onday, the only day of the week it's safe to read BlackChampagne, without hearing about Flux's martial arts interests! At least that's usually true...

I didn't do any Kali this weekend, but Malaya and another female friend of ours did, and they were both kicking ass. Not literally in this case, but their stick work is really progressing, and they were doing better than ever before and were very excited about it. With Kali the teachers often speak of themselves or others needing to make a breakthrough, and while they never really explain what they mean, it's obvious what they want. They want us to get much better, all at once, even if it's just that one time when we were super motivated. It's basically punctuated equilibrium, rather than slow steady evolution of skill. Improving in a great leap, all at once, mostly due to mind triumphing over matter. 

How this happens is never discussed, but I think I see the theory: We (the students) know what to do. We know all of the movements and techniques the intermediate and advanced students are using; we just can't put them all together yet. Especially not under the time pressure of sparring with another person, with other people watching, when we're going totally freestyle. It's silly though, since it's just physical movement. It's not magic; we know the moves, and the Gurus aren't growing a third arm or extra thumb to do the same moves better, faster, and with more precision. It's mental; they just think faster, know how to move their bodies better, and so on. A lot of what holds the students back is thinking that we can't do it that fast, or that well, and not to get all Yoda on you, but that is why we fail.

It's not entirely mental, of course. Anyone can shoot a basketball, but only a few people on earth can do it well enough to earn a living in the NBA, and it's not all mental attitude that's holding back those guys you see on the playground. There are other prerequisites too; you've obviously got to be very quick, or very tall, or very strong, or some combination of the three, but a large part of it is being able to handle the pressure and being able to do it when you're exhausted at the crucial end of a tough game.

Kali doesn't have such physical barriers to entry. You don't need to be fast, or strong, or tall or anything like that. It helps, and you can hit harder and do some things faster and others in a more athletic style, but the art is designed and can be modified to be effective for short people, or people without leaping ability or foot speed or youth. Leaping and speed don't hurt, but Kali isn't Muay Thai or some other martial art where the champions are 20 or 25 years old, and after that it's all downhill as they lose their leaping ability and their bodies break down from the extreme stresses their high impact sport puts them through.  To be great at Kali you just need to move in coordinated fashion, which is where the breakthroughs come in; everyone has the coordination, but it's learning to harness it. Some really brilliant students make leaps forward all the time, the master of our school keeps progressing in frightening fashion, and other students and Gurus/Guras learn quickly and steadily (me) without making great sudden leaps, and others need much more practice to get the moves down, and may never be able to do them well enough to be really good.

Something the teachers often do in Kali is have us work on something during class, and then during the last 15 minutes or so they stick all of the pairs out in front of everyone and have us do it with an audience. Kali isn't really a competitive situation; it's not like we're fighting for a starting spot on the team, but when everyone is watching you there is definitely more pressure than when you're just doing your thing off in a corner of the room with another student. At first I didn't see the point in this, but as I've done more Kali I've realized that the benefit is that it weeds out the people who don't have the balls to be there, and that it is a good way to force you to step up your game. You want to do well with everyone watching, you want to look good and make your partner look good, and you want to make your teacher proud. It's pressure, but in a good way, and that sort of thing pushes you to make a breakthrough.

One thing the teachers say is that "eventually you'll get tired of being hit." It's sort of an adversarial style of learning, but when you're learning or practicing a move or technique with someone who's better than you are, they're going to hit you. Not that hard, but hard enough that you know you're being hit, and while some people can't take it and drop the class, it tends to push the rest of us to get better. It's not so much to avoid pain, since we're not playing that rough; it's more a point of pride. The breakthroughs come when you simply get tired of being hit, and start moving faster, or dodging better, or doing whatever you've got to do to improve. Malaya simply got tired of sucking at stick (as she put it) and when pushed to do well with an audience she stepped it up a large notch and did the best she's ever done. She was put in a pressure situation and she did far better than she ever thought she could do, and did better than she would have done if not pressured.

I haven't had such a breakthrough on anything yet, (I've improved steadily on everything, and I'm not dissatisfied with my skill, but I could be better than I am.) but I've been thinking about it all weekend, and I realize that I'm tired of just being okay. I'm tired of being slow with my stick, and having to be careful not to hit other people. I know I can move faster and with more precision, and I know I can do multiple different hits in a row the way the masters do. Just because it's acceptable for me to do the simple hit, under-hit, double stick spin hit, etc, doesn't mean I have to settle for that when I could be doing so much better. With that in mind I've been thinking about Kali a lot this weekend, and even dreaming about it, and I have decided that I am going to step it up from now on. When pressured in front of class, but not just then; all the time. I am going to really concentrate and I'm going to work harder at it when I'm doing it. I don't need to practice six hours a day; I just need to fully concentrate and do much better in the time I do spend on it.

To quote another movie, remember Morpheus with Neo in The Matrix in the training room? "Stop trying to hit me and hit me... You're faster than this... Don't think you are, know you are!" It's corny, but that's really what it's like in class, at least in my thoughts. I know how to do it, I'm just not pushing myself to do it, and I can't wait for the teacher to drag me there, kicking and screaming.

My barehand has improved a lot lately, and I'm not sure why; I haven't thought consciously about wanting to get better at it, but now that I've had this semi-epiphany I'm going to try and work at it in the same way. Just because the guys I spar with have a year or two more time in Kali than I do doesn't mean I have to always be worse than them at parry/check, especially when we're just doing the basic left and right high punching. I have fast hands and I've always had very fast reflexes. Why shouldn't I be able to parry their strikes and land my own? They might beat me with better technique and knowing crafty ways to do quicker punches, but the only way I'll learn those is to master the simple stuff and push them to have to use those tricky things to keep ahead of me.

In conclusion, you can probably expect an ebullient follow up post on Wednesday, or else a very disappointed and very short blog entry about how Kali sucked last night.

For today's blog I've got a quick reflex test game, a quick note on the NCAA Basketball Tournament, and then some news about the depressing right to die Terri Schavio case. After that it's a book review, but not a new one. I didn't do a word of reading this weekend (other than some Entertainment Weekly in the bathroom and tons and tons of work on my novel), so I'm still unacceptably slow on my Dead and Dying Angels review.  Wednesday, I hope, but when I'm in the mood to write I try not to spend any reading time on anything but my own work.

¤ Fun game to test your reflex speed.  It couldn't be simpler either; there's a red dot, you hover your mouse over it, and after some random time it turns yellow. You click as fast as you can when it changes, you get five trials, and your score is your average. Oh yeah, if you guess or flinch you get a 1 second penalty, and two penalties equals game over.  The records are in the .1 to .17 second range, and those are faster than me, at least at the very early morning hour I played it at.  I averaged around .21 when I was really concentrating on it, with a best individual click of something like .16. I'll have to try it again sometime when I'm feeling really hyper, or full of caffeine. Or both. That might be dangerous though; the times I really leaned in and concentrated on the screen with all my mind, I found myself actually jerking in my chair when I clicked, I was so keyed up.

The fun ones are when you get all five with just a second or two to wait on them. The hard ones are when one or more have something like a ten second delay, and as you get tenser and tenser and fight the urge to blink you can feel your reflexes slowing to a crawl, or abandoning you altogether. I'm lucky to beat .275 after a really long delay, while I can usually get under .2 when I don't have to wait that long. If you're in a quiet room you can try counting your heartbeat while you wait, just to give yourself that "tense scene in an action movie" vibe. I got slower when I started doing that, personally.

Besides your reflexes, I'd think your mouse button is a major factor. My dad's got this old POS mouse that came with his computer, and it's like clicking a rock; my forefinger gets tired just clicking links while I'm surfing with that damn thing, and I'd be surprised if anyone could beat .3 with that brick. Would a button that only requires a feather touch make for faster times? I wouldn't be surprised.

¤ The NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament is going on now, and while I generally pay attention to big sporting events, I've just never given a damn about college basketball. Especially now, when all the best players go straight from high school to the pros, or play at most one or two years of college ball. There's no continuity on rosters, no experienced talent in the games, and never a player with a career worth following. Plus the game is just such a mad scramble in college, with very little of the one on one play and organized fast break action you see in the pros. It's mostly the game that matters though, as a reason for my disinterest. I actually prefer college football to pro football, and for quite a few of the same reasons I give as bad things about basketball. At least I never claimed to have a scientific argument.

As usual, I have yet to watch a second of the tournament, though I have idly followed the game outcomes solely to root for underdogs. As of Sunday night the first two rounds have been played, the field has gone from 64 to 16, and there are only two teams left worth rooting for. Twelfth seeded Milwaukee-Wisconsin, and 10th seeded NC State. Wis-Mill is up against the #1 team in the country next, so they're done, but NC State's got 6th seeded Wisconsin not-Milwaukee up next, so they've got some chance to go from the "sweet sixteen" to the "elite eight" as they so alliteratively call these rounds on TV. After that it's the "final four," and at that point they give up on clever names and just call it the championship game. There's no alliteration at the start either; you're just a team in the field of 64, and then if you win your first game you're into "the second round." Why not the "thirsty thirty-two" or "trembling three-score plus two," though?  They could go Marine-like and call it "The Semper Fi XXXII." It sort of works as a rhythm if you say the Roman Numerals out loud; "the-semp-er-fi ex-ex-ex-aye-aye!"

Or not.

The only thing close to game analysis I've read is the running diary the Sports Guy kept on Thursday and Friday, when he furiously clicked through about 25 games, typing down notes on the viewing experience as he went. Fortunately, the diary is as much about non-basketball stuff as it is about the games themselves, which kept it interesting for a non-fan such as myself.  It's a good way to get a flavor for the games without subjecting yourself to actually watching teams shoot 38% while 8 six foot 7 guys with no jump shot battle for the constant rebounds while two ball hog point guards who can slash but not finish wait outside to see whose turn it is to miss a lay up next.

¤ Informative medical wrap up of the Terri Schiavo case. The right wing has been going nuts over this case for years, motivated by their staunch opposition to any right to die cases, and if you're like me and you've done your best to ignore the situation, you'll find this blog entry informative.

Lies Terri Schiavo's parents told me

The Terri Schiavo case has transfixed the right wing media while attracting comparatively little attention from the left. This is discrepancy is understandable. Once you know the facts, there's very little to argue about. The case is literally a no brainer.

The Schiavo case presents no intricate medical, ethical, or legal dilemmas. Abstract Appeal's comprehensive legal chronology shows just how straightforward this case should have been. Michael Schiavo is Terri's legal guardian, the courts have determined that Terri wouldn't want a feeding tube, and Michael asked the doctors to take the tube out. That's really all there is to it.

The Terri Schiavo appeal is a vicious and lavishly-funded propaganda campaign. Terri's parents and their allies are using pseudoscience and character assassination to destroy Michael Schiavo. The right wing is eating it up.

Bottom line: Terri is never going to wake up or regain any additional function, when she was still alive she said she didn't want to be kept alive as a vegetable, her husband has won every court case and is her legal guardian, and it's his decision to make if they should keep her body alive with a feeding tube for another 30 or 40 or 50 years. Let her go; her mind and soul (if you believe in that sort of thing) has been gone for 15 years.

You could also point out that the only possible treatment for people who end up like Terri did (though not for her, since she's too far gone) is stem cell research... the same sort of research blocked by the same sort of right to life people who are trying so hard to keep her empty husk alive in a hospital bed for another 50 years.

¤ Of course this wouldn't be America if there weren't blatant hypocrisy where power, money, and politics intersect. To quote Digby, since he sums it up pretty damn well:

By now most people who read liberal blogs are aware that George W. Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient's family's wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother's wishes in Texas just this week. A 68 year old man was given a temporary reprieve by the Texas courts just yesterday.

Those of us who read liberal blogs are also aware that Republicans have voted en masse to pull the plug (no pun intended) on medicaid funding that pays for the kind of care that someone like Terry Schiavo and many others who are not so severely brain damaged need all across this country.

Those of us who read liberal blogs also understand that that the tort reform that is being contemplated by the Republican congress would preclude malpractice claims like that which has paid for Terry Schiavo's care thus far.

Those of us who read liberal blogs are aware that the bankruptcy bill will make it even more difficult for families who suffer a catastrophic illness like Terry Schivos because they will not be able to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy and get a fresh start when the gargantuan medical bills become overwhelming.

And those of us who read liberal blogs also know that this grandstanding by the congress is a purely political move designed to appease the religious right and that the legal maneuverings being employed would be anathema to any true small government conservative.

Those who don't read liberal blogs, on the other hand, are seeing a spectacle on television in which the news anchors repeatedly say that the congress is "stepping in to save Terry Schiavo" mimicking the unctuous words of Tom Delay as they grovel and leer at the family and nod sympathetically at the sanctimonious phonies who are using this issue for their political gain.

Mark Kleiman has some good comments on the issue as well.

¤ At least some good is coming of the poor woman's suffering. Her misguided parents and their right wing backers are torturing her, but at least their meddling efforts may save some other people from a similar fate.

TAMPA, Fla. - Terri Schiavo didn't have a living will. But because of her, thousands of other Americans won't make that same mistake. Attorneys and organizations that promote the importance of living wills and advance directives say the bitter legal battle over the severely brain damaged woman has led many people to put their end-of-life wishes in writing.

At attorney Christopher Likens' office in Sarasota, clients invariably bring up Terri Schiavo as they put their affairs in order.

"Almost universally, it's `That poor girl. I don't ever want that to happen to me,'" Likens said. "People are much more informed about the issue."

Even with a living will, it's essential that you let your relatives know about your wishes, because these documents are often contested in court, as parents or other relatives fight your right to die.

The novel is not your usual teen-targeted swords and love story though; it's more intelligent and mature than that, with all adult characters doing adult things. It's full of anti-heroes and difficult lives and has a distinct lack of chivalry or shining armor. Unfortunately, you need to be an adult to keep from getting bored with it, since there's not much of a compelling plot or many interesting characters to keep you turning the pages. As a teenager this book would have bored me and I would not have finished it.

To the scores.

Dragon's Treasure, by Elizabeth A. Lynn
Plot: 4
Concept: 7
Writing Quality/Flow: 5/7
Characters: 7
Horror: NA
Humor: NA
Fun Factor: 3
Page Turner: 4
Re-readability: 5
Overall: 5

As I said in the intro, this story is only fantasy thanks to the dragon-transforming prince. If not for him it might as well be set in Germany in 1302 BCE, except that everyone speaks English and the living conditions are pastoral and agrarian and there's no slavery or butchering barbarian hordes or deadly plagues or cruel kings or viciously-controlling churches. In fact, as is often the case in fantasy, there's no mention of any religion at all.  Basically it's a rose-tinted historical novel with one magical character. They mention mages and wizards and such, but none are ever seen.

This isn't necessarily good or bad; I'm just letting you know.

I would have liked more fantasy elements in the fantasy, but that's mostly personal preference. What really hurt the book though was the lack of excitement or a real plot. There are three main characters: a young male thief and brigand, his sister who was left behind when he fled his homeland, and the dragon-transforming lord. The book begins with these three in close proximity, then scatters them apart for 200 pages, before they come back together near the end. Unfortunately, the book is way too much about them all doing their own, non-related things. We've got no real reason to want them to get back together, and since it's mostly circumstance that brings them back, rather than any building climax in the story, when it happens there's no real reader excitement or dread or anything.

The novel also isn't sure what style it wants to be in.

The chapters from the female character's point of view are very female in style; there's no action, she's gathering and drying herbs, catching fish for supper, getting to know her farmer neighbors, making medicines to heal their sick daughter, etc. All very minor detail stuff, and not boring or awful, just in that small, female-specific style that I've seen in various books by Anne McCaffrey and Ursula K. LeGuin.

The chapters from the male thief's POV are very different, since there's never any attention paid to the minor details. He's robbing, he's hiding in a cave with his fellow outlaws, he's running from soldiers. Unfortunately, those sections are told in very dry, emotionless writing, even when people are being murdered or raped.

The chapters from the dragonlord's POV are much like the male thief's, except that he's attending royal weddings, meting out justice, hunting, turning into a dragon and flying around, etc. There are two good scenes when he assumes dragon form and blows things up with his fire breath, mostly since he's half mad as a dragon, and there's finally some emotion and passion in the description. Unfortunately those are just two scenes, the second of which is really the only powerful moment in the book.

The plot also tries to be sprawling, in much the way George R R Martin's ongoing Song of Fire and Ice series is, but it never comes together in Dragon's Treasure. We see lots of lords and barons and such, we attend a royal wedding, and we learn lots of names for court people. Unfortunately none of them appear more than once or twice, or do anything of any importance, and are therefore swiftly forgotten. They are just background noise, completely irrelevant to the main plot, and none of them are sketched vividly enough to be memorable anyway. The contrast between this style, and the vast character palette of Martin's series, where everyone is important to the story since they're all scheming and interacting in clever ways, could not be more clear.

If all of this makes the novel sound terrible and boring, it's not. Here what I wrote immediately after finishing it, and even went so far as to add a review to the Amazon.com page.  Something I've very seldom done, despite the 150+ reviews I've written for this site. There is one review there that I've never posted on this site though, if you're unaccountably dying to see what I think of my headphones.

It was probably undeserved, but my first thought upon finishing the novel was, "What a stupid fucking book!"

That doesn't sound very promising, but in a way it's a good comment. If the novel had truly sucked, I wouldn't have had any strong reaction, since I would not have cared one way or the other (and probably wouldn't even have finished it). Dragon's Treasure isn't a good story, but it had enough promise that it could have been good, and I wanted it to be good, or at least better than it was. As it stands Dragon's Treasure is basically a very long and well-polished collection of notes about characters, character types, and a land that a good story or series could be set in. It's not a serviceable novel in of itself since there's simply no plot, building conflict, climax, or resolution.

We meet a lot of characters; some interesting and others forgettable. We read about a number of events; some fascinate us, most leave us indifferent. We see lots of plot elements, some clever, most un-involving. On the whole though, it's just 325 pages of scenes populated by average characters, doing average things, with no larger theme or goal to hold it together. If you asked me what the book's main plot was, or central theme, or the message a reader was to take from it, I couldn't answer the question. It's not about anything, there's no protagonist or antagonist, and there's no real reason for it to exist. As I said, it's like a lot of ideas in search of a novel to tie them together, and while the ideas were generally good, or at least usefully-average, they did not form a cohesive book.

I didn't hate it and it didn't bore me, but I only kept reading to see what was going to happen, and in the end... nothing happened. Hence my angry reaction when it ended without an ending. Though this novel wasn't really any good of itself, I can imagine the raw materials of it being turned into something good, or even excellent, if Elizabeth Lynn figured out what she wanted to write about, and bent her talent and these characters and this land to some larger purpose.

That being said, it's not an awful book, and I've certainly read many worse fantasy novels. This one would bore younger readers to tears, due to the lack of conflict of a violent or romantic nature, and its vision of a largely magic-less agrarian medieval world is unrealistic (far too peaceful and totally devoid of any religious influences) if you're used to the work of superior fantasy writers like George R R Martin. But if you're an adult who can read quickly and doesn't demand a page turner, you might not dislike this one. I wouldn't pay $$ for it, but that's what libraries are for.

PS. I have not read Dragon's Winter and did not know it existed until after I wrote the above, but I doubt anything in that book would change my opinion of its sequel. If anything, Dragon's Winter might lower my opinion of this one, since I was assuming Lynn had just invented all of these characters and the world they exist in, and was trying to figure out what to do with them. Knowing that this is book 2 in a series makes me less sympathetic towards its wandering, conflictless nature.

When I headed to Amazon.com to see what other readers had said about Dragon's Treasure, I was surprised to find just two reviews. And since only one of them was a real review (More on Amazon.com's #1 reviewer and uber-hack Harriet Klausner in a moment.) I even added in my own comments. Comments that could have used some editing, in retrospect. At any rate, the one review there basically agreed with me, while fiddling around too much to actually say that the book was plotless, and giving a far-too generous 4/5 star review.

As for the other review, by Amazon.com's #1 reviewer... it's typical soulless, poorly-written back cover fluff, like all of her reviews. Look at them if you don't believe it. They are all 4 or 5 stars, all 3 or 4 paragraphs, and all sound like computer-generated press releases.  For Dragon's Treasure she clumsily-summarizes the plot for two paragraphs, before summing it up with the following drivel.

No one would notice if this sort of review popped up from time to time. But when there are 8632 of them from the same reviewer, and they all sound the same and give the same bullshit score, it's kind of hard to miss. The funny thing is that other Amazon.com users are catching on, and have been calling shenanigans on Harriet's tripe. Her Dragon's Treasure review has just "1 of 5 people found the following review helpful" and most of the reviews I see by her on various books and movies are similarly-unpopular. People realize she's just trolling for feedback and positive scores, I suppose, and even when she weighs in on books that have very high scores, people seem to go out of their way to disagree with her empty opinions.

My question is why. What benefit does it provide her to churn out an unending stream of reviews for books she's never read and movies she couldn't possibly have seen (given the time it would take to watch/read them all)?  I guess being #1 on the Amazon.com list is some sort of a moral victory, and she's clearly in a battle with the #2 guy, who has somehow managed over 9500 reviews, while #3 drops down to hardly more than 2000. But it's not like there's a prize for being #1, or a salary, and given that most people seem to think she's a hack, there's certainly no benefit of public acclaim.

I have to quibble with the Amazon.com scoring system, while I'm on the subject. As far as I can tell, they rank reviewers solely by how many people agree with their scores, with no attention paid to disagree scores. That method obviously rewards people who write more reviews, and while that's fine, it would be nice if their approvals were divided by the total number of reviews, or the disagrees were subtracted, or a percentage was listed, or something.  Then again, being as I just wondered why she cared to try so hard to be #1 when there's no reward for it, why am I pondering scoring changes to remove her crown?

Seriously though, how about a sortable top reviewers page, like something from an ESPN.com baseball stats page? Sort top reviewers by total reviews, positive feedback, negative feedback, percentage positive, etc.  Maybe there's some guy with only 300 reviews who makes brilliant points and who everyone agrees with, but who can't crack the top listing since he's got a real life and only reviews things he's actually seen/read personally?

Oh wait, no one cares. Right.