Undead and Unemployed, by MaryJanice Davidson. Somewhat to my chagrin, I'll admit that this is the first book I've ever bought from the romance section of the bookstore. Ai. Anyway. First off, the main character is.....vapid. And is also the narrator. I had to say that first. That notwithstanding, the writing is pretty amusing, like Evanovich-lite, maybe? It certainly is a take on the whole vampire thing I haven't seen before - dark chick lit? Obviously, I'm not sure what to make of it, but it was pretty funny at some points, and is very light reading.
      'And why was that tickling my brain? There was something there, and I just couldn't get to it. Damnit! Why was I great looking instead of a genius? Usually I didn't mind, but nights like this..."
-
      "I'm so sick of this! Something completely weird happens to me, and you guys are all, 'Oh, yeah, that's in the book of the dead, too, did we forget to mention it?' Well, no more! We're sitting down right now and reading the the whole nasty thing from beginning to end. Where is it? Is it at the hotel? Let's go find it right now."
      "We can't," Sinclair said.
      "Why not?"
      "Because to read it too long in one sitting is to go insane."
      "Oh, that's your excuse for everything."

Condemnation, by Richard Baker. And now for something completely different. If you like intrigue, you'll be intrigued by this book. I haven't been restrained yet, so I shall continue to be a punning machine. And that wasn't even really a pun at all, so it's a completely new low. Neener. This continuation of the 'War of the Spider Queen' shared setting is chock full of political machinations and manoeuverings (wow that word is annoying to spell), yet still moves forward at quite a decent clip. I doubt any action in these novels will match up to the high standard set by the first in the series, but this held its own admirably, and best of all expanded the already unique setting in completely unpredictable ways, both in terms of physical and cultural landscape. Tally ho, and all that, to the rest of the series.

Word of the Day: cyanotic - the adjective for a bluish discoloration of the skin and mucous membranes resulting from inadequate oxygenation of the blood

      A couple random things. One, I identified in oblique ways with two people I wouldn't have expected to identify with previously; in an emotional/personality sense with the dojo's taekwondo instructor, nigh identically, if only for a moment; and, I learned that Bruce Lee supposedly suffered from severe and frequent headaches, just like me. That those headaches may have indirectly caused his death is just something I'll have to ignore for the moment.
      The other night, the local randomness radio station was playing modern raï, which is great, bouncy grin-inducing music if one ever has occasion to listen. Tonight, even better, there was music that literally got me to gasp in aural pleasure (apologies for the aural pun). It was jazz of a lounge-y sort, played by a bass, a jazz guitar, and some lush vibes, and man if a woman had been set in my arms I swear I would have been a dancing Casanova. Now here's the trick: the music gets to the end of the set (which ironically contained that song that I remember the high school jazz band playing, 'Caravan' or somesuch I think), and the dj thanks the band for playing live in the studio.
      How cool is that? Hans and the Attache, a local Tucson band made up of guys who seem to actually like Tucson, playing what was described as Southwestern island jazz, playing live on the radio. I am very much set on going to see these guys in person. Yes.

Traffic school! Which really doesn’t deserve an exclamation point in any way. Let’s hear it for spending several hours going through the motions. I did learn a few trivial things, but the one thing I have to say I did get out of it was a reinforcing of other changes that have occurred within me recently. Part of the instructor’s stated goal was to ‘change our attitude,’ which judging by the open sleeping or sassy looks of some of the people might not have been a realistic goal. I think it did work with me because I was already receptive to it, but I guess that’s the way of that sort of thing. Like the friend I went with pointed out, though, more videos of interesting crashes or the like would have certainly made the day more interesting. That, and less being concurrently sick on my part.

Also, a lament. Which I regret I feel like I don’t have more eloquence for at the moment. I’ll just take one example: commercials for sleeping pills, and tangentially a news story on the increasing prevalence of kids under 10 being prescribed the same. With a beautiful iridescent butterfly, one commercial implies that your worries will just float away with the medication, and oh don’t worry about those side effects like memory loss either they’ll float away, too. I don’t remember enough to semantically take apart any of them, unfortunately, but here’s my angle on it – I lament that it’s human nature in some way to take the easier route, to have someone or something else do the work. Wow, that sounds arrogant now that I read it…oh well. Anyway, instead of addressing the original concerns or worries or stresses that are described and implied in the commercial, they are subsumed under the comforting blanket of chemical ignorance; instead of exercising or doing yoga or a hobby, or trying to fix the originating issue through communication or self-study or time-management or any number of things, take the pills! Who knows, maybe that memory loss will even work out in favor of contentment.

And, some comments on cervical chokes (being a martial arts technique). Basically, it's the same effect as full nelson or crucifix - a forward crank of the neck - but is done with a a kind of Thai-behind-the-head clinch from the front; the best positions for leverage for it are from the guard (ironically probably equally from both sides of it) and sometimes from the top of a mount. It can be avoided like most chokes, by taking away the base of the leverage, though in this one that's probably usually a bit harder because it's really a full body technique, and because it's just an odd technique and is hard to even recognize till it's too late sometimes. Just watch out, on either end, for injury-causing - like full nelsons being off-limits in wrestling, it's easy to leave someone with a really sore neck and traps, if not big knots in their muscles; luckily, I've still got some arnica cream...

      I was thinking while watching Teen Titans just earlier, why do I like this so much? I mean, I like cartoons, but I like this one a lot. Then it hits me: it's a lot like Gen13 used to be (for those who remember the crazy, quite popular but no longer running comic...which I can think of exactly two people who might). They both have gorgeous art, with drawers who know how to put together great action, and best of all both of the art styles are unique (with little flares of emotion and character) and clean (ie, one can actually tell what's going on without having to interpret). Of course, Teen Titans doesn't have the gratuitous violence, sexual references and images, and and massive vocabulary of the writers (if any English major reads this, you probably would have gotten a kick out of that comic) of Gen13, but it's as damn close as any 'kids' cartoon will get, anyway. And it's kind of nice that way, too. Also, Teen Titans has a really catchy theme song. What worries me is that what made the connection between the two for me was the similarity of the current Teen Titans story arc, which seems to be heading towards something like the way they ended Gen13, which was amazing, but also horribly sad, it actually kind of got me going a little if I remember correctly.
      And I think cartoons in general are nice for several reasons, but here's one in particular: they're almost always devoted towards something positive. One would be hard pressed to find a cartoon that doesn't have some humor, some cuteness, or at least some uplifting thing going for it; mind, I'm not talking about anime or what, but just general cartoon shows, which one can tune into when everything else on is just depressing (ie, the news). I mean, fitting the entirety of Return of the King into a half-hour's worth of Kids Next Door, with an epic guinea pig army versus housecat army battle? Hilarious.
----
Blue Ball Machine - no, not what it sounds like

Mad skills. So my mom got food poisoning pretty badly yesterday; somehow, naturally, she was still adamant that I eat something. So, still not having any appetite really, I revisit the wonder that is the microwave burrito. And even get through a bit of a workout right after that just fine, but then start to feel it creeping up on me as I get in bed. Then I turn around and wake up with food poisoning, albeit a much, much milder case than my mom. Irony, to thee I say: screw you.

In other news, what can we learn from this encounter with a burrito-encased demon of malaise? Well, I think I’ve gained further insight into my mind-body connection. For example, yesterday I was reflecting that days without the release of yoga was leaving me in a very, very odd state – too personal to get into, but there were layers, and it was foggy. So I finally get in something of a state to do yoga last night, which offers some release, but the clarity that came with that at the same time seemed quite unfortunate, for the effect it had on me. Now the question becomes, how much does this burrito-born bodily disquiet bear into that? I know my face was pallid in the mirror this morning, but does my physical feeling reflect deeper into me, or is it, perhaps more unsettling, quite the opposite? Or, is it just a question of greater or lesser vulnerability? Hm. Stupid burrito.

      I had a whole bunch of notes from watching Ultimate Fighter the other night for its season finale, but don't feel like getting them, so I'll just touch on a couple of random thoughts. One, that show is a great way to see some solid fights; yeah, some of them were boring brawling, but one might run into that spending money on pay-per-view Pride Fighting, too. On the other hand, some of them were both technical, with the fighters having distinct styles and strategies, and at the same time wars. And then to see the passion and effort these guys put into it; I guess I'll just say (quite facetiously) that for a bit I didn't feel so messed up for crying lately after seeing seasoned cage fighters cry.
      At the local dojo, I had the pleasure of seeing a black belt from waaay back, and meeting some nice new people. Apparently, the direction our school is headed in is not so much teaching to a particular style, though a core of the general Ko Sho styles will still be there of course, but with everybody all in all, let's see.....Tomiki aikido, mixed with Yoshinkai aikido from the Ukraine, potentially some capoeira from Sweden, ninjitsu from that big camp I forget the name in Thailand mixed with some kenpo and BJJ, Daito-ryu aiki-jujitsu from Japan/Hawai'i, Shuri karate mixed with some wing chun, a couple taekwondo variants, traditional jujitsu if I can get back into it, Okinawan weapons...is eclectic the right word? I think so, I don't quite remember the definition. But yeah, basically the plan of the moment is to create a space where anyone can come in and train and learn and develop themselves, having the choice of picking a particular system, but also being able to come in and work out with all sorts of different aspects of martial arts, including just plain working out of course with weights and cardio, and even outside things like cycling. So...we'll see how it goes, I guess.

      I'm caught in a tangle as to whether to act on impulses to rant about everything that's happened lately. But I won't. Maybe quite obliquely, I suppose. I can't think of more than one or two times in my life where I've been driven so fiercely towards a combination of self-control, self-study, and at the same time surrender of both of those things - I'd tried to consciously devote myself to self-growth and study in the past, but I haven't in a long, long time felt such a need. Here's one thing I've become more aware of internally - an oscillation, for lack of a better word. At first I thought it was just a result of crisis and stress that I would be so conscious of my mood or being or whatever swinging up and down, but as I explore it I begin to get glimmers of how there isn't just one little sine wave of my mood, nor is it as simple as a sine pattern, but that there are multiple patterns of differing scale in my life. Definitely bearing further thought. In related and unrelated line of thought, these articles have been helpful in that regard, if they might be of any use to anyone else.

      Just to keep my mind going, I thought of a couple other things absolutely randomly. One, in having three different sort of data analysis projects dumped on me by higher-up people all at once, I was staring at a lot of numbers that had little to no meaning to me, and yet having to recognize things and mark them down and understand, etc etc. Anyway, where I'm going with this is that I started to get an idea about what they sometimes say in fantasy stories, where the character reads some eldritch tome, or looks at evil glyphs, and then remarks that it hurts their head to try to comprehend what they're looking at. Yep, not very profound, I know.
      I also remember this random game from back in the day called Earthsiege. I only remark upon it because I loved the idea that (the player taking the side of the hardscrabble geurillas) one was almost completely reliant upon salvage from the field. So what, one asks. Well, it directed the player towards finesse, where if you could take out the baddies with a maximum of skill and minimum of stupidity (ie, be really precise and blow off their mech's foot and let them slide down a hill so they couldn't get back up), you were rewarded with beaucoup salvage; if you just rampaged around with a blase attitude, the game of course wouldn't give any salvage, and it would be hard to even progress. Like Soul Caliber, a game that rewards finesse = automatically awesome.

If anyone’s in Tucson and is looking for something to do, they might stop by The Cottage Bakery and Café (on Kolb south of Speedway), where they might get a glimpse of the gorgeous Karen Candelario (and her art that they have on display is really pretty, too). Her art is generally of an abstract nature, but not so abstract that there isn’t meaning to be found with a little looking. Though Karen’s a great kickboxing instructor, she’s also a hardcore cycling gal, so any proceeds go straight towards a new carbon frame bike, so it’s for a good cause…

Also, though the next isn’t till the following November, of course, the All Soul’s Procession is quite the happening. The procession itself – down 4th Ave and a little ways around on Toole - seemed to draw a huge number of people, and grew along the way as people watching from the side inevitably joined in. The costumes, or whatever one wants to call them, were outstanding and far outstripped the few I saw on Halloween, with gigantic headdresses and totems, and face and body paint and all sorts of imaginative dress involving everything from bone to glowsticks to fire. I wish I’d known to dress up ahead of time, but tried to do my best by just taking off my shirt (tattoo better than a UA shirt?), though I’m sure the people who just saw me from the front thought I was just some idiot with his shirt off. Along the way were huge projections of photos of lost loved ones, and even little scenes, such as a posing gal on a car made into an intricate shrine, and a little silent play with Egyptian dress and god-costumes a la Stargate headdresses, bellydancers, and fire-eating and dancing.
At the end of the procession there were huge sculptures made out of metal and fire, and everyone gathered at a stage to watch a wonderful show set to a pulsing beat by an energetic drum group, with modern dance set on platforms, trapeze artists hanging by a crane, the oddest mosquito-demon costumes I’ve ever seen (oddly graceful on four stilt legs), even more fire, and a giant memorial urn that is hoisted high above the stage and set on fire. And, I got to see a big sparker of a shooting star.

Also, I keep forgetting to say anything about it, but I got a new car. Well, it’s a 2003, anyway. I know people keep asking me about it with the expectation that I’ll be excited or happy about it, but regardless of my present mood, if you know me you know it’s the rare occasion where I become outwardly excited about an object, much less a car (that being contrary to my reactions to people and emotions, which really get me going). That being said, it’s a nice car, as I’ve sure I’ve said an upgrade of my last car basically that we luckily got from a private seller on the cheaper side while looking for more economical cars (dealerships: worthless). And we got a much cheaper loan from a credit union than we would have from our usual bank, if that helps anybody. One of my favorite things about this car, really, is that 91.3 FM comes in consistently, which I marvel at. Hello odd grooves in the morning, and the most random assortment of folk, blues, tango and who the hell knows what else, without the more common layers of static (any song where a guy can sing “lay it on me…yeah, you know what I’m talkin’ about…” before a bass solo is automatically awesome).

      My brother and I noted today that we have a similar reaction to stress (of whatever kind), which is somehow comforting in a small way (the commonality I mean). That is, an aversion to eating. I don't know about shared details, but for me under very high stress having food physically placed in front of me garners an almost physical reaction, like a mix between anticipation and pain and just plain pain. When I do get food down, it just sits like lead in my stomach, though things like walking and ginger (bleh) seem to help a bit. Hunger sneaks up on me, and when it does the conflict between appetite and aversion is...uncomfortable, to say the least. This is one of those posts that I'm sure seems like complaint, but for whatever it's worth it's meant as an acknowledgement of the reality of something, as a step towards dealing with it, and as sharing in case anyone else runs into a similar quandary.

      Also, I started a poem-journal of sorts the other day; I'm not sure if I'll ever post any of it, or even really ever share any of it on account of its personal nature, but just for kicks it's called "Alchemy" (at the moment anyway). Hell, I can't imagine it would be seen as anything but quixotic or emo were I to do something like post it, anyway.

Jarhead, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard. Well, I'm going to throw out one thing that some people people (re: ladies) might like about the movie - naked Gyllenhaal, and a solid amount of it. Other than that, I'm not remembering anything pleasant. That's not to say that the movie was supposed to be pleasant in any regard, which it wasn't, but I'm not sure I really got anything from it either. About three quarters of the way through, my thought was 'a wannabe Full Metal Jacket with prettier faces and cinematography.' Other thoughts include wondering at the gross distortions of boot camp and some things during the war, this based on conversations with the Marines my dad and I know and talk to, wherein I wonder whether the director was trying to pull another avant-garde-by-almost-post-modernism American Beauty, and not quite pulling it off. I don't deny that I'm sure there's some truth to the movie, in some or several ways, but even if that's the case, I'll just say that the trailers were then completely misleading, and regardless that's not a movie I would have seen had I known more.

ah, linguistics

surreal art video from Phil, not as surreal as my dreams lately, watch out there's some cartoon boobies

Maunsell Towers - ok, never heard of that idea

gridgame - I used to spend hours playing the lab o' life version of Conway's Game of Life, trying to make as complex a self-sustaining organism as I could, though I haven't seen a version that uses lines like this one - I wonder whether it still approximates the ecosystem simulation of the original, that window's too small to tell

      I always thought the Battletech line of novels and games was interesting - it was a huge, and wonderfully cohesive shared science fiction setting with lots of great authors and ideas, before the publishing company's management made them go all defunct (shades of Farscape...). Anyway, so flipping through some old books, I get to thinking.

      To discuss in generalized terms, the setting begins with a Roman Empire-analogue - once great, united humanity has degenerated into a decadent, backsliding mess of 'Successor States,' each supposedly warring for the basis of being the leader of a new, united humanity, but not really, they're just warring. Then the barbarian analogues come along, smashing and grabbing everything in their path, yadda yadda yawn, but: it ain't so simple. The barbarians consider themselves much more civilized than those they are invading, and even twist that into their vaguely-religious rationale for the same. They're not just from 'somewhere else,' but rather are the return of the old, united humanity's equivalent of the UN peacekeeping forces, who exiled themselves, only to return with advanced technology and a mission to restore the old united front - on their new cultural terms, though, rather than trying to recreate the Golden Age.

      These barbarian-analogues have even more interesting twists. Though they consider themselves more civilized than their invade-ees, they seem to have instead reverted to a tribal/clan culture, with caste systems dominated by the military caste (but: semiotic apart warrior caste as they call it, vs it actually being a military..eh? eh?), and history partly recounted in epic poetry. They're badass, but not rape and pillage-wise, but rather skill and honor-system/duels/etc-wise. Instead of class issues, they have genetically-engineered, born-in-a-metal-womb versus normally born issues. Flip everything around, and those opposing them, when looked at closely, are close analogues of modern nations and/or cultures.

      So, I'm not sure what semantic-structure might pop out of this upon a closer reading, but I do think it makes for interesting questions concerning what actually constitutes civilized or not, or perhaps just as a sociological scenario, especially as I haven't gone into the myriad details of each of the different factions which each provided their own little twists. Or, in a broader sense, say take conflict of the 'barbarian' angle of creating a new unity on new terms, versus the pre-invasion false-pretense/impossibility of trying to return to a Golden Age. And just thinking of/realizing this right before I press the post button, from the way they kind of ended before the company went under, most interestingly of all, it turned out that the closest they come to unity is not quite entirely new, but not exactly a return to the old, either - a mix of semi-idealistic nostalgia reawakened and revitalized by the stress of a new threat, and a changed-past that seems new, returned after a self-exile from the breakdown of the original unity.

      Hoo boy, messed myself up something fierce lately. Inadvertantly pretty much fasting for two days, running on little or no sleep, giving myself way too much time to brood (unfortunately, I probably don't pull it off as well as David Boreanaz), and then sitting in an office being microwaved by the upstairs heat treatment center, while the soft rock station playing on the radio in the woman's desk in front of me played every love or lost-love song one could think of, all day long. I mean, I'd hear another song come on, and be like damn, I am not listening to that station again if I can help it. Well, as a famous judoka once said, get knocked down seven times, get up eight. Or maybe that was more of a Chumba Wumba thing. To go even further down cliche road, time to climb back up on the horse and get my confidence back.

Unleashed, with Jet Li and Morgan Freeman. I watched this last Friday, and while when I watched it I was in a particularly sensitive state, I'd venture to say that several different points in that movie would have had me close to tears regardless of what state I was in. To maybe clarify that a little, one thing that always gets to me are literacy issues. For example, in Jackie Brown I think it was, Samuel Jackson's character moves his lips while he reads, which began to strike a chord in me, but then another character makes fun of him for it, and that went straight to an almost physical reaction within me. To be cut off from or limited in a kind of communication which the majority of the rest of one's social world has complete and unconscious access to....in my empathic reaction it feels like something that would make one feel permanently left out, or even almost make one feel less-than-human, going by the idea having access to communication as a basis for having the quality of 'humanity.'

      Part of the reason I wanted to be an English teacher for so long was to help kids be able to express themselves and communicate, especially during that teenage time in their lives when everything is awkward and confusing and it's so easy to just withdraw from the world. When I see it's hard for someone to even use the language they were born with to be able to get across one's meaning to another without it coming out wrong or saying something that wasn't even intended, which I know it certainly was for me at that point in time and still is in some ways, it really gets to me. In the past my impulse was to help them, which probably meant I was quite pushy about it, in retrospect; I think maybe that was part of my hesitancy to become a teacher, my nacent and now fully growing secondary impulse to nurture and provide a comfortable environment rather than push or try to do it for the person, and that conflict between the former and now primary latter impulse, however late I unfortunately realized it, was destabilizing enough to be part of pushing me away from becoming a teacher.

      To circle around to the movie - to explain the literacy thing, Li's character (Danny) has a book with the alphabet and pictures for each letter - L for love, K for kiss, P for piano and so on. But beyond that, Li's character is also forced into a less-than-human status, not because of his trouble with literacy, mind, that's ancillary, but by restricting his ability to communicate - as Freeman's character points out, Danny doesn't even have access to his own emotions, much less is able to express them to others. How does he find his humanity again, the question becomes in my mind. Through a few different ways, which interweave, and I'm not sure of their importance: through music, a different form of communication that's certainly connected with emotion; through a safe and comfortable environment with access to be able to learn at one's own pace to communicate; and maybe this was most important in my mind, and something I wish I'd learned a while back, an environment where questions aren't constantly asked, but only when they are part of a real need - the answers, and Danny's final acquiring of really knowing himself, come in their own time, nurtured by those prior mentioned things. I found these things profound, and am sure there's more depth I don't know yet that could be drawn out with a closer reading.

      And just to speak to the martial arts, the fight scenes are great. As much as they are mostly formless, I was looking for some hung gar I'd read was in used in the choreography, and it comes up more and more the more Danny begins to gain possession of himself - a fine example of using martial arts within a narrative, in my opinion, in that one can see the physical expression of Danny's internal change as his fighting style becomes more effecient and graceful. That being said, it's also always nice to see movements that are practiced in the dojo in a movie, so that was nice as well.

addendum, later -
      A couple more things; I thought it was interesting that this movie made me realize, in its hardcore violence (and yet with some form at the end), that when one practices forms, they are representative of that level of violence. Also, I thought the maxim repeated in the movie that "Family sticks together" was also important in Danny's awakening, as the family provides the final impetus for it, even after he left it.

Hm...breaking my own work-rules, using something besides email. But: slowest day ever. I find myself in a situation similar in some ways to one I found myself in about four years ago; the trick is, I'm on the opposite side of that situation than I was in the past. Besides the circumstantial differences between the two situations, there's been massive change in me. And that's kind of a problem for me - I definitely feel more mature, self-aware, and in control of myself than I did those years ago. But I don't want to be! It's the oddest thing, I want to be young and immature again, I want to be able to confront unknowns with argument and selling myself and pleading that just comes out as I feel it, rather than restraining and containing within myself and having self-checks and a desire to be mature. As much as I keep wanting to ask just one more question, I stop myself because, of course, I'm afraid of what the answer might be, and how I'd handle it. I have everything going for me in my life, but I haven't been able to shake being caught in a mode where I'm living from moment to painful moment - I don't want to think about the future or the past, and so I feel caught in strange parody of a zen state.

Everyone's gone through it and all that jazz, I know, my response to that being that this time for me it's a matter of degree, and believe me, I'm trying my hardest to get myself back in order, as much as it might seem like I'm wallowing in negativity! Maybe that's what this writing is part of, I don't know.

Wow. So my mom says, "...and that's why I became a realist." I thought I had been a true, hardcore realist for so long. And the big secret I was keeping from myself, I realize, and now that I look back I'm sure I knew it on some level, was that there...is, was, i'm not sure of the tense, pure idealism at my core. I don't really know what I'm writing at the moment, maybe it's kind of free verse in that sense, maybe I'll just go and delete it later.

unfortunately, it seems I would be fated to end up at the bottom of the Indian ocean...

I wish they had audio of it, but here's a nice bit of breaking down an obscure language

kinda creepy, kinda cool: machine elves

emo.

      Somewhat recently I went from several years of working through literature to spending my day staring at numbers, codes, prices and dates in spreadsheets and variations thereof. So I began to find little escapes, like printed out poetry half-hidden behind my monitor (though Baudelaire might have been a bit lewd for work), scribbling notes for story ideas admidst purchase order reminders, and bringing books for my breaks. But, after a while, regardless of whatever was going on in the rest of my mind, staring at the black and white grids and starkly apparent meaning of numeric symbols began to wear on my mind. Then I started adding colors to my various spreadsheets. Bright red to get me moving on ASAP tasks, and dark red for lesser priorities; bright blue to show me something is approved to send, and darker blue to say it's ok, but might bear waiting. Reddish-brown to call my eye to something that needs to be watched, and purples for longer-term reminders and their degrees of importance; and slight shifts off of black, deep green or gray, to catch my subconscious as a I scan along. So, not only do my spreadsheets seem like different degrees of rainbows now, but I'm having fun creating my own semantic system, going by whatever meaning my (sub)conscious applies to each color and shade.

      So in the course of totally messing myself and a lot of stuff up lately, I was taking a lot of vitamins. Which seemed like a good idea, in theory, and probably was. I'll admit I didn't have much care for the brand of vitamins, despite my cousin's (who works at a bio-research firm) admonition that the only brand that apparently actually absorbs into one's system is Thermi...labs, or something. But the brand wasn't really the issue. What was the issue was that I had been taking a set of several vitamins everyday, and then every once in a while trying out this energy/recovery drink mix ("Emergen-C") on account of working out plus being fatigued, which is based on having lots and lots of vitamins in it. So: I'm obviously not exactly doing good empirical research here (except for article-ness, if one can count the interwebnet), but I'm pretty damn sure at least one of the times I got really, really sick lately (this past Saturday, after an Emergen-C after almost four hours of working out) was probably the result of a vitamin overload. Not so much the vitamins themselves (like an overdose), but that there were so many vitamins in various forms with relatively little food (me being mr. no-appetite lately) in my system.

This has been a vitabloggie warning.

      Regardless of my feelings about the dojo at the moment, I have to say that as much as they're often derided in the general martial arts community, seeing forms done by two people who've been doing them for upside of thirty years and have fought bare knuckle/full contact raises my opinion of them, at least. That said, I think they're often actually worth of derision the way they are commonly taught, but if one can find someone who has put effort into making their forms their muscle-memory library of practical bad-ass-ery, then they're worth it. Tangentially, an interesting analogy - that forms are just a folder where one stores collections of related, functional drills, and learning and maintaining forms acts as an analogical filing system.

Location Earth Dog Tags - raise your hand if you're also tempted

Darwin's Radio, by Greg Bear. When this was recommended to me at the end of the summer, it was with the caveat that it had a very slow beginning. Which it did; actually, more like a very slow first third or half. I think that's mostly a consequence of the author not delving into the 'front lines,' as he puts it (the more personal, character driven area of the plot), and rather focusing mostly on the broadly sweeping lines of scientific discourse and global events.
      Now, the trick is, all that dry, more academic stuff is probably quite necessary to setting up the best parts of the novel; and that's not to say that it's not interesting, it was just dry and slow for my tastes. The ideas the book are based on range from unnerving to seemingly profound, and to risk a cliche are nothing if not thought-provoking. Aside from the questions raised which would be infinitely better addressed by someone who is more interested in sociology or anthropology than me, one thing I noted was the parallel between something a favorite literature professor randomly lectured on once (use and comprehension of language as a marker of 'humanity;' tangentially that marks babies as not-quite-human) and in this novel augmented verbal and nonverbal communication as markers of evolution, or evolved humanity. Which really makes for a quite lovely end result of the scientific side of the story, though the rest of the story makes for a quite worrying ending (which is interestingly set in Tucson).
      If this could have been condensed, it would have made for an amazing Outer Limits episode, with guaranteed shivers and goosebumps. And to return to the 'front lines' or not issue in terms of where a good story might be located, I generally enjoy 'front lines' stories where the scientific and global plot are secondary to the characters' development and own stories (a horribly over-used reference being Evolution's Shore), so if one is more interested in the conceptual idea being primary (say, Philip K. Dick fans, perhaps), Bear's style might be more interesting as well.

      Also, between two Hitchcock movies (Notorious, which I haven't seen but the ending I caught seemed good, and Rebecca, which I have seen but don't really remember unfortunately because it was at four or five in the morning, though I've listened about the corresponding novel) on the boobtoob there was an old preview where Hitchcock himself goes on and on in this incredibly deadpan but also incredibly subtly hilarious way about birds, which suddenly somehow turns creepy at the end, and culminates as an advertisement for The Birds. I used to be kind of iffy about wanting to see his movies, but this little preview-thingie caught my attention - it was brilliant.

      And, Bloodsport III is a very, very bad movie, but its fightscenes are way ahead of the time, even for now, including all sorts of quite realistic grappling and throws and inventive combinations. So, basically, just watch the last twenty minutes or so like I caught and you're golden.

lens culture - interesting photography idea

The Full Moon Atlas - I recently had a great conversation about amateur astronomy, but unfortunately don't have the Seattle guy's contact info to give this to him...

I'm thinking this would have been good for a Jurassic Park movie

This may turn out melodramatic. I don't care, really.
      Lately, I have been pretending most everything's all right when it really hasn't been. I've been exhausted most of the time, sick the rest of the time, and spread way too thin all of the time. As a consequence, I became more and more sullen, depressed, and apathetic, and probably worst of all, passive-aggressive, running from work to physical work to too little sleep; I'm not sure that the scale will say I've been losing weight, but shirts I recently filled out are hanging off me. I've had a few feeble, abortive attempts at rectifying all of that, but nothing of any consequence. I've had my happy moments lately, when I wasn't being so serious or was distracted, I don't know. But I need to face up to the truth of things. In one night, the one thing I had been founding everything I wanted and dreamed and hoped for.......I'm not even sure what, at this point. But it's a pain so shining fierce I think it has woken me up to the point where I'm going to change my life in major ways; I might be really messed up at the moment, but at least I feel more awake, I guess. Like my dad always said,
      Welcome to the real world.
It's time for me to grow up.

Doom, with Karl Urban and the Rock. My dad thought were going to see another version of Dune until the title appeared in the opening credits, so that was kind of funny. For much of the movie, I was wondering where it was going; and then I was kind of disappointed, because I wanted to see flying skulls and flaming phlegm balls and bull-headed cyber demons and the whole nine yards. But: after a bit of thought, I'm quite satisfied with what they chose to do. There isn't really any fantasy in this version of Doom, which is ok, because they (relatively) cleanly pulled together a very neat science fiction plot instead. Also, the Rock played a quite different role from his usual, and I'm starting to really like Urban as an action star.
(now, spoilers, but I found this curious)
      An integral part of the plot of this version of Doom's story is the reference to the unknown purpose of a portion of human DNA. In the movie they refer to it (nonscientifically) as a possible 'blueprint for the soul,' and imply that it might code for predisposition to be good or evil. Now, I am currently reading Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear, wherein he uses that same 'junk DNA' as a plot device, except the topic of that story is instead leaps in evolution inspired by integrated retroviruses within that portion of the DNA. I'm not sure where I was going with this except to note that oblique parallel, and wonder whether that same thing may come up in more science fiction stories in the future.

      I'm reading through the fight-sports section in the back of Black Belt magazine, and noticing a common thread through the three events that are described (K1, UFC, and Pride Fighting). That is, spinning kicks. Which completely boggles my mind. I mean, in the events in question (kickboxing, MMA and MMA), for someone to deviate from the standard of boxing strikes, muay thai kicks, and BJJ on the ground is a rare thing, if ever - which makes sense, usually, as the standard mix of techniques is simple, practical, and well-proven many times over. But, to throw in spinning back kicks and hook kicks? Those are more technically difficult than the norm, and while powerful also vulnerable to countering, and thus have been shunned in the past as just flash, ineffective, or vulnerable. And yet, here I read about knockdowns and even a knockout by a back kick to the torso, and - get this - "Rua's attack had a capoeira-influenced flair as he leapt, stompt, and swept his helpless foe," and all that after beginning the match with a "spectacular series of spinning kicks." The word capoeira has officially been used seriously in a fight sports column. And - check this out - he ended the match by leaving the mount and then "dive-bombed [his opponent] with a hammerfist." Who, in the normal state of things, would ever leave the mount willingly? Much less to drop a crazy big hammerfist? Boggling, I tell you.
      But, also, awesome. There's room for bringing in some out-there or traditional techniques, and kicking butt doing it! In the same Pride tournament, an Olympic judo gold medalist dominated his match, for example, and I definitely remember seeing some traditional JJ throws and hammerfists in the last Pride tournament I watched. I can't wait till they get a kali fighter in the ring, like the Dog Brothers have been talking about. Once again, awesome.

      I think soy and rice milk are great. And not just because I have recently completely spontaneously become lactose intolerant. For one, they are generally cheaper than regular milk. Two, that argument in Snatch I think it was that humans just aren't meant to drink the baby-food of another species (excluding processed forms like cheese and ice cream, I rationalize). Third, my dad actually likes flavored soy milk - crazy. Fourth, I think plain rice milk tastes the best, but soy is probably more nutritious, and tastes okay, but is better flavored. And fifth, mango soy ice cream - ah yeah. Good stuff.

"What must chickens think of the Easter bunny?"
"A cross between the Predator and King Herod."
Scary Go Round

More on little people! I say they're oompaloompas.

interesting-
"A cougar's vertebrae are joined by muscle, rather than ligaments, allowing the cat to cover up to 45 feet in one bound, leap 15 feet high, and reach 40 miles per hour in just 50 feet. But its skeletal structure prevents it from maintaining such speed over distance. When chased by dogs, a cougar will climb a tree rather than outrun them."

History and Legends of Hot Dogs - to be a total nerd and quote SG Atlantis, "This is big...the wheel, the light bulb...the hot dog..."

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with Mos Def and Martin Freeman. I wasn't exactly disappointed, per se, but it didn't exactly hold my interest very well, either. I think the special effects and cast did justice to the novel, as well as the tone of the whole thing, but in the same token I think imagination might be better suited to really bringing out the humor and images of Adams' novel, in the end.

      A while ago, I read an article (that I probably rambled about here) that was written by an Arab author, detaling his opinion that in some senses Middle Eastern culture was stuck in a sort of a limbo (I'm obviously horribly simplifying a very long and involved text). That is, having had an expansive golden age in recent centuries, and then (even and especially) more recently having been under the crush of orientalism and colonialism, there was a lingering feeling that a continuation of that golden age was stolen, or on the other hand, is deserved. The author of this article added to that thought by asserting that any progression that a feeling like that might have inspired is rather stifled by the stgnation of religious influence - ie, that of the Koran, for example, which has preserved the (Koranic) Arabic nigh unchanged for centuries - an influence that effectively works towards stagnation.
      Fine, all well and good and open to vigorous debate and all that. So then, I spend a good portion of this past weekend listening to Hebrew with various English politi-religious assertions mixed in; and this sudden thought springs into my head, that if Arab culture is supposedly too stuck in its past, and negative effects on culture occur and reactive elements erupt, I wonder whether the same could ironically be said for Hebrew/Israeli culture, given the existence of the 'promised land' of Israel and coming out from that extremist settlers and displaced Palestinians.

Nadya Lev - photography

How fun!

Marguerite Moreau had a cameo on Lost. It probably didn't even last a minute. But, as I have a bit of a crush on her, I don't care. Awesome. Also, as much as I don't like the show, I got sucked into watching Invasion; I can't help but think that they're trying to put forth some analogy between deep sea fish being attracted to pretty lights, and the humans in the show - of course, I'm going to interpret that (theoretical) analogy as a remark upon people's intelligence.
And on that note - yay! Most intelligent post ever.

      Having an endorphin rush and a headache from vascular constriction at the same time is crazy. I don't need drugs, I've got my blood vessels. On an entirely different note, judo throws are funny to me, at this moment in my training. In one sense, they are technically very interesting, especially in their requiring of higher-order skills in taking balance and using momentum; also, they are myriad. The things is, a huge many of them definitely require some sort of uniform to provide easy grips. When you're just down to, say, shorts and tank top, or less, most of the judo throws are impossible without major changes, and then they often just aren't anywhere near as effective (a sweaty arm or torso most definitely does provide the handholds some nice, thick fabric does). Furthermore, when strikes (as atemi or for power shots) are mixed in, the dynamic entirely changes - by-the-moment tactics take precedence over balance-taking longer strategy. I start to see the reason for the difference between traditional jujitsu and judo, where jujitsu uses strikes and hooking (using a conditioned grip to gouge or otherwise cause pain, for example), and judo uses yanks and more movement. In the same token, that makes it that much cooler to see a judo stylist throw someone around in an MMA fight - they really, really have to know their stuff.

Pascal Renoux - photos

The results of my completely listlessly watching television, while often doing other things, till I fell asleep on the couch until I was woken around dawn:
Teen Titans continues to have great animated martial arts mixed with some lush fantastic elements - it seems like the animators really know their stuff when putting together the action scenes. Naruto has the same, and a wonderful setting based upon a culture entirely built around ninjas, but sitting through almost every other moment of the show is positively excruciating. FLCL...um...I had this show described to me once, and kind of scoffed at the (completely insane and psychedelic) idea of it. In a certain sense, like Tank Girl with an extra dose of mushrooms, and somewhat similar music. Roy Jones Jr was just plain disappointing in the fight they showed the other night (that was recorded on Oct 1). At first I was thinking he was pulling some sort of drunken boxing thing, but yeah no. He basically got beaten around without fighting back at all. And to think, he used to knock people out starting with his hands behind his back. Wrath of the Dragon God was in one sense surprisingly good, even and especially for being a Saturday night SciFi movie, but at the same time a bit disappointing, in the book-is-always-better-than-the-movie sense. I will note the quirky Adult Swim-style commercials for DnD that actually made me chuckle out loud, and the surprising number of herpes medication commercials. And what do kids think when they see parents-should-talk-to-kids-about-drugs commericals on the Cartoon Network? Also, To Have and Have Not, based on a novel by Hemingway and with a screenplay by Faulkner, with Bogart and Bacall starring, is well, well worth watching.

Defining Moment - article about the history of a sassy dictionary

Grim Tales from Down Below - yet more wonderfully drawn shenanigans involving everyone's favorite cartoon and claymation characters!

      Werewolves and vampires seem a funny thing to me, in a certain sense. That is, once someone becomes, or is to cursed to be, such a monster, they are no longer human. Which is all well and good, but at the same time, both monsters can be very human at times - say, the werewolf when the moon isn't all a'shine, and the vampire with the fangs retracted. So - what keeps them from being labeled as a human that's been stricken with a curse; why the default inhuman label? Would it be too much to say that a human has the potential within their humanity to become a monster? Is it easier to just say they are a monster and strip them of any (good or bad) humanity - couldn't a normal human become just as animalistic or depraved without any external (internal?) influence (a la the end of 28 Days Later, for example)?
      Also, from another side of things, what about the Amerindian idea of a shapeshifter? That, I know very little about, unfortunately, but would anyone be able to tell me whether they are considered primarily human or inhuman?

The languages of Guernsey - a lovely article on linguistic history and some islands that apparently exist between France and England - I had no idea they were even there, to be honest

Quarter Shrinking - one of those someday-I-will-try-this things

Rilo Kiley - though I have yet to actually have any mp3's of such, their website plays the fun muzack - I would settle for an mp3 of Korn's 'Twisted Transistor,' though...

and a picpic update

      In working with the warehouse manager, who turned out to be quite a nice guy (he just seemed frustrated before because in truth is he has a huge number of very lazy and seemingly willfully stupid jerks working for him), I got to hear an interesting little lecture (sorry, I'm not really up to trans-scripting a thick Vietnamese accent): he said it was his opinion that many people who spurn education or are willfully ignorant think they know everything; people who really enjoy being educated and learning, on the other hand, realize that they are only a little speck in terms of how much knowledge and even common-sense wisdom there is in the world. So, maybe not a lecture, but it seems like a lecture's worth of information could be contained within that bit of opinion.

Archie! - man, I've been waiting forever for that...but where are the rest of the pictures?

History of the Biohazard Symbol - fun with semiotics! I have to say, though, I think if I was in one of those focus groups I would have at least guessed something like "bad and/or scary"

Kryptos - would it be tacky to try to work this into an Alias episode?

Words of the Day -
catenary - the curve formed by a perfectly flexible, uniformly dense, and inextensible cable suspended from its endpoints. It is identical to the graph of a hyperbolic cosine, or, something having the general shape of this curve (it just seems like an odd, very specific word)

verglas - a thin coating of ice, as on rock (ditto)

SIGHwhatever - a bit creepy, but interesting and clever

-the author of this comic is once again my hero for the day, on the basis of that punchline

phrase-that-was-actually-used-seriously of the day, courtesy of Troy: "melee in the cafeteria"

      So, I was up at around 2 AM the other morning, just...uh, falling asleep in a chair, basically, and Neon Genesis Evangelion: End came on. And though blearily (that better be a word) confused by coming in at some point long after the movie had started, I quickly started paying attention. For one, near the end there is (me agreeing with a reviewer, here) a giant-robot-battle to end all giant-robot-battles. How does one make a giant-robot-battle gratuitously violent, you ask? You add giant-robot-blood-and-organs. Yummy. Actually pretty gross. And horribly violent. From another angle, some of the imagery and plot is quite disturbing - on the shallow side, on a visceral level. On a slightly deeper side, on a conceptual and subconscious level. In the conceptual sense, for example, the whole idea of something 'angelic' is completely up-ended, and (once I got it after a spot of 'research') the exploration of individuality and one's consciousness are interesting (and also explain some of the loud, psychotic screaming, shiver-inducing whisper choruses, and creepy horror-movie little girls at a couple points). What I meant by the subconscious side of things is a heavy dose of sexual imagery, which never really actually presents itself obviously as such, but I could definitely feel a purposeful pattern tugging at the close-reading part of my brain.
      And, there's a crazy 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque psychedelic sequence for those who are into that sort of thing, involving live-action shots of really random things, like people falling asleep in theatres. Yeah, I have no idea what that was supposed to symbolize. Because then they cut back to the continent-sized glowing woman. It seemed interesting that early in the morning, anyway.

      A big issue we ran into when I took existential philosophy was whether or not free will was possible. The main hang up that I can remember basically was the question of whether anything we do can be considered free of the influence of what came before it - prior thoughts, choices, and deeds, and not just of ourselves, but of everything - a kind of exponential butterfly effect, where every last little thing is a consequence of something else. So, not putting much of any thought into this at all (rather, just staying up late and falling asleep on the couch), I wonder whether the concept of nirvana - or, escaping from an cycle of reincarnation - might somehow be applied to escaping a cycle of consequence. Or perhaps, a zen ideal of no-ego might be applied in a similar way...

      Some interesting bits from a customer at the Diner that my dad regularly talks to, who just spent a while travelling all over France. One general thing was that while Bush obviously wasn't particularly popular, at the same time apparently Chirac seemed to be equally unpopular, on the reasoning that his policies were killing tourism.
      Also, at one point this American couple were relaxing on their hotel balcony; they soon saw a small group of students carting effigies of Chirac and Bush and burning differing flags as they moved down the street beneath the balcony. As odd as that duality was, soon after that a much, much larger crowd of students came from both sides of the street and dispersed the first, burning-things group. The couple's main remark upon this was that as they watched the BBC later on, they saw that very first burning-things group, but there was not a single mention of the second, larger group of students. Ah, objective reporting.

      In the (now week-long) continuation of a very diplomatic and tactful argument at the dojo over various martial arts principles, I have to confess that I was holding up my side with very little confidence because of lots of recent disilliusionment (I'm really hoping that's actually a word) - having refined and better understood what we were actually talking about, today it boiled down to explaining previous training from differing disciplines and comparing. But, when the head instructor finally wandered over and his opinion was asked, he pretty much repeated exactly what I had said in almost the same words. I found this fairly odd, as he and I had never discussed the topic before, nor could I remember him expressing those opinions; I'm not sure whether it relieved my feeling disillusioned to be backed up, as it were, but I certainly found it striking that our (the head instructor and me) training from the same teacher carried through so consistently in us.

Serenity, with Jewel Staite as the really attractive woman. And there were other people too. Yay for advance screenings! And friends who win tickets from local alt. rock radio stations! Though, interestingly, we saw an inordinate number of people that we knew. Go figure. I still can't pin a negative or positive opinion down about the movie; I had only ever seen enough Firefly to get a general idea of the setting and who each character was, though that seemed to work fine in terms of understanding the movie, at least. The stilted/altered/embellished language the characters use threw me for a loop at first (I had forgotten it from the television-watching), but I quickly warmed up to it. Though a few lines fell flat, all in all I got a big kick out of it by the end. The martial arts were great quality...at least, I think so, we were sitting on the very end of the second row. I could be mistaken. There was a plot and whatnot as well, but that's mainly the part I can't decide whether I liked or not; maybe I'll go see it again from a better angle and decide then. And also not have one of the lenses of my glasses fall into my eye this time.

      And while clambering through boxes in the warehouse today, I listened to an interesting conversation between two of the receiving guys. Basically, they were talking about science fiction shows, like the kind they show reruns of on Saturday afternoons or late at night. That doesn't sound like much, but I marvelled at the realization that these guys, who I thought were so inescapably macho that they wouldn't go near anything but the basest of Rambo-style action, could take such delight in parsing out the details of setting and character for each of the shows, and if the other guy hadn't seen it, in describing and explaining the same. That all sounds arrogant or pretentious of me to say, I'm sure, but they were like a couple of English majors; of course, they lingered over describing the time the hot actress had to wear a maid's uniform, but honestly, who wouldn't?

      I was reading an article that claimed that the muscles that are most commonly very tight are the hip flexors and the very bottom of the abdominal muscles. And at first, I thought yeah, yeah, yeah. Then a little while later, in a fit of boredom or whatever, I sat there thinking about it. And those muscles certainly felt relaxed. And then just when I was about to shrug and forget it, those muscles actually relaxed. And I gasped. I think half of my palpable relief was from the release of the mental block, and half from the physical. Later, I realized that as I pushed on the gas pedal while driving home, I was flexing my toes as well as my foot. I certainly didn't need to be flexing my toes, and there was a smaller, but still palpable, release there as well. Now, the trick is keeping those muscles relaxed.

Tingo, nakkele, and other wonders - fun article about un-translatable words

Alias - beautiful, but (at least for me) a bit uncannily disturbing

      Quick notes on tonight's Pride Fighting Championship - for one, the general consensus among all of us watching was that while Pride rules allow for a few more brutal movements (stomps to opponents on the ground, for one), nonetheless the UFC is more intense and enjyoable to watch. That's not to say that these fights weren't enjoyable, per se; I particularly enjoyed one of the Japanese fighter's repeated traditional throws (hip throws and harai goshi's), and the suplex's that popped up here and there. There were even some hammerfists when fighters were on the ground, a few odd double-hand techniques, a couple spinning elbows and heels, and even a completely random tornado kick. But we thought that last guy was just being silly because he knew he had lost. So, all in all, good times.

Woogle - well, it doesn't quite turn out right, but maybe that's half the point

Rock, Paper, Scissors to the nth - all of a sudden, a deck of cards might not be needed when stuck in, say, airport layovers or the like; though I suppose people might think you're talking in sign language

Word of the Day: williwaw - a violent gust of cold wind blowing seaward from a mountainous coast (it seems like one of those "the Eskimos have a hundred words for snow" words)

Insurrection, by Thomas Reid. This being the second novel in a shared-setting series, I think, as one reviewer also pointed out, I started reading with the desire to learn more about the unique society and psychology of the drow that the books center around, but I've been caught up by the various characters and (big!) story. Which, in this novel, starts out a bit ambigously but quickly crescendoes in terms of huge amounts of intrigue and excitement. That being said, I'll note that I didn't particularly enjoy the characters and action this time around as much as in the first novel by Richard Lee Byers, but to be honest I'd say that's a hell of a tough act to follow, with fighting being described by a martial artist and the chance to introduce the characters in question.
      In any case, there is some fun writing, with things like the phrase "incendiary alchemy" used seriously, and "My mother always told me not to get involved with bad girls, especially if they had wings."

      Martial arts having been mentioned, I'll just note again that the choreography in Atlantis maintained it's extraordinary quality through the season finale, with fight scenes that both traditional and MMA stylists can appreciate. Now, that being said, the finale for Battlestar Galactica was very, very interesting for a few reasons. Firstly, its usual high-quality cinematography and character-driven storyline. Then, the other bit; for the whole week up till Friday, I'd noticed that they were hyping the Atlantis finale over and over, and barely if ever mentioned the Galactica finale which was to be on the same night (which was decidedly odd, as the latter show was the much bigger draw for ratings). Then, about halfway through the Galactica finale, there was one of those "The follow segment contains scenes of a mature..." messages, which really confused me, as I'd never seen one before in the middle of a show. And the next segment was quite disturbing, almost to the point of making me walk out of the room for a moment (as it was, I ended up just standing up and looking away because I realized how they were going to end the scene); basically, it dealt with a sanctioned rape of a prisoner.
      Which is interesting now that I've had some time to adapt to the memory, in that it was sanctioned by a female officer, who appears to have only males under her command. If anybody with some gender issues experience wants to tackle that one, I'm all ears. I will say that at the least I thought the SciFi channel did the best they could with that episode in terms of advertising it, and in justifying that scene in terms of the story.

Deeper Than Words - art

Welcome to the Thrid Season of the O.C., Bitch! nice...or rather, very not-nice primer...sort of (via Carolyn)

CharacterDesigns.com - art resource

      I'm not even going to talk about Lost. Damn cliffhangers. I also watched Invasion, if only for moral support of the bevy of science fiction shows this year (besides the original series on SciFi, Threshold and Surface, namely). I liked the affable UFO buff, he was pleasant and interesting. The recquisite carefully doled out bits and hints have potential for growth, I suppose. But the relationships between the characters - I mean, who's married to who and who's step-sibling's uncle is related to which of the other characters? Maybe that's supposed to be a reflection of a modern-family-archetype or something, but sheesh, they couldn't have expanded the connections a little bit? Or maybe they'll just add more characters later, I hadn't really thought of that. But still. Incest - but not really.

blanc fonce - art

      After searching and experimenting for a long while, I think I finally found a good aid for meditation. Concentrating on purely on my breathing or stimuli (visual or aural) works well enough for me, and chanting does - but only if I'm really in the right mood - but I've really come to like mudras, or placing my hands in certain positions. I can't say I buy into them actually having some physical or even mental effect simply of their own accord in any way, but I can say that the physical act of contorting my hands a bit and relaxing them in front of my chest focuses my attention without drawing in clouds of connotation-thought better than anything else I've come across. Anyone else have a particular focus they prefer?

Also, I made a Flickr account to play around with the new camera I just bought, so I'll probably link it to the right and add to it as I go

I honestly haven't seen enough Firefly to really get what this guy is arguing (I didn't realize the setting was like that), but it passes the time till Serenity comes out

      An interesting point came up in a conversation with someone I hadn't talked to in a long time (Spoon rocks!). Basically, this gal and I, while dissimilar in passions or interests (except for a strange penchant for dancing at random and inappropriate times) share a similar issue. That is, while we have often been advised to 'do what makes [us] happy' or 'make a living doing what interests [us],' and this is sound advice, at the same time we run into a conundrum. We either do what we love or what interests us, and make the sacrifice of not having very much of a living or being able to support a family comfortably etc etc, or make a living doing something we care little about and do our best to continue our passions and interests on the side.
      Now, the biggest trouble in explaining this thought is not coming off as whining, bitching, complaining; we were really trying to objectively figure out the best course of action. Also, at the same time, we tried to recognize (and think of) basically, things we hadn't thought of - lucky breaks, wise investing, change in life-perspective; maybe something will happen with the lovely lady come January from her time with AmeriCorps. Anyhoo. Thinking.

for lighter fare, comic-find courtesy of Cherubim:
-for the few who'll have any idea what this might represent
-10 points to living in Arizona

The Consolation of Philosophy, by Ancius Boethius, translated by Victor Watts. I don't really recall why I own this book, I think it must have been for a class that didn't end up using it, so I figured I'd read it instead of sellling it on the basis that it was in a recommended reading list in the back of another good book. As much as I probably wouldn't go out of my way to read it again any time soon, I will admit it was enjoyable to work through, especially in its interesting intermixing of prose and poetry. The basis for its being written is especially interesting if true, in that Boethius apparently wrote it while in prison watiing for his violent execution, particularly for its finishing optimism. And especially for a philosophical text, it was astoundingly easy to read and comprehend, though whether that was by Boethius' original writing or Watts' translation I'd be curious to find out. A good bit of late-Roman and Byzantine history is scattered in footnotes and in a handy introduction as a nice extra; and if anyone else ever gets around to reading this I'd be curious to compare opinions as to whether a huge amount of the ideas in this text seem scattered in every-day Western cultural assumptions (that sounds pretentious, but read it and also be like what the hell?).

Art of Philip Straub

Moonstruck, with Cher and Nicholas Cage. Hilarious, and classy; where Old School dealt with cheating and relationships in as tasteless a manner as possible, which wasn't necessarily too bad, just a different kind of funny, this film somehow turned its exploration of infidelity into an intelligent foray that was even warm at times. Just watch out on the volume, there's a lot of screaming.

-nice article on ankle locks

      I had several good ideas in the midst of an endorphin rush on the way home. But I lost them in the crash afterwards, I think; ah well. In any case, recently I'd been feeling somewhat lost in my martial arts training - I was kind of asking myself, 'What the hell am I doing anymore?' Which seems a bit odd in retrospect for the amount of hours per week I've been putting in, which is probably more than ever before. I don't think tonight was a complete turnaround, but at least it might get me out of my slump.
      Basically, we tried to approximate full-contact, no-holds-barred fighting as best we could. We used grappling gloves, makeshift headgear (chanbara helmets), and a slight modicum of restraint. The dynamic of this kind of fighting from the usual sparring of traditional martial arts is a world apart. Range takes on an entirely different meaning, and I found myself having to correct all sorts of bad habits (pulling strikes short of their targets, slowed down pull-backs based on courtesy, giving up grappling position for the sake of training escapes) on the fly. High kicks went from a staple to rarely used strikes based on opportunity or strategy, as I quickly found out that in this context they are horribly easy to catch or lead to having one's 'tree chopped down' with a kick to the supporting leg; I was only able to pull off one clean roundkick to the face after a series of feints and switches (ironically slapping my instep on the hard face-guard of the mask - ow). And strategy in turn played a bigger role than I've been used to - there doesn't seem to be any room for half-way choices. It's just strike, strike to create opportunities for grappling, or clinch and grapple; trying to switch strategies in the middle of things required too mental acrobatics for me to handle at this point in time, at any rate. Regardless, there is a huge amount of self-analysis that's going to be occurring for the next few days, most definitely.
      Random notes: grappling gloves actually aren't as bad of cushions as one would think; they do great job of protecting one's wrist and hand, and while they aren't exactly boxing gloves, they diffuse the bone-hard feeling of a fist at least. Chanbara helmets - hmm. Great cushioning job, which makes sense considering they're for fighting with weapons, though one's neck better be conditioned to check the yanking it'll still take. Having them pop off during grappling, or pretty much cancel out one's vision in a clinch were big hindrances; even ranged fighting suffered the obfuscation of the bars across the face (hands and feet are a lot smaller than the sword and staff-length weapons they're designed for, I guess).
      And now, off to nurse the tennis ball sized bump on my ankle, so I can start running again this weekend to build up my cardio. And possibly so I can get a shoe on tomorrow for work. Damn leg blocks...as a post-script, low shin-roundkicks to the thighs were only slightly less dangerous to use than high kicks.

interesting article on on joints that go snap, crackle, pop

      This is going to be really esoteric, random, and possibly high falootin'. Not like the restaurant, though. I don't think like the restaurant, anway. Anyway. I was reading this book and it had a little about a God-concept from back in the old Platonic days (I'm resisting making a horrendous ancient-Greece-platonic-men joke), where the god-figure is the prime mover, who sets everything in the universe in motion without being moved itself. And a few different angles on that same thing, but it's late and I'm sticking with that. Then I completely randomly thought of some article I read way back about some people viewing aikido as a spiritual practice. Then I thought of the zen idea of something being still and yet in motion at the same time - ye old moon's reflection on water, etc. Then I wondered whether that zen idea might be applied to the prime mover, which led to me wondering whether the idea of the prime mover might be combined with that zen idea to describe an ideal mental state for an aikido practitioner, based on the principles of the discipline. Then I remembered that some zen practices view attempting to achieve an ideal mental state as a way of getting closer to God/unity/nature/etc. And that's how (I think) I now understand maybe why aikido might be viewed as a spiritual practice.
      That breaks things.

Old School, with Will Farrell and Luke Wilson. I always struggle a bit when talking about comedies after I see them, because they generally don't do much for me; I pretty much watch them either when there's people who can Rocky Horror along, or when I'm obligated to - like when a short Mexican hands me a movie that I have to watch to find out why he's been going "Frank the Tank! Frank the Tank!" all day long. So, in light of all that, I still thought this movie was pretty lame. It had its share of skin and funny moments and a slew of generally funny actors. I suppose it was kind of generally funny. I wouldn't call it a total waste of time. Eeyup.

"...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.