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Was It A Cat I Saw?

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There's a famous skateboard video part by Mark Suciu, Verso, which has been covered ad nauseum in skate circles.

The video ends in a groundbreaking way with somewhat of a palindrome: a series of tricks, with each trick mirroring the one before it. He's gone on record stating it took about 2000 attempts, more than two years, and resulted in numerous injuries.

The final (and first!) trick of the sequence is among the simplest in skateboarding: a 50-50 grind.

Final tricks in video parts-- "enders" in the lingua franca-- are traditionally reserved for extremely technical or groundbreaking tricks on unique or challenging obstacles. Enders are of high cultural significance, often analyzed and talked about for decades. A skater can quite literally make a career out of a good ender.

In Verso, one of the most hyped videos of year, Suciu capped his run with a simple trick on an unassuming curb, and the skate community at large panned the part.

That was until someone discovered (Or Mark had to explain) the mirrored sequence, and people began to dissect the part and reveal the brilliant nature of the performance.

I'd struggle to articulate exactly how challenging the sequence was, and there are breakdown videos on youtube and comments littering the net who do it better anyhow.

This sounds really interesting but I know nothing about skating, the people, or this video. Any links that break it down?

Here are a couple links. It may be a little heavy on the jargon, but Mark's explanation is fantastic, even for the layman.

- Breaking down Mark Suciu’s “Verso”: https://andrew-hughes2012.medium.com/breaking-down-mark-suci...

- Mark Suciu's "Verso" Part (note the highlighted comment which describes the main "controversial" sequence): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlcxbZbHTj8&lc=UgwTbcW99Wm9Z...

- Mark Suciu Explains His Verso Part and the 50-50 Ender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w97Y06WACOE

Wow, I... don't understand anything about this. I'd probably have to dig much deeper into this, or maybe even be a skater myself.

I don't understand what the tricks are and why they relate to each other. This is where skating myself would probably be important.

I don't even really get what a "part" is, what it is that is being named "Verso" here. I don't understand why the videos I'm looking at seem to consist of multiple different short clips, instead of being one long unbroken clip of what I would have expected "Verso", or maybe at least just the "ender", to be.

Are all the clips together "Verso"? Are they individual reenactments of Verso? Is Verso even a sequence of moves or is it some sort of, I don't know, style? Is the "ender" one clip or multiple?

So I basically understand neither the, uh, performance, nor the framing of it all? Which is an interesting feeling.

This is not a jab of any kind. From the way people talk about this, this totally seems like something I could passionately discuss evenings away with likeminded people if I was part of that world. It's just interesting how utterly impenetrable it looks to me at first glance. More so than, say, chess, e-sports, or figure skating, which I also no next to nothing about.

There is _so much_ nuance to skateboarding, and specifically street skating, one could take multiple college-level courses and likely still have much to learn.

Skate videos over time have evolved to become the collections of short clips containing a few tricks by one or more skaters set to music.

Historically, videos have been produced by skate "teams" which are made up of the roster of skaters the producing company sponsors.

For example, skateboard or shoe manufacturer will sponsor pros for a year while their parts are filmed, in the vein of a record company contracting a musician for an album.

This all dates back to the VHS days, when filming, editing, and distributing a video was nowhere near as simple as clicking "upload" from an iPhone.

Each clip is usually a short series of a small number of tricks without editing cuts, called a "line". Successfully filming a line can happen in a mythical single take, or can be the result of hundreds or even thousands of attempts because it often requires landing multiple complicated tricks in a row, with a small bit of choreography in between.

A collection of lines by an individual skater comprises their "part" in a video. Parts are often filmed over the course of year or more, across continents, in various cities, and, as mentioned in parents, the tricks typically progress in difficulty. Lines are to skateboarders what songs are to musicians. And parts are analogous to albums.

Video parts are usually assembled in progressing order of the skaters' prominence and skill as well, with new additions to the team shown first, followed by the veterans. The skater's name is shown in the lower third, and tricks roll with music playing in the background. There is not really much in the way of voiceover/play-by-play explanations which can lead to a surprising amount of artistic expression through sequencing and music choice.

Parts range 1-3 songs at most. Often a skater will struggle to film enough material to take up more than a couple songs. Skate videos have ranged in total length from 10 minutes to 1.5 hours, sometimes with silly skits or pranks (think Jackass-lite) mixed in.

Verso is the name of the video, and was distributed Habitat, a board manufacturer. The entire video comes in around 12 minutes or 4 songs, and only features Suciu. It might be referred to as his part, even though there are no other featured skaters.

The best way I could explain the way the tricks in the final line of Verso relate to each other would be as follows. If he rotates his body in a 180 to the left on a given trick, the "mirrored" trick will rotate to the right. If a board flips clockwise first, the mirrored trick flips counter-clockwise. Additionally, there is a component of foot placement: "popping" the board up from either the tail or the nose, and using a regular (dominant foot on the tail) or switch stance.

Verso's final line follows an ABBA format[1] in that spirit:

> The clearest view of Mark’s creative gesture comes in the fourth movement of Verso, where we find the “ender” behind the delayed release. One announcement of the gesture is the paint-dripped sign bearing an X of lines from A→B and B→A. Another is the basic-ass frontside fifty that’s so far beneath Mark’s abilities that it can only be a message. We see a second front fifty close the section, an anti-ender to affirm a pattern that in poetry and rhetoric is called ‘chiasmus.’ ABBA, the formal repetition of elements in a reverse order. Think of Matthew 19:30, “But many that are first shall be last, and many that are last shall be first.” Or Keats, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

1: https://www.jenkemmag.com/home/2019/10/03/serious-review-mar...

Very insightful, thanks!

A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal--Panama!

-- From Guy Steele, "Common Lisp, The Language (2nd ed.)"

More: https://webhome.phy.duke.edu/~schol/WWW_palindromes.txt

Whoa... somebody tell me that was machine generated?

Maybe. There are others thousands of lines long, and ultimately tedious.

"A man, a plan, a canal: Panama" has always sounded too simple to me. There's got to be more to it. Yours makes more sense.

Aibohphobia: the fear of palindromes.

Also: Weird Al's "Bob" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUQDzj6R3p4

"Video unavailable. The uploader has not made this video available in your country."

The entire song is made up of palindromes. It contains the following variation of the post title:

Was it a car or a cat I saw?

The fact that it's a parody of a Bob Dylan song and Bob is itself a palindrome, is the cherry on the cake. It's my favourite Weird Al song for this reason.

And it was released in 2002.

20 February, by any chance?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAfIikFnvuI

works for me or Google for

"Weird Al" Yankovic - Bob

This article has broken my brain. I read this and stared at it like "this isn't a palindrome? What are you on about?"

Its funny how this is also a palindrome.

I'm sure it was unintentional.

aibohphobia being both a palindrome and the word for fear of palindromes is absolutely intentional.

I'm sure you understand sarcasm.

no, what's that

Then what will we call the fear of that little robot dog that Sony made?

There's a 14th century composition of, I think 40 verses or so in Sanskrit, that when read forwards relates events from the Ramayana and when read backwards, relates events from the Mahabharata. The musical notes to which it is set is also palindromic. Here's a video explaining one such verse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4KuL_dUMZc

Barry Duncan: I wrote a palindrome for a friend that's 800 words long.

Peter Norvig: Hold my beer [1]

[1]: https://norvig.com/palindrome.html

For those who want to skip to the good part, https://norvig.com/pal3btxt.html

(...I'm personally not at all sure that we should allow " a kCi," as part of the text, that's not a real word, it's a unit of measure!)

https://jonagee.com/html/wp_books.php

OTTO: a Palindrama

Was the best book I've read to my kids this year.

My 6 year old has been running around the house talking in palindrome. My mind was blown, and I had a few chuckles at some of the inventive palindromes. The story barely made sense, but it didn't matter. Highly recommended.

Agreed - Jon Agee has another palindrome book titled PALINDROMANIA! (that OTTO seems to be based on).

Also spoonerisms are fun for kids too, Jon Agee has book of those and it's also great. Shel Silverstein has "Runny Babbit" (Goctor Doose always gets a chuckle out of me)

I loved "Go Hang A Salami, I'm a Lasagna Hog" as a kid, learned lots of good ones from there.

Another all time great, when it comes to media based around palindromes, is Weird Al's Bob Dylan style parody, palindromically titled: Bob.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUQDzj6R3p4

I learned that one with the clauses reversed, which I incorporated into a haiku format:

I’m a lasagna

hog, go hang a salami.

This sentence no verb.

Edited: to add superfluous line breaks not that they could have been anywhere else.

Thanks for the Weird Al video. My kids are also Weird Al fans, but we haven't seen this one yet!!

I remember reading an article years ago (mid-2000s, must have been) about an entire book that used palindromes extensively. I believe it was sci-fi-adjacent, only thing I remember distinctly was something called "ylyly" in the book.

Ylyly was a planet, I think. Haven't ever been able to find this again. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

Like Napoleon was said to have said in his exile (why in English and in a palindrome is never explained in the story) "Able was I ere I saw Elba".

"Whether it's read straight or flipped, it's still Woo Young-woo. Kayak, deed, rotator, noon, racecar, Woo Young-woo."

was it a car or a cat I saw?

This calls for automatic generation with language models.

Not sure about language models, but here's one generated programmatically: https://norvig.com/palindrome.html

A language model could help to create text that's not so artificial, I would think.

I'd like to see an interactive tool to help you compose them. My first cut at this was https://github.com/darius/js-playground/blob/master/palindro... (not currently online) but you could do more.

Go hang a salami. I'm a lasagna hog.

Doc, note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on Cod.

I was a bit disappointed that Barry's article did not contain any palindromes itself. I tried to reverse it and scan for words which might form palindromes, but found only one real candidate with a manual search before I, an insufficiently skilled/trained/devoted reader, glazed over: busy, nay! from "any subject". I'll continue to work on my reading, but don't have much hope.

Fortunately, I'm a programmer, so a quick script found the following words in the reversed text: name, mail, item, sign, both, cart, tell, arts, ever, unit, named, refer, demo, busy, rail, tube, semi, tons, tire, nuts, bare, tubes, rows, memo, stir, baton, verb, mania, erase, astro, carte, peek, warp, stub, veil, dime, carp, tyre.

"Mania" from "remain a mystery" was the only notable find IMO. Sadly, that would be harder to turn into a palindrome, because "yretsy" is not a substring of anything. No deeper secrets seem to have been embedded.

Reversed, the text is:

> elddimehtniteemlliwewtahttnedifnocmaignitirwruonokrowotsuwollalliwdnagnidaerruoynokrowoteunitnoclliwuoyfithginrevoderiuqcatonsiytilibisreverfoyretsamadnaenilpicsidgnitcaxenasignitirwemordnilapdnamednoemordnilapaesopmocotelbaebothtgnertsdnaytilitasrevfonoitanibmocrailucepasekattitcejbusynayllautrivnoetirwotytilibaehtsiedutitpaelbisrevernommocnufongiserusenodnagnirimdahtrowsitahtemordnilapaotniyalpdrowromsacrasromuhynoriecudortniothguonedetnelatsienoemosfitnemeveihcaelbatonasiesnessekamyltnetsisnoctahtemordnilapgibacitoahcdnagnilwarpsotelbareferpsiesicnocdnakciuqezisstiybemordnilapaegdujottonluferacebdluohsuoyelihwsecnetnestcerrocyllacitammargsniatnocemordnilapanehwdesserpmimailarutanerommeeslliwecnedacstirennigebafotahtnahtyklabsseldnarehtoomseblliwtsimordnilapdehsilpmoccanafokrowehtylniatrecemordnilapafoytilauqehtenimretedewodwohdelaeverneebsahyretsymstiretfaneveuoyotyretsymaniameryamssecorpehttahtrevewohdnimnipeekerewtisaeyeelbisreverahtiwhtrofdnakcabsemordnilapdaerotsisemordnilapetirwotgninraelrofdohtemevitceffeenoyawaecartelddimehtniteemkcabdnatnorftahteveilebtonnacylpmisdnaemordnilaplufretsamaybdennutsyletelpmocerauoyspahreptikcehcsyawhtobemasehtsiyllaertitahterusekamottnawuoyeroferehtdnatnetepmocninaybnettirwsawgnidaererauoyemordnilapehttahttcepsusuoyspahrepsegatnavdalacitcarpevahoslanacgnisreversihtesicrexelausivlatnemlufesuagniebotnoitiddanidrawkcabdnadrawrofemordnilapadaerotuoyrofefasebdluohstiytilibisreverfoaediehthtiwelbatrofmocyllaniferauoynehwderreferpsyawlasiegasudradnatstubesruocfosnoitamalcxetpurbadnasnoitaiverbbayolpmeotyrassecentidnifsemitemoslliwtsimordnilapdecneirepxenaneveelbissopsaegaugnalyadyreveotesolcsasitahtgnihtemosecudorpotebdluohslaogstsimordnilapehtnoitautcnupcitarrednagnillepslausunusnoitamalcxeegnartssnuonreporpsnoitaiverbbafoesuehtybdekramnetfoerastroffeylraeesehtnrutdnatovipemordnilapehtgnittelfodaetsnielddimehtnignilbuodfororrelatafraenehtsierehtemordnilapehtnisrettellatipacllaesuotnoisicedcitsilytsetanutrofnuehtsierehtstsimordnilapgninnigebybedamsekatsimehtfoemosezingocerotelbaebdluohsuoygniniartlamrofhcumoottuohtiwdnimonmehtyapdemrofnisimeraelpoepesehtsnoitceridhtobniemasehtebtsumemordnilapaninoitautcnupehttahtnoisserpmiehtrednuerasemordnilapfosredaerecivonemosemoclliwemitehttiawdesufnocdnayzzidemocebyamuoyelddimehtniteemyehtlitnusdnehtobgniwollofybdetacitsihposdnarevelcgnieberauoytahtgniknihtdrawkcabdnadrawroftignidaernotsisniuoyfidrawroftidaersdrowrehtonieslegnihtynadaerdluowuoyyawehtemordnilapadaeruoyevignaciecivdatsebehtsierehsemordnilapgnidaerotwenerauoyfi

Can you see anything in that?

I think that's a town in Wales.

This is not a palindrome: "waS I taC a tI saW"

Whitespace and casing is significant.

Some people consider the redivision to add to the appeal. And sticking to "perfect palindromes", it's hard to get past the level of "POOP, OTTO, POOP".

Em, no redivider on me!

There are various palindrome words you can add to those, such as racecar.

RACECAR POOP, OTTO, POOP RACECAR!

My kids will love it.

POOP is the world's shittiest palindrome.

I believe you're confusing palindromes with Python. It's a common mistake.

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