I think women's self-defense classes are a wonderful thing. I also think that if the women heading in that intelligent direction want to further their training, the guard position (on their back, attacker between legs) and the techniques that spring from that are a good way to go - I dunno, it just seems like that kind of situation maybe just might come up. Judo and Japanese jujitsu offer good training in that regard, but (as much as i have ambivalent feelings about the martial art) Brazilian jujitsu probably has the most developed set of techniques. Of course, just like any purely self-defense practice, it would probably be better only to train a few simple and practical sweeps rather than the myriad chokes and armbars, though I would say that training the other side of things a little (breaking and passing the guard) would definitely improve defensive techniques.

-Another example of what I've probably snapped about recently to various people. We don't need divisive and inflammatory stereotyping, or the ignorance of the existence of people who are fighting against those stereotypes from the inside. Those writers and reporters and whoever who can work from the inside of fundamentalist cultures and nations to counteract the general conception of "the clash between civilizations" need all the support they can get, and a mirrored action from the outside of those nations.

-Thing With Feathers - silent and artsy comics

-Red Meat - definitely not silent comics, but very funny (via Kevin)

Resident Evil: Apocalypse - I bet I'll come off as arrogant for saying this after all the praise I've heard, but with Wyatt and Alan backing me up, it wasn't all that great. It wasn't a bad movie per se, but....yeah. We figured it couldn't quite decide what kind of movie it wanted to be; that, and it killed off more characters than a George Martin novel, but without the development, so I just didn't care. The loco Barbie/Tomb Raiderish chick was fun to look at, at least, though they could have zoomed out on the martial arts.

Shogun's Ninja - To quote a guy on IMDB, "This movie is just straight-up weird." Sonny Chiba has amazing physical development in it, however, and he really does have some skillz. I think this might also be the origin of the name Hattori Hanzo, unless it's some historical Japanese thing I'm missing. The one thing I'm liking about some of these old movies that were made in Asia is that they always have some cross-cultural themes between Japan and China; hence, my burdgeoning interest in Warriors of Heaven and Earth.

Rome: Total War - more cross-cultural fun, but more explicitly of the beating kind

One of the techniques of the set called the 17 in Tomiki aikido is especially interesting, because it moves in three different directions at once. It can be turned into a pretty solid strike, which pretty much universally makes observes wince in sympathy, or an odd jujitsu-style dumping throw, but the principle behind it is best seen in the aikido variant. The tension created by pushing their arm above your head, extending through their body horizontally with your elbow, and sinking your weight when done properly manifests itself not as conflict between the different lines of effort, but as something that rather springs from that tension - the only analogy I can immediately think of being a good poem that has tension between narrative and lyrical elements producing something beyond each of those paths.

-Alka-Seltzer + H2O + a severe lack of gravity = cool (via Wyatt)

-to quote someone else, whoever's out there pressing the big red button for hurricanes, you can stop now

-sad and pretty all at once

-check out the gorgeous back of the girl in the middle of the (I think, can't tell w/o motion) S-dobrado

According to an article in the Scientific American I just got, reciting poetry is beneficial to your health. The study in question used epic poetry such as The Iliad with its hexameter lines (which incidentally really only works for this in German or Latin). Basically there are several nice affects such as a probable endorphin boost, slowed and deepened breathing, and a sort of calibrating of breathing and heartbeats. So, um...yay!

-photography by Karim Ramzi

-Nicaraguan Sign Language - the kids have the skillz

-I knew math was evil

-my holy grail-type quest is now to find this pepper for my mom

-mmmm...folklore goodness

Collateral - Interesting, all in all. Of course, I'm still a hold-out Tom Cruise fan (you heard me - bring it!). I was half expecting it to be a shallow regular-guy-becomes-badass-hero movie, which there was maybe an element thereof, but the movie taken as a whole went quite beyond that. I thought it was especially cool that I found my opinion of the antagonist, while naturally bad, having an arc of its own - kind of from curious respect to odium, I think. I also thought the end of the movie had a nice (though relatively blatant, I suppose) symbolic touch.

      On my way up to Phoenix, it was raining really hard. Which was actually nice, besides the wrestling of the Lego-Safari car's thinking it was a kite to be blown away by the incessant wind. In any case, the wide open vistas by I-10, which I normally readily enjoy in the sun anyway, had grand curtains of rain sweeping across them. Lightning staccato'ed the distance (and a couple times the not-so-distant feel-it-in-your-chest), Picacho Peak had cottony shreds swirling around its peak (yes! triple redundancy withing a sentence!), and the dust storms right near Phoenix were positively intimidating in that they were under the mountains at one moment and smothering the road the next.
      But the real kicker was the rain was coming down so fast in some places that the desert didn't have time to soak it up - so there were huge puddles dotted with little shrub-topped islands every once in a while. The most interesting of these was one that's islands were creosote and white crosses, and one larger island with a big American flag. It was actually a bit difficult to see because the sun was silver'ing the water, and there were diagonal yellow rays coming through the clouds above it. Still pretty cool, though.

-Tuesday Comic - this is the comforting chicken soup of comics

-this is like when we used to jump down the stairs in middle school, times 50

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow - I'm going to give this one a great big somewhatokay. The hotness that is Jude Law and Angelina Jolie countered the annoying unattractiveness that is Gwyneth Paltrow. The movie was pretty and all, and unique I suppose, but that didn't really save it. As the setting got more and more interesting, the plot seemed to get proportionally more out of no where. So, aesthetically pleasing, interesting setting, Angelina and Jude hot, Gwyneth annoying and ugly.

Lost in Arabic Translation

Book-a-Minute Classics - they really summed up my opinion of Catcher in the Rye

Days of the Week - I suddenly get that whole Baron Samedi thing in voodoo

What the IDF is doing in Nablus

Four Stories - poignant, with woodcuts

The Latin Deli, by Judith Cofer - A mixture of prose and poetry; the first part is fiction based on stories of Puerto Rican immigrants, the second part is memoirs and poetry about the author herself. The poetry is beautiful and easy to read, and some of the stories can give you quite a knock emotionally (re: me on the verge of tears or just putting the book down and staring into space).

the Blue Marble - best landscapes ever

Collected Tears of the Weeping Nivbed - rediscovered oldie

Mess Studio - it's very much worth the slightly odd navigation

Robotech Invasion - basically what appears to be a wonderfully accurate presentation of one of my favorite trilogies (gameplay trailer)

Xuemei's Nice Meal of the Day:
-lemon-pepper soy teriyaki honey-garlic plum orange-sesame sherry chicken
-roasted cubed potatoes
-shiitake mushroom + meatball + spinach soup
-salad + rolls

Steph's noodle soup
-winter melon
-tofu
-fish balls
-Chinese noodles
--with fish sauce and sesame oil (I added chili oil to mine because I like endorphins)

-the actual video for "Mad World" from the Donnie Darko sound track, as opposed to the one on the dvd (via Phil)

-I'm honestly drooling (via Carolyn, ironically)

-Haiku, with fractal and a fractal'ed translation thereof

-Bliss Studios

Well, Wyatt's report from BALLS 2004 was that it went pretty well, all in all. For his team, anyway; pretty much everyone else's rockets exploded - literally. The Precision 1 went to about 27,000 feet based on the initial estimates from the equipment, and we're waiting on the various video viewpoints of it (including the in-rocket cam). And oddly enough, when they finally found the rocket out in the desert using radio transponders, somebody had somehow found it first and drove off as Wyatt's team got there - and stole part of the graphite nose cone, which is just completely random. Also, we still have no idea what BALLS stands for.

-Project Vote Smart - ok yeah some of these people are just wackos

-Not so much of a tongue-twister I guess, as a tone-twister

Random Trivia Day from History of the Middle East

Amr called this place al Fustat, "the tent", because, so the tale went, on returning to his tent there from Alexandria he found a dove nesting among its goat-hair hangings. Amr declared the site sacred and gave orders that the tent not be disturbed. After the dove had raised her brood and was gone, Amr built his mosque on this site (now located in present "Old Cairo"), and around it grew up Misr al-Fustat, " the Settlement of the Tent". The word misr is not only a present-day colloquial name for Cairo but the official Arabic name for Egypt itself as well.

"Iraq," the official name of Faisal's new realm, came from the Arabic word araqa meaning "deep-rooted." Etymologically, "Iraq" came from the Sumerian region of Uruk (Warka) dating to about 3400 BCE. The biblical name for the region was "Erech" (Genesis 10:10).

Among these raiders were the "Philistines" of the Bible who challenged the Israelites' claims to the land, but who also traded with them. The Egyptians, whom they also harassed, called them "Peleset," and from the Greek historian Herodotus (484-425 BCE) came the name, "Palestine." It was the Philistines who introduced iron tool-making into the area. Iron was traded with the Israelites for limestone available only in the hill country which the tribes of Israel controlled. ---(I think it's interesting that a transliteration of the modern Arabic for Palestine is filistine)

+ Warriors of Heaven and Earth - looks to be an interesting flick, if only because it's the only one I've even heard of that involves the period of history and the region that it does

Duel to the Death, or Xian si jue - The first half of the movie is actually kind of funkyinteresting. Ninjas versus Shaolin monks, which is kind of a fun comic book premise. In fact, the whole movie would be a wonderful comic book. Yes, it's old school to the point of Mystery Science Theater'ing itself, and/or not even needing the re-do of a Kung Pow kind of movie. But it has some pretty unique stylistic things going on. That, and as the scenes get closer and closer to the end they get so FUCKING ODD that they leave you watching the credits with your jaw literally hanging open and your hands clapped to your temples. I swear that was the position I was in for the last twenty minutes of that movie.

-It would be awesome if the world was actually like this

Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands and Trumpets from the Islands of their Eviction - both by Martin Espada. Espada's poetry has a palpable passion in it. I found it interesting in that he uses very little figurative language, which I'm not used to, even though my favorite poet (Jack Gilbert) uses even less. In any case, one could learn some Spanish from Rebellion as it has Spanish translations on each facing page, and Latin American history from both.

And the other random thing I was thinking about was the idea that say someone recognizes something about themselves that they hadn't realized before - say, that they are arrogant, or that they react a certain way in certain situations. But it seems that that aspect of themselves might react like a particle that has just been observed, and thus been hit by a photon - it changes a little. So it seems like it comes back to "the moment in which you think you know a thing is the moment in which you must look deeper," and the infinite loop that entails. The tangent to this idea runs off an example of some really screwed up people that I've met at UMC. They know that they're messed up, and it'll probably be the first thing they'll tell you. But in that sense to me it seems like they're not really "observing" it anymore; it has just become an excuse for them to act the way they are comfortable acting, because someone else told them that about themselves and they went with it. But that use of it also conveniently blocks them from getting to know themselves more, and maybe changing to be healthier, but gods forbid that we wouldn't want them to be uncomfortable. Which isn't to say that there aren't the people who have some issues and are genuinely trying to work through them; it's just that they seem quieter about it.

-Now that's just funny

It's really too bad they don't make this shirt

My next goal

Studio : Qube

Savage Sun Arts

Art of Hyung-Tae Kim

   Finally, some attention is being called to an Muslim criticizing Muslims. Without launching into a tirade about Orientalism, which I'm sure I shall at some point, this is what I've been rambling about when I say that labeling a full billion people with one name doesn't make them all the same.

   And on a tangential note, no one who this concerns will probably ever read it, but to all the people at my mom's school, her name is Najwa, pronounced n-capital lowercase e-lowercase zeta-w-schwa. Not a long 'a' or a Southern drawl 'a' or three syllables or with a silent 'j' (where the hell did that one come from?). Two syllables, with the first vowel just like in "bet" or "net." Gods....the closest example I can think of is people drawling out Carolyn's name to a ear-scraping Caroliiiine, but that has less variation.

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"...beneath mountains, effervescing majestic."
"These women ran with destiny beneath their wings..."
"...each man, taken into my mouth like a warm vowel..."

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The Random Frog Children, "a very random comic in many parts"

Vanity Fair - This movie was pleasure to watch aesthetically, and was well enough otherwise, though it probably wouldn't be so pleasant if one were in an impatient mood. It almost seemed like various scenes were taken piecemeal out of a novel, and enough that there was a coherent story, but inessential bits were left out. Or rather, I'd be interested to see if there were many deleted scenes. I went ostensibly to take my mom out, of course, but also to see Jonathan Rhys Meyers in another movie....'cause he's hot, basically. I also found a new interest in Romola Garai, the much-more-attractive-than-the-lead supporting actress; I actually thought she was Rose Byrne till I looked it up, but I guess I just like that type or something. I thought that Reese Witherspoon's character was at least interesting in any case because she was a perfect parallel of Gaby McAslan from Evolution's Shore, but without the redeeming qualities. And on an entirely random note, a comment upon the growing prevalence of martial arts in movies: totally illogical capoeiristas at an India-themed picnic, and an odd spat of grappling that takes place in India.

Shaun of the Dead - the zombies are walking to the music at one point. I need say no more.

Bubbles - kind of random. Wyatt found it; it has cool music, like that obscure speed metal song from Spawn

   Well, this year's neighbors seem a bit better than the previous. Not only are there soda machines outside the house right behind us, but there hasn't been a red tagged house within a block so far (unlike before when every single house was red tagged, and then twice over). So far the only noisiness has been in the middle of the day (which was beautiful today between downpours), and that involved a car stereo and girls in bikinis on lawn chairs in a front yard.

Eden X - art by Jason Chen

LifeGem - while this seemed very wrong at first, I'm still vaguely intrigued, if only morbidly (no pun intended)

Over breakfast at the diner (plug, plug), my dad gave me a pretty good idea based on the training he got at the olympic training center. Basically, there are two ways to go about it ("it," of course, being some breath-training). Either set a watch so it goes off every fifteen minutes or so to remind you to breathe deeply or control your breathing, or at any minorly stressful point (pulling up to an intersection, thinking of an answer, during an awkward conversation) just be conscious of how often you actually end up holding your breath.

The Youngest Doll by Rosario Ferre is a nice collection of short stories. While it's translated from Spanish (the author is Puerto Rican), I thought it still flowed smoothly enough. In fact, some of the more disturbing and deceptive qualities of the stories more than came through. Kind of lyrical fiction with a sprinkle of horror.

-the best part about the new King Kong movie is not Peter Jackson being the director. Oh no. It is that the illustrious Jack Black is going to be in it! Hoorah! (via the lit theory...not sure what the hell to call that class...prof)

loïc peoc'h - photos