ReMembering Cuba - edited by Andrea Herrera pretty much embodies the word "spectrum" in my opinion. It's a collection of 'testimonials,' essays, and art from Cuban exiles of myriad stripes and 'American-Born Cubans' that shows a huge range of views and aspects and thoughts about cultural issues, exile, politics, family, and I could obviously go on. I'd definitely be interested in a similar collection from Mexican-Americans, or any other ethnicity for that matter; another interesting one in my mind would be the Arabs of various nationalities in Tucson, for example. My mother's experience as a Palestinian is readily apparently different, for example, from the various Syrians, Lebanese, Assyrians, Irani (well, I guess they're Middle Eastern), and Iraqis we've met.
Kisses - by Steve Orlen is a really easy-to-read collection of poetry. Family, personal history, and being a Jew are some of the main aspects; also, it didn't really click till I got to the bio at the end, Orlen is on the faculty at UA.
Ong Bak - besides this looking to be crazyawesome in and of itself, I think it's also interesting that among the Muay Thai techniques even visible in the trailer (and some Krabi Krabong? not sure), there are really traditional techniques that are hard to find even in texts nowadays. They were the moves made illegal in the ring because of the potential for massive injury - kind of like how Japanese jujitsu competitions were done away with altogether in favor of the safer judo, I suppose, now that I think about it.
-pic from Cassini; I'll confess that it took me a little while to figure out what was going on in the photo, but it's cool; I'm still interested in what that probe going down to Titan is going to show, though.... (via Kevin)
-Paper Airplane Designs - haven't really tried any except the Blimp, which was cute, and the Swallow, which I just realized what I should have changed to make it fly better, but there's still many more to fill up procrastination time
As much as I enjoy a good football game (of either variety) or late-night volleyball or what, there's one big reason I enjoy martial arts more: it makes me think. The other night for example, my brain was definitely using way more calories than my body. We weren't even using our bodies very much - the only thing that was sore afterwards were my deltoids. I got hungry in the same way I do when I'm trying to piece together a term paper, the kind of hungry where I need to eat to maintain my thought process where it needs to be. Furthermore, beyond just wrapping my mind around the concept at hand, I was trying to tell my body to apply it - or rather, to let my body just do it, which takes its own kind of mental effort.
Tangentially, the almost three hours of workout today was interesting in and of itself. We had a karate/wing chun person, a taekwondo person, a kenpo person, a kickboxing/aikido person (not sure what the hell to label myself striking-wise), and a kickboxing person (who, absolutely tangentially, was totally hot). So with all these people with training in different disciplines, there was a noticeable range of styles, with each person moving entirely differently. It was crazy, I tell you.
Alexander - the Great waste of three hours. I'm not even sure where to start. There was no character development whatsoever (seriously, anything where they have to tell you straight off the bat that he's Great, rather than showing you...). In that vein, none of the other characters were developed much at all, unless you count mascara boy or the psychotic mother. Furthermore, for a movie about Alexander the Great, there were only two battle scenes; while I grinned that they had Alexander use a supercool falcata (yay kukri stylin'!), every military and otherwise (building cities, reform, &c) accomplishment was pretty much a spot on the map and a few seconds worth of narration. I'm not sure whether the nude scene was a rape, the constant dude-dude sexual tension would have probably been a lot less uncomfortable had they actually consummated something, and there were so many Oedipal and Freudian things laid on thick in the beginning of the movie it was like the Xuemei's cake that collapsed from too much frosting. The couple interesting points for me were the visuals of Babylon, the costuming and other aspects of the Persian and Indian armies, and the random Voldo dance. I don't know what the hell was with that.
-as referenced in Red vs Blue, I bring you: the Turducken. (via Wyatt)
In watching The Incredibles, I was struck by how they integrated really old-school style heroes into a modern context, and I mean really made them a part of it - they had to interact within a system with consequences, &c &c. Yes, it was cartoonish, hell it was a cartoon, but it seemed to me a great deal better than the other old way of doing superheroes, who are practically a context unto themselves. I can't really speak for anything recent, given my self-imposed exile from comic book stores, but I do remember improving trends like Gen13 2.0 practically having its plot initiated by 9-11, and some of the X-Men comics playing more active roles and reacting to governments such as the EU.
And yeah I think that's cool, and that it's a real upgrade to a nice place (balancing superhero-ness and interaction with context), but all in all I always preferred the ones that I knew of that went entirely over to the context side of things: Aberrant, which led into Aeon Trinity. These were games published by White Wolf that had a somewhat standard premise of mutation leading to supernatural abilities, but went an entirely different route. The only thing resembling superheros in Aberrant were viciously satirized, almost like Marvel's X-Statix but with more than just a focus on the media-angle; eventually, (following the-most-dangerous-thing-that-can-happen-to-a-people-is-a-Hero theme in Dune) the "Aberrants" are almost the cause of an apocalypse and are exiled, inverting a number of the usual themes. From there, the focus on the philisophical questions of being supernatural in Aberrant lead to the practical superceding of context-over-"hero," where even the supernatural soldiers supposedly fighting for the good side are almost certainly anti-heroes, and the only good is a lesser evil with the best chance of surviving. I mean, you can't beat that kind of stuff (in my opinion anyway).
-who's up for foraging with me? I know ocotilla flowers taste like honeysuckle and prickly pear pears taste kind of like cranberries off the top of my head, but what else is there? I bet there's a huge amount. Oh palo verde seeds can be used like pine nuts..hmm...
Odd idea concerning the nature of the characters in Alias that connects to my thesis - the characters in Frank Herbert's Dune function as heroes because of their supernatural qualities, but at the same time (while a shallow reading of the text makes it seem otherwise) whatever romanticization they have is stripped from them. For every beyond-normal quality they have, the hours of work and pain and discipline are detailed, implying that yes, even you Mr. Joe Reader could hypothetically become like this. While none of the characters in Alias have supernatural qualities, they certainly behave in a beyond-the-norm manner - their actions take on heroic proportions. Even still, Joe Viewer can apply to the CIA, or can take martial arts, or can take a language or acting course. So the characters of each are at the same time epic in nature and just like you and me - we can identify with them and look up to them simultaneously.
-wasn't there something about cell phone bombs on CSI: Miami the other night? (via Wyatt)
-Nuclear Terrorism - being able to center a map of a blast zone on a zip code is cool, but I wish they'd also lay out likely targets in that regard as well so I would know where to avoid on principle (via Kevin)
Xuemei's getting-into-med-school-celebration Meal:
-fried chicken and baked chicken (Italian style)
-Chinese greens with garlic
-West Lake soup (beef, cilantro, green onions, egg (flowered))
-sparkling cider and sparkling cranberry juice
-crack muffins of doom
+
Xuemei's nice meal of the day:
-ribs (Cantonese sauce)
-Chinese greens with garlic
-soup (ribs, straw mushrooms, thick noodles, cabbage)
-rice
-interesting article on fitness in Western history
-I figured out where I was attracted to Marguerite Moreau before the Easy trailer - she was in Queen of the Damned! Ok so I was excited about this at four in the morning.
Here's the dream I had this morning. I was in a deli with my mom and my aunts and uncles, but everyone except for my mom was acting, well, slightly oddly. Then I heard screams from somewhere in the distance outside of the deli, and got a really bad feeling. As my relatives started arguing in the usual Arab manner, I turned to see shadows and then velociraptors in the shadowy back of the deli. My relatives saw them as well, but just turned and stared at my mom and I, so I grabbed her hand and pulled her out of the building. In the space between the deli and another building, which turned out to be an odd bank, I don't remember much except the running sensation, overcast skies, and it sounding like something in between dead quiet and catastrophe.
In the bank was a hysterical, skinny employee, wringing his hands at his inability to lock the front door, which oddly was a really loose wooden affair with two doors that could swing in or out. So I set to work with a nail and two pieces of thick wire trying to connect the doors in the middle and hold them together, all the while hearing dull, heavy roars from the distance. I looked up through the window and saw more raptors stalking around outside, so got my mom again and pulled an odd dream thing where it felt like running up and running down stairs simultaneously. The front door smashed open and the teller screamed, and I looked back to see human shaped shadows following us, and heard my relatives' voices, and then one of the shadows paused, and out of its face blossomed a multitude of long tongues, then my cell rang and I woke up. Soo....Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Jurassic Park, and something Lovecraftian going on?
-amazing detailing of a Tokyo underground that manages floodwaters; somewhere in there is an animation of how it works
The Incredibles was some great fun. As much as I've always been a proponent of leathers over spandex in superhero-style, I think I finally get the appeal of the other side now. Fantastic action and feats are like crack to me, and this movie was chock full of them; which isn't to say that it didn't have several registers of dialogue and characters operating at the same time, as well. It just wouldn't have been the quality it was otherwise, in my opinion.
Tangentially, I suppose I need to qualify my enjoyment of the implausible doings to avoid being called out for past rants. Ironically, for me they're valid when they're within reason. xXx made me inordinately angry, for example. Besides its other poor qualities, the action based on what was supposedly just an extreme sports star suddenly doing superhuman things, not to mention his ease of transition into his new killing role in life just made for a boring character. I mean, near the beginning his motorcycle spontaneously pops up to the level of a guard tower and I'm dropping that before I get started.
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Hero, on the other hand, pulled off the flying and whatnot for me. While the kung fu of the characters can in no way account for some of what they pull off, the films' roots in romanticized stories and as a reference to any story of back-in-the-day kung fu masters negates that.
-------
In the latest National Geographic, there is an article on the Okavango Delta. Not much to say, except that this delta doesn't end in a body of water...it just trails off into the middle of a desert. I dunno, that just seems rich with meaning; there's more in the article in that regard, on the nature of water within the ecosystem and the integral reliance on flora and fauna for the nature of the delta. Also, cultural detail, like a local poem: "I am the river. My surface gives you life. Below is death."
+ unrelated, trivia-laced tattoo article
"To say I in English is a normal, nearly imperceptible form of self-expression, a convention of thought and syntax; but in Spanish, the iteration of yo quickly turns into an exercise in narcissism." - There's a lot more to this passage, but I thought it was interesting as an example of inherent differences in languages. It seemed kind of indicative of the "thought doesn't determine language, language determines thought" idea.
In the same class where I read that passage, it was interesting that almost everyone in the class were immigrants or had parents who were immigrants or some other very close connection in that regard. I had no idea that it would be the very few people who didn't have stories to share rather than the converse; even the cute Natalie Portman-lookalike was half-Lebanese (and that proves so far that half-Arabs are consistently cute...haven't met an unattractive one yet...).
-I now also feel more justified in liking J Lo
(needs revision)
Suicide, attempted.
-
I got there in the afternoon,
but the room was
dark.
He stared at the ceiling, and cried quietly,
soft gasps and sobs, unrestrained;
his skin seemed too weathered to absorb the tears.
I rested my forearms on my elbows, watched the tile floor.
He spoke, I listened.
He hadn't always been a construction worker;
his calluses caressed calluses while he looked at his hands.
He would steal morphine from pharmacies to buy drugs
How?
Through the ceiling.
His father would make him wait while he made it.
Made what?
What he was going to beat me with.
His third wife left him almost thirty years ago
Why?
He was too boring.
I cocked my head to the side.
He said:
I've been sober for twenty-eight years.
I don't remember it, I blacked out.
The detective looked at me through the bars.
I almost killed a little girl and her mother.
The detective said, "Fuck you."
My head tipped back, and I watched the ceiling.
The room was dark.
In the spirit of getting a Brazilian jujitsu book that finally was on sale down to ten dollars (I know, the sacrilege etc, I need the reference though), I figured hey why not review what I already have. For example, Jiu Jitsu by "Professor" Robert Clark. The cover bills it as 'The Black Belt Syllabus' and 'The Official World Jiu Jitsu Federation Training Manual.' Which I might have cared about if there was any effort at explaining what the hell that means, because it's actually denigrating in my mind without any reference. I mean, he spells the name of the martial art like the Brazilians usually do, but the book is obviously for Japanese jj, not that he ever indicates that he is operating with either. In fact, the terminology he uses for the throws seems to be coming from old school Western wrestling, or somewhere less sensical, and is just confusing if not misleading.
The technique sequences are stiff and stilted, and the pictures are little aid to the small amount of textual explanation, and as such often require deciphering. There is no explanation of principle whatsoever, and the pins range from esoteric to doesn't-actually-quite-work-like-that. The one somewhat useful section is a short survey of mid-range strikes and a few drills for chaining them together, though even that seems to be taken from a generic karate style.
For the complete opposite of all that, there are Small-Circle Jujitsu by Wally Jay (the closest school to Ko Sho jj I know of), and, to a lesser extent, Jujitsu: Intermediate Techniques of the Gentle Art by George Kirby. Basically I don't feel like writing the opposite of everything I already wrote.
-fun clock
-Cave Hunter - can't figure out why it's called that, but hey it's kinda fun. The most interesting part, as Wyatt pointed out, is that in some ways it plays with what one might define as "up," especially when you try to figure out what the original "up" was after progressing a a ways (via Wyatt)
Whenever I come back from trips I usually feel a momentary dislocation; that is, I recognize everything, but as if I had stepped sideways, if anyone out there gets that reference. When I came back from New Jersey, oddly, I didn't really get the feeling from location; I think to me New Jersey is place made up more of people than terrain; the cute copper-skinned girl working the counter at my Aunt Maha's deli is much more vivid than the fog-shrouded walls of trees and dilapidated brick buildings. When I come back from the Mojave or, as per this time, the foothills north of the Catalinas, however, my family's neighborhood and then the university are off kilter. That feeling always makes me suspicious for a while, like I'm looking through someone else's eyes, but they're sitting right next to me.
Peppersauce Canyon was certainly different than the day to day norm. Its silly name belies the general harshness of the area. At the same time, contrarily, it was gorgeous, if only for moments. Half of the ridges are sunbaked, nothing but grass and cactus, though when the dawn hits them they go from blue to rose to orange and gold. Their shady lee sides are generally generously coated in stunted mesquite and cats-claw ("Ow! Why the OW hell are OW the thoOWrns curved? Don't they OW want to OW keep the herbiOWvores away? Hey look I'm bleeding" - Wyatt). Oh, and also century plants, like the one that thrust the spiny tip of one of its spears in the way of my fingertip (and my bodyweight behind it) as I fell. Sonuvabitch that hurt. And bled, profusely. The ravines between the higher ridges were alternately dense scrub and juniper or what seemed to be a fire-blasted wasteland of the same. The tree-skeletons were elegantly dead in most cases, however, bonewhite on one side and coal black on the other for the most part. From the highest ridges and peaks (did I mention we covered a huge amount of ground?) there's a view of a valley big enough to hold another city in, mirroring Tucson to the north, with a similar northern range of mountains bounding it in the distance. Moonless night and before dawn were also interesting, if only aurally; coyotes were distinctly and periodically present, and the thundery crashing and stamping was revealed to be cattle when the sun came up. There was also the shrieking bark that paralled us for some distance in the darkness (no, it wasn't coyotes, they were barking a different bark at the same time), that was kind of worrisome for a bit.
One of the last places we found by tracking a group of deer up and down several ravines was a sort of deer-Shangri La (or at least seemed so, judging by the Grand Central Station of tracking marks we found). There was an incredibly dense shadow-ridge perfect for bedding down, but staying high for look-out-age. Opposite that was its equivalent, sun-ridge style, and at the bottom there was a riparian area with a relatively steady spring. The only trick about that ravine was this gargantuan skirling, swirling wind that was funneled through it in the afternoon. We could actually hear it eddying and spiraling long before it got to each of our respective places, and we could track it by sound well enough to brace just before each wave blasted whatever tree we were hunkered down behind. The weather's odd 'behind' the Catalinas, let me tell you.
-mmm come to daddy...
-how to throw cards (also some reviews of unusual knives)
happy fun movie trailer time yay.
Monster-in-Law - So I click on this, thinking it'll be a dumb kid's movie or somesuch, and yeah it did turn out to look kind of dumb, but in the interest of ethical procrastination I clicked 'play.' And then I actually yelled out loud. Lo and behold, it has one of my most favorite actors (Michael Vartan) and one of my...favorite people to look at, to be frank....redundantly Frank, I suppose. I don't care if it looks stupid I'm seeing it damnit. It's the principle of the thing.
Easy - This one also looks good, but actually solidly good. That, and I'm already kind of crushing on Marguerite Moreau. And she has a cool name. Interestingly, IMDB says it was made in 2003, and the one reviewer was somewhat weakly scathing, but based on his lack of coherence, feh.
Closer - Like the first movie, I'm seeing it because I like Clive Owen and I think Natalie Portman is totally cute. But this one, like the second movie, also looks pretty good. And if the trailer music is hopefully any indication, I'm buying the soundtrack. Xuemei, tangentially, has already claimed Jude Law as her boyfriend and will probably be dragged along, if anyone else wants to come for their own random reasons.
Elektra, unfortunately, looks to be about as good as the movie that spawned it. As much as I think Jennifer Garner is great, I'm going to stay wary about this one.
-also, House of Flying Daggers is actually coming stateside apparently, and under its proper name, and not the stupid Japanese release name. This is cool.
"What is a poet? An unhappy man who in his heart harbors a deep anguish, but whose lips are so fashioned that the moans and cries which pass over them are transformed into ravishing music...And men crowd about the poet and say to him, "Sing for us soon again" - which is as much to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul, but may your lips be fashioned as before; for the cries would only distress us, but the music, the music is delightful." And the critics come forward and say, "That is perfectly done - just as it should be, according to the rules of aesthetics." Now, it is understood that a critic resembles a poet to a hair; he only lacks the anguish in heart and the music upon his lips. I tell you, I would rather be a swineherd, understood by the swine, than a poet misunderstood by men."
- haven't finished thinking that one over, but it's pretty, and also:
'"Do you wish for youth," said Mercury, "or for beauty, or power, or a long life; or do you wish for the most beautiful woman, or any other of the many fine things we have in our treasure trove? Choose, but only one thing!" For a moment I was at a loss. Then I addressed the gods in this wise: "Most honorable contemporaries, I choose one thing—that I may always have the laughs on my side."'
- Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
The Order of the Stick - I promised myself I wouldn't get stuck reading another slew of webcomic archives. But this one is funny. Okay, to qualify, it's funny if you have any knowledge of D+D; otherwise it's probably nonsensical.
So Xuemei explained to me that muscle knots come in two types: the small, hard ones you feel when massaging someone are from lactic acid, whereas other knots are from muscle fibers tangling. For some reason this messes with me (I think that I didn't realize muscle cells could almost literally knot up), but I suppose it might be useful information when it comes to yoga'ing out painful points. Though I could also really go for a shoulder rub now.
-mmm vocab (that I've run into in the course of today's thesis research)
nepenthe - A drug used by the ancients to give relief from pain andsorrow; supposed by some to have been opium or hasheesh; hence, anything soothing and comforting
aporetic - inclined to doubt, or to raise objections
pharmakon - can mean both remedy and poison
sinthome - uh-huh and riiight
-and quotes
"Unlike Virginia Woolf's precarious somersaults out of the real..."
and also
"...how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank while Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming, and blood spurted everywhere in crimson torrents, and Boob was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain"
vs
"...how i wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats"
Hanshi Anderson had his (twice?)yearly seminar today. Crazy 72 year-old badass. I got the dubious honor of being used for a demonstration (the senior teachers are usually used, like the one shaven-headed teacher who's bruises were perfectly visible all over his scalp); held in an armbar, I got double-tapped in the eyeball with an elbow-forearm. Sooo cross-eyed. We also skimmed a Wado-ryu kata, a Korean form (Steven has a super-similar tang soo do form apparently), and a short Chinese form. All of which was very, very confusing to the guy with no training in forms beyond five movements. But: there were also the taiho techniques that they train Air Marshalls with, which are basically jujitsu, which let me redeem myself somewhat from my earlier awkward following-along. By causing other people pain. Like the big jerk with the tattoo'ed arms and tight shoulders. Good times.
----tangent: Hanshi Anderson thinks yoga is great. ha.
-quick procrastination; and it actually flaps
-the sad part is that I don't think I can dance that well
The Lonely Crossing of Juan Cabrera - by J. Joaquin Fraxedas. The style of this has been likened to Hemingway, but for lack of experience I couldn't one way or the other on this. It is emotionally moving and aesthetically pleasing to read, although at some moments depressing, and at one point just disturbing. I'd call it a short epic, detailing the variegated aspects of emigrating from Cuba to the United States.
-Catch Wrestling techniques - this...is an odd set of techniques. Some are variants of what I've learned, or are clever ways of using favorite techniques that I never would have thought of, such as 'armlock2.' Some I remember from back in the day but totally forgot, like 'keylock.' And many of the others seem a bit esoteric, but do-able. I think. Who wants to try?
-Implosion World - seriously, how can anyone resist stuff blowing up
My poetry teacher told me something that stuck today - that sometimes our greatest strength is our greatest weakness. In my poetry this is apparently my facility with creating tone and revealing emotion; the trick is, I pretty much only do that through figurative language and lyricism or meditative poems. Thus, I need to express the same things through more concrete details, and trust in my strength to carry itself through rather than overemphasizing it.
As I walked home, I thought about a similarity in my martial arts training. One of my strengths is my control; usually I'm as precise and effecient as I can be in my techniques. The trick is, this often leads me to holding back (controlling my technique so I don't hurt the other person, but to the point where the technique doesn't work), or conversely when I finally do let myself go, the other person is almost inevitably injured or hurt. I think basically I need to find that balance between conscious control and cutting loose.
-article on lifting the arms properly; this immediately helped with poses for putting my clicky shoulder back into place
As much as I am wary of higher end literary theory and the difficulties in understanding that it implies, I liked the way the teacher explained why the writing is sometimes...odd. She said that the concepts being discussed require a different sort of syntax than just a straight out explanation, involving metaphors and figurative language. Which also reminds me of the philisophy classes I took; the language seemed insane, partly because of translation in a few cases, I think, but also because the things being discussed just couldn't be described in regular, everyday language. Which is doubly weird in my mind, because that might mean that the figurative language needed can apply directly to sciences in some cases, such as Searle's involvement with artificial intelligence.
-Art of Daryl Mandryk
-Preserving Amerind languages
-more crazy origami
The next new favorite conditioning exercise: I've read about them as 'tiger pushups,' but hadn't really tried them till the new head instructor set us to them, with the backing evidence that supposedly Bruce Lee liked them. On hands and knees, put the soles of your feet flat against a wall. Lift your hips into an approximation of downward-dog pose. Then, keeping your body in that upside-down 'V,' do pushups by touching your nose to the floor. Say hello to an upper-pec workout, along with body awareness conditioning (very easy to get almostvertigo during the bottom of the motion, at least for me).
Secondarily, there are also regular pushups done facing another person; on each up, reach out and slap hands at face-level, alternating sides.
Thirdly, I don't remember who came up with it in the class, but get another person across your back for a full-hip throw, and start doing squats (can also be an indicator for the lifted person if abs need to be worked). The Honbu variation is apparently to walk from corner to corner of the mats while in that position. Our variation includes interspersing hops during the squats.
Also, Scott found a great site for parkour (+ Q of the N); at the bottom of that page there is their description of 'flow.' That immediately clicked in my head - it's also the overriding principle/ideal aspiration of jujitsu and some other martial arts (aikido, perhaps hapkido?) in being able to flow without hesitation between techniques as needed on the fly. Ah, connections.
-So this girl can't feel pain. That's crazy and all, but here's Kevin's doublecrazy question: without pain, can she really appreciate pleasure? Whoa. (via Kevin, natch)
-Tea tree oil and citrus listerine is absolutely vile, but if you take it like a shot and gargle it seems to instantly get rid of sore throat-age.
-Blanc Fonce - art
-sculpting geometry - art for math nuts
So. Um. Cousin Taryn's wedding. My Big Fat Greek Wedding (no, seriously in some regards) + Janet Evanovich + Arabic + crowds and crowds of relatives + rave-like reception. The cousins whom I hadn't seen (or for some, met ever) in ten years ranged from elementary cutie-patooties, to sorority/frat drunks, to cool composition-at-Boston music school, to sports-car-chic-job-Paris-party vs ambitions-centered-on-richest-husband possible, to friendly Jersey girls, and to crazy New Age. And there were also the people trying to set me up with the odd looking Texan. The bride's maids from the groom's side were fat, and danced crazylike, but did a credible dance from 'Thriller.' Uncle Johnny and Aunt Maha were back to their normal selves. Threatening to kill each other. And the intro from 'Misirlou' on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack was accidentally played as they set up for carrying the new couple around on chairs to Arabic chants. And there was a crazy giant circle dance. And my mom pointed out that unlike cousin Kelly's wedding, no drunken Arabs got into brawls. So, all in all, it was kind of scary, but fun.
-mmmmbahaha.
-reminds me of the original GI Joe rocket that almost hit the neighbor (via Wyatt)
