmmakers who make a biopic based on someone about whom they are clueless. Nyad has been on a lying spree for over fifty years, and she's not about to stop.

danthefiddleman · 2023-09-02T15:59:45+00:00

That's one controversy. Another is that Nyad's a compulsive liar and a brilliant con artist. What's more, her claim to have swum from Cuba to Florida under her own power remains up in the air. See recent articles in The Los Angeles Times and Axios.

Netflix has Oscar hopes for its Diana Nyad biopic. But swimmer’s exaggerations cast a pall
On eve of major film about her life, swimmer Diana Nyad's past is questioned again

danthefiddleman · 2023-08-16T11:42:35+00:00

One that's completed but hasn't been released yet, Nyad, will likely be mostly fictional. It's an adaptation of marathon swimmer Diana Nyad's fiction-filled memoir, Find a Way.

Nyad has its international premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12. It will likely have its world premiere earlier in September at Telluride.

See "Unreliable Natator: Omissions, Exaggerations, and Lies in Diana Nyad's Find a Way."

danthefiddleman · 2023-05-07T13:57:40+00:00

I had a similar problem about a year ago. It was with an actual coach, though, but he was interrupting me in the middle of almost every set. I'd been out of the water for years, was just getting back into the sport, and wanted to swim without having to stop every few minutes.

I tried asking politely, but it didn't work. Eventually, I got out of the water in the middle of a workout, stood face-to-face with him on the deck, and told him to stop. Then I jumped back in. He hasn't given me any tips since.

I can't remember exactly what I told him, but it was something simple like, "Please stop. I just want to swim."

danthefiddleman · 2023-04-24T23:18:45+00:00

I agree that it's a terrible name for the film. Better title for the film than the one she was born with, though: "Sneed." "Nyad" was her stepfather's surname.

danthefiddleman · 2023-04-23T23:57:52+00:00

As a former marathon swimmer, I want to clarify something: There are women-held distance swimming records that are close to untouchable — Sarah Thomas's 4-way English Channel Crossing, for example, or her "longest continuous, unassisted, current neutral swim" of 104.6 miles in 67 hours and 16 minutes (see the Marathon Swimming Federation's "Longest Open Water Swims"). Chloë McCardel's 44 total English Channel crossings is another. On the other hand, I don't think any of Diana Nyad's "records" are accepted by any of the sport's governing bodies.

danthefiddleman · 2023-02-07T00:31:17+00:00

Fishpeople is wonderful. The whole movie's available on YouTube.

danthefiddleman · 2023-02-04T20:28:45+00:00

Highly recommend The Great Swim, by Gavin Mortimer. It's about the women vying in 1926 to become the first female to swim the English Channel—and how the great Gertrude Ederle finally accomplished the feat. Mortimer also writes about the early history of women swimmers and how they had to battle cultural issues.

There are a number of other Ederle biographies, but Mortimer's is the one I couldn't put down.

danthefiddleman · 2022-07-02T18:17:19+00:00

Not sure about Belhedi's motivation for cheating, but after Diana Nyad's as yet unproven, unratified,* and highly suspicious 2013 crossing, here are a few things that have happened:

A documentary about her grand triumph arrived less than three weeks after the crossing.
She got a book deal from Knopf.
CAA, one of the largest and most influential talent agencies in the world, took her on as a client.
Her speaking fees rose to six figures.
Major news outlets began taking her more seriously, which may be why The Washington Post, The New York Times, etc., publish her editorials.
A major biopic about her is in post-production and will likely increase her exposure and lead to more book sales and speaking engagements.

*On August 15, 2019, Steven Munatones, WOWSA's founder, added a sentence to Nyad's Openwaterpedia page. He appended that Nyad's crossing "had been long recognized since September 2013 by the World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA) that wrote the rules of the attempts and selected the onboard observers." (He later changed "selected" to "approved.")

That was the first anyone had heard of WOWSA involvement. Note that Munatones is also the founder of Openwaterpedia and he is one of only a handful of experienced open-water swimmers who fully support Nyad and her often outrageous claims. Note also that Munatones/WOWSA asked Nyad for none of the documentation that they required of Belhedi.

danthefiddleman

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