ednesday, and I will now celebrate my return to Kali class, after a week without... by not talking about it. Not much to say really; Tuesday night we didn't do any stick work, just open hand, and it wasn't cardiovascular since we mostly stood still and worked on punching, defending, balance, weight distribution, footwork, etc.

I used to only really enjoy stick stuff, but I'm getting to like open hand more and more as I improve at it. I'm still far from being any good, relatively speaking, but I'm good/fast enough to have fun when my partner is new since I can work on technique and teach them. And when I'm working with someone better than me I enjoy learning from them, seeing how they move and dodge and lean, how they get in their hits, and try to emulate them while speeding up my hands enough to match them.

Dance class is tomorrow night, but Malaya's gotta thing at work so we're not going. We'll have more free time come June, and can work on our Samba skills as well as our Kali.

I'd blab more but I have a bunch of movie stuff and news written, and I need to get back to working on the novel, so that's all for now. Friday will bring reader mail, additions to the My First Time page, and other things that are yet to be determined.

To the news...

¤ I hardly even know how to intro this one, but it's a link sent to me by a regular reader, and the story told there is entirely fictional, highly obscene, and extremely amusing. Here's the site; hover on the link to see the blogspot URL and get a pretty good idea what it's all about. A representative quote:

I spit on my skeezer-pleaser and, prying her ass cheeks apart like a hot dinner roll, drove it home, into the biggest browneye I had ever seen. She gurgled contentedly.

Despite what you might conclude from the above sample, it's really quite a clever page. It's a blog, but a blog with just one very long-form entry, in which the anonymous author describes picking up the fiery and hateful Ann in LA, turning her on with his liberal opinions, and taking her home for some hot, degrading sex. Sex she only enjoys when she's hating him for his left wing opinions. It's satire, obviously, and pretty amusing satire at that, mostly for the imagination put behind the outrageous word choices. I'd never before seen anyone simile anal sex to hot dinner rolls, for instance. Not even on the Internet. (Or use "simile" as a verb, for that matter.)

I wasn't prepared to like it going in, since while I loathe Ann Coulter as much as the next decent American, I think that throwing shit back at her only makes her happy. If everyone simply pointed out her lies and distortions, she'd get nowhere. But since her lies and attacks make people so angry, they can't help but sink to her level, and provide quotes she can seize upon as further examples of the irrational Bush-hating liberal whatever whatever. So while cursing her, or posting doctored mocking photos of her weirdly-bony face might be momentarily-satisfying, it's not very productive long term.

I did enjoy this blog entry though, since it's clever and satirical enough to work, especially given the loathsomeness of its target. It's like an editorial The Onion had to reject for length and obscenity, even though they would have loved to post it on its other merits. My objections to Ann Coulter are more of a objective nature, since while I disagree with most of her positions on the issues, I would be ashamed to have her on my side even if I didn't. As I say in the largely-relevant intro to my Ann Coulter article page, 

Coulter is not a journalist; she has no interest in fairness or objectivity or presenting information for her readers to make up their own minds about. She's a polemicist, with a desire to outrage. So she picks a topic, finds some examples that more or less fit the situation, and then presents the material in the most biased and unfair light possible, in order to make her point.  You have to lack all objectivity, and agree with her completely, to read anything she writes without voicing numerous objections. And even then, if you have even a speck of objectivity, you'll find it impossible to avoid spotting innumerable distortions and outright lies.

She was also on the cover of Time Magazine last week, the subject of a 6000 word love letter that just about every blogger who isn't a fanatical right winger found totally outrageous, for numerous reasons. Ann didn't like it either, because... she thought the cover photo made her legs look weirdly-proportioned. That damned liberal media!

¤ Now this is a weird story, by a guy who is either very greedy, utterly without shame, an idiot, or all of the above.

MIAMI - A former caddie for LPGA golfer Jackie Gallagher-Smith is suing her, saying she seduced him in order to get pregnant. Gary Robinson says Gallagher-Smith, who is married, used him as "an unwitting sperm donor." He is suing for an unspecified sum, claiming fraud and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

My first thought was that Jackie is a lesbian, and needed the sperm that way. Apparently not, being as she's married; but her husband is infertile, as well as now being the most humiliated man alive.

Robinson, 26, began caddying for Gallagher-Smith in February 2004, and soon thereafter began receiving advances from her, he said. Robinson said he was in an emotional state after recently ending a long-term relationship with a girlfriend, and he passed off some early advances as "innocent playful activity."

The relationship became sexual about two months later and the two would sometimes engage in unprotected sex, he said. When rumors of the relationship began spreading around the tour, Gallagher-Smith told Robinson that he must deny they had anything but a work relationship, the suit states.

Robinson goes on to say that Gallagher-Smith told him she and her husband had been unsuccessful in conceiving a child. In July, she told Robinson she was pregnant and led him to believe he might be the father, the suit says.

Under pressure from Robinson, Gallagher-Smith eventually told her husband and said he forgave them, and Robinson continued to caddie for Gallagher-Smith through the end of the tour season in October, Robinson said.

The real victim here is the husband. Not only is it now public knowledge that he's shooting blanks, but we also know that his wife repeatedly cheated on him with her caddy, got pregnant from it, told the husband about it, and then the topper; kept working with the same caddy for the rest of the season! I can see maybe forgiving her if you really wanted the baby, etc... but there's forgiving, and there's rolling over like a whipped dog. And when you let her keep working with the baby daddy, probably porking him now an then for old time's sake, that's just wrong. And now he's going to raise the baby another man put in his wife's belly, and think about where it came from every time he looks at it for the next eighteen years.

Worst of all, his wife's not even that hot. Bit of a horseface, honestly. Yes, that was uncalled for.

Here's one closing quote from the article, just in case you weren't already sure that the caddy was a scumbag.

"I hope to get retribution for the emotional pain and suffering and eventually get some rights to the child," Robinson said. "The laws in Florida are very tough with the situation I'm in but this suit is about financial retribution."

Well, at least he's upfront in the end, admitting it's about the money. I can't see him having a case here... I mean what's he suing for? I can imagine him winning some visitation rights, but money? Did she hold a gun to his head? Drug him? Tie him up? If he was suing to avoid child support or something like that, and claiming she told him she was on the pill he might make that argument, but instead he's basically saying he screwed his boss and that it's keeping him from finding other work in the field. Keep it in your pants next time, stupid.

Some people say they liked Contact anyway, and that it all made sense, but they probably just want to impress Jodie and don't have the balls to do it the old fashioned way; by blowing away Dubya.

Jet Li's open hand is great, and even though the weapon work is less inspiring than what I see every time I attend a Kali class (Seriously; we do faster, tighter, cooler stuff every day, and I'm not even talking about the Master of our school, who does sword stuff that you would not believe on film; you'd think it was just an effect since no one could go that fast with a blade that close to another living human's face.), the trailer has some very cool camera work and action shots, and I quite enjoyed watching it.

¤ I'm also enjoying the new Land of the Dead trailer. It's stylish and well done and fun to watch, irrespective of whether or not you have any desire to sit through a zombie movie. (I do, in this case at least.) Better yet, it doesn't give away anything from the plot, and I like when a trailer can interest me without ruining the movie it's cobbled together from. In fact this one might be too reticent with the info, since it wasn't until I read about Land of the Dead in the EW issue mentioned below that I got interested in seeing it.

The plot, very briefly, is that it's set far in the future, in a world overrun by zombies. They are everywhere, aside from one walled city where the last untainted humans live, and of course the zombies are trying to get in, and they appear to be getting smarter and finding ways around the city's defenses. The humans aren't just waiting around and hoping for the best either; they've got super anti-zombie tanks and all sorts of cool improvised weapons. I find that whole world set up much more interesting than yet another "zombies appear in the ordinary world and chaos ensues" film, like last year's Dawn of the Dead remake (which was surprisingly good), or the upcoming Australian low budget Undead.

I can't see ever writing a zombie movie or book myself, since it's just been so done, and done, and done. But I did enjoy thinking about it after watching Dawn of the Dead last year, in terms of anti-zombie technology. There are thousands or even millions of them, and they apparently animate magically; I.E. they don't need to eat or sleep, and will not just fall down and die eventually. If you want to reclaim some portion of the earth you must kill them, and the only way to do that is to blow or cut off their heads. You don't have the bullets to shoot them all, or the explosives to blow them all up, so what can you do?  Keep in mind that they're stupid and don't know to use tools or weapons against you, nor even to duck, and that they will swarm right up to your weapons, if they can smell you near them.

How about a heavy-duty truck or even a tank with metal guards around the tires and windows, and long arms on each side, with thin wire cables attached at about neck height. Drive through large parking lots full of zombies and behead hundreds of them at 40 MPH? Or you could mechanize it and modify heavy duty fans with sword blades. Weapons that could be retrieved would be great too; like something to shoot out sawblades with long wires attached to them? You can't reuse bullets, and you can't go out and get your projectiles back, but the zombies aren't smart enough to stand on the wire to stop you from pulling your deadly frisbee back.

If you were really brave or stupid or bored you could get a suit of armor, or make one with some sort of unbreakable plexiglass, arm yourself with a sword, cover your suit with sword blades, and go out and start hacking away. You'd want a strong steel cable attached to you and a winch too, though, so your friends could pull you back up onto the safe building. After all, no matter how many you cut you'd still get tired eventually, and no armor would help you dig out from beneath hundreds of swarming zombies.

Zombie wars! Hell, there's probably books about that already, with better ideas than I've thrown forth here. So never mind.

BTW, I guess Batman doesn't go out in the day much, but if he did... imagine the sunburn marks, just over his mouth and up to his nose?

¤ Lastly, Apple's Quicktime Movie Trailer site has a new addition; high definition trailers that require QuickTime 7, and only play on the Mac OS. They say PC support is coming, but luckily for me in the meantime, Malaya uses Macs, and after she got her annoyance at having to DL and install the new QT7 out of the way, we marveled at the HD trailers. They play at more than full screen, in movie dimensions (much wider than your monitor, unless you've got one of those glorious cinema display monitors), and have astonishing image quality. DVD quality, perhaps, though they skimp on the frame rate to keep the file sizes from being as astronomical as the bandwidth required to deliver them.