Randoms.

What a strange, odd night. Besides the initial, somewhat flustering and blink-inducing news, class went fine...except for all of us being physically messed up. Kevin gets props for being hardcore in the final grappling rounds, though his body handed him a nice adrenal dump afterwards. Michael gets props for learning what happens when the aggresion of Western wrestling runs into the yielding of jujitsu, though his shoulder is probably going to be swollen after he set himself up for a beautifully executed pile-drive right onto it. Hugh gets props for climbing nearly every day this week, and pushing himself to the point of killing both his biceps anyway. And I messed up my shoulder, again, pretty much leaving my right arm annoyingly useless, and I'm so ashamedly out of shape I've got sore spots on my torso an knots in my posterior hips (ok seriously this time, who wants to rub my butt?). Then we get home, and Ms Kim shows us how a 65 pound dog went loco at work at pretty much mangled her poor legs; I've not seen such big bruises with so many colors since the hospital. So props to her for still being relatively polite to the client in the middle of all that.

An anti-ode to bullthorns. Note my restraining myself from any sort of profanity or expletives. I'm not sure what they're actually called, but that's what Ms Xuemei called them many years ago, and it's stuck and propagated ever since. These little seeds are basically nature's caltrop, pointy in a blunt way no matter how they're oriented. The plant they spawn from is a weed that sticks completely flat to the ground in a viney form, clinging tenaciously even after herbicide has long killed it. I'm not sure which is worse, the seeds' tendency to stick to footwear, and then ambush bare feet later on in the house, or walking outside with bare feet and planting both soles into the center of a plant (which inevitably has a wide diameter, so stepping back off of it means stepping on even more bullthorns). So here's a big honking middle finger to you, Mr Plant.

Three, I don't know why I thought of this, but some self-exposition on the name I use for the blog, Jinn, in terms of what it's referencing, in different senses. One, djinn from Islamic folklore. Two, the word "jin" in its various definitions in Japanese. And three, that definition of "jin" contrasted with its use as a term in bonsai.

Interesting time-based map