‘Engine 2 Diet’ fad from Texas, ‘Tecktonik’ dance craze from France
Tirelessly scouring the world for the exciting and the new, I saw a diet fad suddenly trending yesterday, then heard about a dance craze overnight during my monitoring of the BBC World Service on WUWM.
Tecktonik
First, the dance craze.
The “programme” I heard was the Monday installment of The Strand, and the dance is called Tecktonik. Unlike The Meatstick and The Mashed Potato, “Tecktonic” is a registered trademark and has a site officiel.
As you can see there, it also has its own hairdo — kind of a science-fictional Mohawk mullet. There are even a couple of official salons. Brilliant.
According to Wikipedia, Tecktonik is also known as “tck,” “electro dance,” “vertigo,” and “Milky Way.” According to my own Googling, the word “wantek” has something to do with it too.
News of the new and fabulous can be slow to reach us here in Racine and, as you might expect, the Tecktonic dance craze took Paris by storm a good year and a half ago. It was the talk of the 2007 Paris Techno Parade. and even then it was something that had been going on for years at Metropolis. There, combining elements of breakdancing, hip-hop, and techno, a discernible set of moves developed which consists, according to the BBC report, of 80 percent arm movements and 20 percent footwork.
Ballet dancer Cyril Blanc is the man most frequently credited with inventing Tck, along with his partner Alexander Barouzdin, a Merrill Lynch investment banker.
From there, the dance has spread via Internet. The most-viewed example on YouTube is said to be this one above, “Jey-jey “Wantek” Danse electro :).”
Watching this, Amy immediately recognized the style from the “Christian Bale rave” seen nine minutes in to Episode 57 of The Digg Reel. Apparently, mustachioed host Andrew Bancroft is no stranger to hardstyle danse wantek.
Another popular Tecktonik dancer is Cali, who started demonstrating his moves in his living room and now sports a virtual wantek training course via his calimero91430 channel at YouTube.
There is some controversy surrounding Tecktonik, due to its trademark and official logo, which are used to market merchandise ranging from CD compilations
Can a youth movement thrive if it is licensed and regulated? I don’t know, maybe I should ask Miley Cyrus. One philosopher/critic interviewed in the story on The Strand dismisses it as “anti-rock and roll,” a “safe” dance, and “a Sarkozy dance.”
‘The Engine 2 Diet’
Meanwhile, The Engine 2 Diet suddenly became a very hot trend on the Internet yesterday right after it was featured on a Today show “Take It Off” segment with Amy Robach.
The story is that professional athlete-turned-Austin-Texas-firefighter Rip Esselstyn learned that some of his fellow Engine 2 firefighters were in “dire physical condition,” so he “sprang into action” and designed a healthier, heart-disease reversing diet which reduced one guy’s cholesterol from 344 to 196 in just 28 days.
The gimmick behind the eating plan is that it concentrates on healthy, low-fat, vegetarian foods like whole grains, beans, vegetables, and fruits. Think brown rice, whole grain pastas, oats, Portobello mushrooms, kale, spinach, Romaine lettuce, mangoes, apples, oranges, bananas, berries,and sweet potatoes. Crazy, huh?
Esselstyn points out that his regimen contains plenty of soluble fiber to make you “as regular as a Swiss commuter train.” We know all about soluble fiber from the Good Eats oatmeal episode (read Scene 11 of the transcript).
The only thing that concerns me is the “28 days” aspect, because returning to bacon burgers after a month will quickly wipe out all of the heart-healthy benefits of the whole foods. Maybe the idea is that after the four weeks, you’ll feel and look so much better that you’ll want to incorporate this way of eating into your diet for life.
Rip Esselstyn’s book is called The Engine 2 Diet: The Texas Firefighter’s 28-Day Save-Your-Life Plan that Lowers Cholesterol and Burns Away the Pounds, and it comes out tomorrow, but you can order it right now from Amazon.com. The Today show has also put an excerpt online.
So there you have it. Now go help the economy and your own self image. Go get your Tck Mohawk, start eating The Engine 2 Diet and dancing to some Tecktonik CDs
