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

Word of the Day: persiflage - light teasing; banter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

twelve med students - cute comic from Xuemei

...but is it a candy bar?

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

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

the periodic Movies that Seem Interesting:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

design cycles - I like the BMW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art by Howard Lyon

Art by Karen Petrasko

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tale of Smith - eerie, interesting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trebuchet Challenge - kind of Tron crossed with medieval artillery

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