"...the condition of human nature is just this; man towers above the rest of creation so long as he recognizes his own nature, and when he forgets it, he sinks lower than the beasts. For other living things to be ignorant of themselves, is natural; but for man, it is defect." - translated from 5th century Latin - which in my mind begs the question, what is it to recognize one's own nature?
-versus-
Shadowcat: "Science and sorcery... is there any thing you can't do?"
Dr.Doom: "Knit. I find it overly repititious."
- I'm more of a cross-stitching man, myself

...hey suburbia! - Cute drawings, and writing that engenders smiling. And cheap shots at emo people. Heh. (But, all in good fun.) Some musical commentary, not too obscure. Also, a fat hamster (with a cute little purse).
      And would someone send me a Rilo Kiley mp3 if they have one? This is the umpteenth time I've heard good things about them.

IronBrush - art

      After watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon again, I started thinking. One, for all the fantastic elements in the fight scenes, there were at least a couple pretty realistic things that I noticed this time around: a quick close-up of the result of Sanchin conditioning (re: Okinawan martial arts, so I assume it's also in the Chinese somewhere), where Zhiyi's character almost breaks Yeoh's character's wrist with nothing but her belly, and this wonderful sequence where Chow Yun Fat's character just keeps sidestepping ever so slightly on 45's and riposting, all the while lecturing his opponent (focus on the angles there, but the rest made it really cool).
      The second bit are questions I had near the end of the movie; namely, if Chow Yun Fat's character is a Boddhisatva, or someone on the verge of enlightenment who postpones it to help others, he's certainly a complicated one. For one, (bracketed by the context of the story) is he postponing his enlightenment to help the young, morally conflicted noble girl, or because of his unconsummated love for his Yeoh's character? While it seems that in order to share that love his enlightenment is permanently forestalled, is he actually still a Boddhisvata who is remaining behind to help ("I would rather be a ghost wandering at your side..."), or has he renounced his efforts in that regard for love, which might just be a different kind of nirvana?

The Constant Gardener, with Rachel Weisz and Ralph Fiennes. Well, for one this makes me want to see City of God (by the same director) even more. I adored Weisz's acting as usual, even when I was actively disliking her character, and Fiennes performed admirably in acting the character development that I specifically went to the movie to see. The cinematographic details, acting (even in body language, always a plus) and plot (which was pleasantly complicated) all fit together quite nicely, with parallels complete and details returned to in surprising ways.
      I also thought the movie was interesting in that it seems to use a similar story-archetype to my favorite novel, Evolution's Shore, even to the point of similar details (tart, somewhat idealistic UK girl, Kenya, uncovering plots by big political players), but unlike the novel, here the female character development is played out in the background, as it were (in flashbacks) whereas the male character's development (which took place somewhat off-stage in the novel) is primary; I only split it by sexes because of the similarity between the given characters, mind. Where the novel is science fiction and the movie is more realistic is the splitting point I think in terms of how the role of disease is played out, with the former turning it into an creator of potential, and the latter placing it in a more overtly economical role - but, I think there is a parallel there nonetheless, just that it's a complex one that hopefully will bear further meaning for both if I can figure it out.
      And I really wonder whether Evolution's Shore might be used as an elucidating comparison to the real-life work of Wangari Maathai, in how integration with the environment plays such a positive role for Kenya in the novel, or whether Maathai's words and work might be used to pull further meaning from the novel based on her real experience.

      Not to keep going on the same subject too much, but I alo wanted to note the role martial arts have been playing in the two Stargate shows. At the very least, they've come a long, long way from the horrendous, even pathetic choreography of Star Trek back in the day. In Atlantis, the military personnel use wonderfully basic traditional and Brazilian jujitsu (and even make it look good, which seems ironic somehow), whereas one of the more exotic characters does and even trains other characters in Filipino style martial arts. What interests me in these points is the use of distinct styles of martial arts to characterize, and as a sort of body language to convey relationships between characters (in the training scenes).
      The body language bit was applied the same way in SG-1, but what interested me more in that show was the impressive cinematography; I don't know how much experience Ben Browder or the other actor he fought have with scenes choreographed like that, and I honestly still don't think at least Browder has had that much, but damn. The slow-downs, shifting camera distance, and angles made for a fight or few that were genuinely rock solid. I just hope they keep up the good work.
      Those, along with random bits in Battlestar Galactica like characters training or the last season finale where it turned out the Victoria's Secret model had some moves worth noting, and not for her looks, kind of makes me wonder whether martial arts might be coming into a companion role with the science fiction genre. Maybe adding an element of art to violence complements the genre in the same way that it adds art to science. Or, as in the case of the Dune series, for example, perhaps martial arts provide a way of really getting into the speculative possiblities for the human body and mind with their connotations of discipline and mental/physical ability.

Although, in a different line of thought, I must admit I feel like the dude in blue some times...but it's good get a laugh out of oneself, hien? This one made me chuckle, at any rate - and at least one person I know laugh (uproariously, even) when I pointed out the possible connection

I don't even know what forty-nine of the real slogans are

      Sort of random thought-stream, running off of my television intake for the week. Which, besides a few cartoons, consisted of tonight. I'll note first of all that the only other person I know who watches Battlestar Galactica consistently, and whom I also know is quite female, was ironically more attracted to Lucy Lawless (guest starring) than Apollo (and, strangely enough, Lawless' character was enough of a bitch that I was ironically almost more attracted to Jamie Barber). And then there was Katee Sackhoff hitting a heavy bag; that brought me back to the female side of things, luckily.
      Not even tangentially, I hadn't noticed the contrasting parallel in themes dealing with symbiotic relationships in the two Stargate shows. While the parasite in question in SG-1 seems generally to be more truly parasitic, especially in its fullest extent of imposing its will upon its host, the symbiote in Atlantis (at least so far as has been hinted) seems like it could be more insidious - to me, at any rate, it's hard to tell whether they're pushing the their-behavior-is-the-other-DNA's-fault angle, or the more interesting augmented-urges-that-are-really-just-human angle. Time will tell, I suppose.
      I also like those little spots they have between commercials, where two actors from a given show are briefly shown in such a way as to hint at their relationship through gesture and body language. Ten points to the SciFi channel.

And how would one translate this random line out of a poem, say, into French:
"French has no word for home."
Something tells me I should take this to a man named Zuzga.

Just for fun, since I'm re-reading one of my favorite books, excerpts from Jack Gilbert's poetry:
"Isaiah said each man walks in his own fire
for his sins. Love allows us to walk
in the sweet music of our particular heart."
--
"...purple is black blooming"
"gray...a thousand colors from white to silver"
--
"Maybe, he thinks, it is like the Noh: whenever
the script says dances, whatever the actor does next
is a dance. If he stands still, he is dancing."

      Just to add to that last reality bit, an oblique take on the issue might be found in Stephen King's novel The Gunslinger, wherein *SPOILER* one reality is actually contained at a submolecular level in another reality (ironically, this time, the real-life reality). So as that space in which the characters' reality is contained is affected, their reality is in turn affected; in this case, I think that the story begins and takes place almost entirely in a different reality than our own, without any invasion or even mixing but with our reality affecting another, leads to an almost completely romanticized and myth-influenced story, with despair or perhaps stoicism, if anything, replacing survival/panic. Woo! Long sentence.

The River of Time, by David Brin. Wow, Amazon has a really old school cover, there. Anyway. This is an anthology of some of Brin's earlier/earliest work, and in that sense if one has read any of his novels or other short stories it's quite easy to tell the difference in the writing. Nonetheless, the writing actually seemed not so important in the sense that the bulk of these stories are speculative science fiction, and the ideas themselves that were conveyed well enough by the writing to give me chills at the end of nearly every story, as if each one was a particularly good Twilight Zone or Outer Limits, what with their twists. As a sidenote, Brin (as with his other books) adds quite nice elucidating commentary between stories, which is especially helpful with this kind of fiction.

Now, What Might Have Been (Vol. 1) as edited by Martin Greenberg and Gregory Benford, on the other hand, basically faceplanted in terms of how much I enjoyed it. These stories are also speculative, but in the sense of "what if..." ideas in terms of whether certain events might not have happened or people existed, etc. Great idea - and the first story with it's contemporary-time-wise but massively different global culture (based around Saxons, Franks, Persians, and Iberians as the dominant political players) sucked me in. But every story after that would have been eminently more enjoyable as an essay detailing what idea the author was basing their story around. It wasn't that the ideas were bad or boring (well, several of them were), but more that the writing was bad and/or boring. Ah well.

Giant Octopus....Shark...Throwdown! - hmm, sharks having been and evolving to be consummate predators for millions of years, octopus has full-body neural net brain power, and possibly tentacles that are worth expending for that much food....hmmm....

"Sarlacc Pit of Platonic Frustration" - yes.

      I think they should have used this article about 'human's closest living relative, the chimpanzee' as part of that 'last of the human genome has been mapped' or whatever it was tagline in the Doom trailer; but then they would have had to bring in chimpanzees, and that would have complicated things. And made it a lot scarier. You know, monkeys - creepy. That, and the phrase 'shotgun sequencing approach' is fun.
      Tangentially, that whole thread of worlds mixing by mistake or otherwise seems interesting. Let's explore it! In the aforementioned Doom, it's been told that I know of as a science community (operating within a corporation) that opens a portal for monetary gain; through that portal come the aliens/entities that either a) are actually demons or b) the slightly more interesting take the form of demons in order to scare and manipulate world leaders through offers of power. Interesting points: our reality is not itself inherently altered, and the link between the monetary purpose of opening the original portal and the corruption-by-power end result.
      In Stephen King's short story, "The Mist," the mix-of-worlds in question originates in a military base (purpose unknown). First, reality itself is altered - this manifests in the form of a mist, which isn't really a mist but a kind of meta-static that resulfts from the mixing of worlds. Then the creatures from the other reality manifest within the mist, which leads to the horror elements concerning the isolated survivors of the resulting mayhem. The interesting thing about this one to me was that it's the only one off the top of my head I can think of where there is minimal fighting-back, as it were, and more purely panic and base survival - perhaps because it is also the one where reality is inherently altered?
      In the Half-Life games, the mix is the created by a scientific community working under the aegis of the military/shady-government-elements, again, purpose unknown (supposedly scientific). The story begins with survival/panic, but leads into fighting-back, but then (like Doom) repeats the cycle after world domination. Here reality itself is not altered, but for all intents and purposes humanity's social and cultural reality is altered when they reduced to a slave race by the other reality. And there, I think it rises above its parallel, Doom, in interesting complexity, as the obliquely altered reality creates panic/survival elements and at the same time leaves room for the more romantic fighting-back.

Word of the Day that I think would be cool to put into contemporary use: aedile - an elected official of ancient Rome who was responsible for public works and games and who supervised markets, the grain supply, and the water supply

Toba Tek Singh, by Saadat Manto - an interesting bit of (kind of satirical) historical perspective

WhiteBelt.Org - this website has skillfully written reviews and articles on teaching having to do with martial arts, though many of them are universally applicable - labeled as Great Stuff, by me

A Sound of Thunder, with Edward Burns and Ben Kingsley. It wasn't quite the worst movie I've ever seen; I mean, it wasn't atrocious. Horrible might be a better word. The special effects, plot, and much of the writing were painful to experience. I'll note a couple of things; there's a slight bit of metafiction in the repetition of the 'time safari;' and there's this one little bit that's horribly creepy, not because of anything gratuitous, but rather because of the complete lack of any gratuitous effects where one might expect them, so that was mildly interesting.

updates from former Green Beret in N'Orleans

I can't imagine it's real; nonetheless, it reminded me of that similar sub in that old show Seaquest, so that memory was pleasant

Stream of thought!
....
....
....
Ok yeah that was dumb. Anyhoo. I just finished watching Garden State again. There are several reasons why I think that it's a lovely movie, but the one I really noticed again was the attention to meaning-rich detail; whoa. When I drive home for work now, I go right under the path of A-10s landing at DM; it's a bit like a slow version of the ones in the trailer for Jarhead. But not so exciting. They really are amazing machines, though, especially when one turns so slowly on practically a dime right over your head that you cringe a little. I wish I could remember whether I mailed my penpal or not, as it takes us months to communicate, so it will be very hard to tell whether I really did. I think I did. I hope. Departure - yeah that messes with my head a little. Sd&#M*&Em38kjd*. Ah, another bad stream of consciousness joke. Ehh. Hm. I end with Macgyver.

"Ay yo, though I be fallin' to my messy-ass death I shall fear no evils..." - yes.

      While I unfortunately wasn't there to see (or participate) in it, there was an interesting situation at the dojo. Our resident MMA guy, about my size and a quarter (so probably still "little guy" status) versus another guy he'd brought in: "280 and some pounds" (his words) and almost as tall as the 6'7" head instructor. And he wrestled in high school. So while he shot in and could bodyslam and hook left and right, and even pin using the lie-on-top-of-you method till the cows came home (that no bridging or shrimping or wedging could break), an interesting thing happened. Out of twelve times that they went at each other, Mr. Gorgeous (that's for you, Carolyn ;) ) choked out Mr. Wrestler eight times, and even got a funny flying armbar as he was picked all the way up into the air to be slammed. At the end of it, the wrestler apparently seemed interested in coming back for some martial arts - the one time he even deigned to add strikes into the equation, the very first movement he ran his neck into a jab; as much as he won some things by size and rule-limited wrestling technique, he lost every other way.

Word of the Day: persiflage - light teasing; banter

other Word of the Day: vatic - of or characteristic of a prophet; oracular

Worldview Throwdown - I wish I could remember more of the article given to me as a model-example for my thesis, because it was a literary version of almost exactly this; tangentially, I wonder how this plays into the "Meaning is context-bound, but context is boundless" angle and whether it applies semiotically outside of photographs (helllloooo Barthes...)

Say Anything..., with John Cusack and John Mahoney. I had wanted to see this because it was listed in something I'd read as one of the most romantic movies of all time, and while I'm not sure I'd quite agree with that description, it did have wonderful writing and acting, and an understated but engaging story. It' always nice to see Cusack siblings acting together, and trivia-wise - like Grosse Pointe Blank - there is a semi-random fight scene with a cameo by a famous kickboxer, this time Don Wilson. One thing that did keep me from overly enjoying this movie was that I just couldn't find the lead actress attractive at all.

Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, with voices of Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Though the animation is gorgeous, and the action and adventure was top notch and original in my opinion (a spectacular martial arts sequence in a cartoon?), there were a couple things that held this movie back from doing really well when it came out. One, Pitt's voice - while perfect for his style of acting - doesn't lend itself well to animation. Two, I think in a similar way to the sexuality in The Road to El Dorado the seriousness of the culminating theme of the movie (self-sacrifice) was a bit too much for a really young audience.

The Crow: City of Angels, with Vincent Perez and Mia Kirshner. Well, it's not a very good movie, in truth. But: it does have great music, and almost slides by on sheer style and darkness.

"When you start doing awake-in-the-dark mental math based on a knife crawling towards you to kill you, you basically have a problem on your hands." - yes.

Sassinak, by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Moon. Old school. I read this when I was much, much younger and remembered it as pretty good; reading it again, I suppose it makes sense that I did, as it seems to be written for a much younger audience - kind of a teenage girl's imaginings of her ideal self in a science fiction setting. In that sense, it does make for quick read, as the plot and writing is pleasantly simple and makes for a decent space opera. The one thing I'll note, however, is that it's been a while since I felt kind of objectified as a male because of the writing as a book (the previous time from a work used for comparison in my thesis research) - I'm not sure that the sexual references would be appropriate for a younger audience in one sense, but in another sense, the female characters in question are certainly assertive and confident and sure of their identities, so more power to them.

immortel, with Linda Hardy and Thomas Kretschmann. An Italian movie based on a French comic book. While that might sum it up right there, there really was quite a lot put into this very, very odd movie. First of all, the cinematography is randomly mixed between CGI and live acting, just as a warning to avoid the distraction of trying to figure out whether a different movie was mixed in during the editing. That being said, there is so much detail in everything from dialogue to backgrounds to physical appearances that it's distracting as well, in just trying to absorb it all; maybe the proper phrase is "rich in detail;" trick is, I think that's one of those things where it either gets one really into it, or puts the viewer off. And while the story seems almost nonsensically weird at first, I really do think there are some interesting issues brought up, notably what does it mean to be defined as human (or not), and what really is a deity.

Aliens Vs. Predator, with Sanaa Lathan and Lance Henriksen. I must note that I thought the Aliens Vs. Predator novels and the one Batman Vs. Predator one-shot comic were great, and well worth finding. The movie, on the other hand....not so much. It was okay. The pacing needed help. I liked the ending, though I thought it was obviously ripped from the previously mentioned other media. The effects were quite nice. The acting...not so much, but the Weyland references were quite amusing. I kind of wonder if the audience already being familiar with both monsters kind of detracts from it, in the sense that it's harder to identify with the characters who are supposed to be surprised.

"Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness. The urgency of their swift movement seems to ignore the tranquillity of nature by pretending to have a purpose. The loud plane seems for a moment to deny the reality of the clouds and of the sky, by its direction, its noise, and its pretended strength. The silence of the sky remains when the plane has gone. The tranquility of the clouds will remain when the plane has fallen apart. It is the silence of the world that is real. Our noise, our business, our purposes, and all our fatuous statements about our purposes, our business, and our noise: these are the illusion." - Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island

-overwrought, and I have no idea if any of it is true, but interesting:
"What we think of as the honeybee is technically the Western honeybee. Apis melifera. They are not native to North America; they were brought here by the Spaniards in the 17th century, by men who called honey 'liquid gold.' But eve the Spanish came late to honey. In a way almost impossible to understand in our over-sugared world, honey was the only sweet flavor most of the ancients knew, and they held it in awe. The Egyptians thought bees grew from the tears of Ra, ruler of the gods; and in India, Vishnu, who holds more or less the same job, was called 'honey born.' In Greece, bees led worthy pilgrims to the oracle at Delphi, and Aristotle believed that honey precipitated from the air when rainbows descended."
...mmm, I should go see if we have any killer bee honey left...

      For some reason, while looking at how the sun was reflectng off one side of a cloud, I thought of painting. Then, I remembered an anecdote I'd read once where the writer, walking with a friend, comes across a puddle with oil slicked into it. The writer continues walking, while the friend, a painter, stops to kneel next to the puddle. While I can't remember the dialogue involved, the writer's point was that an artist (be they painter, photographer, or poet, etc) often sees the world in a way keyed into their skill. In that vein, I'd assume something similar for engineers, teachers, and anything else that one can categorize someone as, of course.
      So my next thought was that maybe that's a good reason to go to an art museum. As much as it's wondered whether we all really see the same things the same way, in a sense an art museum might be a place to get insight as to how a collection of other people see the world.

twelve med students - cute comic from Xuemei

...but is it a candy bar?

I'm not sure I can see it working out, but "re-wilding" would certainly be interesting

General Horace Wade - a neighbor for most of my life, and I barely knew anything about him (via Wyatt)

the periodic Movies that Seem Interesting:

Jarehead, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard. Wyatt pointed this one out to me - I'm quite curious to how it will play out politically, though by the trailer it seems wonderfully put together in acting and cinematography

Thumbsucker, with a bunch of good actors - a bit surreal, and a bunch of a good actors

Aeonflux, with Charlize Theron - for only a couple of reasons: over-the-top scifi violence (though it seems it'll be walking a thin line against corniness), and I'm intrigued how the massive change in story from the orginal animation will play into a movie, as much as the writing in the trailer is painful (I mean, at the end of every episode, the main character would die, right?)

The Constant Gardener, with Rachel Weisz, Ralph Fiennes, and intrigue - done and done

Doom, with what appears to be the Rock and that guy from The Chronicles of Riddick - although the trailer doesn't particularly excite me, I'd see it based on memories of being freaked out by the original game

There was an interesting show on the National Geographic channel that purported to trace humanity's ancestry through the Y chromosome to a common ancestor - a "scientific Adam." That every male might have the same minor mutation apparently indicates that every last dude on the planet could be traced back to one guy. While I'm not totally convinced, it was definitely intrigueing; tangentially, I'm of the opinion that the Garden of Eden story is an allegory of humanity gaining sentience (once sentience was gained, then looking back on a time where there was no worry over mortality and all our other foibles might lead one to consider it paradise). In the show it was suggested that tool use began at almost the same time that the scientific Adam was dated to have existed, and furthermore that language might have similarly arisen concurrently. If it's true, it almost makes me wonder whether some oral history was passed down that told of a common ancestor or leader that generated those old creation yarns.

      For a swordwork seminar about integrating breathing into hip movement and footwork, I sure learned a lot about using my wrists. My issue stemmed from the fact that the person teaching the seminar, a quite senior Japanese gentleman who had apparently been taught by Gichin Funakoshi, was wearing a hakama (or, as it's been not-so-affectionately called, a jicama). So, while I really do realize why hiding one's feet with a hakama would be effective in a fight, now, standing directly behind someone trying to teach you how to move your hips and feet and not being able to see their hips and feet just isn't cool.
      Tangentially, as much as my face is still a bit sore three days after an Army MP facelock and an technique involving a knee and my eye socket, I feel like submission attempts by pain alone just don't cut it. I mean, I certainly wasn't going to tap out from the pain of either of those examples once I spent a second or two collecting myself; ironically, I did tap out to the facelock only because I was caught in a pin I couldn't escape. The same goes for pressure points; if one is going to go for a submission in my mind, there either has to be a complete pin, or some actual danger to the self, as with joint locks or chokes. That being said, a submission by pain will work if applied with such sharp intensity that the opponent has no time to override a reflex to tap, but that's still dependent upon how mentally conditioned they are.

Bones - new show with David Boreanaz, of Angel fame (who also happens to be on the cover of Men's Health), because he is aweso

design cycles - I like the BMW

Save Your Neck - makes a good point about lengthening the muscles - that is, consciously lengthening as opposed to just stretching, or contorting by arching

Asteroid Threesome - that's cool and all, but I want to see something really weird, like three comets, or stars, or probably impossibly three singularities

frog + food = poison - something about focus on how the poison is generated reminds me of Rappaccini's Daughter

365 tomorrows - a bit of science fiction each day, great stuff

The Great Raid, with Benjamin Bratt, James Franco, Joseph Fiennes and Connie Nielsen. For some reason, I just couldn't get really into this movie till right near the climax; my best guess is that it was a combination of the pacing and the lack of depth in the characters (not that they didn't have depth, per se, but that it was so spread out amongst the large number of characters). That being said, it was a solidly good movie that certainly had my attention. I think it was almost like a documentary in some strange sense, and that might have been part of my enthusiasm issue - I was expecting more drama and almost missed the low-key quality acting; either way, the actaul footage at the end of the film in conjunction with the story is a wonderful effect.
      I think Franco did a fine job, and it was nice to see Nielsen, Bratt and Fiennes in the same movie, even if not in conjunction. I will note that as much as I was happy about the portrayal of Filipinos, I thought it was kind of curious that there were no subtitles for the bits of Tagalog spoken in the movie (unless I just missed them somehow, and someone correct me then). If I were unnecessarily close reading that, it would seem to say something about the relative positions of the various cultures in the movie by proxy of their languages, but I think it was just an editing choice.

Christopher Walken for President 2008 - he's totally got my vote; I mean, just imagine him giving speeches...or at the debates. Think about it.

odd, mild insult of the day: "You eightball."

New York Changing - I'm not to keen on big cities, but the evolution of one is certainly interesting

/..\ balloon bowl /..\ - I just think it's amazing he doesn't fall down

"...when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." - Nietzsche
      So there's that vaguely ubiquitous quote. And I sat there looking at it. Then I thought of the old 40k setting I hadn't thought of in so long, where excessively Puritanical (for lack of a better word) societies were often pitted against their opposite, in terms of hedonism or sheer grotesque nature. So, a tiny issue I used to have with that setting was that I didn't really understand how some of the characters, coming from the rigidly controlling Puritanical background, could switch over to the morbidly grotesque or sybaritic side of things without some illogical bridge, ie, psychosis or overpowering external influence. Basically, I wasn't satisfied in that I thought relying on a seeming rationalization to consistently explain that switch was a shade too far of an excuse.
      But to return to that quote, it reminded me of that thing I learned from literary theory class that I always come back to, that within one's subconscious there's almost always a tiny part of oneself that is fascinated by or loves whatever we consciously hate or are disgusted by, and vice versa. Hence, the idea of morbid fascination. So, with that principle in mind, voila - my issue seems resolved. It even works nicely in that I remember some of the characters were influenced to turn by a little voice in the back of their head - in the setting, a demon or whatnot, but from an outside perspective, a nicely personified example of that principle of the subconsicous. And yes, I know the quote doesn't exactly fit that, but it made me think of all that, so neener.

Art by Howard Lyon

Art by Karen Petrasko

      An editorial I just read made an interesting point - while one could go to top athletes, musicians, or executives and request training, any opportunity (basketball camp, business seminar, etc) will be exorbitantly expensive. Martial arts seminars given by everyone from the top cagefighters to military to really old traditional teachers range from $50 to $600; a somewhat comparable (in the sense that it's a physical skill) mountaineering seminar, for example, is upwards of $9000. Even in my local Arizona region I could list recent and upcoming seminars fearturing people from Japan, the Philippines, Brazil, a big cagefighter coming from Las Vegas (I mean literally huge) An interview in the same magazine made me think back to that editorial in a different sense, however - the interviewee was of the opinion that martial arts are sustained because the people that teach them enjoy teaching. That's not to say that other kinds of seminars arent's conducting by people that enjoy the same, I guess I'm just thinking off the cuff that it's nice that as the martial arts are generally built around constant learning, it's conducive to relatively easily accessible seminars.

      And I just finally realized that if a spearhand (a strike with the fingertips, with all the fingers aligned and together, and the hand flat) is conditioned properly and is used to hit a soft target, it acts like a thrust from a staff, because of the minimal striking surface (I had previously thought that striking with the fingertips couldn't be anything but uselessly fragile). Wa-hey....dorky epitomes, 101.

The Physical Body - minus the (quite interesting looking) giant implements, the bodywork stuff in the video is where a good deal of the conditioning we use for jujitsu at the east Ko Sho comes from (but seriously, I hope that guy doing the squats is wearing pants)

Samurai 7 - Akira Kurosawa versus the classic of similar name....hello, hello, hello....

Kill Harry - Harry Potter versus Kill Bill (down at the bottom)...strange.

      One interesting thing about a call center is how many accents one might hear in a day. There's the range one would expect - Texan, various degrees of Southern, the odd Brooklynese. Then there's, say, a French accent from Canada, then a New York accent crossed with a Jamaican accent. I mean, whoa - my mom has an Arabic/Jersey accent, but it's so faint as to just accent her speech (no pun intended). But the contortions required for a Jamaican New Yorker...

oilcomputer - I'm still campaigning for one within an aquarium; I suppose I'd settle for a terrarium

scarwars - in one sense, a little bit too far in the yikes side of things; but I love some of those designs, and I'm afraid if I keep looking at it I'll become more intrigued...

Interesting response to the Israeli barrier; of related interest, though the staff at a Kurdish restaurant was happy to attempt a cross-dialect conversation in Arabic with my mom, they were only happy until she said she was Palestinian. Then they walked away; unfortunately, that hasn't been a one-time experience, either. Ah well.

That Which We Call Body - kind of oblique, but maybe a response to the opposing poles of dance and martial arts from before?

Ballet! Also interesting. And quite a workout, I have to say; not so much while I was doing it, but I certainly felt it in muscle fatigue for much later on - I understand much better now why dancers like pilates. As for benefits in cross-training, I'd rank posture, balance and coordination in the main. One thing I really noticed was that whereas the martial arts I usually train in have conditioned me to find the most effecient way to perform a given movement, in dancing it seems almost the complete opposite, with control and the extra energy put forth to generate grace taking precedence. In the same sense, however, that might be stemming from a very basic understanding of the latter, and now that I think about it perhaps when the basic dance movements are more conditioned the grace comes naturally from within the dancer and/or their mindset. Hmm.

      Two more weird dreams I've had relatively recently have involved a similar image between them. Both were disturbing in the same way as the sigils on the girl's back from that third recent dream, but these other two did not seem to be as direct of symbols. In the former, I was able/compelled to split a crack I saw in a friend's face; inside, their head was filled with stuff that I remember clearly, but can't really describe. The closest I can come is clockwork mechanisms of bone and ash, and that's letting top-of-the-head adjectives come. In the latter, another friend had a wasting disease of some sort, and I was compelled to scrape at the lesions and bumps on her forehead in some twisted effort to save her, but it only opened holes into a similar view of a hollow space inside her head, also not really describable, but more organic this time. And if I gain one more vivid image like that that's so hard to shake...ah...well, I'll be putting a lot more effort into figuring out why they're bubbling out of my subconscious.

      First of all, several points to Wyatt for getting to the semi-finals of his squadron in the pugil stick competition at the Air Force Academy. He says it was thanks to all the Ko Sho training of angles and combinations, but he might have just been being flattering or modest in his own skill. Highlights: the angle-to-missing leg-->thrust to face worked nicely, and during one of his last matches he tripped backwards and his opponent charged in to hit him while he was on the ground, but he rolled with his fall and slammed both feet into the guy's belly, knocking him backwards. Ah, the classic up kick. Unfortunately, quite illegal in that context, but nothing to be done for good reflexes.
      In related news, another Ko Sho student did similarly well during his time getting his specialized training as an MP for the Army. That context was a general hand-to-hand fighting competition, however, and as he described it their training is pretty much jujitsu, so with his already-trained stature, he (quote-unquote) kicked ass in the ring. Not quite as modest, but nothing to be done for kicking ass. As it were.

(best told in quiet and dry voice)
"Two men walk into a bar. The first man orders a scotch and soda. The second man remembers something he'd forgotten, and it doubles him over in pain. He falls to the floor shaking. And then through the floor and into the earth. He looks back up at the first man, but doesn't call out to him. They weren't that close."

Pilates! Interesting. I mean, I've had limited experience with the matwork before, but not the pilates machines up till now. I'm still unsure as to what the effect of it is upon my body, thought I'm assured by the three other people that were in the room that it's great for dancers (those three being ballerinas). I do feel something, not sure what, in my core and hips, which is nice because of how hard those are to work usually. I also realized that my left foot (the one formerly known as broken) is still weak years later, though in the same token that I was able to feel that so where I hadn't realized otherwise speaks to a really refined workout. Though the expense is a bit inordinate, the machines really are quite slick, so I'm torn as to whether the cost is worth it.

nowhere girl - imaginary friend and better world - depressing at first, but it builds up to quite interesting
(see also: rockingest page ever)

      The other night, I had a dream where the bulk of it was taken up by chasing this girl (a cute one that I haven't seen forever in real life) through crowds and restaurants, basically part of a cityscape, I suppose. Then, when I finally catch up to her to get the kiss I've been wanting, we both laughingly tumble, and somehow her back is bared to reveal sigils and script and an odd diagram not scarred but somehow bloodlessly cut into her skin. Now, I've read fantasy books where things like that 'that would hurt your eyes to look at them' have been described, but never really understood that what that meant, if even in only a dreamscape. I wonder it all means, though....

      Usually when I see a large, vibrant blob of flaming pixels on the 'radar' part of the local weather, I shrug; I mean, I've tried to walk outside and connect it to clouds I can see, but they're usually out of visual range when I remember to do that. But today, oh no. What I thought was way east of the city just happened to be the entire east side of the city. It was pretty awesome in the awe-some sense to drive towards it, what with the rain being lit up by the setting sun and huge rainbows with lightning arabesques and forboding indigo as background. But the moment the edge of those satin-lit curtains came upon me - quarter of a block visibility, the wind vs the lego car (round 3), sweeping gusts of rain and hail, ambulances and police fighting through traffic slowed to a timid crawl. While the idea of a moat around the dojo as was brought up once people were inside (dripping wet, natch) is interesting and all, it's not cool when one's car suddenly sinks only to slam its wheel into the curb. Okay, maybe it's cool in retrospect.

The Tale of Smith - eerie, interesting

      An article I was reading about possible other forms of life beyond the standard DNA/RNA/what have you based paradigm brought up an interesting point. If, say, something of electromagnetic energy could achieve some level of sentience, what kind of perception of time would it have? Would its perception of time be something that speeds up and slows down even more than our 'time flies when you're having fun' shift in perception? Which leads to other interesting questions - how do really different not-so-hypothetical beings, such as hummingbirds that have much faster metabolism, perceive time? Or, perhaps even more interestingly, do they percieve time the same way we do, and whether it appears fast or slow is purely a mental thing?

Rocket Blasters is a fun show. It's like a really sped up, and in some important ways simpler version of what my brother did in the Mojave and Black Rock for Raytheon, but is especially distinguished as a reality show in my mind because everyone is nice and encouraging to each other, as crazy as that sounds. And they strap rockets to Mini's.

That Ring Is So You - except for the jaw biopsy part, I have to admit I'm intrigued

Singin' in the Rain - kind of like that old Nike commercial with the pretty European breakdancer, except with lower tech, of sorts

Wizard's First Rule, by Terry Goodkind. First of all, for some reason I couldn't help but imagine the main character with anything but a mullet. Secondly, I'm not sure I would have finished it but for the fact I was reading it on the recommendations of my sister and my roommate; I don't think it's necessarily that bad, really, but it's definitely not my cup of tea. The only intrigues were that characters kept things from each other for too long, almost every single character expounds on morality at some point or another (and each in turn seems universally wise, leaving little room for variation), and for such a large book the plot and even the number of plot threads seemed excessively simplified.
      Now, in the same token, after discussing I can see where the people I know who've read it are coming from when that simplicity of character and story is a benefit (say, as refreshing after reading a relatively excessively complex George Martin novel), so maybe it just comes down to whether one prefers coffee or tea, as it were. One thing I did like, in any case, was the use of (as far as I could tell) truly original fantasy ideas for monsters and magic, which while interesting unfortunately seemed to be concentrated only at the beginning and end of the novel.

      The fossa. Madagascar seems intriguing in a similar way to the Galapagos Islands in that it has a quite unique environment; while I'm generally more interested in the plants (they are so weird there!), fossas seem to be no exception to the oddness rule. What really interested me when I initially read about them was that they were described as a predator who's ancestry 'predates canines and felines' and that they had retractable claws like a cat, but flat feet like a bear. I guess I would have described it like a predatory version of a platypus, except agile like a margay.

      And the third ingredient in Trader Joe's strawberry-lemonade is aronia juice. And I was like, huh? Interesting. But I suppose 'aronia' is better than 'chokeberry.'

      And, I happened to be sitting on a rock under a tree earlier, and a sprig of eucalyptus leaves fell down next to me. When I looked over, I realized an ant had come all the way down on the sprig, as there was a line of ants going up the tree, but they were nowhere near where the leaves had landed. I wish I could have gotten an account of the ride from the ant; I bet it was awesome.

      Totally unformed thought: stalactites and stalagmites seem either poetic or symbolic all of a sudden to me. The stalactite - as solid as can be matter being sculpted by gravity and a liquid - in turn forming a stalagmite - out of the same medium, but now as if a progeny of sorts - until they finally merge into a single, rocky being after meeting halfway. Or maybe I'm just bleary, and things seem more profound at the moment.

My mom walked in and her first reaction was "That's like you!"

So many...the thought of it almost brings tears of joy....

March of the Penguins, narrated by Morgan Freeman. I think it's great that a documentary like this is doing is well as it is; I just wish it was a bit more like a real life adventure with Steve Zissou. Alas. One can see penguins slapfighting each other anyway. From a totally different angle, about halfway through the movie I started thinking that penguins might be interesting in that they live in, and are dependent upon, an environment which is a boundary between two distinct environments. They aren't wholly water or land creature, and as such (or so I thought in the theatre) might be conflated with a similar social archetype, with social groups or culture representing environments (say, someone raised in Mexico and the USA equally). The question then becomes, what can be learned from that conflation?
      The other thought I had was a bit more focused on the biological aspect of the movie - what would the penguin be like/what would be required were it to adapt over time to be a wholly aquatic animal? I mean, one line in the movie said they spend their first four to five years at sea (the stretched assumption I'm making being that by 'at sea' they meant purely in the water, but in that false assumption was the seed of my thought, so neeners).

the American Sheik - just plain odd in one sense, but certainly interesting if effective as a cultural bridge, like the long term SpecOps units in Afghanistan

Trebuchet Challenge - kind of Tron crossed with medieval artillery

Zork? - nahhh...couldn't be...maybe?

      For whatever reason, I started thinking today about the different schools of thought concerning fighting with the staff (maybe as a distillation of the different schools of thought on how to fight in general?). The kind I'm most familiar with, from Okinawan styles generally, holds a rigid staff near the middle, splitting it in thirds. For example, in a staff-vs-spear form, one end of the staff hooks away strikes or thrusts as the other end hits, for simultaneous offense and defense; another focus in the same style is on disarming movements. In contrast, almost every Chinese style I've seen holds a semi-flexible staff at one end; in contrast again, I've noted Filipino styles holding a rigid staff in the middle as well, but with training integrated into sinawali/weaving drills. I've also heard many times over of English quarterstaff fighting, but haven't been able to discern much from the few old documents I could find.
      Secondarily, my experience with the short staff has been almost exclusively Japanese, though I know of a few Korean, Filipino, and even Arabian styles. From my own experience, the short staff is either taught as held at one end, mimicking a sword for the most part, but with an emphasis on thrusts and the availability of a staff's two-end no-blade versatility, or held almost at both ends, and used for in-close grappling and throws.
      So, the two points to the rambling: it's just interesting to look at how the same thing can be looked at so many ways, and any thoughts or information or pointers to more information would be much appreciated.

-interesting, if true-
"In South Korea, police officers carry guns but do their best not to take them out because, according to Oh Sok, a police officer who shoots a criminal--regardless of the necessity of it--has to pay the criminal's medical bills (or funeral bills). As a result, many police officers there become damn good at unarmed combat, and from the sounds of it they get plenty of practice."

      Disney's Aladdin takes on a whole different aspect when postcolonial ideas are applied to it; I'm still contradicting myself in my head as to whether its orientalism is insidious or ingenuously clever kid-entertainment. One tangentially interesting little tidbit I noticed was near the end when Jafar says "So long!" in the middle of a song to Aladdin. At first I thought he said "Salaam!" (peace!) which doesn't make any sense, then I realized what he actually said. What made it interesting to me was that I remembered recently reading that the phrase "so long" came to English from Malay (I think, or at least from that lingual-region), wherein "salang" as a variant of "salaam" arrived there by way of Islam. I don't suppose the Disney writers thought of that as a really oblique ironic angle, but hey, what with the supposed hidden sexual references I suppose one never knows. And did they spell the title of the movie the way they did to avoid making it look like "Allah-din"?

Targete Art - lots of nice paintings

      A while ago, I was driving around with my dad and we saw a large hawk's nest at the very top of a long-dead and dried up tree. A moment after passing it, my dad said: "The tree's dead, so..." I'm not sure why, but that statement almost gave me goosebumps; it was almost as if the at-first seemingingly banal nest had been shifted by the words into another kind of existence where it wasn't just a hawk's nest in a dead tree, but something else, if only in my mind. Another kind of existence that gave me the heebie-jeebies.

-kind of seemed like an easy ego-booster, and I'm not sure of its veracity at all, but nonetheless:
"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."

Cool dialogue of the day:
"'How many times, dear father,' Richard asked through tears and gritted teeth, 'must I slay your shade?'"
-and something about this line seemed poetic to me:
"Put words to your need, Richard Cypher."

      In the process of moving, I found some old dit da jow (aka "hit wine"). I bought it years and years ago in some horribly foolish conditioning scheme, but it turned out it was well worth it's money in terms of the seemingly magical way it made bruises disappear. Lo and behold, it still works after who knows how long (I thought it would have evaporated) - one of my middle fingers has been painfully jammed for a while now, the joint still being swollen, but a little dit da jow started loosening it right up. Drawbacks to it are that I've never seen any but one brand actually work, and they're not selling anymore, and that it is quite pungent (thought not exactly unpleasant, kind of an herbal kahlua).

      I think I must have been driving along or some such when I conflated these thoughts: the exploration of identity (ie, Lacan's mirror image I think it was, or the uncanny nature of the double) I went into for my term paper in literary theory, and the many variegated identity issues that are addressed as problems in understanding in yoga (ie, one's identity is not one's emotions/I am not anger, I just feel anger, or, I am not pain, as pain comes to the nerves as light comes to the eyes). That's the extent of my thought at the moment, in any rate; I just wonder if one approach could be used to compliment the other approach, like I did for zen and existentialism.

      In other news, I'm 0-2 in recent weird fruit acquisitions. The honeydew nectarine seems about on par with the mango nectarine; less flavor than a regular nectarine, and not that much different flavor at that. In fact, the only differences I could tell were in appearance and a possibly imagined slight melon aroma. I am quite interested in how a melon and a pitted fruit would be crossed, however, unless they never were and this is just an odd and oddly named nectarine variant.

The English Gipsies and Their Language, by Charles Leland. Yes, yes, I know that appears spelled wrong, but its examples of daily "nomadic and vagabond" life seem interesting historically. And, anyone wanna buy a dag?

I OK, You OK: English Pronouns in Malay - it seems the poor Malay speakers sometimes get sick of dealing with an overload of excessively complex native pronouns. Crazy.

Cool! to the nth

tuesday comic - this hasn't been going since forever, but I always thought it was cute and clever

Word of the Day - anagogic - A mystical interpretation of a word, passage, or text, especially scriptural exegesis that detects allusions to heaven or the afterlife

      The monsoon season in Tucson is nice for several reasons, but the one in particular I'm thinking of might be a bit silly, I suppose. Back in some survey class for British literature, I think it was, one of the concepts we covered was the sublime. The sublime is such that whatever one is viewing or experiencing is awe-inspiring, or even terrible (in both senses of the word); it's gigantic beyond words, utterly inscrutable, incomprehensibly beautiful, etc. So, my thought is that nigh everyday for a while now the skies over the valley have been on the order of sublime, with storms bigger than mountain ranges, sprites and fountains of lightning, curtains of moisture and sunshowers, and that's quite enough waxing bad poetical, I suppose. And is there a word like sublemon? There should be.

Free Words - I have to say I'm not exactly sure what the message is, but it reminds of the better parts of the poetry classes I've taken, and it makes me smile

Salamander Dream by Hope Larson just concluded; it's pleasant, and calm, and the end was quite moving
-----in a similar vein, circuity was less sensical, and though I only think I understood what happened, was moving nonetheless

55 words - ironically, I find I have no words for it; great idea and execution

avp - to be quite shallow, I find I also have no words for this, but it also made me quite happy to find

"We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. . . . we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. . . . Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us." Rainer Maria Rilke

      With as much as conventional power sources and their byproducts of smoke and waste and runoff figure in scifi art and literature genres like cyberpunk, I wonder if there can be an opposite side to that. That is, would it be a boon to more unconventional power sources (wind, tidal, solar, geothermal) to put some effort into aesthetics? For example, would setting up solar panels in a circular-flower arrangement in a public area boost their image in the public eye more than their practical benefits? Or, failing making the apparatus itself aesthetically pleasing in its form, maybe decoration, like colored or mural'ed windmills?

"It's life size suggests it may well have been used as a sex aid by its Ice Age makers, scientists report." - I'm still not sure how they don't know it was used for something else entirely and just happened to look like a penis; I don't know, whenever I see something like that in archaeology I think of this school exercise from way back when where we had to imagine future archaeologists trying to make sense of our stuff

Bruce Lee statue? - hm. No mention of JKD

the dance at the end is crazy

Runaway Jury, with Rachel Weisz and John Cusack. Though it had three of my favorite actors in it, namely Weisz, Cusack, and Marguerite Moreau, and several other quality actors, I was totally distracted the whole viewing time by a new very masculine hobby. All the same, it looked interesting and engaging even with my mostly vague understanding of the plot. And it had a nice ending. I think. All in all, it was nice just taking in some great actors all put together.

      That, and we caught a bit of Gigli, which seemed quite as horrible as it had been touted. But: it did have this nice scene of Jennifer Lopez doing yoga in spandex and extolling the feminine form, in a monologue in the same vein as Al Pacino's near the beginning of Scent of a Woman. And this wonderful gem presaging a love scene:
(girl): It's turkey time.
(guy): Huh?
(girl): Gobble gobble.

      This instructor from way back in the day just randomly showed up in the middle of class at the dojo today. We knew he'd been having some hard times back before he disappeared, and he had always looked strung out and gaunt. So now he's all nicely dressed, oddly wearing a David Carridine/Kung Fuish hat, a nice haircut instead of perpetually mussed cornrows, and he's found religion. And, apparently, a kind of kung fu I've only heard of - water boxing - of which he might be teaching a class at some point. The funny part was, as much as he seemed to be talking crazy talk (martial arts-wise, what with humming birds and biting praying mantises and bears and trances, and otherwise, I suppose) what he was doing had an elegant and practical flow to it, as best as I could tell. He's like this odd wandering mystic, of sorts. Which would explain the David Carradine hat, now that I think about it.

Google Moon - mark my words, I'm going to use this to plot out my future house

Word of the Day: elan - enthusiastic vigor and liveliness, or, distinctive style or flair, or, the blonde character

      Well, I wasn't particularly impressed by the mango-nectarine. As much as I seem to have developed a reputation with anyone who's gone to a market with me for making a beeline for the exotic fruits section, on my side of things I'm often disappointed with the result of my treasure-hunting (notable exceptions: starfruit, green plums, prickly pear fruit). The mango-nectarines just didn't seem to have much of any flavor at all, and an unremarkable texture; now that I think about it, however, I suppose in that regard they might make for good filler in fruit salads. Meh.

Cassini Zeros in on Saturn's Strange Satellite - for fans of Evolution's Shore (even if it does change shape in the novel, it really might be hollow?!) and alliteration in article titles

Sweet Mother of All Catfish - I mean, in the thumbnail I thought it was a megamouth shark; though, when one of the aikido students at Ko Sho came back from the Ukraine she said there were monster catfish near Chernobyl

The 20 Hamburgers You Must Eat Before You Die - Yeesh, morbid title; and it would help if they explained why for each. Nonetheless, this being dedicated to Wyatt and his adroitly concise burger reviews, I'll just add the burgers we had in Anchorage....mmm, peach brandy sauce...

Word of the Day: callipygian - having beautifully proportioned buttocks
               "A Brooklyn woman was acquitted of manslaughter due to lack of evidence; she was accused of killing her husband after he mocked her for her lack of callypgian rondure." -- for any Farscape devotees, that sentence almost recreates a hilarious joke between Crichton and Aeryn (I just think the almost-paraphrasing is funny)

      So there I was, standing in the rain, kind of languidly hitting one of the posts of the pullup bar at my parents house, talking with my dad who was adjusting the gutter to fill his barrels of rainwater for the bonsai. Then it hit me (no pun intended): that's why one's hand is turned palm up for an uppercut. I think, anyway. That is, I was tapping the post with vertical and regular (3/4 turn for Shuri Karate) punches, and I noted that the regular punches felt like they could extend a little bit through the post further than the vertical punches. So I was all, "Hmm." Then I turned my hand all the way palm up, and my punch didn't even reach the post.
      So, then I started thinking, and as far as I can figure, it seems to me that since an uppercut is shortened as such, one can get more power out of it within a closer range; if a regular or vertical punch was tried inside trapping range, it would be too hard to generate any impact to be useful. But the uppercut in being foreshortened is perfect for the same, and also because it can adjust to go straight up, as the other two longer ranged punches cannot. Interestingly, I also noted that palm-heels have a more extended range as well, but at the same time can also be adjust for straight up angles. And this is all discounting hooks, as I was bracketing off circular strikes. And the lightning waspretty awesome at that point in time, beyond any of that. Lots of pretty lightning and thunder.

Visiting Patients, with Dictionary in Hand - I've only had occasion to witness this particular kind of occurrence a few times, but I've certainly seen a lot of trouble caused by (both) horribly tactless doctors stuck on stereotypes and patients/families who don't know how to listen

I want one - I especially like how it can be dedicated to different to scripts for different languages. And gaming stuff, that's fun too.

      Crazy wind today, huh? It wasn't quite the skirling, spiraling blast that lives in the canyons behind the Catalinas, in my humble opinion I'd say it was about as much as could be in the valley. It did make for a great combination of city-lit dust and blue lightning over the city, and for this strange liquid-seeming dust that flowed in waves across the roads, with little ripples and everything. The other odd part about the wind where I was for part of the evening was that it didn't stay in any semblance of a consistent direction; just standing in place I almost felt the buffeting was twisting me around two or three different ways at a time (I counted). Crazy.

      In other news, we finally got to see the premieres for SciFi Friday. Stargate SG-1 - the show I could never quite get into - left me with a split opinion. On one side, I adore the acting and rapport of Ben Browder and Claudia Black, and the Farscape jokes and almost Whedon-esque atmosphere (except not witticisms, but more gestural/or dry humor?) had us hooting (literally) with laughter. On the other hand, the characters they seem to have left over (I was hoping for a total overhaul) from the show's previous incarnation just bugged me. Stargate Atlantis left me with the same feeling I had for it in its previous season - great ideas and concepts, nice execution of same, acting....hm. Now, Battlestar Galactica far overarched the other two in terms of writing and acting and effects quality, as usual, but that is to be expected I think in terms how seriously each of the shows takes themselves.

      Unusual technique of the day: the diaphragm choke. As differentiated from blood chokes, air chokes, cervical chokes, and the rare face-numbing brainstem choke. Basically, the only way I know to do it is to just adjust a knee-on-stomach mount (a kind of lazy high variant) such that the weight goes specifically onto the solar plexus. Of course, knowing that pin, the diaphragm choke isn't so much an end-goal as a stunner for transitioning to other techniques. Or hitting things. That too.

      Is the valley girl's use of the word "like" similar to the role played by the prefix "al" in Arabic? Though "al" is a fixture of that Semitic language and is variable in morphology according to what sound follows it, both "like" and "al" in their respective language/dialects are ubiquitous and somewhat variable in meaning. Or I could, like, being talking a bunch of hot air.

      While oftentimes the issues of Black Belt range from corny to downright misleading, every once in a while there is a real gem. For example, the cover article for this month is a discussion of kali tudo, or kali as applied to mixed martial arts (one of the reasons I particularly like kali is because, as is illustrated so well in the article, it shares a particular kind of angular footwork with the martial arts at the Ko Sho schools). Similarly, there is an article which initially put me off as a jargon-based martial art (that is, one that makes up polysyllabic terms for simple techniques as a marketing gimmick), but the ISR Matrix stuff actually had some decent variations on jujitsu techniques that were immediately useful in class.
      And though I consistently disagree with him, Bill Wallace's column provides some talking points. If anyone happens to read it, I think he left out shin-roundkicks, in terms of his discussion instep roundkicks are more dangerous than ball-of-the-foot roundkicks on the basis that the latter are not done in the same way as the former, as he assumes they are, and I don't think that sidekicks are inherently bad for the body if one turns their hip over enough or with proper conditioning, and I think that they shouldn't ever be done with the blade of the foot.
      And, I liked the fight highlights that mentioned a TKO by spinning back-kick (I thought no one used those effectively except Cung Le) and a judoka who didn't get his ass knocked out and actually "controlled and took his opponent down at will."

Phrase of the Day (from the Swahili): kufa ku-zuri - to die beautifully

"Treat a man as he appears to be and you make him worse. But treat a man as if he already were what he potentially could be, and you make him what he should be." - Goethe. Another one of those one's I might have brushed off as initially idealistic, except for two examples that brought it back to me relatively recently. One: how some of the drunks/gangbangers/manipulators/what-have-you are treated during their in-and-out ER stays makes a big difference; I'm not saying they're made into "what they should be," but different sides of them come out depending on how the staff interacts with them. Assuming they're lucid to some degree, of course, otherwise it's a whole different ball game. Two: at the Air Force Academy, one of their base principles of making the cadets into officers seems to be something like Goethe's assertion.

Feral Cheryl - I think she's way hotter than Barbie

Ketka's world - a bit of art (and it's Russian, which is also cool)

Entrances to Hell - clever-ha ha photography, or no? I think the sheer amount of Angel I've been watching with my dad has biased me enough to wonder a tiny bit

      I recently learned that ballet dancers are often taught to tuck their pelvis when spinning to spin better on a straight axis. While I gather that this is perhaps more directed towards multiple spins, my thought is: can it be applied to spinning techniques in martial arts? I haven't really tested it properly, but I'm going to try running through some capoeira spinning crescents just to see if the principle applies, as I never use those, then some more taekwondo-ish spinning hooks or what, then the techniques I actually regularly use to good effect, spinning elbows and forearms. Then, seeing how a tucked, tilted or neutral pelvis affects throws and grappling - for example, a tucked pelvis I'm thinking will be better for holding some pins (as one tucks their pelvis for a proper crunch), but a tilted pelvis would obvously be better for bridging, as one tilts their pelvis to get full curvature of the back in similar backbends in yoga. I know that all sounds way overboard, but I guess I get excited when somebody points out something that had otherwise been going right by my kinesthetic sense.

Word of the Day: bellwether - one that serves as a leader or as a leading indicator of future trends (interestingly from Middle English, being the lead ram [technically, a castrated ram] with the bell around its neck)

Phrase of the Day: cheeky monkey!

Other Word of the Day: koine - a regional dialect or language that becomes the standard language over a wider area, losing its most extreme local features (I just thought it was an elegant word for what it defines)

War of the Worlds, with Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning. Generally, not so great. [probably spoilers, but not if you read the novel, I suppose] I usually like Fanning okay, but her hysterical and bratty character was way out of line for my taste. As my dad pointed out for Cruise, he pretty much plays one character, over and over and over; which I happen to like to some degree, so that was fine, I suppose. The special effects were the highlight of the movie, in my opinion. The story, as it was pretty much true to the novel from what I remember, unfortunately is not really enough to carry the weight of the actors and special effects; I mean, it makes for a great scifi short story or Outer Limits episode, but a Spielberg epic? Not so much. The aliens were great (always a fan of nonhumanoid), and the way they brought to life the novel's three-legged design was clever (I read that the effects and concept crews took issue with it at first, as it is really just not a very effecient idea).
      The movie did bring up in my mind a few things that kept me from dwelling on Fanning's shrieks. One, that the scenes with the alien walkers were similar to the exciting unscripted interactions with similar large walkers in the latter part of the game Half-Life 2, so if one wants to experience their feelings from the movie again, voila. The plants at the end reminded me of two things, in their sense as a motif. One, Evolution's Shore by Ian MacDonald, in which there are no aliens per se, but only the plant life (or an approximation of plants as such). Two, the Invid Invasion novels and animation, where aliens invade because an alien plant has taken up residence on Earth. It might make for an interesting essay to confer the three and see what comes out of it. I suppose even the plot of Half-Life 2 could possibly enter into it, if one could tie in suppression of the ability to procreate with maybe something symbolic about the plants (ooo, maybe a Narcissus angle).

The Story of Language, by Mario Pei. Great stuff - basically, a book about linguistics that heroically resists the seemingly pervasive tendency of linguistic books to descend into ill-explained jargon. Apparently I like multi-syllable words. Part one delves into what exactly language is, and its history in terms of the human race. Part two is probably a bit slower going generally than the other parts, involving various aspects of grammar and study of pronunciation. Part three picks up again with the social functions of language, then part four was my favorite, running through the different major and minor language groups and discussing their characteristics. There is one more short part beyond that about the problems of developing an international language, both by logic and politics. Throughout there are practically lists of interesting trivia, and the author's style is sharp and witty at times, thought as it was written in the sixties some of the Cold War ideology is out of date.

PowerPuff Girls Doujinshi - while I am currently suffering from a self-induced fast from collecting actual comics, I do try to indulge my happiness from cartoons whenever I can (re: Foster's or Cowboy Bebop). This webcomic is a nice extrapolation if one enjoys kicking back to the Cartoon Network, as the art is quality, the plot is pleasantly simple, and the cameos and stylized versions of the cartoon characters are great fun.

Rocking phrases of the day/phrases that sold us on things:
"Let them fight the good fight. Someone has to fight the war."
and Xuemei's:
"This is the beginning. One book. One Rule. Witness the birth of a legend."

      When I read this: "Every English word is at least in part an ideogram, with the pronunciation offering some clue, but never a complete key, to spelling," one of the first things I thought was spelling bee. That is, I bet that's why spelling bees work so well in English - with rules and roots and quirks from Latin, Greek, Old English, French, German, Spanish, etc etc, it almost makes sense to mess with nervous kids and force them to try to put illogical things together. It wouldn't do to have a spelling bee in a language that is more logically phonetic; it just wouldn't be any fun. Though I can't say I can quite see English words as ideograms, really, even if I kind of like the idea. I suppose one could try to pull something like Arabic calligraphy and stylize some cursive.

Tom Yum Goong x, y - ::glee::

the Web Cartoonist's Choice Awards - congrats to two of my favorites, Scary Go Round and Questionable Content for their awards

"...Philologists, who chase
A panting syllable through time and space,
Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark,
To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark."
-Cowper, Retirement

      Thinking point: "The 'moment' has not yesterday or tomorrow. It is not the result of thought and, therefore, has not time." An argument for or possible path to perceptual dilation, that is, a dilated perception of time to be able to react more quickly to what would otherwise be beyond time for thinking, or what other possibilities?

Omniglot - an great website if you're fascinated by language or writing-as-art, with information and examples of all different kinds of scripts; for example, I had no idea that some scripts have been invented purely to write a certain language (like Norwegian or Mandarin), instead of using Roman script, which is interesting if you think about how many accents are needed for some Europaen languages, or the tones in Chinese

Panchok Workshop - art

word of the day: tergiversate - To use evasions or ambiguities; equivocate

Samples from NY gallery show by 'the Creatures in my Head' artist

      Interesting perspective shift (original idea not mine)! In teaching/learning anything, sometimes the method takes priority over any end result, or goal, or what have you. To do a hip throw, you place your feet just so, twist hips across, place arms in any number of variations, or, to do close reading of a text you parse out what's important, maybe bracket off part of the text, maybe go sentence by sentence, etc. Instead, maybe it might be better to shift the end result/goal to the primary position of importance-of-attention - the goal of a hip throw is to bounce the opponent on the floor right in front of you, for example, which leads to questions: fine, how do I go about doing that, and how does it involve my hip? Or, in the the other case the end result might need to be determined to even get started - what do I get out of close reading, or what can I give to other people using it? (cf'ing "The problem is never apart from the answer. The problem is the answer - understanding the problem dissolves the problem")

N8 Van Dyke - art; I like the way some of the titles tie into the pieces

art by alexiuss - and backstory for each!

phrases of the day:
"I had a lot of time to think. I gained some perspective. Some... M.C. Escher perspective."
-
"Bla, bla, poly-syllabic bla."
-
(looking at heart monitor printout)
"Looks kind of like art...I call it, 'Takes more than that to kill me, punk.'"

      In case it's ever shown again for whatever reason, on the National Geographic channel there was a small marathon of the show Taboo for some reason. In lieu of doing the project we were supposed right away, my dad and I sat through some very interesting programs on gender-bending (transgender, inverted stereotypes, and religious festivals), rites of adulthood (alligator-style scarification, whipping and running on the backs of bulls), tattoos (tattoos that possess people, Russian prison art, facial womanhood tattoos) and there were more after that, I gather. I'm not really sure how to describe them, except to say that they were well put together and interesting, though maybe not for the faint of heart/those that can't stand lots of blood.
      Another program on Discovery/Times was about Special Forces operations in Afganistan. Once again, not sure how to describe it except by this (from an entirely different source, which I scoffed at as idealistic, then remembered the soldiers): "We live as though the world were as it should be, to show that it can be."

gah...so rough. but there it is.
-----
Ghostlight

Almost to California, we passed a wildfire.
The full moon did little to dispel the night's desert
of black plains between road and flame; instead,
she only deigned to touch and conjure a genie's cloud
of smoke, lunar blue reflecting on the corpsedust of plants.
In the dark, we passed a funeral pyre.
Life embedded in the sand became dancing citron and ember,
animated in its last throes more than it had been under any sun,
a phoenix held fast at the moment
of rebirth.

      When I was getting my tattoo, the artist somehow got around to talking about how people say the phrase "I'm sorry" a good deal sometimes. His point was that when one says, "I'm sorry," there almost always is an unspoken "but..." afterwards. For example, "I'm sorry, but if you hadn't done that," or, "I'm sorry, I didn't realize..." His suggestion as a counter was to say, "Forgive me," or some equivalent; I'm not sure of the validity of his point, but it seems to have slowly convinced me over time to where I pretty much agree with it, cumbersome as the replacement might seem.

Underground Urban Farm - I think they should have called it Urban Farm Underground, to make it sound more like a trendy nightspot

Art of Aly Fell

"The Basque language contains a tradition of difficulty which the Basques themselves do nothing to dispel. They have even created a legend to the effect that at one time the devil spent seven years trying ot learn their tongue, but finally had to give it up in disgust; but there is another story to the effect that Basque is used by the devil to fight with his mother-in-law."

-as opposed to-

"La inteligenta persono lernas la interlingvon Esperanto rapide kaj facile. Esperanto estas la moderna , kultura lingvo por la internacia mondo. Simpla, fleksebla, praktika solvo de la problemo de universalo interkompreno. Esperanto meritas vian seriozan konsideron. Lernu la interlingvon Esperanto!" - crazy! For some reason some old yarn had got me down on Esperanto for a while, I think something about them suppressing use of other languages at an Esperanto convention, but hey that's pretty readable right there!

-also, but not so easy-
Interglossa, which combines Latin and Greek roots with Chinese syntax
Monling, which only uses one syllable words
Idiom Neutral, which was spawned from Volapük, and is a combination of English and Latin/Romance languages with German grammar rules

-try it, I dare you
"One of the toughest sounds in any language to a person who does not grow up with it is the r with a hook over it, which indicates a blending of the rolled r of Spanish or Italian with the s of 'measure,' pronounced simultaneously." - that sound being in the Czech; of course, the first person I challenge does it right away, naturally

-a point that came up in class the other night
"Balance is the control of one's center of gravity plus the control and utilization of body slants and unstable equilibrium, hence gravity pull, to facilitate movement." - sometimes balance not actually meaning balance and all that, especially when it comes to ju-style throws, though the quote is in reference to ranged fighting

-talking point:
"The problem is never apart from the answer. The problem is the answer - understanding the problem dissolves the problem." -hmmm?

-sleeping, or bleary-eyed snickering? option b.

      New exercise! The dolphin pushup (name from the yoga pose it is adjunct to). Starting from what is basically a somewhat elongated downward-dog position (body bent to about 90 degrees, heels on the floor) but with one's upper body resting on forearms instead of hands, simply move the torso and hips as per rhythm between that start and a plank. It's similar to a dand/Hindu pushup in how it isolates different muscles than a regular pushup and also works on flexibility of the legs and shoulders, but in a much more intense fashion. Yummy.

      Vaguely ok not really tangentially. I was reading about the zen metaphor of the reflection of the moon on running water for being in a ready-state in martial arts - that is, still, but in motion simultaneously (a paradox points beyond itself, right?). Then for some reason I thought of the thought-problem of 'what is one's identity?' that was an oft argued concept in that existential philosophy course from back when - specifically, the part that went, how can one claim to have the same identity over time when one is constantly changing (whether by cells dying or whatever definition of consciousness changing). Then I thought, well, why not apply the zen metaphor to identity? Eeeyup. Mmhmm.

Dark Fury, with voices of Vin Diesel and Kieth David. First thought: how the hell did I end up paying the same for this half hour movie that I did for two two+ hour movies? Luckily, they were all on sale, so I'll take it, especially considering the worth of this short. While I'm not quite particular to some of the stylized faces/bodies, I did end up warming up to them and the wonderful way lifelike and stylized motion was captured in the fight scenes and otherwise. As with apparently any story with the character Riddick, copious badassery abounds, and some of the scifi ideas were neat.

"The Amazon River...was so named by the explorer Orellana after a battle with the natives in which the women fought more bravely than the men."

      In honor of (as apparently the Canadians called it at one point) the Rebel Picnic, I think it is worth noting (as evidenced by the journal entries and letters read during the Revolutionary War marathon on the Military Channel) that many of the most random people around that olden time were all kinds of articulate and eloquent. It was like, man, they were even casually eloquent when needed. Whoa.
      Also, could someone explain to me the almost ten second long fountain of green sparks that spewed out of La Paloma tonight? No way in hell that was a regular firework.

USA 1, Comet 0

It seems they actually managed to finish translating one of Sappho's poems

Word of the Day - splendidophiropherostiphongious - the acme of desireability

"Yucatan, in Mexico, means 'What do you say?' in the langue of the local Indians; this was the answer given by them to inquiries as to the name of the country."

      I didn't particularly enjoy the 'Native Americans in Film and Literature' class I got stuck taking a while back (aside from seeing Dead Man and doing a term paper on White Comanche), but one aspect of it lingers on. That is, the entire class was devoted towards breaking the unconscious urge to accept any image of Amerindians presented to us, which led to a tendency in the class to say, well duh, look how obviously bad those stereotypes are. But after a semester of it, any just-plain-bad image became glaringly obvious, like a mini-paradigm had been shifted, to be cliche. In any case, the point I've been getting to is that I think more classes or efforts in a similar theme would do well to exist; that is, anything that breaks those unconscious assumptions, which I'm sure are innumerable.

Loups-garou is my favorite term for werewolf. In other news, the antidote for previously mentioned.

Filed under aweso: Scott's Sunfire

Word of the Day (as featured) - eschaton: end of the world, end of time, climax of history

Limey's on being clever
also:
"An account of the way an exasperated Cockney tried to spell out the name of the town of Ealing for the benefit of the telephone operator runs as follows: 'E for 'eaven, A for wot 'orses eat, L for where you're going, I for me, N for wot lays eggs, and G for gawd's sake keep your ears open!"

      Back from Colorado! First thought, looking at hooligans in car hooting at pretty girl: those kids ain't got nuthin on my brother. Many and sundry sights were seen. Will probably be written about. Once I get through my giant list, at some point. In other news, Kevin started a bloggie - now it's powm! Rocking hardcore. Talking point: "Just as the universe is created by the participation of consciousness, the prescient human carries that creative faculty to its ultimate extreme." In my periodic Dune reference/connection, there was an interesting article that noted a casino's general distrust of machines for security, and their opinion that the human eyes and mind are far superior. And isn't it interesting that a bird you see flying by your car is going the same speed you are? I hadn't really thought about it. They are speedy.

Episims - I want to see what happens with Ebola...or maybe syphillis...

Bacteria Pull Off Photosynthesis sans Sunlight - you go, little dudes

Word of the Day: paralipsis - to pass over a subject with brief mention in such manner as to emphasize the suggestiveness of what one omits: "If one put her thinking in a nutshell, it would not overflow."