Friday, September 30, 2005
Coach... coach... coach?
Some weeks ago
I posted about college football coaches, and the way they can turn around a floundering program. It's fun when Charlie Weis goes to Notre Dame and immediately takes them back to the top 10, or when Urban Meyer has Florida thinking undefeated after several years of mediocrity. Unfortunately, instant coaching turn arounds work both ways, a fact I was reminded of while watching a bit of TV Friday night, and stumbling onto Pitt @ Rutgers.
Pitt's new coach is Dave Wanndstedt, ex of of the NFL, where
he never won anything. Pitt was coming off of several respectible seasons, and went 8-4 last year, winning the Big East and earning a spot in a BCS Bowl Game (where they were
atomized by undefeated Utah, in Urban Meyer's last game before heading off to Florida). They were greedy though, and didn't renew their old coach's contract since they had their eyes in Wanndstedt, who was a local boy and who they hoped would take their football program to the top.
Well, he's taking them somewhere; they're now 1-4 on the season, their only victory came over a Division 2 school, and when I turned on the game Friday night they were losing to the perennially-dreadful Scarlet Knights of Rutgers by a score of 27-0 at the half. Pitt looked slow, disinterested, and uncoached on both offense and defense, and I thought their QB had perhaps the weakest throwing arm I'd ever seen at a major football school. His lefty passes were going out like shotputs, with no zip and a strange sidearmed sort of throwing motion. I figured he was injured or filling in for an injured starter, but I see by
the final box score that he's their
regular QB (though not a very good one), and that Pitt managed a few touchdowns in the second half and made the score respectible, and that their QB threw the ball 60 times for decent yardage. So I guess he's just always like that, and has found a way to be successful with it. Unlike his coach.
Wanndstedt may yet turn things around this year, or next year, and there's no way they can fire him after just one year, given how much they paid him to come coach there. It usually takes time to recruit players and remake a college team, and what with
Pete Carroll's current dynasty run at USC, every college will be looking to hire an NFL coach for their magic pixie dust of success.
Fun with Kali
I've not posted about Kali lately, so bear with me, since Gura's getting married next weekend, and she's (understandably) taking a couple of weeks off for the occasion. I'll be jonesing for it, and pestering Malaya to play some, and maybe even driving way the hell down south to a class or two at Tuhan's house. But that's for next week, and the week after. For now, I'd like to recount the fun class I had last night.
There were but three students; me and two guys who have been doing it for 2 and 3x as long as I have, and while they're better than me at most everything, I'm close enough that we can all work on the same stuff and interact somewhat evenly. That's one nice thing about Kali the way we do it; a 4th year student can go full speed with a brand new student, and both can get something out of the exercise. The new guy is just learning the basics, while the older student is doing those, but working in advanced techniques while still keeping the rhythm and form. Triple punches and kicks and elbows, along with the basic single punch the beginner is working on, for example.
Anyway, with three of us in class Gura had us do numerado with a wide variety of weapons. Numerado is basically a controlled type of sparring, where one person leads and the other follows. The lead initiates each exchange, always swinging first. The follow counters or parries the attack, lands a counterattack, and then waits for the next attack. It gets far more complicated, of course, with pace changes, sneaky lead attacks that you try to land with misdirection, combos, change ups, constant attacks without pause in between, and so on, but the basic form is one person throws and the other follows, rather than you both hitting at the same time, or going without any preset sequence, as in actual sparring. Leading is much less work, in numerado, and it's nice with three people since you sit out a turn, then follow and get tired, then lead and cool off, then sit out one, and so on.
We did that with, in order: stick vs. stick -- stick vs. open hand -- stick vs. double stick -- stick and dagger vs. stick and dagger -- double stick vs. double stic, and were just starting broadsword vs. double stick when 9 o'clock rolled around and it was time to quit (not that I or the other two guys had any desire to do so, since we were having a blast).
I could go into a long discussion of every permutation, how I did and didn't do, what the other guys were better and worse at, and so on, but eh... The most interesting thing for me was the double stick, since as I've blogged in the past, that's the weapon(s) that I most enjoy using, and that I feel the most natural affinity for. I like staff a lot too, actually, but we hardly ever use that, largely due to space reasons.
Anyway, after watching me do double stick vs. stick, and then double stick vs. double stick, Gura said that I looked the most natural, relaxed, patient, balanced, comfortable, etc that she'd ever seen me in Kali, and yes, that includes when I'm going open hand. Which, you'll note, doesn't mean I was great with double stick. Just that I was more relaxed and better with it than I am the rest of the time.
It's funny, since I've spent far, far, far more class time with single stick than double stick, and I don't work on doublestick all that much alone, or with Malaya, and yet I fully agreed with Gura. I do feel more comfortable with two sticks than with one, or none, and when I'm going smoothly I get into a mood where they aren't just sticks I'm holding in my hands, but are more like extensions of my arms. I don't feel them all the way to the tips yet, but I'm getting close, and I'm far closer with them than I am with just one stick, which seems illogical.
The trick, as Gura told me, is to transfer my confidence and comfort with double stick to all other types of Kali. Single stick, sword, knife, open hand, staff, etc. It's not possible to be equally good with everything, since everyone's got something they prefer or dislike a bit, but Kali is meant to make you a weapons master, and for that you need to have the same ease and control with any weapon (or none at all) that you do with your favorite. It's sort of a state of mind, or a type of confidence. You know you can do it, you've done it with a different weapon, so you just do. It's not about memorizing weapon lengths or weights or endless drills or anything like that; it's all about improvisation and having control over your body to do what you want it to do, no matter what sort of tool you've got in your hand. Tuhan dragged a shovel out of his tool shed at a past workshop and proceeded to dominate with it. A big ass heavy dirt-clotted shovel he'd never fought with before, against guys using sticks they'd handled every day for the past few years.
I can sort of see how that works at this point, but I'm far from putting it into practice. Of course we also get better with a given weapon the more we use it, but there are basic principles of movement and form and technique that transfer across all weapons. Students often make a breakthrough with one weapon, or empty hand, and then find that their new ability to fight very close with short punches (for example) translates perfectly to stick, or dagger, and that they can basically use those weapons in the same way they were using their arms in open hand. Finesse learned with open hand translates directly to the broadsword; fast swings and hard hits learned with stick translates to open hand, and so on.
As always with Kali, the theory is far easier to grasp than the actual. Anyway, class was a lot of fun, I enjoyed working with a variety of weapons quickly, and by doing that I could see how they translated across. People were trying or seeing others do things with double stick that they'd never thought of, and then taking those moves and using them with single stick, or with stick and dagger. Which is just what Gura wanted us to do, I'd imagine.
As for my Kali, it's odd, but I'm now far better attacking than I am defending. I was throwing for the best student there (and he was throwing for the 2nd best, who was throwing for me when we rotated and my turn came up), one who has excellent offense and defense, and that was a challenge. I could get in some hits, but only by being very sneaky and deceptive and clever. I could hardly touch him with single stick, though I had some luck with stick/dagger, and double stick. As I was landing my hits though, or watching him block combos I didn't think he could possibly have survived, I realized that I would have been nearly helpless against the battery of attacks I was using. If I'd been fighting myself, I wouldn't have had a chance and I would have had to turn down the difficulty of my attacks quite a bit to keep the numerado session interesting.
That was far from news, since I've worked with that student and others in the past, used tricky moves to get hits, and then watched them use it against me and score hits more easily than I did when I used it in the first place. You'd think that knowing how to do the attacks, and inventing many of them up in the first place, would make me able to block them. And I do, in theory, but getting the body to flow and react and do what I need it to do quickly enough is quite another thing. At this point pretty much any complicated or tricky combo will get through my defense, and while I'm improving, (I don't walk into simple attacks hardly at all, anymore.) my offense is improving as well, and more quickly.
I'm sure there's a Kali lesson in there as well; a parallel to the "translate your skill with double stick to other weapons" one. If I can do the moves, why can't I block them? I'm not (often) facing something that I've never seen, or that I don't know how to do myself. And I'm not being beaten by speed or power. So is it all mental? How much of it is muscle memory and control? And if I master the "see it/do it" principle, can that be applied to other physical endeavors? I can juggle 3 or 4 balls, which means I know the principle to juggle 5 or 6 or 7 or more. So why can't I do it? Could I if I believed I could? Do or do not, there is no try?
(Actually, with juggling it's all about the throw. Catching them is easy; you've just got to gain enough skill in your hands to make the throws consistently the same height and distance and angle, so the ball comes down within reach of your hand. Juggling five balls isn't really that much harder than three; you've just got to throw them a bit higher so you keep your hands don't have to move super fast. It's just that a higher throw means a harder throw, which means that any slight inaccuracy is multipled by the greater height up and then the longer fall back down. And no, I don't think it's mental; it's muscle memory training to get your hands to catch and release with nearly perfect accuracy, every single time. Perhaps a Kali/juggling master could convince me otherwise, though.)
Top Ten Creation Myths
Here's an educational article on Live Science that lists and ranks (based on nothing whatsoever) the
Top Ten Creation Myths. After all, since "Intelligent Design" is "science" based on Christian cosmology, and since some (Christian) people want it taught in place of actual science, it's only fair to consider some other creation myths, especially since most of them come from cultures and relgions that far predate Christianity. (Shouldn't we rank them by seniority? After all, why would the "one true god" wait thousands of years to reveal Himself and then provide a creation timeline that so totally contradicts observable facts?)
Needless to say, none of these myths are remotely plausible to any modern, educated, objective human, but it's interesting to compare them and see what you notice;
the Judeo/Christian one is easily the vaguest and least creative, for example. According to the Bible, some god just is, with no explanation for where he came from. One day he up and creates light and such, from nothing, and then he makes the earth and puts people on it and such. From there it gets more interesting, what with Eden and the talking snake and tree of knowledge and such, but on the whole it's a pretty impoverished myth, in comparison to most of the others.
Compare
the Hindu Cosmology, what with creator gods sprouting 1000 heads, hands, and feet, divine body parts turning into clarified butter, and universes with expirations dates set every 4.32 billion years. Wild! Take your seventh day of rest and shove it!
What I always wonder is how literally people believed in these myths, even back in ancient Summeria or Greece or whatever.
Norse Cosmology, for instance, has fiery lands and frozen lands before the current earth, which was formed from a dead god's body.
The sons rose up and killed Ymir and from his corpse created from his flesh, the Earth; the mountains from his bones, trees with his hair and rivers, and the seas and lakes with his blood. Within Ymir’s hollowed-out skull, the gods created the starry heavens.
It was obvious to the ancient Norse that mountains were not made of the same stuff as human bone, and that the oceans and rivers were not actually blood, etc. So did they take the myth as a cool story that explained something they lacked the science to even take a flying guess at? Or was it believed literally, and were ancient scientists/philosophers making up supporting myths about how Ymir's blood transubstantiated into both fresh and salt water, and how the stars actually formed the shape of the inside of a skull if you looked at them just right?
My natural inclination is to say that those ancient people had common sense and could see the obvious contradictions between their myth and reality, but given that plenty of modern humans can't manage the same trick, I may be giving our distant ancestors a bit too much credit.
As for the whole intelligent design being taught in schools issue, I of course think it's ridiculous that anyone would seriously consider it in science classes. As if American kids weren't dumb enough and the US weren't far enough behind the rest of the Western world in science already? Then again, if they just move the goalposts and change the entire definition of science and knowledge, perhaps we'll be in front again. You might do okay with the Kansas School Board, but good luck convincing your mathematical formulas that 2+2=5 once you're out in the real world, though.
More (and yet less) realistically though, I'm all for the teaching of religious creation tales in school; I'd just like them to be in a Humanities class, and to include at least the nine other cultural accounts in the aforementioned article. I'd love to see a teacher cover those stories of giant skull universes and serpent skirt goddesses and talking snakes and white bull semen being purified to create all the animals of the earth, and so on, and then at the end saying, "But of course we all know that the Christian story is the true one, since it's clearly so much more demonstrably-true than those other old(er) fairy tales. Most of the kids would just yawn and continue day dreaming about a new iPod or Ford Mustang, but wouldn't the few who actually paid attention have to start viewing the religion they inherited from their parents with a bit more skepticism?
Religion is bad for society?
It's hard to do much
with this article, since it's so vague about the methodologies of the survey in question, but it certainly makes for a provocative headline.
Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its "spiritual capital". But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.
The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: "Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.
"In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.
"The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so."
...
The study concluded that the US was the world's only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from "uniquely high" adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.
Hopefully this one will get some more media play (Though probably not in the US, where the media isn't so much "god-fearing" as is it "fearful of those who claim to be motivated by god.") and we can see some graphs and charts and figures, with which to properly evaluate the claims made. I do know that the US has the world's highest incarceration rate, and that most prisoners have less education than the population at large, and are also/therefore more likely to self describe themselves as religious.
Everything relates to everything else though, and the prison population is more about the lacking social safety net in the US, inequalities of race and class, and our ridiculous drug laws. I don't see religion, or lack thereof, as a major factor there. Not that my spur of the moment opinion is based on actual evidence, or anything.
Abortion is another interesting one, since I'd think a pretty direct connection could be made between level of sexual education, access to and knowledge of birth control, and abortion. After all, women who don't get pregnant virtually never have abortions, and if you know enough to use birth control you're unlikely to get pregnant. I recall reading that Russia used to have far and away the highest rate of abortions in the world, a fact that was directly tied to a chronic lack of birth control and nearly cost-free medical care, which included abortions. It had little or nothing to do with their believing or not believing in Christianity or any other religion.
Abortion, and unwanted pregnancies in general can also be tied directly to poverty, (as can incarceration rates, as mentioned above) and there is a huge permanent lower class in the US that I assume boosts the abortion rates. The flavor of Christianity many in the US favor certainly plays a part in that issue, since it discourages birth control and sex, and since people all through human history have inevitably had sex, no matter what their religion of choice said about it, the religious ones in the US just end up doing it secretly, guiltily, and without protection. Of course their religion says not to have abortions either, but... yeah. Eighteen years, and all that.
Anyway, it's a juicy issue for discussion and study, and I'm sure Christian researchers can and will chew up the same stats and facts and figures and come up with conclusions that directly oppose those of this study's author. Lies, damned lies, and statistics, after all.
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Cat Pursuit.
Jinx likes to run. Despite that inclination, she's not actually very good at it. Oh she's nimble, and she's got great acceleration, and a pretty good top speed. The part she's not very good at is path-finding, since she tends to crash into walls, jump too low and bounce off the front of the couch or the side of the bed, run full speed into the dead end hallway when the doors or closed, or back behind the couch when there's no other way out. Etc. She also tends to stop very quickly and for no apparent reason, a behavior that sometimes allows the slower Dusty to catch her, and one that has nearly gotten her squashed numerous times, when the two heavy-footed humans in her house occasionally indulge in her desire to be chased, and pursue her down the hallway.
The oddest "run Jinxie run" thing yet though, happened tonight.
She and Dusty have their yearly vet appointment tomorrow morning, so we've brought the two kitty carriers in from the storage closet. We leave the cages sitting out for a day or so before taking the cats anywhere, so they'll get used to the scent of the devices and not run at the sight of them. It works too; the cats don't show any fear of the cages, though that's more about their small brains than our clever behavior -- I think the cats just aren't smart enough to remember that those cages = travel in them in the car, even though they vigorously hate that experience.
The cages are sitting in the hallway, down near the bedroom and bathroom doors, and after watching hyper Jinxie charge around the living room, and grunt and race up and down the hallway a few times, I got up, and on my way to the bathroom I clapped and shuffled my feet and said, "Jinxiejinxiejinxie!" while charging her.
She leapt up and gave her little "Prrowrt brrout!" sound effect, and raced down the hallway, heading straight into the no-escape bathroom and jumped into the tub. When I rounded the corner on her heels and reached over to molest her in the tub, she leapt past me and ran... straight into the kitty carrier. Where she crouched down, as if I wouldn't see her.
Yes, this is the same cat that managed to avoid capture for a full half an hour the last time Malaya tried to bring her and Dusty back from Malaya's parents' house. And the same cat that will doubtless serenade Malaya all the way to and from the vet's office tomorrow, showing
her usual frantic desire to escape from the kitty carrier.
Is a cat's ability to be maddening and frustrating completely coincidental to their stupidity? Or a direct by-product? Sometimes it's hard to tell.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Yoga in Oz?
I have no idea
why this article about the growing popularity of yoga for men in Australia turned up on the US Yahoo most popular articles, but given my own newfound interest in the stretchy form of exercise, I had to read it. I'm not real fond of the whole "yoga is for metrosexual wimps" subtext of it either, but I suppose that's a reality for a "sport" that largely involves wearing tights, kneeling on a mat, and sticking your ass up in the air.
SYDNEY (AFP) - Increasing numbers of Australia's famously macho men are showing surprising metrosexual tendencies, ditching competitive exercise for the meditative calm of yoga.
"We are getting the rugby players, the body builders, the gym junkie guys," says yoga teacher Duncan Peak, a former parachute officer and first-grade rugby player.
"He now comes in here and gets humbled by the first posture."
It's also news to me that Australian men have such penis size issues. I thought that was strongest in the US (As the NRA, SUVs, and Hummers testify.) and macho countries like Spain, but I guess I'll have to add Oz to the list.
Peak, who runs classes at a gym close to Sydney's famous Harbour Bridge, says about 30 to 40 percent of his students are male, drawn to the 'power yoga', or vinyasa, brand his school uses.
Power yoga is practised as a flowing stream of poses done in a heated room to further loosen tight muscles and allow for deeper stretches.
Peak believes that power yoga is more accessible to men than more meditative versions because it allows them to practice poses without losing their masculinity.
"Australian guys are brought up on aggression and competition," says Peak.
"What we try to build up with them is getting away from competition or trying to beat the person next to you. That's what the guys are really learning."
I do like the sound of that power yoga though. Not so much the name, which reeks of yet more penis issues, (They'd probably call it "Xtreme Yoga" in the US.) but the stretching in a heated room. I'd suspect you'd be better off with 5 or 10 minutes of light cardio exercise first, to get loosened up and warm from your core, but perhaps it's got a decent placebo effect.
Being warm does help, though. I've been doing several minutes of leg and back stretches every time I take a shower lately, and then more once I get out, and those stretches feel great. I'd think the heated room would have to be sauna-hot to simulate that, and no one wants to do yoga sitting in a puddle of their own sweat, but the concept is cute. And if it makes people think they're stretching better, and makes them spend more time trying to get loose, then why not?
Celeb Safari
Cute site that's not really anything special, while remaining oddly-compelling. It's called
Celeb Safari, and that's pretty much what it is. Just lots and lots of photos of regular people mugging with celebrities. No skin, no action, no violence, and nothing newsworthy. Just celebs, out of their natural habitat. I enjoyed the
Celebs A-Z Page best myself, though they didn't have any of the celebs I thought to look for. The site is every growing though, so perhaps someday they will.
Chop Socky Review: Fists of Bruce Lee
Chop Socky Review Page here.
First score is compared to regular movies, second score is for a chop socky movie.
Fists of Bruce Lee, 1978
Script/Story: 2/4
Acting/Casting: 1/3
Action: 5/6
Humor: NA
Horror: NA
Combat Realism: 5
Eye Candy: 0/2
Fun Factor: 4/5
Replayability: 2/4
Overall: 1.5/3
This film is one of the many 70s films by martial arts guys that followed a simple plan: "I look sort of like Bruce Lee, so I'll change my name to a phonetic version of his and try to become a bigger star now that he's dead." This one stars Bruce Li, and no, there's no reason at all to include "Bruce Lee" in the title other than blatant marketing bullshit. It has nothing to do with him, or his Jeet Kun Do style, or anything else.
I don't usually worry much about eye candy in these types of films, but this one gets a special mention for being the single worst transfer I've ever seen on a DVD. They took the original wide screen movie and stretched it out to fill the full screen, top to bottom, but didn't do it very well. So the sides of every scene are cut off,
and the characters are 8 feet tall and skinny. Simply putting this one into a decent letter boxed format would have improved the visuals and the movie substantially. You can't adjust it either; wide screen and other options are grayed out on the display menu.
Story:The plot is hard to follow even if you don't fast forward over all of the talking scenes. It's set in modern day (well, 1978 modern day) Hong Kong, and has something to do with the Hong Kong mafia, rival crime bosses, and their struggle for power. Lots of different gangs fight in relatively non-lethal and non-weapon fashion, Bruce Li wins every fight he's in, and lots of extras get knocked out. There's a huge cast, with maybe 50 actors shown, of which at least 20 have multiple speaking scenes. The rest are just random thugs (If you can call 5-foot tall Chinese guys in eye-splitting 70s leisure suits "thugs.") who shout a word or two before heading into the heavily-choreographed combat.
Bruce is posing as an electronics expert who is installing a security system for one of the crime bosses, who just happens to have a cute daughter. Yes, I know, what are the odds? These are the least violent crime bosses in history, who have only unskilled and unarmed martial arts students for protection/muscle, so you've really got to wonder how they hustled up the money for the palatial mansions they inhabit.
Numerous fights ensue, none of them for any good reason, until eventually there's one last battle where all of the bosses are in the same place, and it turns out that Bruce is an undercover Interpol agent. He wins, of course, after doing the old, "Handsprings make me bulletproof!" avoidance trick, when one of the bad guys finally pulls out a gun. The girl survives too, but since these types of movies are always pretty much sexless, he doens't get any. Not exactly Bond, Bruce Bond, is he?
Martial Arts:This movie has a ton of fight scenes. I mean a ton, like 25 or 30 scenes of at least 2 minutes in length. Lots of them have multiple guys going, usually 4 or 5 after Bruce, but there are plenty of other random gang rumbles, where a dozen or more of the instantly-forgettable lesser characters are out there punching and kicking at each other at the same time. Almost all of the fighting is empty handed, though there are a few scenes with poorly-handled nun chucks, inexpertly-wielded knives, or horribly-swung staves. Do not watch this one for the weapon stuff, since it's just dreadful.
The fighters are fairly no-nonsense, and some of the moves look like they might hurt, but it's all pretty much touch style. Hit them, they fall down, you move on. No one ever does any arm breaks, or joint locks, or choke/submission holds, and no one is much on finishing off an enemy once they go down. They land a couple of punches, knock someone down, wait chivalrously while the punched guy does that "press hand to mouth to check for blood; then look intense and furious" bit, then go back into it. A few guys are killed by weapons, but mostly they just get bloodlessly punched out, with the occasional faux-Bruce Lee one-footed stomach stomp, which invariably results in the downed guy straining and holding the foot for a moment, before going theatrically limp.
Everyone in the movie can fight, at least, to some extent. They all do basically the same types of Kung Fu though, with nothing high flying. Some guys are more athletic and do some leaping kicks, and everyone is flexible enough to do head high crescent kicks and back kicks, but they never look very impressive or threatening. There's really no point in kicking if your kicks aren't any more powerful than your jabs, other than that it looks better on film. And since this is a movie, that's probably why they chose them.
If you've done any martial arts it's hard to watch most of these fights, since they are so obviously choreographed, and no one ever takes the openings they get. Fighters are constantly throwing long, slow punches, or swinging kicks that aren't going to hurt even if they hit. Step into them and land a hard punch, or kick out their plant foot and break their ankle or knee. Anything but ducking back, or just ducking the kick. They never even have any nice sequences, where one guy does a high kick, the other guy spins under it and throws his own kick, the first guy parries that, etc. They just take turns, politely and calmly, kicking at each other. Reminded me a bit of
the Tae Kwan Do tournament we attended a couple of weeks ago, though honestly, those kids had a lot more intensity and speed with their attacks than the guys do in this movie.
Overall:The combat scenes in this one definitely grade higher quantity than quality, but if you just want a to watch a lot of different guys punch and kick each other, over and over again, this film should scratch your itch.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Eragon Update
Speaking of Eragon, as I was (Sort of. Tangentially.) in the previous post, I'm about halfway through it, and it's not bad. It's not great, and it's probably not even good, but it's servicable fantasy, and I've certainly read
worse.
I feared it would be as big of a rip off as
its detractors say, but while it's not original, and most of the elements of magic, dragons, the world at large, etc, are certianly derivative, at least they're not
outright recreations.
I don't have any huge complaints so far; just lots of nitpicks. For example:
A lot of the dialogue is very flat and lectur-y. Not at all how real people talk, and way too, "Let me explain exactly how I feel in one short sentence." It's an immature writing style, and I mean that more in terms of the writer's experience than his age. I've read plenty of work by much older writers that makes the same mistake.
The lack of originality is a problem, and it seems very avoidable. The world is basically Tolkien's Middle Earth, with some of MacCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern grafted on, and magic heavily-influenced by LeGuin's Earthsea novels. Humans dominate the world and there are secretive, noble, and powerful elves, but they're fading away and seldom seen these days. Dwarves exist also, but are even more hidden away in their mountains. Evil orc-type monsters are massing and rampaging over the isolated human villages. Etc. Why not throw in a fourth non-monster race? Or make the dwarves be wood elves or something, rather than cut and pasting in short, bearded, mine-digging guys? Why not makes the elves be flighty and silly, or scheming and evil? Anything, just to break out of the Tolkien blueprint.
Christopher Piolini can't write dramatic scenes or emotion very well (yet?) so every time something that should be awesome happens, it's just sort of book reported on. It's very "telling" rather than "showing," as the old writer's mantra goes. We see the hero teenager falling down and sobbing when someone he loves dies, but we feel no emotion. We read about him running from a monster, but we don't really sense his fear, or his triumph when he slays a foe. Etc. I can't really say what is missing from his telling of such scenes, and I would have hated to hear this when I was a young writer, but maybe he just needs some more life experience. At 16 or 17 (his age when he wrote this novel) I didn't have enough first hand knowledge of such emotions, or the maturity to convincingly work them into words. I'm not entirely sure I do now, for that matter.
The main problem stems from the unorginality and lack of emotional intensity in the writing, and it's that I don't feel involved in things. I'm interested in the plot and the characters, but it's purely a "What's going to happen next?" sort of interest. I don't have an emotional connection to anyone, and I don't really care what they do. I think this is largely because the characters don't really feel alive to me; they're just people I'm reading about. It's holding my interest, but not compelling me to read very quickly, and I could stop right now and read an outline of the novel from some online FAQ and feel I'd gotten almost as much out of it as if I'd continued reading it myself. I'd rather read the book itself, and I'm going to finish it, but I'm not feeling much urgency to do so.
Perhaps things will pick up, though. The adventures have hardly even begun, and the stage is being set for an interesting series of confrontations through the remainder of the trilogy.
Home Schooling?
A topic Malaya and I often bat around is the coming education of our hypothetical children. The area we live in has very good public schools (there are regular newspaper reports of parents from all over the Bay Area forging residency papers in order to get their children enrolled), and there are some super expensive private schools (the type that call themselves "academies") in the area too, if we wanted to go that route. Nevertheless, Malaya often ponders home schooling them, while enrolling them in martial arts classes and piano classes and youth soccer etc, so they could be socialized by other children that way.
I'm not a big fan of the home schooling concept, in part because as a writer I'll be working at home, but also because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have the patience to teach my own kids. It's great in concept; you help them with vocabulary words, tutor them some in math, and their innate love of learning keeps them self motivated. The reality is probably that we'd get some lazy, video game obsessed kid who thinks staying at home all the time is a reason to play games all day, go over to his friend's house after school, and who screams and pouts if we try to get them to do their faux-school assignments. Teaching below the college level is an incredibly difficult job, after all.
On the other hand, I remember how miserable and bored I was all through high school, and how sitting in school for 8 hours a day did me virtually no good at all. I wasn't doing drugs or skipping school or being bullied or anything classic like that; I was just bored and uninterested, I wanted to do my own thing, and the endless time wasting bullshit drove me crazy. My high school had 6 periods a day, (or possibly 7, I honestly don't remember) with lunch before the last two. Classes were something like an hour each, and on average the first 5-10 minutes would be taking attendance, reading announcements, general chatter, etc. The last 5 or 10 minutes were no better, as everyone got ready to leave and the teacher hurried to wrap things up, which left maybe 30 or 40 minutes in the middle for anything resembling actual education. And that time was taken up at least three days a week with some busywork bullshit, or catch up time, "Now you're all going to read the chapter you should have read last week, and if you've already read it you can read it again."
I'm not going to go into a whole "my high school experience" blog entry, largely because I don't remember enough to write about and you don't want to read it anyway. You get the idea, though. I was bored and completely disinterested in everything about the high school experience, I wasn't doing the work or getting good grades or learning much of anything, and I wasn't part of any teams or organizations. So why was I there at all? I would have learned far more following independent study courses, and lately I've lately been wondering why I didn't do just that. Talking to Malaya today, she asked why I didn't just get my G.E.D. and quit going to school at 16 or 17, and I really have no idea. It never occurred to me at the time, and neither of my parents ever mentioned it or anything like it. Not that I'm blaming them for my teenaged malaise, but damn I wish I'd done that. Or been entirely home schooled from about 14 on.
It's easy to say in retrospect, and as many fights and disagreements as I got into (Looking back, they were almost stupid and almost all my fault, but try telling that to a know-it-all teenager.) with my parents during the 14-16 years, it probably wouldn't have worked, but who knows; maybe our dynamic would have been very different if I hadn't been pissed off and sleep deprived from the early wake up time required for school, 5 days a week. I don't see how they could have home schooled me really; just with the logistics -- they both lived in San Diego, but had been divorced for years and both worked full time. But I read at a college level by about 8th grade, and though I wasn't doing shit for school work (passive aggressive issues, largely -- I hated school so I didn't care about grades and I wasn't going to do school work if I could help it), if I'd been motivated, I would have. And what better motivation could I have had than the prospect of not having to go to school anymore?
I can't say for sure over the distance of years, but if someone had come to me after 9th or 10th grade and said that if I studied all summer and learned enough history, math, English, etc to pass the G.E.D. test and qualify for my diploma early, I could graduate and never have to go to 11th or 12th grade, I would probably have laughed and gone skateboarding. But if they'd kept asking, and I'd thought seriously about it after a month of utter boredom in September, with the new semester just underway, I might have taken the offer a lot more seriously.
As we were talking about this in the car today, and when I mentioned that I knew I wanted to be a writer by the time I was in 10th or 11th grade, Malaya said, "Just like that
Eragon kid!"
I'd forgotten about him until then, so caught up was I in my misery of high school memories, but yeah, just like that. Christopher Paolini is his name, and as
his bio says, he was homeschooled by parents who lived way out in the middle of nowhere, and finished high school, via correspondence courses, at the age of 15. He was already working on writing fantasy then, and while I'm not claiming that I could have or would have finished a fantasy novel and had it turned into a huge bestseller by the age of 17, as he did, I'd certainly have done something more with my teen years than I did.
I did graduate high school, just barely, after skipping several classes entirely during my last year or so, but I only went to graduation since my parents and grandparents came to town for it, took off the gown and cap as soon as possible, and immediately vandalized the tassle thingie that I hung from my rear view mirror, like most everyone else did. None of them pulled most of the strings out so they hung way too long and looked mangy, though. I was so down on school after the boring bullshit of high school that I didn't bother with any college applications, despite my 1300 SATs (good scores back when 1600 was the max, rather than 2400 now), and chose to live at home, paying fair market rent and working semi-full time, while trying to become a writer, rather than going to college, which my dad was willing to pay for and pay my rent and everything else while I went.
That lasted a year, at which point I owed dad like $5000 and decided that four years of him paying my bills wouldn't be so bad, especially since I was dying to move out of mom's house. So off I went to community college, and found, to my astonishment, that I really enjoyed it. Classes were just 3 or 4 hours a week, and better yet, you could set up your own schedule however you wanted, with night classes or whatever, and they even had variable lengths! I took most of my classes with 3 hours at a bang, one day a week, and was so happy that way. We got a lot of reading to do, but I didn't have to get up early and go every damn day, I didn't have to yawn through busywork in class, I wasn't surrounded by chattering 16 y/o idiots, etc. I would have loved college when I was 16 or 17, and would have gotten far higher grades than I did in high school, since the work was intellectually challenging, and there wasn't all the soul-killing boredom to suck the life out of me.
So, to belatedly return to the issue of my/our own hypothetical future children, I can't see us doing full home schooling, at least not on our own, though hiring some private tutors seems like a great idea. Simulate college in the home; private tutor in each subject who comes once or twice a week for a few hours each time. The kid doesn't get sick of the subject, there's no stupid busy work, they get individual instruction, etc. I don't know if we'll go that route, but I at least hope we're not wedded to the traditional, "You go to school to learn until you graduate from 12th grade and then you go to college." I certainly would have been happier with anything but that, and really, high school is pretty much complete bullshit. Skipping it won't mean a thing for any kid who isn't trying to get an athletic scholarship to college. Even for the kids who enjoy it, and who largely peak at 18 (setting them up for a steady downhill slide afterwards), virtually no one does anything in high school that still matters when they're 30. Or even 25. Or that couldn't have been done better in other ways. I had some good friends then, and still know one of them, but we hung out after school, not during it, and we could have done that as well or better if I'd been home schooled, or bettr yet, had my G.E.D. already.
College isn't that much different, but you have to get through high school before you can do anything interesting with your life, and you pretty much have to do college as well to support yourself as an adult, and you'll probably need grad school and maybe a PhD in 20 or 25 years, when our future hypothetical kids are getting up there. (If you don't already.) But at least in college you're meeting adults you'll know your whole life, making contacts that will turn into future employment, and taking classes in course areas you want to take them in, and learning useful stuff.
High school is like eating your vegetables (just go with the metaphor and pretend I'm not mostly a vegetarian); you might as well do it as soon as you can, so you can move on to the food you like. And dessert after that. And if you can get it out of the way at 15 or 16, do so. Remind me of this when I'm blogging about how my damn 13 y/o won't do his homework, in 2021? Kthx.
Monday, September 26, 2005
Chop Socky Review: Dragon Strikes Back
Cheesy martial arts movies! AKA Chop Socky!
Malaya and I enjoy watching bad martial arts films, and since I review every other film and book I consume, I might as well start reviewing these as well. The review will be a bit different than my usual reviews, since the films aren't really movies, in the same way. No one is going to sit through one unless they're a fan of the genre, so while I'm going to rate all the usual categories, most of my discussion will cover the story and the action. The story since I can make jokes about it, and the martial arts since that's why you're watching the movie, if you are in fact watching it. (Go with God.)
I use my normal review scale for these, but since those scores would always be very low, in comparison to modern movies with 50000x the budget, I'm also scoring them in compared to other cheesy martial arts movies. All of the reviews will be grouped on the Reviews page, and I'll put in links to my other, non-chop socky movie reviews.
I'm currently working on four reviews, for the four films I got in a box set called the "Martial Arts Marathon." Four films on two DVDs for $5; discount multimedia rack at Ross. The films?
Dragon Strikes Back,
Fists of Bruce Lee,
Blood of the Dragon, and
Bruce's Fist of Vengeance. Needless to say, none of these films star Bruce Lee, or anyone else you've ever heard of. They're low budget punch-fests set in Hong Kong, with entirely native casts (speckled with the occasional white or black guy) and plots that don't make much sense. Not that anyone cares about the plot; these are just fist-porn, when you get right down to it. I usually fast forward over the dialogue to get to the next fight scene, personally.
All scores have two numbers; the first in comparison to other movies, the second in comparison to other chop socky. The one exception is the "combat realism" score, since I'm holding these films to the same standards of, "Would that actually be effective/possible in real life?" that I do modern action films. In fact, I should probably grade these martial arts movies more critically on that score, since this is their genre, and if they can't do that right, what can they do?
Again: Scores are all 1-10. "All movies/chop socky only"
Dragon Strikes Back, 1972
Script/Story: 3/6
Acting/Casting: 2/5
Action: 6/6
Humor: NA
Horror: NA
Combat Realism: 6
Eye Candy: 1/4
Fun Factor: 3/4
Replayability: 2/4
Overall: 2/5.5
This film stars Chen Lee as a wandering monk type dude, in Texas. Yes, he's a Chinese cowboy, in the Old West. Curious about this one, we
looked it up on IMDB and found that it's actually an Italian film. It's a spaghetti western, as they call them, but one with a Chinese martial arts guy as the hero. No, it's not worth watching just for this novelty aspect.
StoryThe plot involves the hero, Shanghai Joe, arriving in San Francisco, popping in to Chinatown for a brief moment, and then buying a stagecoach ticket to travel east to Texas, where he pursues his dream of becoming a cowboy. Predictably enough, he meets with constant racism and physical attacks from one drunken white idiot cowboy after another. The movie gets monotonous about 2/3 of the way through, when Shanghai Joe has had at least half a dozen different groups of cowboys, ranchers, gamblers, etc, try to rob him, cheat him, trip him, insult him, and so on, always culminating with them attacking him and him kicking their asses.
The English dialogue was obviously dubbed in, so perhaps the original Italian version was better, but the dialogue during these scenes is frequently so bad that it makes them completely unbelievable and almost impossible to watch. Perhaps they didn't know enough words in English to translate the taunts and insults, but it's unpleasant to sit through several straight minutes of bearded, dirty white guys shouting "Slant" and "Chink" at a small Chinese man. I believe the joke, "Chinese use chopsticks because they're too stupid to use forks." was used twice in the movie. No, it wasn't funny either time, unless you perhaps take it as a clever attack on the white guy making the comment; I.E. he's so stupid that that idiotic comment was the best insult he could come up with? (
Just like Harlan Ellison?)
Eventually the plot progresses a bit, bounties are placed on the Shanghai Joe's head (understandably; he's killed or beaten unconscious like 30 people by then), and he discovers someone worse than the casually murderous racists; a wealthy landowner who is not only enslaving Mexicans to work his land, but is routinely slaughtering them, sometimes by standing them up on barrels, putting nooses around their necks, and then shooting them in their extremities until they lose their balance and get strangled. Why he's blowing away his own slaves is never quite explained, nor do they say what he needs slaves when he's a cattle rancher and the slaves only distract his men from doing their actual cowboy work. Basically, he needs slaves so he can be an evil slavemaster, and have extras to murder to prove his evil nature. They're sort of self fulfilling, in that way.
The plot really gets ridiculous at the very end, when we get a flashback to Shanghai Joe's training (this is while he's healing himself from half a dozen bullet wounds in like two days, without ever eating or drinking) and there's a standard training montage. It touches all the requisite bases, with him thrusting his fists into scalding sand, punching through boards and bricks, enduring beatings, and so on. The twist here is that another man was being trained at the same time as him, but they never saw each other, and were both blindfolded when they received their sacred lotus tattoos and graduated and headed out into the world.
Five points if you instantly realize that the final ultimate battle in the movie will be Shanghai Joe facing off against the other guy, who has turned mercenary and is serving the evil cattle rancher. It was funny, since I'd been wondering what the final battle would be, since so far Shanghai Joe had won every fight in like three hits, since none of the fat, lazy, racist white men knew how to do more than throw roundhouse punches. Fortunately the plot conjured up another martial arts master for him to battle, just in the nick of time!
Joe wins of course, after a final battle that's overlong, extremely brutal, and full of the nearly criminal misuse of various martial arts weapons. It's not the worst thing in the film, but it's far from the highpoint, largely since the main evil rancher has already been killed, leaving us to wonder why his merc is still fighting, since there's no one paying the bill. Plus there's no emotional weight to the fight, since this new bad guy just walked in; we have no reason to like or dislike him. Not that there's emotional weight to any of the other fights either, since we quickly get sick of every single person other than Shanghai Joe being an asshole racist who deserves the beating he's going to get, but hypothetically speaking...
I've spent far more words on the plot than I intended to, but there's not much else to talk about. The story was actually pretty inventive, and while it was ridiculous, at least it wasn't just another, "You have killed my master and I will avenge him." story set in ancient China. I didn't give it a very high score overall since it was repetitive, predictable, and one-note. And yes, that's pretty much par for the genre.
Martial ArtsAs for the martial arts, they weren't very impressive. Having drunken white guys as the targets was fun a few times, as the asshole racist cowboys got their deserved beatings, but it soon got old since they presented no challenge to Shanghai Joe. I don't know enough about Kung Fu to say what style he was using, but it was not high flying, and not very brutal. Lots of chops, kicks, and punches, none of which looked very powerful. Lots of jabs, basically, and every fight required him to hit the bad guys numerous times to knock them out. He never did any joint locks or breaks or submission or choke holds, and while watching him land a flurry of light hits, after which he stepped back and waited for the bad guy to come at him again, I kept shouting "Finish him!" at the screen.
He seldom did, and it wasn't like Shanghai Joe was beating them up to punish them before going for the knockout; his style was just not hard-hitting enough to win with less than a dozen strikes. Very inefficient, especially when dealing with multiple attackers, as he usually was.
Most of the fighting was relatively realistic though, without too many "Oh he so didn't hit him with that." shots. The early fights were heavily-edited though, much the way most modern action films do it, in order to hide the fact that the actors involved can't actually fight at all. I'm not sure why they did it that way, since the cowboys were just throwing huge right hooks, or swinging chairs, and all Joe had to do was dodge or parry and then land his hits. Surely most of those could have been done in one take, with a camera far enough away to let us see how he moved.
Only the last fight, when Joe faced off against the evil Chinese guy, was shot from a distance, and there were some decent scenes there, though the choreography wasn't that great. The weapon stuff was especially mediocre, with knives thrown from the shoulders, like darts, and swords handled very poorly, with big, slow swings and no real control.
OverallSince the only real draw for this sort of film is the martial arts, I can't recommend this one. There's not that much action, far too much of it is one-sided and takes place in dark rooms, and there's very little variety in moves and styles. The weapon work sucked too, even though there was very little of it.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Movie Review: Corpse Bride
Tim Burton's
Corpse Bride is an animated (well, stop action photography with puppets, along with various special effects) fairy tale that falls somewhere between Tim Burton's
A Nightmare Before Christmas, and Tim Burton's
Every Other Movie with Weird Characters Doing Weird Things in a Weird Place. The story is sweet and a little bit touching, the visuals are amazing and inventive, and the characters are alienated and sweet and misunderstood. And like in every other Tim Burton movie, we found ourselves nodding off as the "plot" wandered aimlessly, while giving us absolutely no reason to care one way or the other.
To the deceptive scores:
Corpse Bride, 2005
Script/Story: 6
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: 4
Humor: 5
Horror: 4
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 2
Replayability: 4
Overall: 4.5
I'm torn on my scores for this one, since this isn't a movie I disliked, or thought was poorly done in any way. Plus most reviewers seem to adore it, judging by the
82% rating it's got on Rotten Tomatoes.
It wasn't bad. The visuals and sets were great, the stop action worked very well most of the time (some of the fast movements and floating of cloth were distractingly-jerky), and the plot was coherent. It was just... boring. Malaya nodded off twice in the middle, and we were both thankful it ran a mercifully brief 76 minutes. (And let us not speak of the pre-movie trailers, which were all stupid trailers for horrible family crap like
Cheaper by the Dozen 2.)
As I said in the intro, it's every Tim Burton movie. The characters were the same misfit outcasts with hearts of gold, the setting was bizarre and disturbing, yet perfectly normal to the people living in it, the visuals were great, and the plot was slow, uncompelling, and pretty much beside the point. We didn't think much of the music either; there weren't many songs in the film, and they weren't very long, but that was a good thing since they weren't catchy or fun or funny. I'm not much on musicals, but I didn't mind and even sort of enjoyed the musical numbers in Burton's version of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Not so with
Corpse Bride.
I may add to this review in the future, but I'm keeping it short for now, and reviewing this like I think they should review music CDs.
I can't recommend it, but neither am I saying you should not see it.
Look, you've seen other films by Tim Burton. If you liked the visuals and imagery and concept of movies like
Edward Scissorhands,
Sleepy Hollow,
The Nightmare Before Christmas, and
Batman Returns enough to enjoy the films despite their slow, wandering, absurd and frequently boring plots, then you'll probably feel the same about
Corpse Bride. If you were bored by those others, you'll be just as bored in
Corpse Bride. Know thyself.
I'd have been perfectly happy to wait and see this on DVD, though I would have been bored then too, and regretted buying it. I think this film would be best seen about 15 minutes at a time, since the enjoyable visuals and the awesome skeleton puppets would get you through that much of it, and when you started to get bored as nothing of importance happened, you could stop it and do something else. And when you returned to the film a day later, it would be fun again.
Friday, September 23, 2005
The Infinite Cat Project
I don't know how I'd never heard of this before, but I saw a link tonight and it's just too damn cute not to post about.
The Infinite Cat Project. One guy posted a picture of his cat looking at a flower. Another guy took a photo of his cat, looking at the monitor displaying the first cat looking at the flower. Another person took a photo of their cat looking at the monitor showing the 2nd cat looking at the first cat, looking at the flower. And so on. And on. And on.
It's not quite infinite yet, but they're up over 1000 cats, and counting.
I'd like Jinx and the Puskers to participate, but since they're not allowed on the computer desks, I might have to sit close to the desk and use my laptop.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Site Donations
I don't believe I've ever
asked for site donations since I (with Malaya's help) switched the site over to the blogger format. In theory I should have; after all I'm doing more blogging now than I used to, so your entertainment value has increased. (No, I can't quite type that with a straight face.) I hate asking for donations though, and since one anonymous donor has been giving $10 a month for over two years, and he/she has been the only one giving anything for many months, there didn't seem to be much point in continuing to ask, when my hosting costs were being covered.
Mr/Mrs Anonymous is still contributing, but he/she sends me a check to avoid Amazon skimming their % off the top, which meant that no one at all was using the Amazon tip jar option. I haven't disabled it, but I have deleted the big button from the nav bar, since its only donation was visual displeasure. The "buy crap" button remains, since it's smaller, cuter, and people actually use it. So send me some money if you think I deserve it, and if not at least try and remember Black Champagne when you buy something from Amazon.com. Do it through the button over there and I get 4-5%, and think happy thoughts when I get that $12 or $15 quarterly bank transfer.
Thanks to everyone who has given or at least considered doing so, and with any luck this will be the last donation post I ever make/you have to read. It's just not worth annoying everyone over for like $10 a month. Just wait for the future "Flux gets published" days though, when I start putting up the old short stories and book bonus scenes and Flux porn and such into a pay area, only accessible to Black Champagne Members. You'll get special icons on your forum IDs too! Etc.
Unoriginal Fiction and Dan Brown
I've been annoyed for months by my too short and off topic
review of The DaVinci Code, and while adding in my recent reviews to the reviews section, I finally got around to revising it.
My old review said The DaVinci Code was just a rip off of Angels and Demons, gave it middling scores, and then launched into a brief and unsourced discussion of why the heretical Christian aspects of the novel weren't of much interest to me. The review now has more comments about the book itself, a more coherent take on what I thought of the fictional Biblical revelations Brown made, and several blog entries about The DaVinci Code added below the review.
While searching for those, I got to reading my old blog entries with a mention of "davinci" in them (courtesy of Google) and found one entry about the "similarities" between the two books by Dan Brown. The entry took off onto a whole discourse on formulaic writing, and I enjoyed reading it (as I almost always enjoy my old and largely-forgotten writing about writing) and thought it deserved inclusion in the writing section, so I threw up an
Unoriginal Fiction page with that blog entry, a quote from another book review, and a longish-introduction I wrote for the occasion. I know I've written other past entries (I just misspelled "entries" as "entires" for the 3rd time in this post. Yes, it's past my bedtime.) on that subject, and I'll add those to the article as well, someday. Yes, I need to hire or browbeat someone (or clone myself) into going over more of the old blog entries (first time I spelled that right tonight) and putting the good stuff into appropriate articles. At least the stuff on writing, since I am theoretically a writer. And stuff.
Anyway, check out the revised review and the other fiction page if you want to. And if by some miracle you remember other, thematically-appropriate writing I've done, and can find a link to it, please let me know. I shan't be looking for it anytime soon, since I can't think how I'd Google it. It's not like there's a keyword to search on that would lead invariably to the subject. Unlike all of my hundreds of other posts that could and should and eventually will be added to the existing articles pages.
Bananas and the real DaVinci Code
Two interesting articles I enjoyed reading and thought you might as well. You need to actually read them though; they're not just pictures of
Lindsey Lohan's return to redheadedness (and really bad dresses), or anything like that.
The first is about
the impending world wide banana crash. I've heard of this in the past and sort of ignored it because I don't really like bananas, but this excellent article from Popular Science explains the problem in detail, discusses potential solutions, the history of the banana and mass-produced fruit in general, and more. The "cavendish" is the only type of banana many people ever see, and while that's helpful for branding issues, it's not a real good thing in terms of biodiversity.
For nearly everyone in the U.S., Canada and Europe, a banana is a banana: yellow and sweet, uniformly sized, firmly textured, always seedless.
...
Americans eat more bananas than any other kind of fresh fruit, averaging about 26.2 pounds of them per year, per person (apples are a distant second, at 16.7 pounds). It also turns out that the 100 billion Cavendish bananas consumed annually worldwide are perfect from a genetic standpoint, every single one a duplicate of every other. It doesn't matter if it comes from Honduras or Thailand, Jamaica or the Canary Islands -- each Cavendish is an identical twin to one first found in Southeast Asia, brought to a Caribbean botanic garden in the early part of the 20th century, and put into commercial production about 50 years ago.
That sameness is the banana's paradox. After 15,000 years of human cultivation, the banana is too perfect, lacking the genetic diversity that is key to species health. What can ail one banana can ail all. A fungus or bacterial disease that infects one plantation could march around the globe and destroy millions of bunches, leaving supermarket shelves empty.
A wild scenario? Not when you consider that there has already been one banana apocalypse.
...
Once a little-known species, the Cavendish was eventually accepted as Big Mike's replacement after billions of dollars in infrastructure changes were made to accommodate different growing and ripening needs. Its advantage was its resistance to Panama disease. But in 1992, a new strain of the fungus -- one that can affect the Cavendish -- was discovered in Asia. Since then, Panama disease Race 4 has wiped out plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia and Taiwan, and it is now spreading through much of Southeast Asia. It has yet to hit Africa or Latin America, but most experts agree that it is coming. "Given today's modes of travel, there's almost no doubt that it will hit the major Cavendish crops," says Randy Ploetz, the University of Florida plant pathologist who identified the first Sumatran samples of the fungus.
On a purely selfish nature, I don't think I'd much care if the Cavendish was largely wiped out, since I don't really like the taste of it. I don't like them green, but I do tolerate them when they're just turning yellow, and ideally when they are refrigerated. Once they get some brown spots though, I pass. I don't like the gooey, cloyingly-sweet taste and I can't stand the mushy texture. Happily for me, there are hundreds of other banana varieties, and they sound damn interesting. And if disease brought about the end of the Cavendish monopoly, I might actually see some of the others in US grocery stores:
In an area about the size of a U.S. shopping mall, Aguilar, 46, is growing more than 300 banana varieties. The diversity of fruit in Aguilar's field is astonishing. Some of the bananas are thick and over a foot long; others are slender and pinky-size. Some are meant to be eaten raw and sweet and some function more like potatoes, meant for boiling and baking or frying into snack chips.
...
The Goldfinger was developed by painstakingly cross-breeding samples from the more than 350 banana types originally collected by United Fruit scientists. It is a highly versatile fruit, suitable for cooking and eating; it has a slightly tart, apple-like flavor and is one of the few bred bananas to gain significant consumer acceptance.
...It transported well and caught on in certain markets, notably Australia. But it didn't taste like the sweeter Cavendish and never took hold in the Americas.
The article runs 5 full pages and as a secret bonus, it might turn into barnyard porn by page four; I only made it through three, so I can't say.
The second article is shorter and not nearly as tasty, but
it's intellectually tantalizing. One of DaVinci's surviving works is a famous mural, the Adoration of the Magi. Its history is unclear, with some evidence that DaVinci sketched it out before someone else finished most of the painting. The interesting thing is that with infrared light, DaVinci's original sketches and outlines are visible beneath the surface painting. Has someone spent four years analyzing the painting and painstakingly-mapping out the hidden images? Does George Bush not care about black people?
Mr Seracini has examined the painting minutely using a technique that exploits the fact infra-red light passes through paint but reflects off the under-drawing.
As the photographs show, he and his team have conjured from below the amber-brown layer with which much of the panel is covered a collection of Da Vinci's drawings that were hidden for more than five centuries. They contain numerous previously invisible - or barely discernible - details. Some will electrify conspiracy theorists.
The Adoration of the Magi could have been dreamed up as a playground for semiologists. Even the visible work is packed with figures, faces, beasts, buildings, foliage and an extraordinary amount of activity, much of which bears no relation to the biblical account of the three kings' visit to the Virgin Mary and her newborn child.
...
Mr Seracini said Da Vinci created the under-drawing as an underpainting because he used a brush and a mixture of lampblack and watery glue.
"Otherwise it would just have faded," he added.
Was he saying that Leonardo might have suspected his work would not stay the way he intended it, and may have deliberately preserved it that way? "I'm not going to speculate on that," Mr Seracini replied briskly. "That's for art historians to do. But I cannot rule it out."
The article talks about a few of the more interesting under images, so check it out if you want more details. Or just wait for Dan Brown to fictionalize them in a future novel with an
entirely-recycled plot.
The article includes a link to a large PDF photo of the images, but since it took me some hunting around to find,
here's a direct link. It's one of those 350k Adobe Acrobat files that pretty well bring your computer to a standstill as they load, so be warned.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
More on Yoga
I posted last week about the yoga I was trying to get into, for some long overdue flexibility improvement. It's been going pretty well so far, with me doing 45 minutes or so (the length of the two 20ish minute programs on the DVD we got) each
morning afternoon when I get up. The two hosts (man and woman) on the DVD are downright creepy, and the poses they do on the two shows have a fair amount of overlap and don't target that many body areas, but the poses are useful for a beginner without much flexibility, and they hold them long enough that I can breath half a dozen times and stretch into them. It's a nice way to loosen up in the morning, and though the moves are just sitting still or kneeling or whatever, I always get enough energy flowing to actually get sweaty doing them. I then often go do some Kali outside, or head to the gym, before showing off and having some breakfast.
I'm getting bored with the same routine every time though, so today I tried the yoga shows I've been taping each night at 3am on Fit TV. Yes, they're on at 3am. No, I don't think it's exactly their biggest show.
Anyway, I was bummed by them. I had 4 shows on tape, I FFed through most of them looking for any useful poses, and while perhaps I just hit 4 that were not very good, this program doesn't look like it's of much use to me. I can't find a detailed description of it anywhere, (the
Fit TV page just lists a bunch of show times with zero info about the show) but
here is a page about it on something called the W network (East Coast cable? Canadian? Never heard of it.), that at least has a photo of the frightening host demonstrating the tooth baring grimace that passes for her smile.
It's not that bad, or good of a picture, but after just a few episodes the host is already scaring me. She's always got this scowly intensity to her, with what looks like fury and hatred behind her eyes. Her face reminds me of Rosie O'Donnell, circa late 90s, when she was still officially "in the closet" (not that anyone ever had any real doubts about her sexual preference), and was apparently the most pissed off human alive. No matter how she was dolled up with hair, makeup, clothing, etc, she always had eyes full of the most burning hatred imaginable.
The Breathing Space Yoga host isn't quite that psycho, but her smiles are these painful-looking grimaces that remind me of the real (non-Disney) version of
The Little Mermaid fairy tale, when the mermaid got her human legs, but at the price, so that every step felt like she was walking on knife blades. I'll bet she placed her feet with as much care as the yoga woman parts her lips. You can't help but wonder how tense and furious she'd be if she hadn't become a yoga guru.
Strange facial expressions aside, I could easily ignore the host if the show were useful. Unfortunately, it's not, at least not for me.
The main problem is the pace of things. It's a show for intermediate or advanced students, in terms of knowledge of the poses. They move from pose to pose very quickly, often with one or two forms in between, and you have to know all of the poses to keep up. I suppose you could follow along, even without great flexibility, if you knew what the poses she was naming were, but what are the odds of anyone knowing the name of yoga poses without having spent the time stretching to be able to do them? As it is I'm constantly pausing the tape to study their forms and figure how to get into them, and then after just five or ten seconds in the poses, far too soon for me to start breathing and trying to stretch into it, they move on to another one. It's sort of like trying to learn martial arts by watching a demo movie of it; useful if you already know and can do the moves and just want to run through them with a lead, but useless if you're trying to learn from it.
The poses themselves are pretty scary too. The show has four people doing the poses while the scary host talks, and they usually arrange the posers on a sliding scale of ability, which is helpful. There's one pregnant lady who has to modify everything for her impending maternity, there's a guy who does things halfway, and then two other women who have warm butter for bones and can be twisted into human pretzel shapes that would have landed them prominent spots in a freak show, a century ago.
So while I can sometimes sort of emulate the guy, or the pregnant lady, I usually get totally distracted watching the host talk while the boneless women contort themselves into forms I'd hoped never to see a human being assume. On one episode today they went from sitting cross-legged (which is about as far as I can go, since my hips, knees, and back hurt even doing that), to the full lotus position (with feet over the thighs), to reaching each arm across their back and holding the toes of the feet. So picture your right leg over your left thigh, while your right arm reaches around the back and holds the toes, and you then bend over to put your head on the floor. And they did that with both arms, which required their shoulders to move pretty much straight backwards.
"Ewww!" I exclaimed. Then followed that with another hearty "Ewwwwww!!!" I would have to literally double or triple the length of most ligaments in my body to even approach that pose, not that I'd want to. Seriously, if they pulled a mangled corpse out of a suitcase on CSI in that pose, people would change the channel in disgust.
Freak show poses aside, they never hold any of the postures long enough for me to get any stretching and breathing use out of them, so I'm thinking Breathing Space Yoga is useless to me at this level. I'll have to spend six months on beginner DVDs and poses, and maybe by then I'll have sufficient flexibility and knowledge of the poses to try and follow along.
Conveniently enough, a good friend of mine has a lovely new wife (we attended their wedding in Chicago a few months ago), and by a happy coincidence, she's a certified yoga instructor, something I did not know until
I posted about Yoga last week, and he replied in comments. He's also handy with a DVD burner, and hopefully I can prevail on him to mail me some useful beginner DVDs, perhaps with some advice from his wife on how best to ease myself into this discipline.
Further bulletins as events warrant.
Monday, September 19, 2005
NFL on HD TV?
HD TV offers amazing image clarity and it looks perfectly 3D and all that, but given how often the networks insist upon showing us the old white men who own NFL teams... I've got two bulletproof arguments against watching the NFL on HDTV. Jerry Jones and Al Davis.
If you need a third reason, you can add
aging starlets to the list.
Honestly, most people are pretty damn ugly, if you look closely. You don't want or need to see them that clearly, even after the make up artists have had at them. I was just watching some of the Monday Night Football game(s), and they showed a close-up of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones making a nuisance of himself on the sidelines, and I literally had to look away. And our TV is not large, and is certainly not high definition. He looks like he's turning into a skeletal lizard, one that's undergoing open face surgery to treat an outbreak of melanoma.
Tae Kwon Do follow up.
Much to my relief, a couple of readers wrote in with comments on Tae Kwon Do, rebutting many of the conclusions I arrived at after watching (
and blogging about) a TKD tournament on Saturday. First was Erik, who posted his thoughts in a comment. Quoting part of them:
..there are 2 styles, the WTF style, that you see at the olympics, and the ITF style. (that hopefully becomes olympic in 2012). In WTF style, full contact, it is allowed to kick someone knockout, but it is not allowed to punch someone in the face. Punches arent seen very much in this style, mostly kicks.
In ITF style, semi-contact, it is not allowed to knock someone out. It is allowed however to punch someone in the face. Here punches are seen quite often. I am not sure how it is with protection in the USA, but in Europe the WTF style use a chest protector and helmet, ITF style uses hand and foot-equipment. A helmet is allowed as well.
I'm glad to hear that there are (at least) two styles, since the tournament style we saw was not very impressive. I also like that one of them abbreviates as "WTF," since that was pretty much what Malaya and I thought after watching a pair of teenaged boys in heavy padding trade ineffective stomach kicks for an entire match. (
They are actually the initials of the two different governing bodies with differing rules; the World Taekwondo Federation and the International Taekwondo Federation.) The tournament we saw was apparently in the WTF style, since virtually no one punched, and those that did aimed them only at the chest.
I also heard from Marty, who had a lot to say. He's been taking TKD for 3 years:
Like most other martial arts, mainstream Tae Kwon Do teachings are divided into two categories: free-sparring and forms. The free-sparring that you saw is the most sport-like aspect of Tae Kwon Do, while the other area involves choreographed forms, fighting drills, throws, defence against weapons, and that sort of stuff. This other category includes the "this will kill someone" type of stuff; in one form, for example, a Tae Kwon Do student punches two impaginary "oppenents" in the solar plexus, breaks both of their legs at the knee, and crushes the second opponent's windpipe. This exact content of this category of TKD teachings varies depending on the school and the teacher one learns from.
The sparring as you described it is not typical of Tae Kwon Do, either. While Tae Kwon Do might not have as many fancy, elaborate moves as Kung Fu, a good sparrer will be able to use (and use quite often) a wider variety of kicks and strikes than you saw. TKD sparring mainly focuses on kicks, but sparrers can still use hand strikes in ways besides scoring points.
Also, good TKD sparrers always take advantage the energy of their opponents. The key to success is figuring out how your opponent will react to your advances before they even have the chance to do it themselves. A free, open tournament like the one you went to probably didn't have the highest level of sparring.
The point of my rather long-winded lecture is that in Tae Kwon Do, sparring is seen as just another exercise to improve a student's control, confidence, and physical endurance. It is much different than the style of fighting that a TKD student would use in a real fight. We practice THAT type of stuff as realistically as we can without mortally injuring anyone, but it is not something that is done
competitively.
Sparring is only one aspect of Tae Kwon Do teachings.
With all of this in mind, Tae Kwon Do is actually just as good (better, of course, in my opinion) as any other martial art for kids to learn. The important part of learning martial arts is not which one you do, but how you learn it. In my experience, many commercial youth martial arts schools focus on earning belts, because parents want their kids to have something to show for all the money that is being spent. Groups like the one you go to, and the one I go to at the local YMCA focus more on each student achieving as much as they can, because the teacher isn't paid for each belt test.
So good news there all around. I especially agree with his comments about how it's not the martial art, it's the teacher. Malaya and I train in Kali, but we're in a very small school, headed by a master who trained under some famous traditional Kali teachers, but then went his own way when he wanted to advance the art beyond the traditional forms, and didn't have the freedom to do that without starting his own school. In other words, Kali as done anywhere else in the world is likely to be quite different in approach and style from the Kali we're doing. The same is true of other forms, and taking TKD from some strip mall, belt-factory dojo is going to be an entirely different experience than learning it from a true master, or at least from serious experts, like Marty mentions.
(True masters are prodigies, and are extremely rare in any discipline; the head of our Kali school is one, and while he knows thousands of other martial artists, he only considers one of them a master, a man who does Kung Fu, and who isn't even teaching it now, largely because he could not find any students he thought worthy of passing his knowledge onto. Fortunately for our edification, our Kali master isn't quite so choosy.)
And yeah, as both commenters say, sparring or tournament fighting in TKD is a very specialized style, with very limited rules and styles. Comparing real martial arts, TKD or Kali or anything else, to the tournament stuff we saw is like comparing
ultimate fighting to junior boxing, if junior boxing only allowed jabs. (And even ultimate fighting is far more limited than true martial arts or street fighting, since in that sport they aren't allowed to do neck or joint breaks, they don't know pressure points, and they can't do anything really dirty, like eye gouges, biting, etc.)
I also like that Marty mentions that he of course thinks TKD is the best style. We feel that way about Kali, based on almost zero comparison, and isn't that the way it should be? After all, if you were doing one form and actually thought another form was better, wouldn't you switch? (You would if your goal was to be the best fighter possible; some people stay with a form they know isn't great just because they've put too much time into learning it already, or because their friends are using it, or whatever.)
It reminds me of a short argument I had with someone about my writing years ago. They didn't like a short story I'd posted on the D2 site, I did like it (obviously, since I wrote it and wouldn't have posted it if I'd thought it sucked) and the other person (who had absolutely no ability to write fiction, but could not accept that reality) said something like, "What, you think your writing style is better than mine?"
I said, "Of course. Everyone thinks their style is the best, or they'd be writing in a different style. Right?" That bit of logic pretty well shut her up, which was fortunate, since I was annoyed and close to launching into a savage discussion of the shortcomings of her painfully-labored and desperately-precocious writing style.
Funny how my posts never end up on the same subject that they began on, isn't it?
Fast Fun Free Online Game: Part 04
It's been a few weeks
since I last posted about a fun, fast, and free online game, and since I found one tonight, I thought I'd share. It's not really a game, so much as a logic/strategy puzzle, but it's fast and fun enough to be worth a recommendation. Click here for
Grow Cube!
The screenshots here are much reduced in size, but the game looks like the top image at the start, and below it you see a shot from halfway through a game that can
not be won at this point. Basically it's a puzzle game; you've got a big 3D cube, 10 icons, and you've got to figure out the correct order to make your 10 moves (each icon can only be used once) in order to solve the puzzle.
It's fun to learn, largely because the little men (they multiply, and yes, you want to get your little guy out first) run around and dig down into the cube and create a waterfall, irrigate the plants so that they grow, move a pot so the water boils, and so on. It's fun simply to watch the little dudes charge around, and I enjoyed figuring out what I had to do in what order. First the pot, then the fire, water before plants so they'll groww, and so on. It's not very complicated, as implied by the "fast" portion of this entry's title. It took me about half an hour to have an idea what I was trying to do, and then a bit longer to solve it. I was stuck about 5 moves into the sequence for a while, until I used some logic to figure what I had to do first and what I could wait until later/last.
Check the comments for a bit of advice, but not the solution, since that would spoil your fun.
You can also click here to see what the solved puzzle looks like, but you really should try it first, and check the final image only when/if you get stuck and need some inspiration. Looking at the solution won't give you the sequence though, so it's not going to ruin the game; just take away lots of the surprise and joy of discovery you'll get as you play it and trial and error your way towards victory.
News of the Weird
Do you read the
News of the Weird? I love the site, but can't recall ever linking to it, so consider this my overdue recommendation. Bookmark the site if you enjoy a weekly dose of capsule descriptions of bizarre news, and while there aren't any hilarious ones this week,
this one made me laugh. After all, how often do you hear a quote from a funny district attorney?
Elijah Walker, 35, who pleaded guilty to cocaine possession in Cincinnati in June, resisted complying with the state requirement that he also give up a DNA sample, in that he feared the state would use it to create a clone of him. (Said the prosecutor, reassuringly, "I'm not sure the state really wants another Elijah Walker.") [Cincinnati Enquirer, 6-30-05]
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Tae Kwan Do tournament thoughts.
Saturday afternoon Malaya and I drove over to an area college that was hosting a Tae Kwan Do tournament in the gynmasium. It was free, and we were curious, so off we went, before driving down to Lafayette and their annual wine and music and crafts festival.
As for the Tae Kwan Do... it was interesting to see a pure sport form of martial arts, in comparison to the "this will kill someone" stuff we mostly concentrate on in Kali class. They had 6 rings (well, squares) set up around the gym, with matches going on in every ring all the time. All different age groups and skill classes were represented, though by the afternoon when we got there, most of the little kids seemed to be done. That was our goal anyway, since while they're very cute all smothered in pads and such, we didn't have much desire to watch 7 y/o's take turns frantically kicking each other in the chest guard. The older students weren't a great deal more impressive, but we saw a few good moves, and one guy got sort of knocked out by a decent spinningg heel kick that got him in the mouth.
I have no idea how the tournament style TKD compares to other forms, but it was very energetic, but not in any way practical for actual self defense. There don't seem to be very many moves allowed; maybe 75% of the kicks we saw were basic side kicks to the stomach area, which is how they mostly score points, I guess. They weren't kicks to hurt though; they were just to score points, so they bounced off the heavy stomach padding like a bug against a windshield. Another 20% of the attacks were spinning heel kicks that hardly anyone had enough control over to actually aim, 4% were straight armed punches to the chest, and maybe 1% were leaping kicks, or kicks that went low, or double kicks, etc.
There was one skinny Asian guy who looked to be about 17 who could do it well enough to be a stunt man in a movie. He wasn't very accurate, but he had kicks that were fast enough to do some damage, and he could string three or four in a row, he could kick to the head with power, and he even did a couple of leaping double kicks. He won his fight by a mile, but even he never hit the other guy hard enough to do more than slightly stagger him.
All of the fighting was open hand; there weren't any weapons used at all, and everyone wore a ton of pads. I mean kicking foot pads, shin guards, knee pads, chest/shoulder pads, huge helmets with face shields, and heavy boxing gloves that went up over the wrists. If not for one guy getting a heel kick to the chin (he did a side kick and his opponent did one of the very few parry moves we saw all day; spinning away with a heel kick that happened to find the chin) and going wobbily with some mouth bleeding, we wouldn't have seen a single solid hit the whole time.
I don't know the rules of TKD tournament style, but it was very odd to watch. They've got so many rules to make it safe that it's sort of kabuki dance-like, in some ways. They never grab or do any throws or even shoves, and they hardly ever punch, only throwing a few straight shoulder punches that looked more like one-armed pushes. They never kick low or do any sort of sweeps, even though those were open all day with the awkward high kicks most people were throwing. They never catch the opponent's slow kick and throw him down, or pull him in for a kill, or hit him/her while they're off balance. They never circle away and get in a hit by side stepping an out of control charge. The never block and step inside an attack to hit in the opening their defense creates, and really, they never block at all. At least 95% of the matches we saw were basically two people taking turns hitting each other, with an occasional leap back dodge.
It reminded me a bit of Olympic fencing, where no one defends or parries anything; they just stab frantically, since they're padded up to be invulnerable, and since the first hit to land wins, and they've got electronic scoring to tell you who landed it, the whole goal is just to dive at your opponent and hit them 1/1000th of a second before they hit you. The fact that you both died in real life is irrelevant, in their sport.
The TKD wasn't that fake, and everyone got in lots of kicks and hits, and we could usually tell who was winning (they fought two rounds of about one minute each, before getting a decision), but it's been so ritualized into a competition form that it's lost any real connection to actual martial arts. It's like touch boxing would be, where the fighters go through all the motions but no one actually gets hurt so no one actually worries about defense or hitting hard; they just score their points and move on.
On the drive home, Malaya and I were arguing about the uses of it for our future hypothetical children. I didn't think it would be a bad thing for a kid to learn, since their young knees could take it, they'd enjoy dressing up in the pads and outfits and such, and it would let them burn off a lot of energy. I see it like a sort of light-contact gymnastics. She is more of a Kali snob than me, and was horrified at the notion. Why would we want our child wasting time on a sport martial art like that, it would teach him/her bad combat habits he/she would have to erase once he/she started doing kali later on, etc. And I agree with her, if the kid were over the age of 13 or 14 or something. By then I'd want the kid to learn something that could actually be used effectively in a fight. But for younger kids, I think the sport TKD would be fine, and probably less wear and tear on their knees than the soccer I played was, if not a whole long more useful in an actual street fight.
We did heartily admire the cash cow aspects of TKD, though. Everyone there must have had
$300 worth of padded equipment on, plus their $70-100 ghi, plus a $50 bag to carry it in. And you know those kids are outgrowing their gear every year, needing new colored belts every few months, wearing out the shoes like mad, needing extra uniforms if you can't do the laundry three times a week, etc. You know those TKD dojos are making more money on their equipment sales than they are on the classes themselves. And speaking strictly on a business level, I admire that. Great revenue stream concept, especially with the art being easy to learn for kids, who go through the equipment the fastest.
USC #1 in a laugher.
I'm trying to limit my football blogging after getting carried away last weekend, but I just watched the USC game on tape, and I just have to comment on it.
They won 70-17 against a quality football team (Arkansas), and it was literally the biggest offensive mismatch I've ever seen in major college or professional football. My first memory was of the StL Rams back in 1999-2001 Greatest Show on Turf era, but even they never scored 28 points on 8 plays covering 246 yards in the first quarter. USC's defense was good, not great, but really, when the score is 49-10 at half how motivated can you be on defense? Back ups and Freshmen played for most of the 3rd and all of the 4th quarter, so the overall stats are flawed, but 736 yards of offense is just outrageous.
USC could probably have gotten over 60 in the first half if they'd wanted to, since after 28 in the 1st quarter they ran the ball almost every play on their next touchdown possession, just to take some time off the clock and let their defense rest. They scored anyway, then went back to throwing it next time and covered 80 yards in 4 plays, and got the ball back with a minute to play and just let the clock run out. The ridiculous thing was that they weren't getting defensive scores or turn overs; they had a pick at their own 30 early on, and a couple more in the second half, but of their first 7 drives, they got the ball at their own 30 or deeper on all but one of them. They just gained like 20 yards a pop, and they did it with a dizzying variety of plays complicated, pro-style passes and power runs. The USC offensive line was just a wall of doom, and I began to feel sorry for the poor Arkansas defense by the middle of the 2nd quarter.
Commentators have been talking up this USC team as perhaps the best in the history of college football, after their undefeated run last year, and while I'd usually say that's just hyperbole, it seems like a fair argument at this point.
Saturday, September 17, 2005
Yoga!
Yes, yoga. That form of organized stretching that's all-to-often set to lite jazz, and/or the sounds of whales belching. I'd tried it a few times in the past, but found it difficult and painful, and never stuck with it. I'm trying it again now though, since I'm tired of being stiff and sore for a day or two after every really demanding Kali class, and I think the improved flexibility will help me avoid an inevitable muscle pull type injury, and should also improve my performance in my martial art of choice.
Lots of the Kali moves we learn are flowing and smooth and graceful (well, in theory; not necessarily in practice, at least not for stiff and blocky Fluxor), and while tai chi is often recommended to get your body moving in a more sinuous fashion, and I want to take some classes in that too, I think the yoga will definitely help. I could probably do just as well just spending half an hour every other day stretching, but since I've been telling myself that since high school, and have never done it other than in spurts here and there, I'm using the the yoga videos as a way to get myself to do what I need to do. I really need it with all of the working out and weight lifting I'm doing now too, since it's making me stiffer and less flexible. You know how some muscle-bound guys can hardly lift their arms over their shoulders? I don't want to get like that, neither overly-muscled or totally inflexible, but I can already see some differences in my mobility from the muscle I've put on, and I want to reverse that ASAP.
There's half an hour of yoga on Fit TV every day, and I've taken to taping that. I also spent $6 on a beginner's yoga DVD from the multimedia rack in our local Ross discount clothing store, and it's already proving useful already. I did a 20 minute session Thursday when I got up, and another one Friday evening after a brutal workout at the gym, and while I don't feel any overall changes yet, I enjoyed them and noticed improvements during the sessions. Both of them started off with a series of stretches and positions, and then ended with the same ones, and I couldn't help but notice how much more limber I was the second time through. I was still like a human stone compared to the bendy instructors, but I'm a lot more muscular than them, and could kick their asses if I had to. So there.
The sad part is that I'm too tight in various areas (neck, lower back and hips) to even feel the stretches where they say I should be feeling them. They'll do some bending stretch and talk about feeling the hamstrings expand, and I'm bending half as far and feeling like I'm tearing pulling loose a series of stitches across my shoulders and neck. They sit in the basic lotus position and lean forward and talk about keeping the back straight rather than bending over, and I'm struggling just to sit halfway upright and keep my thighs from cramping up as they tense and throb. On the bright side, I have little trouble with the various strength elements, and enjoy holding the tension in my thighs in some squatting stances, or holding my body stiff in the various faux-pushup type poses.
Still, it's been a whole two days, and I knew I was dangerously stiff going in, so any improvements are good ones. It should translate directly to Kali too, since there are lots of moves I could do if I were more flexible; high spin kicks and crouching sweeps for example, and more shoulder and torso flexibilty will really help with various large stick/sword swinging moves too. Plus, once I'm looser I will hopefully be able to walk the day after we do something involving a lot of back bending or crouching. Which would be nice.
Movie Review: The Transporter
The Transporter is an entertaining, exciting, clever, fun, and completely ridiculous action film. It's nothing special on the surface, just car chases, shoot outs, and fight scenes, but it takes those familiar elements and makes them more fun than usual with an above-average plot, decent acting, and a number of extremely-creative and clever action scenes. It's not really any good, but if you go in expecting action, fast driving, explosions, fight scenes, a little bit of female skin, a lot of male skin, and can turn off your brain at a popcorn thriller, you should enjoy it.
To the scores:
The Transporter, 2002
Script/Story: 6
Acting/Casting: 5
Action: 8
Combat Realism: 4
Humor: 5
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 6
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 6
Overall: 6.5
It's not really good, but it's far from bad, and it's fun if you keep the right frame of mind. The main character is "the transporter," just like the title. He's an ex special forces (from no particular country) living on the ocean in Monaco, and for fun and profit he transports things. Anything, no questions asked, no exceptions made. He has three rules. 1) Never change the deal. 2) No names. 3) Never open the package.
The film opens with him picking up four armed men in masks, while alarms sound and police cars approach. He's fine with the situation; what he doesn't like is that the deal was changed. He contracted to take 3 men weighing no more than 250 kilos. Shouting ensues, the robbers threaten the Transporter's life, but the car won't start without the ignition code and finally the head robber blows away one of the three in the backseat, they dump the body, and they're off on wild chase through the picturesque streets of some unnamed European city.
The next package is when things get interesting, since a flat tire leads to the discovery that the package is human sized and squirming, and from there complications ensue, and the plot thickens greatly, with the Transporter becoming a target for a small army of killers. There are driving stunts galore, there are faux martial arts fight scenes galore, there are shoot outs, and so on.
What elevates this film above most cheesy action fests is the inventiveness of it. There are half a dozen long fight and stunt scenes, and almost all of them had at least a few things I'd never before seen in a movie. The most clever has the Transporter cornered by a dozen bad guys in an old garage. He's vastly outnumbered, but his shirt is off, and when one guy falls over a tub of old oil, the Transporter dumps out another one all over himself, coating the floor and his body with the slippery stuff. He then steps onto a bike, breaks off the pedals, and proceeds to fight with bike pedals stuck over his toes, giving him improvised metal cleats, while the bad guys are falling and slipping everywhere, and constantly grabbing at him and sliding off.
In another scene he fights half a dozen guys on a public bus, using the seats for leverage and cover, the overhead bars to swing from or hang his legs over and fight upside down, the side rails to swing around and kick, and so on. There are improvised weapons (he battles several times with his own clothing as a tool), there are leg locks and submission holds to incapacitate several bad guys at once, there are wild escapes through the floor into the ocean, and much more. It's really quite a clever movie.
There are even some good characters, from an understanding and sympathetic police detective to a quirky and self-asserting female hostage, and they mostly make up for the vast armies of one-note evil bad guys. The Transporter could have been an action classic with just a few improvements, most notably a plot that we might have gotten involved in, and a bad guy worthy of a final confrontation. The film has a great sense of humor, and it's very light and frivolous, but it's a bit too puffy overall, and the lack of any real compelling narrative or building climax keeps it from succeeding completely. It's meant to be popcorn, and it is, but it's got just enough serious elements to detract from the fun and remind you that this is the real world and things aren't always happy here. I'd usually approve of that, but with the rest of the plot so completely divorced from reality, it's jarring, rather than fortifying.
Thursday, September 15, 2005
"Sounds like community."
Malaya and I often do some Kali outside our condo, in a little cement square area. It's not very big, but it's enough for our two person stuff, and we're often just practicing various moves side by side, rather than sparring or interacting directly. The neighbors see us out there, when they walk past to take their trash to the dumpster or check the mail, and mostly they just walk past, and mostly we just move our swinging sticks and staves and knives out of the way. One guy stopped to talk a few days ago though, and asked what we were doing, where our dojo was (well, he tried to ask that, but he couldn't find the word "dojo" in his memory and instead said something like, "...where do you go to get your um... training?") and sounded somewhat interested in trying it out himself. I think it would be cool if some of our neighbors got into it, and actually went to class and such. More people to play with is always fun. Of course they'd then want to hang out and practice here with us and carpool to class and such, and that would be a lot less fun.
The oddest comment to date came to Malaya a week or so ago, when she was walking back from the parking lot and met one of our neighbors. The woman roped Malaya into a conversation and said how much she liked to see us doing our thing out there, and said that she especially liked it when she heard the sound of our sticks whacking together. She said it, "sounded like community." I'm not sure if that's related to smelling like teen spirit, or where you find communities distinguished by people hitting baked bamboo sticks together in rhythmic fashion, but that's what she said.
I'm cool with that interpretation, though. It certainly beats her calling the cops to report a stick-based assault, or throwing a pan of water on us like we were a pair of rutting felines.
Sleep is contagious.
Everyone knows yawning is contagious, but did you know that the sleepy is too? Since the weather has grown abruptly autumnal the cats are attached to the bed like lampreys, so long as there are warmth-producing humans in it, and this morning it was downright chilly, I was very warm under the comforter, and with the cats sprawled out on each side of me, I just could not get up. Malaya was already up and gone, but since I'm a lazy himbo, and himbos aren't paid to get up in the morning, (especially when they were up until 6am editing away on their aspiring fantasy novel) I kept drowsing; a chore that was greatly aided by my feline bookends.
I'd wake up, feel their sleeping weight and yawn and fall asleep for another 20 minutes, wake up, doze off again, etc. It reminded me of a moment from the drive back from Long Beach last week. Gura was at the wheel, her fiance R was shotgun, and Malaya and me were sharing the right side of the backseat, with our snack-loaded cooler on the left. R was snoring away, Malaya was sleeping too, and while I was awake I had on the iGimp and might as well have been asleep, for all the conversation I was adding to the environment. In my defense, Malaya's sleeping head was on my shoulder and if I'd spoken my words would have traveled to the front seat via her ear, but still, it was no real surprise when Gura jostled her fiance awake, in order to keep awake herself. As she said, the weight of sleeping people was pulling her down, and Flux being awake wasn't enough to counteract the sleepiness of R and Malaya.
Thus I hold Dusty and Jinx responsible for my nearly seven hours of sleep this morning. I'd have been up by noon if not for their furry asses. Bonus points to Dusty for remaining in bed, cat-snoring while completely covered by the comforter, for an additional 2.5 hours.
Paris' phone hacker does time.
The 17 y/o who hacked into Paris Hilton's cell phone (not that it required hacking when she had her
dog's her ex-dog's name as the password) has been
sentenced to 11 months in juvenile hall. Given that virtually everyone in the world saw and enjoyed the fresh crop of
Paris-titty photos generated by his "hacking," shouldn't we all share in the punishment? Seriously, everyone who had a laugh from the whole incident could do an hour or two of his sentence, and he'd be out and free to resume humiliating tech-stupid celebrities in no time.
Harry Potter Movies...
I'm not sure how they do it, but they keep sucking me back in. The first 2 were boring, slow, and unimaginative, and I wouldn't have seen them except for my mom wanting to go and taking me along with her. I hadn't read the books at that point, so I at least had some slight enjoyment of discovering the characters and the world via the plodding films. I then read the first five books before the 3rd movie came out, and that made it enjoyable for me, since the movie skimmed over the book so much that it wouldn't have made any sense at all if I hadn't read book 3 by then. I gave
HP3 a 7.5, which seems nutty in retrospect since I don't have any fond memories of the movie, haven't had any desire to see it again, and remember it largely for the gaping plot holes. (Things that were tediously explained in the book were skipped over entirely in the film.)
(I have seen a few bits of HP1 and 2 on TV since the films came out, and they're both boring and burdered by dreadful special effects. I don't recall which film it was, but one of them was on cable a few weeks ago and Malaya and I were openly scoffing at the awful blue screen shots in the Quidditch match.)
Now HP4 is coming out this fall, and while I was hoping to keep from growing interested in it, they keep saying this one is by another real director, one willing to take some liberties and spice things up, and that the characters are maturing and that there's real danger and terror now, etc. The teaser trailer wasn't real impressive, but now they've launched
the first full trailer and I have to admit that I enjoyed watching it. Unfortunately it's on AOL MovieFone, which is shit, but happily they've got one link that doesn't require downloading their janky software, or some sort of beta test software from some other unknown company. Click the link for "X-Large Quicktime" or
just click this to go directly to the actual .mov file. I'd recommend a right click and "save target as" actually, but hey, you know your own tolerance for 33meg movie trailer files better than I do.
Pledge of Allegiance Ruled Unconstitutional
While
I agree with this judge's ruling in principle and in legality, I still wish it would go away.
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 14 -- A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the law requiring the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools is unconstitutional and said he was ready to issue an injunction to three California school districts to halt the daily reciting of the pledge.
Terming the case "a cause celebre in the ongoing struggle as to the role of religion in the civil life of this nation," U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled that the pledge's reference to "one nation under God" violates children's right to be "free from a coercive requirement to affirm God."
...
In his ruling, which he acknowledged will "satisfy no one involved" in the debate about the role of religion in public life, [Judge] Karlton said he was bound by precedent from the appeals court, which in 2002 ruled in favor of Newdow that the pledge is unconstitutional when recited in public schools.
On pure legal merits, it's an open and shut case. The Constitution has long been interpreted to mean that that the people have freedom of and from religion, and that the government can not impose symbols from one religion on everyone. With that as your starting point, there's really no way to defend a pledge that forces school children to say, "one nation under God" each and every morning. Since I don't believe in that sort of thing, I certainly don't support it, and I'm in agreement with the father bringing the lawsuit, that the pledge should be restored to its original, pre-Red scare hysteria version, when "under God" was not part of it.
That being said, I don't think this is a battle worth fighting. Freedom of and from religion is one of the absolute requirements for any modern, free, democratic society, and it's essential that the laws and governmental powers of a nation not be influenced or tainted by religious justifications. I'm all for legal action that keeps the US from becoming the Christian theocracy the religious right dreams of. Headline-grabbing lawsuits over a couple of harmless words in the pledge of allegiance do not fit into that category. In fact, I think this sort of lawsuit hurts the ongoing battle against the Christian right.
My reasoning is that this is a sideshow, and that it distracts from the real issues, and that it feeds into the persecution mentality the Right, and especially the Christian Right, gets their strength from. Athiests and people of non-Christian religions want nothing but equal and fair treatment from government, and we see the courts as a shield between the power-mad desires of the Christian Right and the rest of us. The Christian Right, on the other hand, lives with a constant paranoia and feeling of persecution, justified or not. In the same way that Republicans can continue to campaign as underdogs while controlling the Supreme Court, both Houses of Congress, and the White House, right wing Christians can act persecuted and hassled in a nation that's something like 75% Christian. That's how they keep themselves motivated, that's how they scare old rich people into sending them money, and that's how they get laws passed and take sneaky control of school boards and ban the teaching of science that contradicts the creation myths in their Bible of choice. And when they can point to court rulings that make no real difference, but are symbollic, like bans on the Pledge of Allegiance, or Nativity Scenes on city property, that gives them enormous ammunition.
I think this sort of case pretty much plays into the religious right's hands, since it doesn't really change anything while creating a ton of negative publicity. "They banned the Pledge of Allegiance! They must hate America!" You can almost hear the cash registers ringing and postmen groaning as donations pour in and outraged/confused letters pile up in the offices of congressmen.
Advice to atheist parents: let them say "under God" in their little morning speech, explain to your children that they can skip those words, and that it's something some people believe because they don't know any better, and save the court battles for things that matter; like preferential treatment for Christian charities, or government support for foolish programs like "abstinence only" sex ed classes that actually increase teen pregnancy and STD rates.
On the other hand, to completely contradict myself, maybe this sort of bold court challenge is greatly beneficial to the non-Christian majority. It lets free thinkers know that they're not alone, and that not everyone grazes happily with the herd. Perhaps this gives strength to people to stand for their (non) beliefs, and prompts people of weak faith to realize that there are alternatives to living and dying with the same unquestioned beliefs they received from their parents. I know I would have rejoiced at this sort of court ruling years ago, when I was younger, angrier, and less practical about the state of religious belief in America, at least.
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Popstar or Pornstar?
Stealing a link I saw on
Asia Carrera's site, this is a 10 question quiz game on Liquid Generation that's just what it sounds like. There are pics of women with their faces covered up, and you've got to figure if they're
pop stars or porn stars. There's isn't any nudity, just a lot of slutty clothing and cheesy music, so click at your own discretion.
I got 7 out of 10 correct, though I was mostly guessing since I only knew 2 of the women before the unveiling of their faces. (And I only knew about 4 of them after the unveiling, for that matter.) Check the comments for a hint, or just go take the quiz yourself.
New Kali Shiny: Part 03
Yes, new Kali shinies. As I think I mentioned a few days ago, Malaya got a pair of sais. Here's the first pair, and down below you see both pairs. It was actually pretty cute; she wanted some, she ordered some from Amazon.com (Buy crap!), and then when she learned that they were not going to arrive by Friday, when she had to have them to get some instruction from Tuhan at that night's womens' class, she asked me to drive her to a martial arts store in Berkeley so she could buy a second pair to get started learning them right away.
So, the ones you see to the right are the first pair used, and the second pair paid for. The ordered ones arrived on Monday.
Sais are pretty much what you see here. These are 18" and 19" (.5 meters) or so, and they're solid metal, so are actually pretty damn heavy. The ones with the higher wrapped grip, ordered from Amazon.com, are slightly longer and slightly lighter. The blade (well, the pointy part, since it's not actually bladed) is exactly the same length, but the handle is a bit longer, which changes the weight distribution a bit.
As for what you can do with sais, I listed about all I know in yesterday's Elektra review. Malaya has learned a little bit just fooling around with them, and Tuhan was gorgeous moving with them on Friday, despite not having ever really used sais for a weapon, but we don't know too much about them yet. They are nice for stabbing with, and you can catch a weapon in the trident part and twist it out of the opponent's hand, or just trap it down with one sai while you stab a hole in them with the other sai. You can also switch the grip quickly, from forehand to backhand, by spinning the weapon around while holding onto the crossbar, and do a lot of different things that way; block attacks with the sai point along your forearm or stab them with backhand elbow strikes, for instance.
And as always, none of this is possible to follow without photos or videos. Basically they're shiny, no one else in our Kali school is using them now so Malaya enjoys being unique, and they're fun to play around with and feel very different than the other weapons we use. And now that we've got two pairs, you can bet I'll be drafted into assisting her learning experience. I already have been with swinging stick and staff at her while she practiced blocking, but I'm sure there is far more stuff to do sai on sai, once she learns it and can bring it home to show me. I'm interested in learning to use them too, of course, but I'll need some longer ones at some point; neither of these are long enough for me to do any of the backhand stuff, since the points do not stick out past the end of my elbows. Not that I can't just do elbows, but if you've got a pointy metal weapon in your hand you might as well use it.
Book Review: Depraved
I said I'd post my review of
The Transporter this week, and I will tomorrow. In the meantime, here's a review of a book that I don't recommend anyone bother reading. I actually had two books by the author, both on historical serial killers, but after barely making it through this one, and only after skimming dozens of pages in the very slow middle section, I took them both back to the library, the second one unopened.
Depraved, by Harold Schechter, is a book about H. H. Holmes, a notorious serial killer who actually built his own murder mansion in Chicago in the late 1800s. He was basically the first serial killer ever in modern times, and certainly the first to have his crimes written about and discussed widely, in a so-called civilized age. Unfortunately the book is far from as good as it could have been, with far too little about his major crimes and murder mansion, and far too much about the relatively minor insurance scam he eventually got busted for, and the boring trial that sent him to the noose.
To the infrequently-used non fiction scoring matrix:
Depraved: The shocking true story of America's first serial killer, by Harold Schechter
Concept: 7
Presentation: 4
Writing Quality: 5
Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 5
Entertainment Value: 4
Rereadability: 3
Overall: 3.5
This one was a disappointment. I ordered from the library
after enjoying Savage Pastimes, another book by the same author, and hoping for an informative and gruesome book about an infamous serial killer. It was, in places, but the presentation was lacking, and the book had no focus and far too much irrelevant courtroom drama.
It opens up properly, with a thumbnail sketch of the times, a brief description of H. H. Howard's infamous crimes, and more background info. It then lists some formative experiences from his childhood, and gives a short bio of his life up to the point he turned to murder. After that it loses its way, with endless discussion of Holmes' travels around the country as he tries to perpetrate a minor insurance scam, and then far too many pages on his anticlimactic murder trial. (Note to the author: just because you constantly say how shocking a development was in the trial doesn't mean the readers are going to agree.) Surprisingly, Holmes' trial is for the murder of a henchmen in the poorly-designed insurance scam, and Holmes was never charged or prosecuted for the dozens of other far more interesting murders he committed. Unfortunately those are hardly mentioned in the book at all, and are not discussed in any detail.
Going by the middle 80% of the book, you'd think it was a biography about a small-time hustler, scam artist, and serial bigamist who eventually got carried away and murdered a partner, tried to collect on his life insurance policy, and was subsequently tried and executed for it. The fact that Holmes tortured and murdered maybe 50 other people, built an incredible murder mansion, and was the world's first documented serial killer is almost an afterthought.
Let's be honest; the hook of the book, the reason anyone reads it, is that it's about H. H. Holmes, who killed a lot of people in various horrible ways, at a time in history when that sort of thing was almost completely unknown. That's what the reader wants to know about, in as much detail as possible, with lots more about the, "mazelike corridors, soundproof rooms, sealed vaults, oversized furnaces, and chutes leading down to the cellar" that the book jacket talks about. Unfortunately, the sentence on the book jacket is about all the reader learns, when its repeated in the book. There are no detailed descriptions of the castle or the torture chambers below, no charts or diagrams or photographs, no eyewitness accounts, and not even any speculation about how the crimes went down.
What we do get are maybe 200 pages (out of the 360 total) covering Holmes' seemingly endless and aimless cross-country travels while dodging the cops and tediously plotting to murder his assistant in a life insurance scam, hoodwink his widow, and dispose of the guy's children. Ten or fifteen pages would have been sufficient for that section, but instead it covers at least 100, most of it of the, "traveled from Chicago to Baltimore, checked into two different hotels under different names, didn't buy the poor girls new shoes, etc..." variety. It's as boring as it sounds. Worse yet, we then revisit that entire story when it all gets relived during Holmes' trial, which ends in his conviction for the murder of his henchmen, as part of a life insurance scam.
The author covered that section in so much detail for an obvious reason; he could just pluck it all from newspaper articles at the time, since there was extensive coverage of Holmes in the media of the day. Far, far less coverage is given to the castle itself, or Holmes' serial killing, and there's virtually nothing about why Holmes became what he was. We get one short childhood incident, lots of unsourced comments about his practicing torture on animals as a child, and then bang, he's being hung for one minor murder with almost no details about the bulk of his crimes. We know everything about a crime we don't much care about, and almost nothing about all of the crimes we wanted to learn about, and that's a definite flaw. I was skimming paragraphs and whole chapters in seconds by page 250 or so; bored with the irrelevant courtroom drama and wanting to get past his conviction for one life insurance scam murder, and on to more about his real crimes.
Basically this is a decent first draft of a book about H. H. Holmes, but it needs substantial editing to add detail about his castle and murders, needs to have at least 50 pages of redundant and boring reportage about his travels removed, and needs much more psychological analysis and discussion about Holmes and the society in which he lived.
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Prodigy or hack?
So... Eragon. You've probably seen the book on a shelf somewhere, at CostCo or Barnes and Noble or wherever, and wondered at the slightly humanoid dragon staring back at you from the blue cover. I'd seen it a million times, but never been moved to pick it up for longer than it took me to flip through a few pages. With the second book in the trilogy (?) now out though, I gave the first one some more thought, and researched it on Amazon.com.
Check it out yourself; there's quite a lively debate.
Overall the book has a 4/5 rating out of 1688 reviews, which is pretty good. Tons of reviews and a strong score. If you sort them by the "
most helpful reviews" though, you'll see a contentious split between "utterly derivative crap" and "brilliant work for a teenager," with 1 star and 5 star reviews pretty well evenly divided.
No one (at least no one well read in fantasy), denies that the author, Christopher Piolini, was inspired by major fantasy works. Everyone cites Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, and Star Wars as clear influences on the plot and characters. Every fantasy novel today can obviously be traced back to Tolkien and others though, so the question is, does the author do something new with the world and the character archetypes? And some people think Piolini did, and others are not so convinced. Here's a quote from the official Amazon.com blurb:
Christopher Paolini began Eragon when he was just 15, and the book shows the influence of Tolkien, of course, but also Terry Brooks, Anne McCaffrey, and perhaps even Wagner in its traditional quest structure and the generally agreed-upon nature of dwarves, elves, dragons, and heroic warfare with magic swords.
Others are less kind:
What you almost always hear first about this book is "wow, it was written by a 17-yr-old". And the author is fully deserving of the respect and admiration he gets--it is indeed an impressive book for a 17-year-old to have written. What he probably should not have gotten was a publishing contract, since while it is impressive for a 17-yr-old, it is less than impressive for a published work of fiction.
If an adult had written and published this, I would have been disgusted (as I was with the Sword of Shannara) with the clear calculation that had gone into the work: "ok, I'll take a lot of Tolkien, a lot of McCaffery, a good amount of Leguin, some Dragonlance, some Star Wars, etc. It will be a can't miss book." Since it's the product not of an adult but of a teenager, it comes across much more positively--as a work of fiction by someone who has read lots and absorbed lots of fantasy and simply didn't have the experience (or the good editor) to take out all of his favorite parts of other works. How can I dislike or be too critical of someone who so obviously loved some of my own favorite authors, loved them so much that they simply took over his book through I'm guessing no fault of his own.
And that in a nutshell is the problem with Eragon. The story is cliched, formulaic and barely passable as are the characters and the language is simply what you would expect from a somewhat precocious teen fan of adult fantasy.
--Reviewer: B. Capossere
Given
my downright hostile reaction to the Tolkien-lite Sword of Shannara, I kind of doubt I'll even make it through Eragon. But I was curious, and it was at the library, so here we are. If it sucks I'll finally get started on the last Harry Potter book, which has been sitting here for weeks. I really need to check some HP FAQ online first though, since I read books 1-5 pretty much right in a row, and the details of them have all blurred together in my mind.
Unwanted porn?
Amusing article
from a UK tabloid.
A WOMAN Tory councillor has been rapped by police for bombarding a neighbour with hardcore porn magazines in a four-year feud. Christine Sheppard, in her fifties, had them delivered to church-going mum Theresa Horsey and hubby Chris. She even wrote to a sex toy firm posing as Mr Horsey -- and asking for brochures to boost the size of his manhood.
..."Then disgusting porn came through our door for six months. It started with Ann Summers-type stuff, but it just got filthier and filthier. There were pictures of girls having sex with other girls and orgies."
You know every teen boy (and most of the men) in the UK read this and had two thoughts: 1) That's a bad thing? and 2)How do I start a feud with this woman?
I like the mention of
Ann Summers too; it's a very well known and very popular UK sex toy merchant -- something we have no equivalent of in the US, at least on a national level.
Monday, September 12, 2005
Movie Review: Elektra
Elektra is yet another Marvel comic book turned movie. This one stars Jennifer Garner as the titular female assassin, in her spin off film after being introduced (and killed) in 2002's
Daredevil. I have not seen that film, but zero knowledge of it, or the Elektra character in the comic book is required to enjoy this film. Not that we actually
enjoyed it, but hypothetically speaking...
To the scores.
Elektra, 2004
Script/Story: 3
Acting/Casting: 4
Action: 4
Combat Realism: 2
Humor: NA
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 6
Fun Factor: 4
Replayability: 3
Overall: 4
Just going by the scores this one could have gotten a much lower overall rating, but while it's not bad, it's not horrible. It's just very, very mediocre in almost every way. It's not good enough or interesting enough or original enough to hate; you just sit there watching it, mildly interested in the plot, enjoying some of the visuals, but pretty uninvolved in the whole affair. It starts, things happen, and it ends. If not for my ability to discuss the individual scores in more detail, I would literally have almost nothing more to say about it.
Having said that I didn't like it, I am surprised at its historically low score on Rotten Tomatoes. It earned
a woeful 7% approval rating, with just 9 good reviews out of 132 total. I didn't like it, but I've certainly suffered through any number of far worse action films and comic book films, and all of them got better RT scores than Elektra. I suppose the complete lack of passion and energy in the film is what did it in, since while no one really loathes it, there wasn't anything interesting or good enough to catch anyone's attention.
The Metacritic score of 34% seems to back that up too; there's just one positive score, and then a ton of 50% and 25% scores. No one gives it a 0% though, since it's not really a movie to hate... just one to forget.
To elaborate: (Some spoilers ahead, not that anyone over the age of 7 would find any suspense or surprise in the film.)
Script/Story: 3Elektra's back story and training and life is far more interesting than the events portrayed in the film. In it she's an assassin, and the movie opens with a sort of action scene of her killing dozens of bodyguards and finally the guy they were there to protect. It's pointlessly-protracted, and not cool, though it certainly tries to be and could have been. How you can have a hot chick, in red leather, wielding sais, killing dozens of guys with machine guns, and then beating the head merc in a longer hand to hand duel, and have it not be even slightly exciting is beyond me, but this film manages it.
After the opening Elektra's next assignment sends her off to kill a hot father and his cute daughter, which she of course can't bring herself to do. She then ends up protecting them from the mysterious and magical assassins "The Hand" sends after them, bonding with them, meeting up with her estranged mentor/martial arts master, and finally returning to her childhood home and avenging the bad guys who killed her mom and ruined her childhood. It's not a horrible plot, but the way it's handled is just so boring and by the numbers that you can't help but be bored with it.
It also doesn't make any sense. The "treasure" is what the bad guys want, and we quickly realize that the young girl is "the treasure." She's supposed to be a combat prodigy, (Not that her action scenes provide any evidence of that.) and they want to take her and train her up to be on their evil side. As we eventually learn though, Elektra was "the treasure" in the previous generation (even though she's like 15 years older than the girl and is certainly not her mother), and better yet, one of the bad guys, a woman with a poisonous breath skill, says she was "the treasure" as well and she doesn't want to be replaced. She might be 35 herself, or 40 or 50 if there's some magical preservation aspect to being the chosen one, but by appearances we've got 3 women in the film, all of whom were born as this amazingly-rare and powerful treasure... and they're like 20 years apart in age. What?
On top of that, the poison breath lady isn't very impressive, and her being on the side of the bad guys hasn't destroyed the world. Elektra is a hired assassin and she's not changing the world. So why should we think the annoying child will be any different no matter which side she's on? Basically, the whole plot is pointless, once it's been revealed. Worst of all, all of the bad guys killed in the film are hired assassins, and nothing happens to inconvenience the real puppet master bad guys who sent them. So they'll just send more, if they want to, and even if they don't, they're still untouched by Elektra or anyone else and free to continue trying to destroy the world, or at least get really rich off of their criminal activities.
Acting/Casting: 4No one is horrible, but the script is so boring and the conversation so flat and lifeless that it's entirely unremarkable.
Action: 4There are several fight scenes and some nice sets for battle, but none of the fights are really any good.
Combat Realism: 2This is a new rating category that should be fairly self explanatory. I was going to call it "Martial Arts," but that would have ruled it out in films with action and fight scenes, but no martial arts in them, and I wanted it to get more use than that. Basically this rating is about how well the physical combat is handled; does it look real, is it well choreographed, is the illusion that the actors can really fight preserved, and so on.
Elektra isn't a very good movie to start this rating on, since the martial arts and other fight stuff in this film are just awful. There are a lot of fights in the movie, with swords and sais and such, but none of them are any good, and none of them are presented in interesting fashion. If you're watching this film to get some idea how to use a sai, don't bother. Elektra does nothing with them that she couldn't have done with a pair of daggers, and either she never trained with the weapons at all, or her trainers had no idea how to use them.
It's really a lost opportunity, since the sai is a very interesting weapon, able to be used like a sword, or a stiletto, or a dagger, and the long trident points to the side of the main point/blade allow you to block a sword and twist it out of the attacker's grip, or turn the blade and stab the sai into their heart while still holding the blade in your trident. How you hold the weapon is a big factor as well, with a plain grip useful for different things than one in which you hook your index finger over one side of the central point, or your thumb. The sai should also be just a bit longer than your elbow, so you can reverse the grip and use it to stab with backhand strikes, and of course you've got two of them, so you can block with one and cut with the other. Sadly, this paragraph contains 100% more sai info than you'll get in the entire film, since Elektra just holds them to look pretty, and fights as though they were a pair of machetes.
There are also a few scenes of staff fighting, and those are simply dreadful. The scenes themselves aren't that bad, but the techniques used with the staff are beyond rudimentary, as if they were choreographed by someone who had just picked up a broomstick for a few minutes. No one with any sort of staff experience or martial arts training would have any difficulty beating the supposed staff prodigies on display in this film, and it's disappointing, since
vastly more effective staff techniques (than those shown in the film) are not at all difficult to do. I've got to blame the stunt coordinator on this one.
Humor: NANot a laugh to be seen. Since the film never attempted to be funny, this gets an NA rather than a 1 or a 0.
Horror: NASee humor. Although, I suppose a child might be scared by some of the imagery and such. I write reviews for adults though, so eh...
Eye Candy: 6This one is an odd score. Some of the special effects are very cool and inventive (if not particularly convincing). One of the bad guys is covered in animal tattoos that seem to live on him. A hawk can fly right off of his chest and become real in the air, snakes flow forth from him in tremendous profusion, wolves howl from his abdomen and leap forth to attack, and so on. Some of the architecture and costumes are very cool as well. Unfortunately, the entire film takes place at night or under cloudy daytime skies in the Vancouver area, and while the woods are beautiful, they're very dark and gloomy and depressing, as are the heavy sweaters and jeans and other functional but boring clothing on display.
Fun Factor: 4A 4 is probably generous, for this uninvolving film.
Replayability: 2Oh hell no.
Overall: 4This one is odd to rate, since while nothing is horrible in it, nothing is better than just barely adequate either. I'm averaging my score closer to the high points than the low ones, but if you gave this a 1.5 or a 2 I wouldn't really argue it. It's all about expectations, as usual. I expected this to be dreadful, and when it was merely bad I was relieved. I was far more disappointed after seeing other action films, when I hoped they would be good.
For example:
Blade Trinity,
Aliens 3 and
4,
The Chronicles of Riddick,
Star Wars Episode 1-3,
Terminator 3,
Underworld, and so on. I scored all of those films as low or lower than
Elektra, but they're all far better in a way, since there are at least a few things in them I would watch again, or that I remember as potentially great.
Elektra had nothing good, but it didn't seem like it was squandering potential excellence either.
Movies, with an eventual left turn into philosophy.
I haven't talked about recent movies for a while, or movie box office, or upcoming films, or any of that stuff. And I'm not going to do so today either, simply because there's nothing coming up that I'm interested in seeing. I did watch a couple of films over the past few days, and wrote reviews of both, so expect to see what I thought about
Elektra and
The Transporter (1, not 2) early this week.
I also watched
Constantine again, for the first time on DVD, and was happy to see that it held up nicely. It wasn't a masterpiece, and I think I liked it more in theaters, (I gave it
a shockingly high 8 then, and while I'd probably lower that a bit on this 2nd viewing, it was still at least a solid 7.) but it was entertaining, not stupid, and while too much of the mythology was hinted at or referenced, rather than shown, I liked the world it was set in, with the absent God, scheming Satan, and mercenary half breeds (angel and demon) all over the earth. The ending was still brilliantly clever, in plotting and execution, and very satisfying. I was also glad I had seen it in theaters, since the visuals, especially of hell, were so awesome on the big screen, and not half so impressive on our TV.
The least impressive thing about the DVD? The extra deleted scenes. Occasionally a film works in extra scenes and improves, but that's very, very rare. And for every
LotR and
Hellboy extended edition, there are a dozen other films with deleted scenes that very, verly clearly show you why they were deleted. Constantine's bonus scenes weren't edited in; they were just tacked on if you wanted to watch them, and to that choice I say, "Bravo!" Because frankly, they all sucked.
Most were slightly different versions of existing scenes, always less interesting than the versions in the final film, but there was one whole subplot they wisely cut out. It starred John Constantine with his fuck-buddy, a half-breed demon named Ellie. IMDB tells me that she was played by
Michelle Monaghan and
DevilFinder tells me she's not very famous. She wasn't very good in
Constantine, but while I didn't think much of her acting, that's not why they cut her out. It was her character, and what it did to the film.
Watch them yourself if/when you get the
Constantine DVD, but basically she's a half breed demon who is Constantine's lover, and a sassy lass. The entirely deleted scene shows her lounging in bed with Constantine, and giving him lip about his smoking and the state of the world. He gets up and gets dressed, and it seems like she's just a girl until the camera pulls back and we see something moving under the covers behind her. A tail, apparently. A nice touch that, but the scene was totally wrong for the film. We don't want to know about Constantine's personal life, or his sex drive; he's much more effective as a loner with no personal attachments.
A later scene has him meeting her again in the neutral ground bar, where she attaches herself like an annoying leech and gives the line about how "her boss" would come up from hell personally to take Constantine's soul. The bar in that segment is far larger than in the final film, and it sucks; it's like a huge Hooters, rather than an intimate, red-lit freak palace. Constantine walks through the bar in the final film, but there's no sign of Ellie then, and the bar is 10x cooler as well.
Her third appearance was in the final battle scene in the hospital, where she talks to John when he first walks in, before he turns on the sprinklers, in the deleted scene. She's actually shown in the final film, just briefly, as the holy water starts to melt her skin away, and there was one last scene of her cut out, when she's the last one living after the shotgun battle, and John lets her go and she scurries away.
I'm telling you far more than you need or want to know, but on the whole the extra scenes in
Constantine were just like Austin Powers' farts; better out than in. Let's give some props to the director, or the editor, or the meddling movie executives, or whoever decreed that they be cut, since the film was much stronger without no Ellie and without the other extraneous tidbits they snipped off here and there.
On a similar bonus scene note,
The Transporter DVD had no deleted scenes. It did however offer three extended length fight sequences. That's what the box said anyway. We watched them Sunday evening though, and as far as Malaya or I could tell they were 99% identical to the scenes in the film. Minus most of the sound effects, some of the snappy editing, and with lots of black frames with text like, "insert reaction of man in basement hearing gunshot" on them. Worthless to watch, in other words, though to be fair we did not do them with the commentary on, and perhaps that would have greatly elevated them. Or perhaps not. Honestly, you can skip all three of those entirely. Just FF to the fight scenes as they are in the actual film, if you want to see more simulated ass kicking.
In one bit of final movie news, I found myself on
the legendary CAP Alerts guy's site yesterday, and while skimming over the recent movie reviews to look for anything potentially anti-religious, I remembered the low budget horror/occult film,
Skeleton Key. It came out a month ago and promptly vanished, but it featured voodoo and stuff, and I had high hopes that Mr. CAP would go predictably insane about that.
He did, and while it's not one of his best rants (Like the one in which he talked about the Harry Potter and LotR movies being part of Satan's grand plan to weaken Christianity and all of Western Civilization by making evil magic and witchcraft attractive to children. Yes, I'm serious. He was too.) I enjoyed it.
To quote:
Yes, mom/dad, this is a movie of witchcraft, demonism and Satanic rituals. Complete with sprinkling of brick dust, candles, circles on the floor, incantations and infant/child victims. And body parts in formaldehyde. Before all the "Hoodooians" start barking, I don't care what it is called by man. If a supernatural power is not of God it is unholy. So the rituals were Satanic. No, that is not ignorance. That is knowledge of the Truth; that is Armor in His Word. [Rev. 21:8, Rev. 22:15]
And, of course, the film deeply minimizes the Christian faith by making it nothing more than just another religion, treating it as unmentionable.
This guy really makes Christians (and all people of faith) look bad, with his simple-minded absolutisms, but I can see the attraction to viewing the world the way he does. Lots of people can't handle reality, with its infinite shades of gray, and the ability to put yourself in someone else's PoV is beyond the ability of a depressingly-large number of humans. (President Bush, for instance.)
Thinking that "We're right and good and they're evil and wrong." is much easier than being objective and open-minded, and when you throw in the fact that everyone wants to feel special, the current state of the world is no surprise. So in CAP Alert Guy's world the religion he happened to grow up with is of course the one true faith, and anything different, even in a fictional film, is evil and the work of Satan. It seems a pathetically childish way to think, but in his world he's probably quite happy, since everything has its place and nothing requires any hard thought. If it reinforces what he believes already, it's good. If not, it's evil trickery sent by some hell-dwelling Bogeyman. And that's that, and even if evil triumphs in the short term, good will always win in the end, and if you die in the struggle, you'll be rewarded forever and ever, in heaven.
It's delusional and pathetic from the outside, but damn, if you can suspend your disbelief it's got to be fun to live like that. Like being a golden retriever, with no greater goals or joys in life than a full belly and a tennis ball to chase, and no threats more dangerous than the pizza delivery guy ringing the doorbell. And we atheists wonder why 90% of the people on earth throw themselves into one logic-defying religion or another?
Insert sports cliche here.
That's why they play the game...
On any given Sunday...
You never know...
And so on. It's also reason #872 why I don't gamble on sports, and reason #3 why casinos are always profitable. I speak of unpredictability in sporting events, of course, as demonstrated by
Sunday's NFL games. I'm not going to recap them or anything, but before the weekend
I bitched about the quality of the contests available on local TV in the Bay Area, mostly because last year's worst and second worst teams, the 49ers and the Dolphins, were featured in two of the three games. The third game on Sunday afternoon looked to be decent though, since it featured the supposedly great Vikings against the playoff dark horse Buccaneers.
I taped that game and watched it when I got up, and of course it was about the worst game all day, with very little offense and a horrendous performance by the Vikings' All Pro QB. The fact that his team almost won anyway just goes to show the quality of their opponents. Adding to the fun, SF and Miami both won their games, after going a combined 6-26 last year. I guess firing the coaches and bringing in tons of new players in both cases might have actually helped, eh?
Further perplexing my "which game will be worth watching on TV" logic, Sunday's late game was crappy, with the offenseless Baltimore Ravens nearly laying a complete egg, and only scoring a late mercy touchdown to avoid being shut out 24-0. The game was 3-0 at halftime, making me quite glad I didn't see a play before the 4th quarter, due to being out for an early dinner and then some errands with Malaya. Everyone is expecting an exciting game Monday night, with the defending Superbowl loser Eagles visiting the Falcons. It's the BirdBowl! Yes, every bird of prey found in the US has at least one football team named after it.
I'm actually betting this one won't be very entertaining, since I think the Eagles will just humiliate Atlanta. It'll be like 24-6 by the 3rd quarter, with only the spectacle of Michael Vick racing around with his headless chicken impression remaining to enliven the festivities.
Checking the spread, I'm shocked to see that Philly is just a 1 point favorite, and if I did bet on sports I'd put down a grand on the Eagles right now. Which would probably ensure that Philly fumbled half a dozen times and lost on a last second field goal. Which is why I don't bet on sports. Or did I mention that already?
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Saturdays beat Sundays?
I was just looking back at
this football-based post from a couple of days ago, prompted to do so by a blogger email letting me know that Vik had added another comment, and started to add a comment. It got long, so what the hell, here's a full post about it. You can skip right ahead if you don't care about US football games.
I sometimes have an idle daydream that I'm a football coach. Not in the pros, but in college, where a coach can really make a huge difference with innovative plays and motivation and such. I'd be horrible at the job in real life, since I am not a "Rah rah!" speech type of guy, and I'd hate recruiting and trying to get young men to go to class and not beat their girlfriends and not take money from boosters and all the other happy shit you've got to deal with as a college coach. But none of that stuff interferes with my idle daydream, since in it (usually as I'm drifting off to sleep on a Friday night and thinking about watching some college football the next day) I'm just watching my brilliant plays work perfectly and befuddle some heavily-favored, traditional powerhouse program with them.
It's nothing I'll ever do, but it does happen from time to time, and it's fun to watch. Urban Meyer did it last year with Utah, taking them to 13-0 and humiliating Pittsburgh in a BCS Bowl Game, before promptly zooming off
to the greener pastures of Florida. Coaches bring down programs more often than they build them up though; Joe Paterno got old and Penn State has fallen off, Florida has floundered since Spurrier left, Colorado and Washington nosedived after coaches left in the late 90s, Notre Dame hasn't gotten it back since Lou Holtz left, Nebraska was the best team of the 80s and 90s until Osbourne quit, etc.
There are always a few major schools with a new coach that they hope will work miracles, and sometimes they do. More often they don't improve things, or even make them worse; long-time NFL coach Dave Wanndstedt hopped
from the pros to Pittsburgh this year and has them off to a woeful 0-2 start. I saw part of their second game, and it was completely unwatchable in terms of offensive ineptitude; the score was 17-10 and the 3 TDs came on a kickoff return and two INT returns. The first game was more interesting though, as they lost at home to Notre Dame, a team that has their own new coach from the pros, and is off to a 2-0 start after beating Pitt, and then the #3 team in the country, on the road.
Charlie Weis is the new
Notre Dame coach, and he was the offensive coach for the New England Patriots, who have won the last 2 Superbowls, largely due to their innovative coaching. There was much speculation about how his clever offensive schemes would work in college, and if the college players could pick them up in their limited practice time. Well, ND destroyed Pitt (a win that looks much less impressive after Pitt's second game) and then won on the road against the 3rd best team in the country. I taped the game and watched it Saturday afternoon, and it wasn't very pretty for ND. They were perfect on their opening drive and scored effortlessly, then basically did nothing the rest of the day, only winning 17-10 because Michigan turned it over 3 times in the Notre Dame endzone.
I didn't think ND's play calling on offense was that brilliant either; they were perfect pecking away underneath on their first possession, but after that Michigan put more guys up close and their defensive line and linebackers dominated the game. ND responded by putting in more conservative lines, with more blockers and TEs, which just let Michigan pack it in even more. ND didn't have the personnel to power run it, and they should have tried to throw some bombs or longer passes to loosen things up and get the Michigan safeties and LBs back in coverage, rather than bird dogging the rush and short pass. But they won and it's hard to argue with that, even though Michigan soundly outplayed them and only lost on turn overs in the red zone. Hell, if Michigan had just kicked 3 FGs on those 3 empty trips down there they'd have won by 2. But a win is a win, and it's fun to watch a coach try to change things around on the national stage.
In fact, generally speaking I prefer football on Saturdays to Sundays. With 8 or 10 college games on, and up to 3 or 4 at the same time in the afternoon, it's hard to go wrong. Especially since in college they tend to play a higher-scoring, more exciting style of football. I am somewhat hampered by not having any favorite college teams, but I root against a few powerhouses that always win, and in other cases I just pick the underdog, or the team that looks to be trying harder or running more interesting plays.
Plus it's good being in CA for college football, since we mostly get PAC 10 games, and they tend to be quite high scoring and fun. Just today (Sat the 10th) I turned on the set in the early evening and flicked past the big name but boring/low scoring LSU/ASU and TEX/OSU games (they both got good at the end, but were crap in the 2nd and 3rd quarters, when I was watching), and found
Boise State at Oregon State. I could have cared less who won, but there were plenty of points, and in the last 8 minutes of the game (all that I saw) Oregon scored 10 points to come from behind and win by three, while the home crowd went crazy and the announcers yelled themselves hoarse. It was great fun to watch, at least partially because I would have been happy with any outcome. I liked that Oregon kicked the game winning field goal with a minute left, but if it had been blocked and run back by Boise and they'd won instead, I would have had just as much fun watching the home crowd fall into a stunned silence as the visitors celebrated. And both outcomes were far more likely than the odds of any given NFL Sunday game being wild and crazy and exiting at the end, with the much more controlled and scientific and conservative play at the professional level.
Nevertheless, I'll likely set the VCR to record the early game Sunday, and watch it in FF mode in the early afternoon after sleeping until around noon. I actually try to get up around 1, when the late games start, since then I can watch the early game on tape in an hour, while the late game(s) on TV get underway, and then can watch the rest of the late game if it's any good, or do other things if it's not. We've actually got errands to run and lunch to eat out tomorrow, so most likely it'll be other things. And that's fine, since I pretty well got my football fix Saturday, and there are good pro games on Sunday night and Monday night anyway.
Saturday, September 10, 2005
It's all about the snacks.
While this post title is true of parties, it's also true of diets. While in Long Beach we ate out for every meal, and didn't exactly skimp on the calories or desserts. There was cake, pie, ice cream, along with entrees, appetizers, buffalo wings from half a dozen different places (literally; we were making a running comparison) and so on. We ate out for more meals there in three days than we do here in a month.
That, on top of the almost complete lack of exercise we got, led me to expect a weight gain. Yet when I got home and weighed myself that night, I was down to 160; the lightest I've been in months. Since I'd weighed 164 or so last check, maybe a week before the trip, I have to conclude that I actually lost weight while in Long Beach, or at least that I didn't actually gain any. Since my entire exercise there was twenty minutes of low-impact Kali at the demo, walking a few miles around the convetion center, and treading water in the pathetically-shallow hotel pool (3.5 feet at both ends, 5 feet in the middle.), and since I ate far more meals in restaurants than I usually do, I have to look at what I didn't do. And I didn't snack, since we finished our entire meals each time in the restaurants, and we never dipped into the travel snack bag of chips, apples, etc.
At home I get a ton of exercise, doing high exertion Kali or going to the gym almost every day, and I eat more vegetables and less meat, and I almost never have dessert, etc. But I do snack a lot, and even though I mostly have just corn chips or fruit, I guess it adds up. Plus I'll often eat more at a meal than restaurant portions, since I can just make another burrito or more French fries here, rather than settling for what they bring me in the restaurant.
The moral of the story? Just by cutting snacks and only having three meals a day you might control your weight or even lose weight, compared to your usual, "Just a few handfuls of Cheetos to tide me over until elevenzies." And imagine if I'd been exercising as usual at the same time? (I'd have been hungrier and had to snack, probably. But let's overlook that little detail, shall we?)
Recent Photos
I've been running late on blog stuff all week, but here at last are some photos from last weekend's Long Beach trip. Our main purpose there was to attend the Pacific Media eXpo at the Long Beach Convention Center, and to perform a Kali demonstration there. We did that, but we also enjoyed wandering around the convention hall and looking at all of the weird anime and such, as
I described in a post earlier this week. Besides that we ate way too much, had too many desserts, went site seeing and shopping, and met Gura's brother and her fiance's brother too.
More details below, attached to each of the relevant photos.
An entirely-unremarkable shot of the crowd waiting to get in, the first day. Click it to see a larger view of more or less the same thing. The convention, in addition to being small, was poorly organized, and despite a rather late 11:00 door opening time, they weren't ready. Shortly after this shot they announced a 30 minute delay and most of the people in line sat down and waited. We walked off and looked around the rest of the hotel area; returning an hour later to begin being underwhelmed by the convention hall.
Gura's fiance took a ton of pics there, as did his brother, and hopefully they'll send some along at some point to supplement the few I snapped on day one.
Here's a shot of some of the Chinese Wing Chun guys who did the martial arts demo before ours. I took some action shots but they all turned out blurry, so no point in posting them. What I do hope to post are some shots a friend of ours took. He had a gloriously powerful camera, with the capability to take infinite shots in a row. Looking through them after the demo, it was like a stop action movie, with about 4 frames per second and 50 or 100 shots in a row of an action sequence. Compared to that there didn't seem to be any point in posting my few shots, and hopefully he'll burn us a CD and mail it up here (he lives in LA) and once it's in I can post some sequences of the demo, featuring both the Wing Chun guys and also our Kali demo.
One funny thing about our demo was that it showed just how self-critical Malaya and me are. We're always our own harshest critics in life, and especially in Kali, and after we do pretty much anything we're telling ourselves we sucked and could have done better, while other people are like, "That was good."
So Malaya did her knife stuff, solo and then stabbing and slicing at Gura and myself when we came at her with sticks, and I thought she was awesome, and afterwards she was like, "I sucked, I was too big, I missed open shots, etc..." I then did double stick with Gura and wasn't very good, missing the timing on several things, and Malaya said I was fine while I was annoyed and wanted to do it again to improve on my shitty display. And that was just a demo, where neither of us did anything especially challenging or fast or difficult. You should hear us after a regular class when we don't learn or perform as well as we expect to!
In theory we're pushing ourselves to improve by being self-critical, so I guess it's all good, as long as it doesn't turn self destructive. I have difficulties with that and my writing, at times, when I know I'm not writing a given scene as well as I could, or as well as it needs to be written. On bad days I'll just give up and do other things, or sit and stare at the screen and not accomplish anything. On better days I skip ahead and write a later scene, or write it while holding my nose, just get the words down and move on. That's what editing and editors and proof reading is for, right?
Here's a little memento from our Long Beach trip. It's already been sweated and washed away, but Malaya treated and we all got temporary (sprayed on) tattoos while wandering around the touristy embarcadero on the Long Beach pier. They were just $5 each in quantity, and when Malaya picked this dagger with the rose and I was up next, I couldn't find a stencil I liked better, so I went with the same one as her. My rose was done in blue though, while hers was red, and we got them on opposite arms, so when we held hands they were side by side. You can gag now.
The bracelet was just $4 at a nearby store, and since we've been looking for some leather bracelets for a while, and balking at the ridiculous $20ish prices most clothing stores try to charge for what are essentially Barbie-sized belts, I snapped up a pair of them. This one matched the tattoo very well, but I also got a wider one with lots of spikes and such. I just wanted it for the size really, since it was the widest one they had. Once we got back I used a pair of pliers to pick out all of the studs, and after spending $15 at Michael's on a leather punch and a bag of snaps, I put new snap holes into it and made it fit me perfectly.
So yes, I spent $5, plus $15 more, plus an hour of labor to turn a highly-decorated spiked bracelet into a completely undecorated strip of black leather, with a lot of unrepairable holes in it. My fashion sense is unrivaled!
I also have no idea where the bracelet in this photo went, since Malaya sort of claimed it and vanished it into her jewelry cabinet once we got home. We're planning on buying some more leather strips and making some more jewelry from them, now that we've got a tool for it. Where to get leather though? It's expensive at crafts stores like Michaels, plus it comes in narrow strips, or else very thin ones that wouldn't make good bracelets. My idea is any thrift store, where they always have a ton of donated belts for like $1 each. I'll buy some dead fat guy's 44" belt and make 5 bracelets from it, one of which will boast a truly enormous buckle. Decorations on them are optional.
The following shots have nothing to do with the Long Beach trip.
First up we've got this disturbing image of a child manikin. It was taken by my cell phone camera, while I was killing time and Malaya was browsing through the bridesmaid's dresses some weeks ago. There were actually four child-sized manikins lined up there, all of them as "Chucky's Revenge" psycho-looking as this one. My cell phone's depth of field focus wasn't good to get them all, but just this one is quite creepy enough, I think. If they'd suddenly come to life and begun eating the brains out of the annoying clerks and overdressed shoppers there, I would not have been a bit surprised.
And finally, two recent cat photos. Just because.
Dusty likes being covered up, especially now that Autumn has suddenly arrived. We've had highs in the upper 60s (10C) all week, with lows in the 50s. Windows have been closed not just at night, but in the day as well, which hadn't happened since oh, April or so, before it warmed up in the summer. I love it, needless to say, and when I had to wear long pants, shoes, a t-shirt, and even a light sweatshirt over the top to take Malaya out to buy her sais yesterday, I was delighted. Today I've been sitting around the condo all afternoon, watching some football and then working on the computer, and with the windows open I'm wearing housepants, a light long-sleeved shirt, heavy socks, and Ugg boots. Pretty much ideal temps, in my opinion, since I like to dress in slightly warmer clothing than shorts, and since I'm usually hot, that requires temps under 70. Yes, I give this sort of thing far too much thought.
As for Jinxie, she's just being a sprawled out little whore, as always. She sprawls a lot, especially when sleeping in our office chairs. Jinx has been in bed with us every night for the past week, after hardly sleeping in the bed at all for months. Either she missed us after a few days at Malaya's parents' while we were in Long Beach last weekend, or she likes our body heat when it's colder at night. Which option you take depends on how much you want to believe your pets love you VS. instinctively use you for your food and shelter and body heat.
Friday, September 09, 2005
Are you ready for some football?
I was, after losing interest in baseball several months ago, and pretty well ignoring the entire NFL exhibition season. And the season started off the way last season ended; with New England outcoaching and outperforming a team with a superb wide receiver and lots of talent, but not enough smarts or heart to win the game.
NE won 30-20, and like most New England games I've seen during their run of dynastic success, the final score was a lot closer than the game itself. I never had any doubt they'd win, at least not after the first quarter when NE made defensive adjustments and ended Oakland's offensive success cold.
I certainly wasn't going to skip Kali to watch the first game of the year live, but that's what VCRs are for, right? As always, taped games are superior to live ones, since they require 1/3 of the time to watch, and you can avoid most of the inane announcer chatter and all of the commercials. I was well into the 3rd quarter of the Raiders vs. Patriots game before I remembered John Madden was bloviating away on the audio, and that was about my happiest moment of the evening, until that point.
I also enjoyed the Raiders' loss, since as was the case last year, my best hope for watching some quality football past November is to hope SF and Oakland suck ass so badly that they fail to sell out their home games, thus triggering the NFL's idiotic local blackout rule, thus allowing the local channels to show other games instead of the crappy home team games. I knew I could count on SF to bumble their way to another disaster of a season, but I had some worries about Oakland, and since the other NFC west options aren't much better than SF, it's Oakland's lack of success that I'm most rooting for. After all, when the Raiders get blacked out I usually get to see San Diego play, and while I fear the happy joy of last year's 12-4 season is going to soon be just a faint memory, at least I can name perhaps a dozen of their players, which is a good half dozen more than I can name on Oakland's and San Francisco's rosters. Combined.
As for NFL predictions this year... I have none. I've read some of the preseason pics on various websites, but I paid no attention whatsoever to player movement, new coaches, draft picks, etc, during the off season, so I'd do nearly as well with analysis as I would by picking team names from a hat. As with everything else, I can't really imagine how people have time to do all of that sports reading and research, much less watch the games on TV and suffer through the increasily-lame SportsCenter. Don't they have video games to play and fantasy novels to write? Who has time to memorize the names of offensive linemen? Or cornerbacks? Or look up how good player X was in college?
It's a shame too, since I was super into following football and digging through the stats and player records and such fifteen years ago, before there was an Internet to support my interests with statistical analysis and indepth reporting and such. If I were in my teens now and had the Internet for info and satellite TV to watch every game on, I'd do nothing but football year round. It's probably for the best that I didn't have that option though, since I know I would have grown as bored with that as a career as I did with my decade-past web designer aspirations.
Hitting people in the head, artistically.
I meant to post about this the night we returned, but since we got back from Long Beach Monday night, it seems like I've been busy with things other than blogging just about every minute. Monday night we vegged out and caught up on our surfing and watched a movie (
Elektra; not as bad as expected; review to come.) Tuesday we washed a ton of clothing and ran errands and I went to Kali that night and worked on surfing and fiction that night. Wednesday we went food shopping and ran a few other errands and I did a lot of proof reading on my novel. And now it's Thursday night (well, Friday morning technically, but I'll consider it Thursday until I go to sleep in a few hours), I was busy all day, I had a great kali class this evening, I spent the last two hours proof reading and editing, and I'm damn tired. Where did the blogging time go?
Anyway, as I said before we left, one of our main purposes in Long Beach was to perform a martial arts demo at the Pacific Media Expo. The convention was very poorly-organized, and while the facilities were nice and the location reasonable, the crowd wasn't that large, and the promotion of events was very poor. There were lots of side rooms, conference hall type spaces, and while they all had bulletin boards out front listing the events scheduled for that space over the three days of the PMX, they were listed in very small type you had to walk right up to and peer at to read. There was no cross promotion either, with no big signs, no regular PA announcements of events about to begin in various rooms, no nothing. People pretty much had to read the event schedule in advance, or walk by a given room (most of which were well off the main entrance leading to the main exhibit hall) and see the tiny schedule posted there to know what was coming up there.
The saddest thing I saw was Asian titty model and
insipid aspiring R&B singer
Kaila Yu doing an autograph session and interview in a room that could have seated 500, with an actual live audience of about 8, perhaps half of whom were part of her entourage. All four of the other people were reporters of some sort, with cameras and such though, so perhaps she'll receive a wider reception via the media. And no, her perfect little
half-grapefruit implants were not on display, which definitely had a lot to do with the size of her audience.
I mention her since she was in the same room in which we did our demo, though we were there a day earlier, and were fortunate enough to attract a couple of hundred more people. Part of that was luck, since a group of Chinese
acrobats Wing Chun guys went before us, and while their wild leaping and kicking and weapon spinning had very little to do with actual martial arts, it was eye-catching and high energy and entertaining, and most everyone who showed up to see them go at 1:30 hung around to watch us go at 2. We started the minute they were done, so the crowd wouldn't have any chance to drift away.
Our demo wasn't anything amazing, but I enjoyed taking part in it. Gura opened up by talking a bit about kali, some of the no-nonsense philosophies we embrace through it, how it's weapons-based and deadly, and so on, and she then had Malaya do some knife stuff by herself, just demonstrating various moves. I then went out and attacked her with a stick, throwing big swings so she could parry them and stab/slash numerous holes in me. We then did some double attacker with Gura and me attacking Malaya, switched to double stick with me vs. Gura, did stick vs. stick with me and Malaya, and some other stuff. None of it was very intense or fast or hard; much less so than an average class, but it was good enough for the demo, and the crowd seemed to enjoy it. It was all completely improvised on the spot too, though I have no idea if the crowd picked up on that. (And if they did, would that be a good or a bad review of our technique?)
Our only advance planning was Gura leaning over the back of her chair and whispering a few "we'll do this and then this and then this" type instruction while the Chinese guys were finishing up before us; instructions with Malaya and I of course failed to retain in more than the most basic way. I don't know if she just hadn't given it much thought in advance, or if she thought telling us at the last minute would keep us from worrying or planning out something cheesy, but we certainly didn't have any time to think too much before we were up there doing Kali in front of a couple of hundred people. Happily, neither Malaya or I were nervous, and we did fine, though our whole series of routines were far less intense and much simplier than just about any random lesson from Kali class.
There was some hitting, at least. Malaya had a knife with no blade, but it had a point and she stabbed us both a couple of times hard enough to smart. I had a tiny little bloody spot on my throat from one poke, I banged Gura in the hand twice during our double stick session, and Malaya got me in the side of the head with her stick. Par for the course, in a Kali class, but when neither of you know what the other person is going to do, and what you do is entirely based on reacting to their attack, accidents will occasionally happen. Which is a large part of what makes it so fun, for me at least.
It was interesting to compare our demo to the one the Chinese Wing Chun guys put on, since they did things almost entirely solo; taking turns doing their leaps and flips and kicks and such, their solo weapon demonstrations were meant to be pretty and flashy rather than effective, and the one short bit of sparring was totally choreographed (they did it twice, with the exact same moves each time) and non-contact. It was flashy though, and they had shiny costumes in bright colors, and a couple of the five guys could do impressively-high leaps and kicks. So while nothing they did was really combat-based, I wouldn't be surprised if most of the audience enjoyed their ballet-style demo more than ours. After all, to the untrained eye (which I had a year ago, before starting Kali) the stuff they did probably looked deadly.
They said they were Wing Chun style, and I don't know the different Kung Fu styles well enough to say if they were or weren't, but they were basically doing gymnastics with kicks. I certainly couldn't have done the flips and spins and such that they did (not with my 30+ y/o knees) but to me it looked like a poor man's capoeira, with much less air on the jumps and far fewer spins while in midair than you see from the really acrobatic experts in that form.
The ironic part was that the best leaper of the bunch turned out to be a friend of the other's, and not part of their regular group. Plus he was 3/4 Filipino, he lives in the Bay Area, and said he's always wanted to do some Filipino martial arts. So he might well end up in one of our classes some day, though he said he was going to stick with Wing Chun for a few more years. He was about 21, said he'd been doing it for 9 years, and that he thought his body had maybe 7 years of that leaping left, barring injury. Gura didn't say it to him, but recounting the tale later she snorted and said, "Three years, if he doesn't blow out a knee before then."
After our various weapon sparring demos, we launched into an audience participation segment and got about a dozen volunteers to come up and play. First off Gura sent Malaya and me out and had us lead one person at a time through the basic stick fighting form we call "numerado." One person leads, the other follows, and the style has the person leading throwing attacks of various types that the person following blocks or counters, and then gets in some hits while the leader turns and tries another strike. It goes from super slow to full speed and totally free form in class, when experts are doing it, but the most basic aspect is to have the person following just try to stay behind the person following. After all, if you stay behind them they can't really hit you (swings over the top of the head aside). The trick is to keep right on their heels so they can't turn around and pop you, and to do that you need to move smoothly, keep close, and especially be able to move sideways in a hurry.
It was interesting to see how complete beginners did it, since they basically kept a death grip on my shoulder, and walked with all the quiet grace of a charging rhino. In class when we do it you often don't hear a single footstep, since both the person leading and the one following step lightly, slide their feet, sidestep, backpedal, and so on. Not so much the volunteers, all of whom were gasping for breath, sweating, and very excited after 30 or 45 seconds in the saddle. I was reminded of those
Michael Vick Experience commercials, though at least no one actually squealed like a girl. Not even the girls, who were actually better at it, given their natural propensity to take smaller steps and keep their weight centered. (Men tend to take long strides and sway more while they walk, which makes it harder to change directions quickly or stop or sidestep... it certainly took me quite a while to get the hang of Kali style footwork.)
After spending some time on that, we moved on to some basic parry/check punching, where Gura paired everyone up, including herself, me, and Malaya, and had us do the basic punching and blocking motion with people. I'm not sure how well that worked, since both Malaya and I had one of the Wing Chun guys paired with us (guys we enjoyed surprising by landing sneaky fast shots, courtesy of our small and precise Kali punching training), while Gura was with some complete martial arts noob from the audience, and there were eight or ten other audience members punching at each other with no experience whatsoever. I figured she'd rotate us around after thirty seconds, so everyone got to try it against someone with some Kali training, but we just stayed with one partner for the whole 3 or 4 minutes, and then that was it; end of demo.
I haven't ever seen any other marital arts demos, so I have no idea how this one compared, but I enjoyed it and was glad to take part in it. I wished we'd had more of an advance plan and could have done some of the faster and flashier and cooler stuff we do regularly in Kali; I think the audience would have loved to see some actual stick fighting, free form or numerado style, and I know they would have enjoyed watching Gura really go off, knocking the crap out of myself or Malaya if we'd thrown attacks at her. It's amazing to watch in person; far more convincing than the fake and over-edited fights in Hollywood films. Honestly, you could hire Tuhan for your movie, give him any weapon you want, line up a dozen stunt men, roll cameras, and in thirty seconds you'd have a far better fight sequence on tape than they now get from six months of training between actors and choreographers and wire-fu operators and all of that happy shit.
Back home this week the Kali has been great, and I'm really enjoying it lately. Thursday night especially I was feeling totally sponge-like, as I soaked up tons of new moves and forms and concepts during two hours of stick sparring against the best student in our class. He ruined me, of course, but he's a great guy to work with since he loves to learn and takes great pleasure in being hit. Not that we were actually hitting each other (well, not very much, just bruises on the fingers, head, etc, when a strike stops an inch too late), but we swing full speed and stop just short constantly, and if we didn't have control people would go to the hospital regularly. Anyway, the idea is to get in hits without being hit, but as I've mentioned about numerado in the past, the person throwing is basically allowing themselves to be hit, so the person following can practice.
At the most basic level you just throw very simple strikes, and they block them in very simple ways, and then do the most obvious hits on you while you hold still to let them practice. As the experience level ramps up though that all becomes far more complicated and the person throwing doesn't hold still as long after each attack, or strings multiple attacks together, or gets into the higher level trickery of "change ups."
The term doesn't mean much, but basically it's doing attacks that come in 2 or 3 or 4 parts, designed to get past their defense. It's not done with speed, since if we just swung as fast as we could we'd obviously get past a person blocking us from a foot away; or break something trying. No, the concept is to move at a reasonable speed, and get in your hits through trickery. At first we just learn simple ones; you swing at their head from the right but actually aim over their head and then swing it around and down so you hit them in the lower left leg. At first that's all you can manage, but anyone with some experience will block those every time. So the change ups get more complicated, and you start faking hits and switching around, breaking up the rhythm to get them leaning or lagging, swinging over your head or stabbing behind you, and so on. The advanced level beyond that is trickier yet, and that's when you do 1 thing just to see how they react, then base your next move on their response. So you swing high to see how they'll move to block that, then shift your move into something to hit them where they're not blocking. Often times that second hit isn't even your intended one, and you're just doing that to move the defender into an awkward position so that then your 3rd or 4th hit is the one that lands cleanly. And it's different every time, based on how they react, how they move, how they hit at you, and so on.
It's completely baffling and overwhelming at first, but after a year I'm catching on well enough to do most of the advanced attacks, though my defense and avoidance lags behind my offense. And it's just fascinating, sort of like a very intricate dance while armed with sticks, as you try to maneuver them into giving you an opening, or trick them into leaning the wrong way, or use your body language to throw them off. You set stuff up constantly; doing one move to another one twice to get them used to it, then doing something different the 3rd time, or changing the angle to hit them low intead of high, or adding another hit to the combo when they're relaxing after blocking or dodging the first two.
It's tremendous exercise too, and after non-stop walking, dodging, swinging, and so on for two hours, my tank top was pretty much soaked in sweat and my thighs were aching. I constantly wish I'd started Kali years before I did, just to be that much better now, and even though there was no Kali of this type a decade or two ago, I wish I'd been doing something like it when I was in my teens. More than usual on nights like this, when my 29 (again) year old knees are aching and sore, and I remember how back in the day I could skateboard and play soccer all day, run up and down cement steps selling cotton candy all night, and feel nothing more than a bit of fatigue in the evening. If you stay in shape you can still do most of the same stuff athletically in your 30s that you could in your 20s, and in theory your superior technique and experience might make you even better. But you won't have anywhere near the stamina, and the recovery time you require afterwards is completely different.
<lecture>As always, the greatest shame of youth is that it's wasted on the young. And like everyone over the age of 30, when I look back at what I did from about 15-25 years of age I just shake my head at the folly and wasted opportunities. Funny how the more sure you are that you know better than someone older -- the more likely the exact opposite is true. As you learn, much to your chagrin, a decade or so later.
Still, pessimism does me no good, so I might as well write as well as I can now, love Malaya the best I can, enjoy learning Kali with a "better late than never" attitude, etc. I can't change the past, but I retain almost full control over the future. And that goes for just about all of us.</lecture>
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Things of the Day: September Edition
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?"
--Jean Cocteau
Soul-Devouring Worry:Insufficient monitor decoration.
Answer of the Day:Because knowing you could easily kick the ass of all four of those noisy frat boys makes their inane chatter far easier to tolerate.
Curse of the Day:May your felines quickly return to normal, give or take a few new annoying habits.
Books Lying Open:Poisons, by Peter MacInnis
Depraved, the shocking true story of America's first serial killer, by Harold Schechter
Fiend, the shocking true story of America's youngest serial killer, by Harold Schechter
Harry Fricking Potter 6, by the richest woman on earth
Movies to see list:The Aristocrats,
Waiting for the DVD.
Wallace and Grommit: The Curse of the Wererabbit, October 5 (Oh yeah.)
Catching up on things.
I could easily fill half a dozen posts with comments on news from the last few days, but since I don't want to spend the time on that with so much other stuff to do, I'll just throw a few in here with minimal comment and move on to more pressing matters.
I enjoy reading Dilbert every day, and don't agree with people who say the strip's jumped the shark (at least not metaphorically). I think it's as cutting and timely as ever, and I enjoy the frequently surrealistic elements. It may or may not be your cup of tea (and I don't even drink tea), but I laughed harder and louder at Monday's Dilbert than I had any comic strip in months.
Cost estimates for hurricane Katrina's damage are now topping $150b. Makes the millions Bush's budget skimmed off of the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project look like a pretty shitty investment. Also, this point has been made elsewhere, but I just can't understand how inept and slow the response has been, considering all of the money we've spent on "homeland security" since 9/11 made that such a priority. No, Bush's "terr-ists" aren't going to attack with hurricanes or floods, but since the evacuation and resettlement of an entire city is pretty much the same in the case of a flood or a dirty bomb, how could the federal response be so utterly lacking? Especially when experts had been predicting a New Orleans hurricane flood for decades, there were days of advance warning before Katrina hit, and a dirty bomb would (hypothetically) go off without warning and would kill far more people in far less time. Feeling safer yet?
Great article on the BBC about how Katrina might save the US Media. Of course it won't, but apparently some reporters have been growing new spines as Bush and other administration officials issue their usual bald-faced lies about how hurricane relief is flowing smoothly and everyone's doing a great job. I say this won't make any long term difference for 2 reasons. 1) The right wing has permanently cowed the media with their long term "working the refs" strategy of condemning anything even remotely critical as a product of the "liberal media." 2) To quote from the article in question:National politics reporters and anchors here come largely from the same race and class as the people they are supposed to be holding to account. They live in the same suburbs, go to the same parties, and they are in debt to the same huge business interests. Giant corporations own the networks, and Washington politicians rely on them and their executives to fund their re-election campaigns across the 50 states.
It is a perfect recipe for a timid and self-censoring journalistic culture that is no match for the masterfully aggressive spin-surgeons of the Bush administration.
But we can at least enjoy it while it lasts. A good measuring stick for the media's refound spine is how they cover the calls for an independent investigation into the Katrina disaster response. Bush is fighting it even more doggedly than he did the 9/11 Commission, but that's hardly surprising. After all, he merely profited from 9/11; he wasn't directly responsible for it.
I didn't know Kanye West (is there a Kayne East?) from the pope two days ago, but apparently he made some righteous remarks on some sort of Katrina relief show on NBC. They were bleeped out of the telecast, but they make for some interesting reading. West said:"I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family, they say, 'They're looting.' See a white family, it says, 'They are looking for food,' " the Grammy winning artist began.
He noted that it took five days before federal help kicked in and then suggested the lag was "because most of the people are black."
"And even for me to complain about it, I would be a hypocrite because I've tried to turn away from the TV because it's too hard to watch. I've even been shopping before even giving a donation, so now I'm calling my business manager right now to see what is the biggest amount I can give, and just to imagine if I was down there, and those are my people down there," he continued as Myers looked on, shell-shocked.
"So anybody out there that wants to do anything that we can help--with the way America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible. I mean, the Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way...and they've given them permission to go down and shoot us!"
He then started to say, "George Bush doesn't care about black people..." before MSNBC President Rick Kaplan, who produced the telethon at New York's Rockefeller Plaza, decided to cut off West's microphone
I don't think I would have said it on live TV, but I'm not going to argue against any of his points. I might argue against his clothing, since he apparently wears green Izod polo shirts, but I guess that's some sort of hyper-preppie outfit to make him stand out from all the rest of the wankster rap stars out there in their baggy jeans and NFL jerseys.
You can see clips of his rant all over the internet, and you simply have to watch it just for Mike Myers' desperately uncomfortable face. It's the funnist thing he's done since Austin Powers; I was literally howling with laughter. Mike doesn't seem fully-conscious until about 30 seconds into Kanye's speech, and while recognition never quite dawns in his soulless little black eyes, (peering out of his doughy face like blueberries from an unbaked muffin) he eventaully begins nodding at random intervals while swaying back and forth, all with the same frozen and impossibly-uncomfortable expression. Words really can't do it justice.
On the topic of Kanye West, I've got to holla out some props (It's impossible to completely refrain from patronizingly-descending into slang when writing about rap music and/or black culture.) for his new single Gold Digger. Malaya heard it on the radio, loved it, and bought on one of her infrequent and tightly-constrained iTunes visits, then passed on to me. It's the catchiest rap song I've heard in years, and is pretty much 3:30 of pure ear candy. Check out the video here if you aren't lucky enough to own the mp3 already. The video is immediately boring, unless you're really hard up to see some female flesh on display, but the song is virtually the same as the album version, and it's irresistible. The sound bed (a endless repeat of Jamie Foxx singing in his Ray Charles voice) is really what makes it work, as is so often the case with rap singles. The lyrics are pretty good, and I love the non-stop delivery and how they layer over the baseline, background vocals, and kazoo solo, but just the rap without the Jamie Foxx lyrics and the rest wouldn't pack 1/4 the punch.
That's all, for now.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
And how was your weekend?
Mine was pretty good. I'd even go so far as to call it a "vacation." We ate out almost every meal, had lots of desserts, site-saw, shopped, and more. Mostly in Long Beach, where we were for the
PMX convention. The convention itself was kind of much a disappointment; far smaller than I'd expected, with just one middling-sized exhibition hall that was 2/3 full of swap meet-like displays of comic books, videos, martial arts weapons, collectibles (action figures, toys, robots, etc) and so on. It would have been invaluable five years ago, but now that you can get all the manga and DVDs you want on Amazon.com, most of the books in real life stores such as Borders or Barnes & Noble, and as many or more of the anime movies at Fry's, traveling to a convention to pay 25% higher prices for them in person seems sort of pointless. Not that we were buying any of that stuff anyway, either there or here.
Other than the underwhelming main hall, they had lots of media presentations in side rooms, many of which were larger than the hall itself. The biggest room seated over 1000 people, based on my quick chair count estimate, and had a regular parade of costume contests, Asian musical acts,
comedians, and so on. There were other smaller rooms with panel discussions, artists talking about their work, Japanese film premieres, and so on. These were generally pretty sparsely-attended, sadly enough, and with the whole convention estimated to draw just about 1200 people, I doubt there were more than 600 there at any one time (figuring some of those 1200 total came to more than one day).
We didn't have much knowledge of the anime and such going in, and didn't wear costumes, but we did enjoy being there, walking around and seeing the stuff on sale, and people watching the weird vendors and their weirder customers. Cosplay was in full effect, and everywhere with maybe 1/5 of the people there in some sort of costume, and about 1/15 outfitted to the point that their mobility was mildly to severely impaired. Most were clearly home-made, and probably 1/3 were just variations on goth, with girls (mostly) and some guys in black latex, blue lipstick, white face paint, and so on. As for the trying-to-look-like-a-fictional-character costumes, you could easily judge the popularity of various anime series just by seeing how many people were wearing outfits from it.
Full Metal Alchemist is the new hot show, and judging by the dozens of people (male and female) with some sort of aluminum foil-based left arm covering. (I saw part of one episode on Adult Swim some weeks ago, and thought the premise was far more interesting than the actual program... a condition that's true for most fantasy, sadly enough.) I didn't know many of the others, though there were of course lots of classics; Pokemon, Sailor Moon, Dragonball Z, etc, along with giant robots of every kind, and lots of guys in long coats and capes and such that looked like the costumes you see in pretty much every futuristic Anime.
If you want fans to dress up like your cartoon characters, it's definitely a good plan to give them cool clothing, non-human colored hair, and nothing too difficult to duplicate in a costume. I could also see why anime is so popular with a lot of people; it's great role playing, and you get to be someone really cool. No one wants to roleplay a loser or a nerd or a geek, especially when the person doing the playing is almost certainly one (or more) of those things in real life. So the geeking gaming guys have fun wearing a crimson trenchcoat, dying their hair blonde, and carrying a huge sword, and lots of not-beautiful girls love to dress up in latex, heavy face paint, and show off their legs and boobs a bit.
The costumes requires the wearers to go places they would not normally go, and the costumes give them the encouragement to be someone they are not. What happens in Cosplay stays in Cosplay? I guarantee you most of the girls we saw in micro minis and leotards with their ass cheeks on display would never wear that stuff in real life, and frankly, going by the quality of the bodies on display, that's probably not such a bad thing. It's also not a bad thing that none of the popular male costumes required much/any bare skin, for just the same reason.
I don't mean to hate though; I think it's cool that people get suited up for that sort of thing, and I'm sure they had a lot more fun there than I did.
I took some pics and the people I was there with took a lot more, and I'll post a few of them tomorrow once I've had a chance to go through the shots on my digicam. On second thought, tomorrow might be optimistic, since we've got to do a ton of laundry, go shopping to restock our home with things of an edible nature, get back on our diets, go to the gym, go to Kali class, retrieve the cats from Malaya's parents' house, and so on. I'll also write about the Kali demo we did in more detail when I've got time to type it out. It went well though, and was fun.
It's odd to get home from vacation, this time more than most, since we were in our hotel room for maybe 5% of our waking hours in Long Beach, watched nothing but a few movies and a sex advice show on HBO, and didn't spend any time on the Internet or reading the paper. I hadn't seen a single baseball or football score the whole time, had no idea what was going on with the evacuations and such in New Orleans, etc. And honestly, I didn't miss it much. When I'm home it seems essential that I read news, read blogs on the news, follow the sports scores, play some computer games, etc. But having done absolutely none of that Friday, Saturday or Sunday, I see how false that mandatory feeling is.
Of course I spent 2 hours once I was home catching up on cartoon and blog surfing, looked over the
college football scores, read the news, and so on, but now that I've done that, and spent some time writing this blog post and a few emails, I wonder why. I'd have been happier, and far more productive if I'd just glanced at the news, made sure I didn't have any emails of any importance to get to, and had then shut off MIE and Thunderbird and worked on the fantasy novel for a few hours. Instead it's 2:30am, I've been up since 7, and that nap in the car during the long drive back isn't really keeping me going, so there's no way I'm going to get any fiction writing done tonight.
Perhaps I can get to that tomorrow night, after the day of chores and errands. I did spend some time thinking about the novel, and have some thoughts to put into notes before I crash tonight, but that's hardly the same as getting actual work done. And since it's been four days since I have, I'm feeling neglectful.
Anyway, more on the vacation weekend later Tuesday, including some pictures, Kali demo talk, hotel gripes, breakfast buffet praise, and so on.
Friday, September 02, 2005
Labor Day Weekend Holiday
Farewell until Monday; I'll be in Long Beach without any computer access, so this will be the last blog post until Monday night-ish. In the meantime:
Wash your sandals. You know you've gotten all sweaty in them many times. Go ahead, take a whiff if you think plastic won't stink.
Get some sun. In moderation, of course, since melanoma is no fun, but no matter how much work you have to do on your computer, a bit of refreshing time outdoors is always well spent.
Pet your pets. I miss our two cats already, after just a night alone... alone... alone...
Donate money to New Orleans flood relief. I have not, but then again, I'm a cheap (and poor) bastard. Or just send some flippers and a canoe, if you prefer. (Just be sure it's not money that will end up in the claws of that nut Pat Robertson.)
Blame Bush. The N.O. disaster isn't entirely his fault, and I'm not much of a fan of New Orleans, but after Bush stood on the backs of several thousand dead New Yorkers to get reelected and lie us into the Iraqi invasion, I'm certainly not going to cut his heartless ass any breaks. There are plenty of facts against him in this case, too. We don't know for sure if the levees would have held even if Bush hadn't stripped the funding for repairing them and chosen to spend it on Iraq, but the federal response to the biggest domestic disaster since the 1906 SF earthquake has been woefully slow, disorganized, and unprepared. Besides, it's impossible not to compare the billions we're pouring into the sinkhole that is Iraq to the days of neglect and indifference that's been shown towards New Orleans. Especially when like 1/3 of the Louisana National Guard is currently in Iraq, watching the greatest city in their home state descend into anarchy and chaos while they dodge IEDs to secure oil production in Iraq -- oil production that must be maintained to keep prices down... oh wait.
London Preston Spears
So Britney Spears and Cletus' baby is about to pop forth from mommy's well-visited coochie, and
she's finally announced the name
they she chose. London Preston Spears. I laughed when I read it, but it makes perfect sense. Britney says it's the city in which she first met her greasy husband. Whatever. Look at the faux-aristocratic sound of it, though. Britney has been steadily sinking back into her essentially-white trash state for the past year or two, so of course she picked a British boarding school name like "London Preston." All it's missing is a Roman numeral after it.
There's nothing white trash type people want more than to forget and obscure their roots, and no one will be surprised if Britney moves to England in a few years after her divorce, and picks up a fake English accent the way Brooklyn whore Madonna did, once she had the money to do so. (Assuming Britney has that money, and given that her career appears to be dead at this point, and that she's far too stupid to have saved any substantial amount of cash from her former success, I wouldn't bet on it.)
The whole thing reminded me of
a movie quote, one I trust most of you are familiar with:
"Good nutrition has given you some length of bone, but you're not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, London Preston Spears?"
Thursday, September 01, 2005
Alone
So we just stuffed two squawking cats into two cat carriers and hustled them down to Malaya's car. She hopped in with them and tore off, headed to her parents' house, where the cats will stay this weekend while we're down in Long Beach. While she's enjoying the no-doubt lovely "waowaorh" filled drive, I'm here all alone. It's funny how quickly you miss your pets, even if it's for doing something annoying. Any other time Jinxie would now be staring a hole in me from the arm of the couch, while I sit and eat chicken taquitos (covered in spanish rice, tomatoes, black olives, lettuce, red onions, red bell pepper, and sour cream) for Kali-class energy. And while that sort of "Feed me Daddy, even if it's something I don't like." attention is usually sort of annoying... I miss it all the same.
Yes, this is the biggest faux-sentimental cliche in the history of BlackChampagne.com. You'll note that I at least refrained from actually saying, "You don't know what you've got until it's gone." Until now, anyway.
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