A long time ago I read an article that described using one's martial art every day. Basically, a student asked his teacher whether he had ever used his martial arts training; the teacher replied that he had only once used it in self-defense, and in that case it was only to restrain a mentally ill person - but he still maintained that he used it everyday. The perplexed student questioned him in this regard, whereupon the teacher responded by saying that he used the principles of his art in every day social situations (the article went on to describe specific examples of conflict management &c). So the reason I thought of this was because in the middle of philosophy today (which can basically be characterized here) I realized the teacher was kind of doing it. I seriously doubt he does any martial arts, but I recognized him blending with what people were saying by repeating their arguments in different words, then turning it around on them. Or, if someone just wasn't getting what he was saying, he flowed from the example he was using smoothly into another.

      Somewhat tangentially, the head instructor at the dojo used an interesting analogy today: the ABC's. When one learns them, one sings them in their specific order, and then learns to put them together to make words, and words to sentences, &c. So kata/forms are kind of like the original song; then you take the component parts out as needed. The words in this case are variously, say, boxing combinations, or karate hand/foot combinations, or counter vs counter in jujitsu. Then, stringing the words together forms conversation, which is another common analogy. Or this could be taken through many threads, that's one right there at any rate.

House of Flying Daggers, aka Ambush from Ten Sides in China, aka Lover in Japan; with Ziyi Zhang, Kaneshiro Takeshi, and Andy Lau. The martial arts were top notch, and even the sleeve thing which vaguely irritated me at first had its own sort of consummation. Kaneshiro was a pleasant surprise, and interestingly his Mandarin was also surprisingly skilled. In that lingual regard, apparently the inherent meaning of this movie wasn't so lost in translation as in Hero, but just some shadings of the flirtations and lovers' proclamations were distorted. The consensus in regards to Ziyi was that she wasn't even so annoying as the normal distractingly irritating; she didn't even flare her nostrils once, but Michelle did note some twitching of the ears. *spoiler* I thought it was interesting that Lau's character was the only male associated with a seemingly all-female society, in that if you took the thready thread of that making him obliquely feminine, what does that say about the feminine in the movie? Though I suppose I should probably stay away from any genderific pondering; I mean, hey, I still like and enjoy Kill Bill ;).

Xuemei's Nice Meal of the Day:
-tofu noodle, chicken, mushroom and cabbage stirfry
-firm tofu and broccoli stirfy
-wonton, mushroom, and cilantro soup

-some useful tips on yoga-style bridging, well at the beginning and end, basically; now I'd love it if someone found something similar for me for a wrassler's bridge

-what a great setting for a skiffy story; tangentially, I hope someone can come up with a simple, non-physics way of explaining to me what happens when a singularity falls into a singularity - there seems something kind of boggling about the idea of that

-cavemen vs dinosaurs: round one! - okay yeah that is entirely misleading but there are mammals involved

-I demand there be more research on sprites and elves (via Wyatt)

-it probably doesn't help that I'm hungry (and they're from Belgium! crazy.)