Professor Popsicle’s next adventure

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This article was published 13/02/2004 (8200 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Arts and Entertainment Columnist

WINNIPEG’S Professor Popsicle must not have got enough attention for walking across Lake Winnipeg for 26 days in the dead of January.

Now he plans to stand nearly naked in a tub of water in New York’s Times Square for talk-show jokester David Letterman.

That’s the story floating around the University of Manitoba’s faculty of physical education and recreation studies, where Gordon Giesbrecht, alias Prof. Popsicle, teaches thermophysiology.

“He’s not your typical academic,” said Maureen Rodrigue, assistant to the director in the faculty’s Health, Leisure and Human Performance Research Institute.

“He ensures that the information he gains through research is distributed to the public.”

Giesbrecht is slated to be on Letterman’s Late Show Feb. 19, Rodrigue said.

He and two Winnipeg colleagues who manage his technical equipment will leave for New York on Wednesday.

His Letterman stunt is designed to take his body temperature down to hypothermic levels, Rodrigue said. She thought he would be wearing a bathing suit, not a wet suit.

The faculty’s associate dean, Elizabeth Ready, said that Giesbrecht’s Letterman appearance will provide good publicity for the U of M.

“The format and message will reach a lot of people,” Ready said. “It’s linked to his research and to his fundraising for the arthritis society.”

Giesbrecht was at a conference in the U.S. yesterday and could not be reached for comment.

He is supposed to be back in Winnipeg on Monday.

Giesbrecht, 46, recently returned from a 26-day trek across Lake Winnipeg, a trip designed to show how people can exercise and work in extreme temperatures. His many cold-weather research studies have earned him his “Prof. Popsicle” nickname.

He also has plans for a trip to the North Pole.

Earlier this week, another talk show host, Conan O’Brien, joked from his Toronto tapings that Winnipeg was as good as Mars if anyone wanted to visit an “icy and desolate place.”

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca

PHOTO KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS ARCHIVES

Giesbrecht plans to stand nearly naked in a tub of water in New York’s Times Square for talk-show jokester David Letterman on Feb. 19.