Akademik

n.

A pastime in which participants iron a few items of laundry while engaged in an extreme sport or some other dangerous activity.

You read right: extreme ironing — part sport, part spectacle. Press garments while kayaking, rock climbing, mountain biking or doing any other outdoor activity you like. (Since extreme ironers must wait for the invention of solar- and battery-charged irons, they heat their irons with portable gas burners, campfires and generators.)

— Bryan Rourke, "Pressing concerns," The Providence Journal (Rhode Island), May 22, 2004

The sport was born seven years ago when a young man named Phil Shaw ... and his roommate, Paul Cartwright, did ''a spot of ironing whilst rock climbing,'' Mr. Shaw said, while skiing the French Alps and after scrambling to the tops of tall trees in the Black Forest of Germany.

Now, countless handkerchiefs and pillow cases later, and after stretching to the corners of South Africa, Japan, Croatia and Chile, extreme ironing is coming to the United States, hoping to appeal to the spin-cycle superhero, the wash-and-wear wonder woman in all of us.

— Pam Belluck, "Get Out Your Boards: Extreme Ironing May Soon Be Hot," The New York Times, May 21, 2004

Extreme ironing is described on its website as "the latest danger sport that combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt".

— "Strike while ironing's hot," MX (Melbourne, Australia), April 18, 2001

The ironmen and ironwomen who partake in this spoof sport (1996) are called extreme ironers, extreme ironists, or simply ironists. It's something you have to see to believe, so check out the Web site of the Extreme Ironing Bureau: http://www.extremeironing.com/: http://www.extremeironing.com/.

Extreme ironing is certainly considered as a sport, and not so much a past time!