Books Lying Open
¤ The Lord of Castle Black, Steven Brust
¤ Seabiscuit, Laura Hillenbrand
¤ Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, Al Franken

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ The price of dates.

Answer of the Day:
¤ Because sleeping late is easier when no one is running a jackhammer on the other side of your living room window.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May you be out of cookies. Entirely.

am taking a break (or giving the readers one, depending on how you look at it) from book/movie reviews today, and running a few recent reader mails instead. That's below.

Up here I've got one news article, and some commentary on martial arts, and the weather. Yes, the weather. And no, I won't be doing anything about it. Other than talking.

Kali class was Tuesday night, and as usual I'm moved to speak of it in a fashion that almost no one reading this will gain any benefit from, since it's so difficult to describe the physical movements we engage in.  That being said, it's definitely getting more interesting as we learn more stuff. Initially we learned a few basic blocks and counters, against stick and open hand. (Not that "open hand" means we only slap each other or something; it's just the term for any sort of unarmed combat, of which there are many styles in the school of Kali I am training in.)  We still use those blocks and counters, though we've since learned many more counter attacks. There are a near-infinite number of them, given how many different types of attacks we have available. Of more interest to me though, are the new types of blocking we're now learning.

It's not exactly accurate to call it blocking, since it's more a combination of blocking, countering, and avoiding, but the way they are combined is just fascinating. The most basic strike with a stick is a sort of overhand, cross body swing, as if you were trying to hit someone on the left ear or temple, and cut down through their body to their opposite hip. That's the number 1 strike, in the 12-strike sequence we learn. The basic counter to that is to stand and face the attacker, then lean to your left while sidestepping slightly, and sweeping your left hand up so you push their hand or elbow (Don't reach for the stick, it's moving too quickly, and in some cases the stick might be a sword of a knife, which you obviously wouldn't want to grasp bare-handed.), stepping past them in the process. We also hook our stick over their arm, or smack their arm or hand as they swing down, and naturally follow that with a swing down into the back of their knee or calf as we pass them. There are hundreds of more moves possible at that point, but that's just the most basic thing; duck to the left and use one hand and/or the stick to guide their strike past you.

At first this seems very difficult; like you can't possibly get out of the way or get your hand up there fast enough to slap at their arm, even at the slow speed the attacker moves while you are learning. Over the weeks and months though, as you practice this more often, you learn to recognize the way their body moves, and your own avoidance movement becomes second nature, and it becomes rather easy to avoid a strike like that, even when you don't know what type of strike they're going to throw, or how fast they're going to throw it.

You'll note that this is exactly opposite of how characters in movie fights counter attacks, where it's usually a strength vs. strength move, as they swing their own sword vigorously at the attackers, resulting in a satisfying clash of steel high overhead, and neither combatant doing anything other than tiring out their sword arm. As I've written about in the past, movie fights have very little to do with what you should be doing in real life fights.

With that basic dodge and counter well-learned, tonight we practiced a new one. When facing the same down-swinging attack the other counter is to step right, not left, and swing your stick in a fast arc, up from the right and across in front of your face, so you deflect and redirect their stick downwards to your left. You do that while sidestepping to the right, and then you keep going further back and to the right, keeping your down arc swing going so you can bring it back up and smash them in the back (or the back of the head, or the neck, or the calf, etc) faster than they can react. As I warned, this is probably impossible to follow from words, and I have yet to bother with taking photos or finding diagrams online or making movies of it. But rest assured, it's effective and very cool looking.

As usual, the problem with having our style of Kali combat in a movie would be that every fight ended so quickly. There are a few weapon on weapon strikes, but it's not sword fencing; there's way too much body movement, and almost every counter is designed to avoid the first strike and deal a crushing return before the opponent knows he's even in trouble. The only way I can see it working well in a movie (working for non-martial artists who wouldn't appreciate the subtleties of a longer spar session that's not all full of flashy and impractical moves) would be for one Kali expert character to take on a room full of enemies and dispatch them all in sequence, or perhaps for two Kali experts to fight wearing some sort of armor that would let them keep functioning while still successfully executing their normal moves. (Of course any Kali expert would modify their technique if the opponent's armor was keeping them from scoring killing blows, but that's another issue.)

While the moves and new techniques are all cool, I am having problems with something else in Kali... I keep getting dizzy. I've always been susceptible to dizziness, since I was a little kid. I could never go on any tire swing that spun around, I can't take teacup type rides at carnivals, and I can't go on those big spinning rooms that flatten you to the wall with centrifugal force. Oddly, I don't get motion sickness very often, and I love almost every type of roller coaster, love falling, love heights, etc. I just can't spin around without getting dizzy quickly, and if I get really dizzy I feel like shit for hours. It's actually good for me to get so fucked up that I have to puke, since then I tend to feel better pretty soon.

Unfortunately, a lot of our sparring and learning techniques in Kali involve moving in circles, one way or the other, and quickly. Not that we ever spin around like ballet dancers or anything, but there are a lot of basic strike and counter exercises that involve the two participants going round and round, or following each other while the one in front whirls and throws attacks that must be dodged, etc. A great deal of our art involves movement, since it's effective and since many other types of martial arts are very static and only fight head on or punch in rows. Obviously enough, if your opponent can only fight in a straight line, and you're constantly circling and dodging behind him, you're going to put him at an immediate disadvantage.

I'd be fine (in terms of getting dizzy) in a real fight, since it would be over quickly, and the circling wouldn't go in the same direction more than three or four times. And I'm fine in class when we vary our attacks and turn left, then right, then left, etc. But since quite a few of our exercises have us going in circles (walking around another person backwards on Tuesday night, while executing a circular arm swinging attack and blocking their counters), I'm trying to learn to deal with it without getting dizzy.

It's ironic, but apparently my life-long 20/20 vision is a hindrance. Most adults have to wear glasses or contacts, and as such are somewhat used to things being a blur, at least out of the corner of their eyes. This helps them not be dizzied by the turning we do in Kali, or so the glasses-wearing, non-dizzy students in my class tell me. I am not used to things being blurry, so I have to try to use focusing tricks to not get dizzy. In some exercises I look past my opponent and focus on the far wall, or look only at their eyes, or whatever. The point there is to use my peripheral vision to see their attack, and that is an actual training exercise we use, since oddly enough, it's often easier to react quickly to their attack if you don't concentrate entirely on it. If you watch them for movement clues you tend to focus too much on their arm or back or whatever, rather than seeing the way their entire body is moving. It's hard to believe at first, but it really does work.

Anyway, I have gotten somewhat better at not getting dizzy in slower turning sequences, but the walking backwards in a circle while attacking thing we did Tuesday night wiped me out. I resisted being dizzy for a while, focusing entirely on the neck of the guy I was working with, and that kept me from feeling dizzy until gura said my time was up and sent in the next person; at which point I nearly fell over trying to stand still. Literally, I had to hold onto a pillar to keep upright, and then barely made it into a seat and had to hang on to one of the arm rests to keep from falling right over to the side.

I didn't puke or anything, and felt better quickly once I cooled down and got some water, but I never felt entirely right again during class, and wasn't real disappointed that we ended up getting a mini-lecture for the last 20 minutes of class, rather than going back into active sparring. I was a bit worried about getting dizzy on the drive home, at night, in the rain, but I felt okay for that and I kept down the nachos super supreme dinner I fixed us when we got home. But I still feel a bit of the after effects of being dizzy, even though it's now more than 8 hours since class, and I doubt I'll be over it entirely until I sleep. I do wonder how I'd feel if I got up and spun around a couple of times, or did some fast moving Kali; would I shake it off and go back to normal, or would I pick up the dizziness right where I left off earlier, and become nauseated immediately? I'm not curious enough to actually try it, mind you.

The annoying thing is that I felt I was really doing well against the dizziness in class. I lasted much longer than usual, and though I was managing something without growing dizzy that would have usually put me on the floor. And then I stopped turning, and the world kept right on spinning around anyway. I've never felt the dizziness hangover for this long after Kali before, since I've always stopped doing what I was doing before I got as dizzy as I did tonight. So should I push right up into being dizzy every time in the future and hope I get used to it? Or should I always stop short of getting dizzy so I won't risk feeling like shit all evening afterwards?

Remind me to do some online reading on dizziness tomorrow; there have to be sites with info about it and tips on how to fight through it.

As for the weather, after 500% more words about Kali than I intended to type... it's raining. It rained yesterday as well, and while that's nothing unusual for the Bay Area in December, it's still new to me after spending the last two decades in dry Southern California. The one odd thing about the rain here that I wanted to mention is... the duration.

It rained several times a year in San Diego, often quite hard, at least in La Mesa, where I lived from around 1997-2003. But it never rained for long. We'd get storms that lasted a day or two at times, and it would rain a few inches during them, but it always seemed to come down in 15 or 30 minute bursts that quickly subsided to a gentle sprinkle. Here it rains, and it keeps raining, sometimes for hours. It was raining pretty good Tuesday night during the drive home from Kali class, let up to sprinkles for an hour or so after we got home, and ever since then it's been raining hard enough that I can hear it pattering down on the roof and overflowing the woefully-inadequate gutter over the back porch. And that's been almost non-stop, for upwards of six hours.

Our condo is in the hills, and I suppose the rising land squeezes the moisture out of the clouds as they come in from the coast, but even as we're a month or more into my second rainy season in Northern California, I continue to be impressed by how much water can actually fall from the sky.

Odder yet, I don't recall any substantial hail storms here yet, despite the fact that it's generally 10-15º cooler here in the winter, and despite the fact that we get a great deal more precipitation up here. It didn't storm often in San Diego, but I saw heavy hail at least once a year in La Mesa, and usually when the weather was in the 50s; far above freezing.  My armchair meteorological analysis is that the clouds that rain here must be lower; too low to get up into the upper atmosphere and freeze, while the much rarer storm clouds down south had to blow in at a higher altitude or they would have blown out before reaching San Diego; therefore their precipitation more often turned to ice. Snow flakes melted before they reached the ground in San Diego, but ice chunks made it down as pebble-sized hail. I don't know why it's never snowed here though, since it's often rained when the actual outdoor temperature was in the 30s; almost cold enough for water to freeze, but we've never had anything approaching snow, at least not at this altitude.

Anyway, to the news.

Judith Reisman is the founder of the modern anti-Kinsey movement. She spent a week in Washington, D.C., recently, talking to people on Capitol Hill about opening a congressional investigation into Kinsey’s work. The new film, she said, is “deceptive and malevolently misleading, to say the least.”

...

Though largely unknown outside social-conservative circles, Reisman has been influential within them. She has served as a consultant to the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services and was given seven hundred and thirty-four thousand dollars by Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department to study pornography. More recently, she has been active in the rise of abstinence-only education; in June, her colleagues gave her an Abstie Award for lifetime achievement. Last week, Reisman testified at a congressional hearing about the dangers of pornography addiction, saying that police should be required to collect evidence of pornography consumption at any crime scene.

Lest you think my calling her a kook is unjustified, here are a few other quick quotes:

She claims that Kinsey actively solicited pedophiles to molest children and report back to him. In fact, she said, “there is absolutely no reason to believe that Kinsey himself was not involved in the sexual abuse of these children.” (None of Kinsey’s four biographers have turned up any evidence that he was.)

...

Reisman also endorses a book called “The Pink Swastika,” which challenges the “myths” that gays were victimized in Nazi Germany. The Nazi Party and the Holocaust itself, she writes, were largely the creation of “the German homosexual movement.” Thanks to Alfred Kinsey, she warns, the American homosexual movement is poised to repeat those crimes.

...

Ultimately, Reisman and her colleagues hope to discredit not only Kinsey but the entire field of sexology which he created, and what she calls “the sexindustrial complex” that has grown out of it. “One doesn’t measure American sexual habits,” she said. “That’s not a science.”

And this Puritanical, sex-hating harpy is busy attempting to influence our government.  I think the Democrats could make tremendous hay out of this sort of thing. If they just had the balls to quit cowering before the enormously-overrated "values" voter, and made some grandstanding speeches about how Republicans were trying to intrude on the privacy of your bedroom, I think it would make news and garner popular attention. They're never going to out-Jesus the Born Agains and Fundies who are in bed with the current Republican Party leadership, so why not go for a "defending privacy and freedom" angle.

dude, you give pantera a five, one of the best metal bands since sliced bread, and Prince (a fagg, etc. etc., etc., not-even semi-rock band) an 8? Come on at least Rush was appropriate name i would say for it's time the 80's...deemed normal at the time, now it may not be......but DUDE, DUDE, PRINCE AN 8???? POD, a 7? "cool"........ you praise pantera for being a cool band , metal band, and what not take....they have obviously been cool WITH A "glam-rock" name and kept it up at least they kep up their image and are continuing to be succesful and what not. Prince is a gay name, we all know that, goes with the image a little weird, not my style, i would personally give this a 4 since a prince is supposed to be powerful and what not the band's name is a mixed bag, Pantera has a connotation of being strong, fast, and powerful, fierce, ALL denote what the band really is, all of the above.... give these guys a 6 or 7 at least but POD, they don't even play rap music, so POD, doesn't belong doesn't sound right it isn't even a damn rap group for crying out loud i give them a 6 or less. Although i gree that you calling them lame band give them a 7, just doesn't add up.

--MHerP

I'm not sure about this one. He starts off sounding nearly as clueless as the PissedOffToolFan you'll see elsewhere on the Band Names Feedback Page, but then when he talks about Prince he seems to grasp the band name concept somewhat, and he also comments on (and disagrees with me about) the connotation of the name "Pantera." But soon enough after that he's going on about how cool or not POD is, and whether or not they rap. On the whole, the impression I get from this is that he's a fan of Pantera and heavy metal in general, and that he hates Prince, and therefore can't stand that I gave him a higher score than a metal band he likes. It's also pretty clear that he only made it through the "P" page, but that's another issue.

Since this sort of misunderstanding semi-flame was exactly what I envisioned receiving large doses of when I first conceived of and wrote this site section, I'm not sure why I continue to be surprised when I receive them. I do enjoy them though. Not enough to update the Band Names section any further, but they do at least provide some reward for the hours I spent writing this section.

I wouldn't entirely agree with the "builds up expectations" part, since I think any expectations are mostly in the viewer's mind. We want to see a big show down, and are disappointed when we don't get it, but Moore didn't actually say we'd get one, and that's the curse of a documentary; there's no writing the script just how you want it to play out. At the same time, I completely agree with Caaroid's larger point, which is that Moore's documentaries do not deliver the punch the reader wants from them. They aren't bad, but they end up being basically semi-non fiction entertainment, and much of that is due to how Moore presents his material.

I personally prefer the more scholarly style of documentary, like the ones Ken Burns puts together and shows on PBS. But while those get ratings, they don't translate well to a mass audience, and if he threw together two hour versions of them and put them in theaters, they wouldn't make any damn money at all, especially not compared to Moore's agita-prop work, the most recent of which absolutely decimated all previous documentary box office records.

Aahz wrote in about another topic I'm not going to quote, but concluded his mail with this bit, in reference to a recent batch of pet photos, one of which featured Dusty looking rather pathetic.

Yes, very, very wrong. Unless it's an accident, in which case it's not your fault, in which case it's not wrong, because it's an accident.

Sadly, neither Jinx nor Dusty much cares about kitty jail, either on the bed or on the floor. Jinx is more likely to escape quickly, just because she's more active, while you can thusly imprison Dusty and leave the bedroom while betting even money that he'll still be under it, asleep, when you return to check. I enjoy putting them both into the same jail, just because that way one cat is usually motionless, and thus provides ballast and makes the other's efforts to escape (which they usually do by pushing the jail to the edge of the bed and simply leaping down under it) more difficult.

Speaking of accidental kitty torture, we've found that dropping a sticker so it just happens to stick to kitty's fur is a sure way to get some amusement. Dusty is annoyed by it, but not scared, and he quickly sets to trying to kick or lick or bite it off, contorting his body in whatever fashion is most appropriate to the task. Jinxie, on the other hand, thinks she can outrun her attacker, and generally takes off at warp speed, streaking down the hallway and under the bed, where she's learned to run in order to scrape off most things. Balloons tied around her collar, for instance.

The best place to accidentally sticker a kitty though, is on their forehead, as though they were Hindu kitty. Dusty knows it's there, and he sees it out of the corner of his eye, but he seldom bothers to scrape it off with a front paw. He instead starts looking up, and looking up, and lifting his head over and over again, often ending up in these weird cocked-neck positions, never quite understanding that when he lifts his head, he lifts the mystery item as well. Jinx just runs, a technique that's slightly more effective at removing the sticker, and far more effective at depriving the humans the joy of watching her battle it.

By the way, this is only cool with reclaimed stickers that aren't very sticky; like price tags off of clothing or the like. Real stickers, or something like tape, is cheating and will stick too tightly to kitty for them to remove it, and you'll pull hair when you pull it off. And that's not cool.  Remember who the lower life form is, and act accordingly.

I don't agree with Dave, but he does have a point. I obviously liked both endings, or I wouldn't have written them as they were, but more generally, I don't much care for happy endings. I don't avoid them arbitrarily, and it depends a great deal on the type of story, but in general, I like more ambiguous endings, both in my stories and in stories I read.

The overuse of happy endings, especially in Hollywood films, is a great source of discontent to me. I hate knowing how a story is going to turn out, and that's the main reason I so dislike most types of foreshadowing, especially the blatantly-psychic, ham-handed type Stephen King (for example) so often uses. And when I say I don't like to know the ending in advance, I don't necessarily mean I know the plot, or that I've peeked at RuinedEndings.com in advance. What I mean is when a story is so typical that you just know how it's going to turn out.  In 95% of Hollywood movies of course the good guys will win, and of course the bad guys will lose. This steals the suspense for me in most films, since I never have any doubt that Spider Man is going to triumph, or that Jason Bourne is going to survive, or that Riddick is going to kill the evil Necromonger lord.

I might still enjoy the movie even if I know how it's going to turn out (Lord of the Rings, for instance), but the plot needs to make that less than totally obvious, and needs to be exciting along the way. I don't mind happy endings, but when I'm sure I'm going to get one during the entire movie, I very seldom feel any suspense as the plot twists. Of the two or three dozen action movies I saw this year, the only two that actually got my pulse going were Spartan and The Manchurian Candidate, since both had twisty enough plots that they felt unpredictable. I won't say which movie had a happy ending, or if either of them did, but I didn't know how they were going to go before the end, and I enjoyed that a lot. I didn't think either movie was exactly a masterpiece, and I didn't give them high scores just because I thought they were effectively-suspenseful, but that was certainly a large part of my positive review for both pictures.

This has gone a bit afield, especially since I didn't think A Paladin's Lesson, the story Dave liked more, was very suspenseful at all.  It's really not much of a story; it's one I wrote very early on in the Diablo II experience, long before the game was released, and it's basically an extended battle scene between a Necromancer and a Paladin, with me spending a lot of time and authorial license imagining how the as-of-then-unannounced character skills might work. Honestly, I hardly remember it at this point, having written it like six years ago and not having read it since I quickly HTMLed it and added it to the writing archive on this site in 2002.

I do recall being surprised by some of the reader feedback though, as players seemed to be taking sides based on whether they personally wanted to play (remember, I wrote it years before the game was actually released) a Necromancer or a Paladin more. I wasn't really planning on playing either of them first thing (My first D2 character was actually a poison Javazon, if you were wondering, though I primarily chose her based on misleading advice from a Bliz North employee and played her only in SP to race through the game and gather d2 site info.) and wrote the story with those characters since they seemed naturally opposed, and I thought they'd work well in the story. And while the Necromancer is the bad guy at a glance, I wrote it so the Paladin was actually the bigger idiot, and so he pretty well deserved everything he got, even as the Necromancer took things far more seriously than the big oaf Paladin did, and as the Necromancer betrayed him in the end.  But still, who is the good guy in that tale? I'd say they're both rather dark characters in their own way, and that rooting for one or the other says far more about the reader than the story.

The heroes of The Dark Lady are more obvious, but it's still open to debate. The Paladins and the Assassin/Dark Lady are murderous towards sorceresses, but if the story was written from the point of view of a Paladin, his side would clearly be the good guys, and the family would be the bad guys, or at least deluded into evil, since they had a demonic sorceress daughter and the Amazon and Barbarian parents were willing to kill to protect her.

The humorous Holiday stories can't really be compared on this metric, since they're written in cartoonish fashion, and like an episodic TV show, each story ends with things in basically the same shape they started off in.  Ironically, per Dave's comments, I sort of ended that series on Halloween of last year, and followed that up with a Thanksgiving epilogue that was sad... and got a bunch of mail from readers who didn't like that it was sad, and that it wasn't more of the same humorous battle/feast chaos.

As I've said in the past when writing about ongoing book series, I can see why some authors keep doing the same thing forever. Maybe the stories lose their sparkle and some readers get sick of them, but lots of fans like that. Especially when there are happy endings every time, no matter how predictable and formulaic and lifeless they seem to more critical readers like myself.

Using my stories for comparison, they're just little online, free, fan fiction holiday jokes, and when I turned out an epilogue that was sad and seemingly an end to the whole thing... I got more unhappy feedback than happy feedback, and far more negative mails than I had for the first five stories put together.  No wonder McCaffrey keeps churning out Dragonriders of Pern novels, Piers Anthony keeps going with Xanth, Terry Goodkind keeps cranking out novels in the Sword of Truth series, etc. They're all suffering diminishing returns, but there are still fans out there to buy them, and the authors don't have anything else to do (a comment that may be unfair to McCaffrey, who is still writing books in other series), and they're easy cash cows.

For an interesting comparison, check out the reaction to Anne Rice's last book, Blood Canticle, which I wrote about in October. In that book she apparently brings two of her long-running series to an end, the Vampire one and the Witch one, and the fans hate her for it. Of course most of their complaints seem to be more about how poorly she wrapped things up than that she wrapped them up at all, but since that fact ruins my parallel point, I'll thank you for overlooking it.  What would be more interesting is if a writer with a series that has gone on for too long actually did wrap it all up in a way that worked well and that satisfied most of his/her fans. Would the fans really appreciate it? Even the ones who had been complaining that the last half dozen books sucked?  Or would they read the excellent final novel and be angry that 1) the previous half dozen were so mediocre in comparison, and 2) that the series was ending now that the author was finally back on top of his/her game?

I'm guessing the second option, which means there's really no pleasing fans, once the quality begins to slip even a little bit. We might get a case study in this in a few years though, if Robert Jordan ever pulls his thumb out and manages to conclude the Wheel of Time as well as he began it.