When professionals take a moment to have fun, we can enjoy the spectacle. See what I mean with today’s video of a doubles match held at Wimbledon earlier this summer. Is there a writing metaphor here somewhere? Add your ideas in the comments below. (If you cannot see the embedded video in your newsletter email, please click the headline and go directly to our site to view it.)

World’s fastest typist. Watch this lady type 185 words a minute and the awe of the students. Put it this way. Stella Pajunas in 1946 set, and still holds, the world record for typing at 216 words per minute. The average person types around 40 words per minute. (See the infographic on this page.) My high-school typing teacher could do 80 wpm on a manual typewriter, the kind I learned on. If …

I may have shown today’s video to you before, but it still thrills me to watch it again. This young prodigy is given four random notes, drawn from a hat, and improvises an entire piece in about a minute. Amazing. Can you, as a writer, take four words and improvise a story in one minute? “See the ball bounce.” Now go write something beautiful!

The brilliant Tom Lehrer wrote this song where the lyrics are from the “Elements” in the Periodic Table. Today’s video shows him performing it live in Copenhagen in 1967. Amazing. Be sure to wait to see what he does after the applause! By the way, he was a math professor at MIT, Harvard, Wellesley, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Read about him on this Wikipedia …