Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Kali Staff Seminar
Since I seem to be in a blogging mood, and not in a fiction mood, and since I'm trying not to surf or play any games while Malaya is toiling away on a work project at her desk to my immediate right, I might as well talk about the weekend staff seminar while the metaphorical iron is hot. Hey, (one of)
you asked for it.
Staff in Kali (As always, when I say "Kali" I mean the particular type of the martial art modified and invented by the Master of our school, so there may not be many/any similarities to other forms of Kali around the world.) is quite different from staff in most other martial arts. We use long staves, 6-7 feet (+/-2 meters), ideally of bamboo, since they're not much thicker than broomsticks, but are strong and durable. (A dowel or curtain rod or the like you get from a hardware store will break or shatter if you hit it hard.)
In form, our staff is actually pretty similar to spear, with a lot of stabbing and poking, and very, very fine control required to do it properly. Needless to say, no one at the seminar other than our Tuhan and Gura was good enough with a staff to use it in full speed sparring. The rest of us did some sparring, of course, but only in controlled fashion, after we'd worked on basic forms and techniques and such for a couple of hours. It was a blast too, with the person attacking taking big long swings, and the other person countering that with a sweep, then landing a few hits of their own, as the first person stepped through, then turned and launched another attack.
In our practice we were doing all large swings, but you'd hardly do any of those in a fight, since they're just too slow and too big. No matter how hard you swing, if the arc of your swing is as wide as if you were swinging a dead cat overhead by the tail, any competent opponent is simply going to duck it, step back from it, or more likely step in, block it, and nail you in the face. Their weapon will be inside yours, after all, and likely pointing pretty much straight at you. A fight between two experts with staff would therefore be much like a fencing match, with lots of stabs, thrusts, and parries. You can block such stabs of course, but it's very, very hard to do so without super reflexes and long reach. You can't move your body to the side as quickly as someone can stab a staff at you, nor can you tell exactly where their stab is aiming quickly enough to dodge appropriately. You can swing a stick to block it, but your reach with the stick isn't anywhere near as long as the staff's.
Staff vs. staff blocking is
easier possible since you can reach your staff out four or five feet, and if you just slightly redirect their stick at that distance, it will move a foot or more to the side by the time it reaches your body, and miss you. And then you can thrust in your return strike while they're defenseless. Reachingg out is the key to blocking most types of jabbing or thrusting attacks, by the way. Starting to redirect them as far from your body as you can. It's why we often leave one hand out after punching, since that hand can then quite easily redirect the opponent's return punch by pushing their arm in one direction or the other. Trying to catch a punch in front of your face is very hard; steering it away by pushing into their forearm is less hard.
As for the most basic staff stuff, it's very much a two-handed weapon. Obviously, I mean you can't control a two meter stick with one hand, (Gandalf's fight double in LotR:RotK aside.) but it's all about the physics of the thing. By pulling the back of the stick in towards your side while pushing the front out with your other hand, you're basically doubling the speed of your attack, since both hands are moving at once. The fulcrum is then the mid-point of the stick between your hands, rather than being at your back hand, if you only moved it by thrusting with the front hand. You've therefore shortened the stick, in effect, since you're only moving the first 3 feet of it, rather than the 4 or 5 feet you would be moving if you'd simply swung with your front hand.
Stabs are two handed also, with the rear hand thrusting and the front hand going to a looser grip and controlling the aim. It's basically like shooting a pool cue, and you let your front hand slide when you swing as well; starting off with a very wide grip, and turning your hips as you swing while sliding your front hand up the staff a foot or two. It can be hard to control the aim like that, but when you do it correctly you can feel how much more speed you've got, and the whistle of the stick through the air is damn satisfying. Currently I find that much easier to do right handed (with the right hand in front) than left handed, but it's just a matter of practice.
And yes, we swing from both sides constantly, switching our grip (in terms of which hand is in front) appropriately. We do a lot of thrusting backhand too, with the same form. With an expert you really can't tell which end of the stick is the front or back, since they're completely ambidexterous and can swing from either side, and with either end at any moment. (That sounded strangely sexual, didn't it?)
The staff is the king of the weapons (well, perhaps the spear is more so, but we're far from the control required to use that) and it just owns sticks, swords, or double sticks in combat. You might survive with a sword if you were very good and the staff guy wasn't, and if you could chop through the staff you'd likely have the fight won, but with other weapons you're just screwed. The staff has too much of a reach advantage, and it's extremely difficult to dodge a fast stab, and since the staff guy can keep poking at you forever, while never giving you an opening to get in on a missed stab (he can back up while pulling the staff back for another stab just as quickly as you can try to advance after dodging one), good luck. Imagine missing a stab to the right of your target. You simply need to pull your arms back and turn to the left a bit for a second stab, and you can do that a lot faster than they can smack your first stab aside and leap forwards within reach of you with their much shorter weapon.
I've gotten good enough with double stick to control a single weapon; I can just hit them in the hand or parry the weapon as soon as they try to swing it from either side, but I was almost helpless against even the mercifully slow thrusts Malaya was using when we tried some staff stuff Sunday evening. Stabs are the hardest things to counter when I'm doing double stick against single stick or broadsword, since the point of the weapon comes out before the hand is within reach, but with those the weapon is slow enough that I can usually slap it aside or down, and then press my advantage from arm's reach. The staff stabs so much faster than a single stick, and has so much more range that it's just terrifying. You just can't reach their hand, much less their body, if they have any idea what they're doing with the weapon.
Double stick, or sword, is very cool against the staff though, since you can win if they play nice and throw wide swings, rather than stabs. The block is very cool too; you form an X from your weapons, catch the staff in them, and force it to the ground to your right or left. You'll then have one stick above and one stick below their staff, and you hold it down with the top one while pulling the bottom one free and swinging it at them. You've got to be quick, of course, and that'll never work against a good staff wielder, (who wouldn't have given you the big wide swing to block in the first place) but it's fun for sparring.
Also great fun was the staff vs. staff sparring we were doing, since once you block the first hit you've got just a world of possibilities. You can swing your stick back and smack them, you can block and stab, you can step in and stab with the butt of your staff, you can sweep their legs with the butt end, you can swing the butt into their head or body, and so on. It's possible to land 3 or 4 hits in like 1 second, since you strike with one end, switch to the other, hit them right and then left with it, stab again, etc.
Hitting twice with the same end quickly was hard, and the staff felt very heavy to try and circle, stop, then swing again. Tuhan could of course do it easily, and he could move the staff faster than you could see and hit you in both shoulders in a blink. It's just physics; you move your hand an inch and the tip of the staff five feet away moves that much further. You move both hands two inches, or just turn your rear hand like you're using a screwdriver, and the tip of the stick moves a foot or more. Plenty to draw back and strike again, and all you did was basically flick your wrist. Doing that with control and speed and power is of course quite another thing, but that's why he's the master, and we're not.
Try it yourself with a broomstick or something, if you're curious. Hold it loosely in your front hand, and just roll your back hand up and out, like you're using a screwdriver. Then hold the staff a foot or so above something you're not worried about breaking (a rock wall wouldn't be a bad idea) and smack it down. First use just your front hand to move it, then try to use both hands, pulling the back one towards your body while the front one moves away. Then try that with the back hand wrist twist thing, and you will be amazed at how hard you can hit from so close to the target. Far, far harder than you could with a normal stick. Malaya and I compared, me hitting a stick she held, and I had to do almost a full power strike with a stick, swinging from the shoulder and using a hip turn, to equal the force of a hit with the staff from about two feet away.
I doubt we'll do staff any time soon in class, mostly since there's not really room indoors for anything other than drills and form practice, but I've been playing around with mine outside every day since the workshop, and I can feel tremendous improvement in my control. I'm still not any good, but just handing the weapon regularly, swinging it from both sides, practicing stabbing at a tree leaf or a spot on the wall, etc, is a great way to gain control and finesse. And with dedication, in ten or twenty years I might approach actual competency! I'll let you know how it turns out.
Weekend after weekend
I suppose that since I don't currently work (other than on writing at home), it could be seen as ironic that I was so damned busy last weekend, and will be even busier this weekend. I blogged
in advance of last weekend, and covered the basics.
Saturday: Kali stick seminar in the morning, bridal shower in the afternoon, dad visiting and dinner that evening.
Sunday: Up early, drove up to Sonoma with dad, did some wine tasting, drove over to Bodega Bay on the coast, drove back with a lot of traffic, had a pre-Bday dinner for dad that night.
Monday: Up early, drove over to Mt. Diablo with dad and did some very light hiking, then had lunch at Sweet Tomatoes and hit a few stores and other errands before returning home in the evening so he could get to Oakland for his flight out at 7.
It sounds rather vacation-y, and it was for dad, I guess, but I was hella tired the whole time and hardly had any computer time at all, as the lack of blog posts attested. I didn't get any fiction done at all either, other than some quick proof reading at night. The biggest source of fatigue though, was my body's inability to adjust to the different schedule. I'm always a night owl, happiest waking around noon, screwing around and going to the gym and such in the afternoon, then working once it gets dark and keeping at it all night, until bedtime around dawn. This is my usual cycle, and I have a great deal of trouble breaking it by going to bed earlier, no matter how tired I am.
So when I got up Friday morning at 10, after going to bed at 7ish, in hopes that I'd be tired Friday night and get some sleep before the early morning Kali on Saturday, I had dim hopes it would work. And it didn't; I wasn't at all tired Friday night, and didn't get into bed until around 4. I didn't go to sleep even then, tossing and turning and dozing until maybe 5:30, when I finally fell asleep... for two hours, since the alarm went off at 7:15 and we were out the door before 8, with a 45 minute drive south to Union City and the park wherein the seminar was being held. (We needed an outdoor location for the staff workshop, since that sort of thing requires a lot of space, especially overhead.)
After 2 or 3 hours of sleep I had to be tired Saturday night, right? I was getting up by 8 or so to drive over to dad's hotel and then head up to Sonoma, after all. Guess again. I got to sleep by midnight just fine, and then woke up at 4, laid in bed until 5, gave up, got up, and worked (incoherently) on the computer until 8, by which time I was feeling really sleepy again. Once Malaya got up and left for her Sunday morning Kali class I set the kitchen timer for 45 minutes and went back to bed, and slept like a log until the buzzer woke me at 9. I was out the door heading for dad's hotel 10 minutes later, thanks to not needing to eat any breakfast, since I had eaten during my early morning non-sleeping time.
Sunday night was more of the same, with no sleep until nearly 5am, and a 8am wake up time, and the oddest thing was that I got right back onto my usual schedule Monday. I was up that night until 6am Tuesday, but then I slept for a good 7 hours, and did the same Tuesday night. I seem to be more locked into my "sleep only in the daytime" cycle than I used to be, since I could flip it around by staying up for 24 hours, or by getting 2 or 3 hours of sleep one night, and then going to bed early the next day. Now my body sticks to the schedule no matter what, apparently. I think you can safely expect to see my signings in the afternoon and evening, when future hypothetical book tour time comes.
The fun will continue this weekend, since we're leaving Friday afternoon to drive down to Long Beach with our kali Gura and her fiancee. She's doing a couple of demos at the Pacific Media Expo, and Malaya and I may be assisting in some way. We're all getting into the event for free, at least, but we're sharing a big hotel room with two beds, and since I can't sleep at night, and I can't sleep in hotels, it looks pretty unlikely that I'll be sleeping at all. Oh well, it'll be fun to attend the event and see some martial arts demos and check out all the cos players and maybe buy some anime DVDs. We'll be there Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, and then drive back Monday. I can catch up on sleep then!
Other than the convention, I dunno what we're doing in Long Beach. Maybe looking up some martial arts stores, or site-seeing a bit, but we don't have any real firm plans, that I know of. If I could just count on being able to actually sleep some while we're there, I'd be pretty damn excited about the whole thing.
Harry Potter Gay Fan Fiction
It seems an outrageous title for a post, but since it's exactly what
this popular UK Yahoo news article is about, I can hardly be faulted for repeating it. Besides, it's a good read:
As Harry Potter fans speculate what still lies in store for the world's favourite boy wizard, few envisage him leaving Hogwarts and settling into a committed gay relationship with arch foe Draco Malfoy.
But some do.
"Draco's breath is warm against his neck, his body gradually relaxing as Harry holds him, refusing to let go, and Harry discovers this is the most comfortable he's ever been in his entire life."
According to the article, there are numerous fan fiction sites out there, lots of them entirely devoted to stories set in the Harry Potter world. The biggest ones don't allow erotica or porn... but others do:
"I don't feel its my job or anybody else's to say what their kick should be. As long as it's well written, I'll post it," said Vikki Dolenga who set up the adult-themed Potter fanfic site, Restrictedsection.org, in 2002.
Dolenga, 34, a client support specialist for a health care data company in Chicago, insists the stories on her site, which gets close to 200,000 hits a day, are examples of "erotica" rather than pornography. A large number of submissions to the site fall into the category of "slash" fanfic -- so called because it explores homosexual pairings of traditionally straight characters, such as Harry/Draco.
Slash has it origins in fanfics written in the mid-1970s that imagined breathless couplings between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock from the iconic "Star Trek" series. With content ranging from unfulfilled homoerotic yearnings to the sexually explicit, slash writing is, perhaps surprisingly, dominated by straight women writers.
"I find it extremely liberating," said Lauren, 28, an advertising copywriter in New York. "I'm not sure why I prefer slash to het (heterosexual) ... maybe I just find it easier to write smut from a distance."
There's even a quote from perennially-delusional sourpuss Anne Rice, who, I must admit, was smart enough to pull up stakes and
get the hell out of New Orleans several months before it became the southern-most cove in Lake Pontchartrain.
The growing, Internet-generated popularity of fanfic has attracted mixed reactions from the original authors of the works being co-opted.
"I do not allow fan fiction," Vampire Chronicles novelist Anne Rice wrote in a statement on her official website in 2000. "The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my characters," Rice said.
Potter creator JK Rowling and her publishers have adopted a more conciliatory approach, objecting only to fanfic that is sexually explicit, violent or profane.
Websites like Restrictdsection.org have received cease-and-desist orders, but can usually remain up and running by simply adding registration and password procedures that deter people under 18 years of age. "It's 2005 and we're still here," Dolenga said. "Though I don't think we'll be winning one of (Rowling's) best website awards."
Like everything else (including hurricane-generated flooding) I'm sure this is all much funnier from a distance, and when it's my story and my characters some hack is throwing into bed together, I'll find it all far less amusing. Feel free to point out what a goddamned hypocrite I am then. Kthx.
Word Verification in Comments
Blogger has added a new "word verification" feature to the comments options, and since it seems a useful way to fight the gradual encroachement of comment spam and isn't a pain to use, I've enabled it. Click any post to comment and see what it looks like; you've likely seen something similar in signing up for various forums or emails or other such things online.
I also turned on the "allow profile images in comments" option, so we'll see how that goes too. That option allows people who have a custom icon on their Blogger account to display it beside any posts they make. I don't recall ever seeing that option on my Blogger profile, but since I spent time setting up this blog rather than screwing around with my account display options, that's not a real surprise. I generally dislike images showing in forums; especially when a forum is comprised of numerous short posts by people with huge, distracting, animated images attached in their signatures. Hopefully those of you who comment and have Bloggger accounts haven't gotten carried away with your profile images. And if you have, well then you'll understand when profile images are no longer allowed to display in BlackChampagne.com comments.
Ahh, fortune cookie!
I enjoy the
fortune cookie "in bed" game as much as anyone, but I swear they're making it too easy now. We at Chinese food with my dad on Sunday night, and here are the fortunes Malaya and I received:
You will be thankful for the pleasures of the coming months.
Soon you will encounter a whole new world of opportunity.
These aren't even vague. Seriously, are they writing these things now with awareness of the "in bed" game and just teasing us all, or what?
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Movies to see... at home.
It's sort of pointless that I keep a list of upcoming movies to see, when we've got an ever-growing stack of DVDs lying here we have already paid for, but have never gotten around to watching. Today we picked up Constantine, Team America, and Elektra at a 3/$25 sale at Blockbuster. We've been waiting for Constantine since it was released and we passed up paying $20 for it. Was waiting 3 weeks worth saving $11? Would we even have found time to watch it yet if we'd paid for it then?
We already had recent used purchases of The Transporter and Howard Stern's Private Parts, and a friend sent me a DVD rip of Saw, and three concert videos, two of NIN and one of Tool. There's also Kiki's Delivery Service, which Malaya got me for my b-day way back in June, we've had Galaxy Quest borrowed from a friend for like 6 months, Dog Soldiers which we bought for $3 on VHS and never watched, The King and I of which we watched one dance scene and nothing else, A Fish Called Wanda and Time Bandits, two movies I've loved for years but Malaya refuses to see. More recently we got National Treasure and Malaya never watched it, but since we saw it in the theaters and I took it to San Diego in June and watched it then with my dad, at least we've gotten some use out of it.
Of all these purchases, the only one I feel a need to defend is Elektra. We never saw it in theaters, mostly since the
amazingly-low 7% RT score scared us away. It's got martial arts (well, the watered-down movie version of them) in it though, and Malaya has lately hatched a burning desire to use Sais, the
trident-shaped pokey things Elektra uses. Tuhan says she can get some if she wants and he'll work some training on them into her classes, and while we're perfectly aware that Elektra is going to be dreadful, at least we can skip around to the fight scenes and avoid the "JGa attempting to emote with her granite-like face" sections. On top of that, the Blockbuster sale was 3/$25, and we really wanted Team America and Constantine, and as always when we're trying for that sort of sale, we could not find a 3rd movie we wanted, even for free. And since picking out something depressing that's of actual quality (Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River, Sideways, etc) seems beyond us... it was cheesy action movie time. Damn the sais being right on the box cover!
Stand in the way... get flattened.
I blogged
a few weeks ago about Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse, the Principle Assistant Responsible for Contracting in the US Army Corps of Engineers. As the article I linked to in that update stated, she was one of the few objecting to the multi-billion dollar contracts being awarded to Halliburton (and others) in Iraq, with no accountability and very little oversight.
It was a truly depressing story, clearly documenting the pork and backscratching and war profiteering US defense contractors engage in at every opportunity. And it's gotten
even more depressing:
Three congressional Democrats asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Monday to investigate the demotion of a senior civilian Army official who publicly criticized the awarding of a no-bid contract to Halliburton Co. for oil-related work in Iraq.
Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, who had been the Army Corps of Engineers' top procurement official since 1997, was removed effective Saturday for what the Corps of Engineers called a poor job performance. Her lawyer said her demotion constitutes "blatant discrimination" and violates an earlier agreement with the Army to suspend her demotion until a "sufficient record" pertaining to her allegations of wrongdoing is complete.
In the letter to Rumsfeld, the lawmakers said the demotion "appears to be retaliation" for her June 27 testimony before Congress in which she detailed her objections to the award of contracts for Iraq projects. "Retaliation against employees for providing information to Congress is illegal and entirely unacceptable," the letter said.
I'm sure past Presidential Administrations have been even more country cluby and old boy networky than Dubya's, but it's kind of hard to imagine how. It's like one of those corrupt communist bureaucracies where you can't get a job without connections, and if you've got friends you get everything and are entirely above retaliation for virtually anything.
Monday, August 29, 2005
Now they tell me...
Almost like some form of karmic retribution for my comments about the imminent swamping of New Orleans,
here comes this news as I'm nursing a forehead, nose, and neck sunburn from Saturday morning's Kali workshop.
WASHINGTON - Redheads sunburn easily, but that may not be the only reason they are at high risk of skin cancer. New research suggests the pigment that colors their skin may set them up for cancer-spurring sun damage even if they do not burn.
More than 1 million Americans develop some form of skin cancer each year. Among those most at risk are people with light skin, hair and eyes, a combination frequent in redheads. They are particularly prone to sunburns, a risk factor for anyone, especially if the burns occur in childhood.
Scientists long have wondered if something else plays a role in redheads' high risk. One theory focuses on melanin, the skin pigment that darkens with sun exposure to provide either a tan or freckles. People with red hair have a chemically different type of melanin than people with dark hair.
Duke University researchers on Sunday reported the first direct evidence that those melanin differences indeed may be a culprit. It turns out that redheads' melanin is more vulnerable to a type of DNA-damaging stress from the sun's ultraviolet rays.
As a kid I had reddish blonde hair, and in some summertime photos it's completely blonde, since the sun would actually leech the red out over a long summer of regular sun exposure. I actually used to go to the beach at least once a week, skateboard for hours every day, play non hat-based sports (soccer), all the time, etc. All of which was probably enough to ensure eventual malignant skin tumors, no mattr how much of my time I now spend indoors, guarding my precious, away from the sun, which burnses us.
At times it certainly does seem that humans are uniquely unsuited to live on this planet. It's almost enough to make you believe in something other than evolution, though the alternative based on the evidence of human fraility is that we were designed by an exceedingly stupid god. Perhaps one of those blind idiot ones the pipers are always playing to in Lovecraft's stories, what with all of our tooth decay, appendixes, easily-broken bones, high female mortality rate during childbirth, skinny and vulnerable necks, poor range of vision, lack of claws or teeth or poison for defense and hunting, and so on.
I've always thought that the more you know about the human body (I know little, but even my knowledge is sufficient for some conclusions.) the more obvious it becomes that we evolved from lower species, and that we're clearly an amazing distance from perfected now. We just lucked into big brains, in comparison to all of the other stupid animals on this planet, and those were enough to let us overcome our endless other physical deficiencies.
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Learn to swim/I'll see you down in/Mississippi Bay
The possibility of New Orleans being entirely flooded
has long been discussed, since since the city was built on silt and sediment deposited by the Mississippi, and has been steadily sinking for centuries, thanks to the weight of people, buildings, cars, etc. Much of the city is now about three meters below sea level, and with the Gulf of Mexico on one side and Lake Poncakaka on the other, all we need is a direct hit from a hurricane-generated storm surge of more than 10 feet for the sea-sized Gulf of Mexico to basically wash over the levees and dykes and fill the city like a bathtub.
It's hard to imagine, but
thanks to Katrina, which may soon become only the fourth Category 5 hurricane to ever hit the US mainland, we may finally be rid of the filthy, drunk-infested, vomit-scented hole that is New Orleans.
The hurricane's landfall could still come in Mississippi and affect Alabama and Florida, but it looked likely to come ashore Monday morning on the southeastern Louisiana coast, said Ed Rappaport, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. That put New Orleans squarely in the crosshairs.
"If it came ashore with the intensity it has now and went to the New Orleans area, it would be the strongest we've had in recorded history there," Rappaport said in a telephone interview Sunday morning. "We're hoping of course there'll be a slight tapering off at least of the winds, but we can't plan on that. So whichever area gets hit, this is going to be a once in a lifetime event for them."
At 8 a.m., Katrina's center was about 250 miles south-southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River, the hurricane center said. It was moving west-northwest at about 12 mph and a gradual turn toward the north-northwest was expected. Hurricane force-wind of at least 74 mph extended up to 85 miles from the center.
The storm had the potential for storm surge flooding of up to 25 feet, topped with even higher waves, as much as 15 inches of rain, and tornadoes.
A disaster of this sort would of course be absolutely horrible, and all joking aside, I would give almost anything to see it in my lifetime. I mean I certainly hope it never happens. Never. Not one bit.
By the way, if you didn't get the title of this post, you really need to listen to more Tool. Start with this song, it's got about
the best lyrics ever, and ones you can't help but agree with, at least on some level, if you've ever been to LA. Especially via LAX, since flying over the sprawling hellhole that is the LA Basin can not fail to instill a sense of disgust at man's invention.
Update: There are lots more articles about the impending doom of New Orleans, and
I liked this one for the background info.
"All indications are that this is absolutely worst-case scenario," Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, said Sunday afternoon.
The center's latest computer simulations indicate that by Tuesday, vast swaths of New Orleans could be under water up to 30 feet deep. In the French Quarter, the water could reach 20 feet, easily submerging the district's iconic cast-iron balconies and bars.
Estimates predict that 60 percent to 80 percent of the city's houses will be destroyed by wind. With the flood damage, most of the people who live in and around New Orleans could be homeless.
"We're talking about in essence having — in the continental United States — having a refugee camp of a million people," van Heerden said.
...
Experts have warned about New Orleans' vulnerability for years, chiefly because Louisiana has lost more than a million acres of coastal wetlands in the past seven decades. The vast patchwork of swamps and bayous south of the city serves as a buffer, partially absorbing the surge of water that a hurricane pushes ashore.
Experts have also warned that the ring of high levees around New Orleans, designed to protect the city from floodwaters coming down the Mississippi, will only make things worse in a powerful hurricane. Katrina is expected to push a 28-foot storm surge against the levees. Even if they hold, water will pour over their tops and begin filling the city as if it were a sinking canoe.
After the storm passes, the water will have nowhere to go.
In a few days, van Heerden predicts, emergency management officials are going to be wondering how to handle a giant stagnant pond contaminated with building debris, coffins, sewage and other hazardous materials.
"We're talking about an incredible environmental disaster," van Heerden said.
He puts much of the blame for New Orleans' dire situation on the very levee system that is designed to protect southern Louisiana from Mississippi River floods. Before the levees were built, the river would top its banks during floods and wash through a maze of bayous and swamps, dropping fine-grained silt that nourished plants and kept the land just above sea level.
The levees "have literally starved our wetlands to death" by directing all of that precious silt out into the Gulf of Mexico, van Heerden said.
Friday, August 26, 2005
Things of the Day: Weekend Edition (Just like on NPR?)
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions."
--Robert Lynd, writer (1879-1949)
Soul-Devouring Worry:Early to bed and early to rise.
Answer of the Day:Because after you have a turkey dog for lunch, dinner is guaranteed to be an improvement.
Curse of the Day:May you find it difficult to adapt to variably-sized sticks.
Books Lying Open:Poisons, by Peter MacInnis
Depraved, the shocking true story of America's first serial killer, by Harold Schechter
Fiend, the shocking trues 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.)
Busy Weekend
I'm awake hours earlier than usual, after dragging (with Malaya's wakeup assistance) myself out of bed hours earlier than usual. Unfortunately I did not go to bed any earlier than usual, so my eyes have that (holes burned into my face) feeling so many of you are no-doubt familiar with from your real lives and real jobs. "Sucks, dunnit?" you're probably saying right about now, with nearly as much sympathy as I feel for this lady
who ran herself over. And you'd be right to do it.
I got up "early" (for me) because I have to get up by 8 Saturday, and then not much later than that on Sunday and again Monday. The ordeal! Since I usually write at night, and seldom get into bed before 6am... ugh.
Anyway, Saturday morning is this month's Kali workshop. We're doing it outdoors in a park down south, rather than at Tuhan's house, since this time it's staff, and you need a lot of room for 10 or 15 people to be swinging two meter lenghts of wood around. We've done some stuff with staff now and then in Kali in the past, but we're always limited in space, and people don't ordinarily bring such long weapons with them to class. My new stick is seven feet long, but it actually fits into my car pretty easily, once I fold down the backseat and stick it from the trunk alongside the passenger seat.
Malaya and I got our sticks on Monday, since we wanted to get in some practice before the workshop. We have no idea what we'll be doing then, but Tuhan almost always starts off with some footwork, then does a few form-learning exercises, and eventually we get to watch him fight with the weapon of choice for that workshop, and then see other students spar in various ways. Workshops are about 2/3 learn with a new thing, and 1/3 watch other people show off their Kali skills. Quite often, the most fun is in watching advanced students and teachers spar, and those always provide a needed reality check for the younger students who have been starting to think they actually know something about the art.
Saturday afternoon is the bridal shower for the upcoming wedding of our friends, and since it's a "Jack and Jill" affair, I've
got to get to go. It should actually be pretty fun, since it's at the bride-to-be's parent's house, which is big and roomy, and there's going to be tons of good food (always at any Filipino gathering) and company. The event begins in the afternoon, and will likely go all evening as such gatherings usually do. There will be a huge buffet-style table of homemade cooking, lots of gaming outside (mah jong, texas hold 'em, etc) and so on.
I can't stay that late though, because my dad's in town for a quick visit, and is going to be driving down from Davis Saturday evening. I'll see him for dinner that night, and then Sunday we're driving up to Sonoma for more
wine tasting and photo shooting. He's staying overnight then, and come Monday we'll do something in the morning before he flies back to San Diego in the early afternoon. Malaya's so busy with the wedding planning stuff and getting stuff done for work on Monday that she's hardly going to see dad at all; just dinner on Sunday when we get back from Sonoma, in theory.
As always when outside events impact on my usual idle-filled schedule, my thoughts are about how I'll get any writing done. Of course when I have pretty much all day to do that most of the time, I seldom manage to get started before 2am, once Malaya's asleep and I've got no remaining distractions; well, none other than the oh-so-succulent Internet and all of its unearthly delights. So I'm going to try and do some writing in the daytime, or perhaps start it earlier in the evening than usual, etc. I've been doing at least 2-3000 words a day for the past couple of weeks, and while I'd like to spend 12 hours a day and do 8000 words and finish the novel(s) in a month, I try to be happy that I'm at least making steady, if unspectacular, progress.
As the above probably hints at, blog posting may be sporadic to nonexistant this weekend. Adjust your lifestyle accordingly. Luckily, just like the past few weeks, there aren't any movies we're interested in seeing this weekend. I'd been hoping that
Brothers Grimm might be watchable, but most of the reviews say it's visionary imagery
in search of a plot. That and the CGI trees look like rubbery shit in the trailer and TV commercials.
The Cave boasts the laziest and least-interesting title of the year, and appears to be of
about the quality you'd expect of a horror movie being dumped in the late-August dregs. And thanks to the new titles listing on Rotten Tomatoes and its eye-catching 00% approval rating, I now know about
Undiscovered, which seems largely designed to make the rest of us hate the aspiring celebrities of LA even more than we do already. You'll probably have more fun reading the reviews than watching any of those; my most memorable movie experience of the past week was following Aahz's recommendation and reading
Ebert's zero-star review of
Deuce Bigalow 2, which starts off snarky, turns cruel, and ends with some ruthless and entirely justified character assassination of Rob Schneider. Two quotes:
"Deuce Bigalow" is aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience. The best thing about it is that it runs for only 75 minutes.
...Schneider was nominated for a 2000 Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actor, but lost to Jar-Jar Binks.
You get the idea.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Movie Trailers
This first one is not a movie trailer, it's a short animated film. However I can guarantee you'll enjoy watching it more than anything else linked in this update, providing you have a sense of humor. It's called Le Building, and I know nothing more about it than that. It may take a bit to DL, since it's a large and very high quality quicktime file, but I liked it a lot. It's completely safe for work, though there is loud singing and then crashing sound effects, so maybe you should turn down your speakers first.
I everyone made fun of the dreadful teaser trailer for Doom the Movie some weeks ago. Well, they've got a full trailer out now, and while it doesn't look any good either, they did try something inovative. There are scenes in the film that will invariably be called the "FPS Cam." They basically look like a real life version of the game, with a camera view identical to the view you get while playing a shooter. There's even a gun sticking out in front of you, a gun that's held up when a new clip is slapped in, a scene with a chainsaw against a fake-looking hellhound demon thing, and so on. I'll give them points for making this movie more like the game it's based on than anyone has done before, but um... games are fun because you're controlling them. Who wants to buy a ticket to watch someone else play? Even if you're watching slightly higher quality graphics than home computers can yet offer?
There's a new international trailer for the upcoming Harry Potter movie, and it's... another Harry Potter movie. The scenes with Harry the merboy look pretty plastic-y, the dragon looks okay, Mad Eye Moody's mad eye looks kind of Borgish, and um... yeah. Nothing awful here, but after the first 2 HP movies were boring and by the book and the 3rd one was more lively but wouldn't have made any sense if you hadn't read the book, my hopes aren't high. Even though all of the news about the movie, including the feature I just read in EW magazine, says this 4th one is the most unlike the book, with the whole "Hermoine tries to free the house elves." subplot jettisoned. We may go see it on a matinee, if we get bored one day. We still have the damn HP6 book sitting here on the desk, and the fact that we bought it the day after it came out, and neither Malaya nor I have yet so much as opened it is probably a fair sign of our general enthusiasm for all things Harry Potter, though.
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
A Streetcar Named Disaster
I wrote 95% of this post a couple of months ago, just before I headed down to San Diego for my dad's back surgery. For some reason it's been ignored halfway down my notes page since then, but since I just looked at it for the umpteenth time and wondered why I hadn't posted it, I'm doing so now. You may need to update the figures slightly to add in recent accidents, but anyway:
I first heard of the dangerous Houston Light Rail in various columns by The Sports Guy, back in early 2004 when he was in Houston
covering the Superbowl. I'd link to them, but unfortunately ESPN.com has now locked all of his old archives away behind their $40 a year Insider wall, so you'll have to take my word for it. His jokes were all to the effect of how "insanely-easy it is to walk/drive in front of" the new monorail, and I thought it was just a comedic, "find something lame about the city hosting the event and joke about it relentlessly" effort.
Turns out it wasn't; the Houston Light Rail really is a car-eating monster, with an accident rate running something like 2500% higher than the national average. It's so bad that the design of the trains has become a running joke, and the people of Houston have given their monorail two excellent nick names. It's known as both the "Wham-Bam-Tram," and the "Streetcar Named Disaster."
Amused enough by those names to look for more info, I found a lot of sites talking/joking about it, but very few making any actual effort to explain the problem. As best I can tell, the trains run right alongside major roads, all through downtown Houston, and since cars must cross the tracks every block, the chances for a collision are extremely high. This is compounded by inadequate warning signs, lights, and guardrails, and the possibility that Houston drivers are really, really reckless. But certainly not wreck-less. Improvements galore have been made, mostly in terms of adding additional warning lights and guardrails, but there are still tons of accidents happening.
One of the first Google returns on my search
was this one, and it's worth a read for the amusement, largely for a few lines like this one:
It should be noted that when Houston's MetroRail supporters were trying to generate public support for the vote on light rail, they told voters that it would take automobiles off the road. They just didn't mention that it would do it one car at a time.
The oddest thing about my search results? Like 75% of the first page of Google returns were Libertarian sites, a fact that generally became clear when I checked out other links on their pages. I guess it's logical Libertarians would compile pages about the Wham Bam Tram; their political ideology opposes basically any sort of public spending (since those things require taxes or bonds to pay for them) and few things are more expensive than major public transportation systems. So when one comes along that's expensive, dangerous, and impractical, like Houston's, their eyes must light up like a pinball machine. Or like mine do when a new fantasy novel comes out that's famous, popular, and written like shit.
Political biases aside, I think we can all agree that the Houston system is a bad one, with a poor design, and we can all try to learn from it. While laughing at the astonishing amount of accidents they've had already, in less than 1.5 years.
I'm probably biased on this issue, since I now live in the Bay Area where we're blessed with the excellent BART system, and a geography that makes a mass transit system extremely viable. I should look up some info about San Diego though, since they were just getting their trolley system going full bore when I moved away from there, two years ago, and while I was amazed at the amount of trolley stops and the engineering they did to build them (clearing out an entire hillside along 8-East, just to get the trolley out from downtown to SDSU), I have no idea if it's helped traffic congestion, if it's worth the tax dollars spent on it, etc. The new trolley stop to the stadium was hugely popular for baseball and football games, during the last couple of years I worked there, but that's a special case with tens of thousands of people heading to a location with far too little parking, for a relatively short time. I have no idea if any of those same people actually rode it to work on weekdays, though the trolley parking lot near my condo in La Mesa (east of San Diego) was very full every weekday I drove past it.
More Wal-Mart Violence
When I first saw the news that someone had blown away two Wal-Mart employees I suspected an outraged customer, or perhaps a petty shoplifter showing solidarity with the guy Wal-Martians
sat on and killed last week, but
news today says he's just nuts. A contention his mug shot would seem to support.
GLENDALE, Ariz. - The man accused of killing two workers in a Wal-Mart store parking lot appears to be mentally disturbed, according to court records released Wednesday.
Ed Lui, 53, was arrested Tuesday after allegedly driving into a Wal-Mart parking lot in this Phoenix suburb and shooting two cart collectors.
The documents released after his initial court appearance early Wednesday alleged that after shooting the workers, Lui reloaded his .40-caliber handgun and then shot them several more times while they lay on the ground.
The court documents indicated that he appeared mentally disturbed but gave no details.
Glendale police previously said it didn't appear Lui knew the victims or had a vendetta against them or Wal-Mart.
Perhaps he was just outraged by continually seeing hundreds of shopping carts strewn all around the parking lot? I'm occasionally tempted to plug a few of the cart collector guys at CostCo, except that there aren't any. And as we all know, murder is
never a solution.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Cartoon Recommendation
It's the laziest type of blogging to simply toss in a link and say, "This is good; go look at it." but I think the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon so perfectly summarizes the state of mind of Americans who still support the Iraqi occupation that I can't resist. So here I go.
This cartoon is good; go look at it.
Monday, August 22, 2005
Celebrities I Can't Tell Apart: #01
For today's installment, I bring you
Catherine Zeta-Jones and
Salma Hayek. Both beautiful, exotic-looking brunettes, Salma is 38 and was born in Mexico; Catherine is 35 and was born in Wales. I've never been able to tell these two apart, but compounding my current confusion is an upcoming movie role for Catherine. She's starring in a
new Zorro movie (why?) with
Antonio Banderas. They made another Zorro movie seven years ago, and if you'd put a gun to my head yesterday I would have sworn that film starred... Salma Hayek. See because Zorro is set in Mexico, and Salma is Mexican, while Catherine is English, or something very much like it. Adding to my dilemma, I saw the last two Desperado movies, which were Western-style films set in Mexico that starred Antonio Banderas... and Salma Hayek. So really, if they made a 4th Desperado film with Antonio and Catherine, and a 3rd Zorro with Antonio and Salma... who would notice?
Here are a few pictures of the ladies just to illustrate my point. I'd say which was which, but hell, I don't know. Isn't that the whole point of this post?
Lawrence Phillips Back in the News
It's always nice to see when an ex-pro athlete
hits rock bottom.
Former National Football League running back Lawrence Phillips was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder Sunday after he allegedly drove a stolen car into a throng of boys with whom he had just played pickup football at Exposition Park in Los Angeles, police said.
Phillips, who has a decade-long history of arrests for violence and traffic violations, apparently was angered when he couldn't find his belongings minutes after the game ended and accused the youths of stealing from him, according to the mother of one of the victims.
None of the victims' injuries were life-threatening, police said.
Of course the car was stolen, and he was wanted on felony charges in San Diego for beating yet another "girlfriend." The article helpfully provides a capsule timeline of his distinguished career. (Whether that's a career in football or in beating up women is open to debate.)
Phillips, who spent his teens in a West Covina group home, first attracted national attention for violent behavior when he was a star player at Nebraska. In 1995, he was charged with trespassing and assault for an attack on a college girlfriend, who said he threatened to shoot her in the kneecaps and elbows. The university provided her with 24-hour protection. Phillips pleaded no contest and was sentenced to a year of probation.
Before Sunday's incident, Phillips' most recent run-in with authorities came when San Diego police said that he had choked a 28-year-old girlfriend Aug. 2 at her home in the Mission Valley area. A second attack allegedly took place 11 days later when Phillips confronted the woman at a party.
...
Despite his troubles with the law, Phillips received many opportunities over the years to start fresh. After pleading no contest in the attack on his college girlfriend, he was drafted the following year by the St. Louis Rams as a first-round pick and No. 6 overall. That same year, he was arrested for drunk driving, a parole violation that carried a 23-day jail sentence.
The Rams released Phillips in 1997 for insubordination. He was signed briefly by the Miami Dolphins, but was dumped again after a woman claimed that he struck her after she refused to dance with him at a nightclub. Phillips pleaded guilty to battery and was placed on six months' probation.
After being signed and then cut by the San Francisco 49ers, Phillips was charged in May 2000 with attacking a girlfriend in Beverly Hills. That December, he was sentenced to six months in jail after pleading no contest to felony charges of beating the woman and making a terrorist threat. He also was given three years' probation and ordered to take anger-management training.
Phillips briefly found football success in Canada — where he had to get special permission to work because of his criminal record in the U.S. — but was dropped by two teams for behavioral problems, despite agreeing to additional anger-management counseling, according to news accounts.
In late 2003, Phillips was back in criminal court, charged in Quebec with sexual assault, assault, and uttering threats, apparently against another girlfriend.
It's really sort of sad that this guy who might be in the prime of his multi-million dollar NFL career, is reduced to cruising aimlessly around LA in a stolen car and playing pick up football with a bunch of 14 year olds. That after a lifetime of arrests, and misery, all stemming from emotional scars he received growing up a ward of the state.
On the other hand, he's a complete bitch who has beaten dozens of women (If 5 or 6 actually pressed charges, imagine how many others did not bother?) but never seems to pick on anyone his own size. (Note how he simply gave up when the cops were on his tail in LA.) I sure hope they like him in prison.
Saddest of all, this surely isn't rock bottom yet. He'll likely get no more than 5 to 10 for the current charges; no way attempted murder will stick for a moment of road rage that left no serious injuries, even with his long criminal record, and he'll be out by 2010 and free to work on bigger and better arrests. I'm predicting cocaine charges by then, assuming that drug is still a big deal in 5 years, after he gets hooked on it in prison and gets taken in by some real criminals for his brief post-prison career.
Mega M&Ms?
On the same theme as the last candy-eating post, Malaya and I have lately been idly wondering just how big those new giant M&Ms are, based on seeing perhaps 5000 commercials for them over the past week of the ad blitz. They never show the actual product in the commercials (just huge fake ones the size of a hubcap), and there aren't even any photos of them on the M&Ms website. So I searched on the subject, and found success with the second return, a
business article from the NYTimes. If you haven't done so before, you'll need to register to read it, or use bugmenot.com for a password, but I found it interesting. It answered my most basic question, and then gave me far, far more.
FIRST there were regular-size M&M's, then tinier ones. Now, the Masterfoods USA division of Mars is bringing out a supersize version, called Mega, with each milk chocolate or peanut piece about 55 percent larger than the equivalent standard-size M&M's.
...Mega M&M's will be aimed at adults rather than children. Although the animated M&M's characters appear on the packages, they are absent from the ads. And the colors of Mega M&M's are meant to appeal to more mature audiences; the regular hues like red, green, yellow and blue are being supplanted by shades like maroon, gold, beige and teal.
"Adults have said they like a bigger bite-sized product with bigger bite-sized taste," said Martyn Wilks, president for the Masterfoods USA snack-food division. "This is definitely for a subset of our target market."
...Mega M&M's will mostly be sold in packages that are intended to be passed around, like 12.6-ounce and 19.6-ounce bags, rather than in single-serving bags.
I like how they've got the colors all thought out and the product designed scientifically. I'm not likely to eat them since we're not fat and we therefore avoid candy when possible, and because the big
Shrek M&Ms clogged up our M&Ms dispenser. Plus they were bigger, but like 75% of that was the crappy M&M chocolate, with tiny little peanuts floating deep within, like the poison gas center of a golf ball.
Wondering about the market trends of larger-sized candy and junk food, what that means for Americans in general, and the market risks of overextending an existing product line? Read the whole article. Here's a little chocolate-y taste:
Mega M&M's joins a lengthy list of variations on the M&M's theme that include, in addition to regular M&M's and Minis, crispy M&M's, almond M&M's, M&M's filled with peanut butter, dark chocolate M&M's and pieces for baking. The strategy is a common one in consumer marketing, known as line extensions, by which new versions of a best-selling brand are brought out continually to capitalize on the popularity of the parent.
Marketers often deem it safer and cheaper to introduce a line extension of a tried-and-true product like M&M's - a Top 10 candy brand with estimated annual sales of almost $1 billion - than to develop a new brand that consumers may ignore or not like. A problem with line extensions, however, is that they run the risk of diluting a brand's image.
..."It just sows confusion, and confusion is the enemy of effective marketing," Mr. Trout said, adding: "People stare at the shelf and don't know what to buy anymore. It's bewildering. And you see it in every category: 'This Bud's for you.' Which Bud do you have in mind? Bud? Bud Light? Bud Select?"
How about people buy the kind they like the best, while not buying the kinds they don't like, much the way they don't buy brands they don't like? Still, perhaps Mr. Marketing Consultant has a point, though I don't see various different types of chocolate in a candy shell, or types of weak American beer in a can, as being different enough to confuse consumers. Companies get into trouble with that when they diversify overly, and start making clothing and toothpaste and food and dish soap and other unrelated things all under the same product name. Read
Matt Haig's excellent book,
Brand Failures, for more information about that issue.
A Confession
Honey, I couldn't help myself. I ate a box of your mini-cereal 30 variety pack. Since I saw that there were
Froot Loops in there a few days ago, and told you that story about when I was 8 and flying unaccompanied and had a big bag of Froot Loops and just wanted to eat them and read my book and kept having to shake my head when the damned flight attendants kept coming by to ask me if I wanted any food or something to drink, I've been thinking about Froot Loops. So I ate some.
They were staring at me.
I hadn't tasted the things in maybe 20 years, and of course they weren't as good as I remembered, and I didn't have them with milk since I don't really drink it anymore. Then again, I didn't have any milk when I was eating them on the plane either, all those years ago, so perhaps that just added to the nostalgia. I think they have more colors now than they used to; I don't remember neon green and aqua colors back then, just grape, orange, red, and lemon. I was pleased to see that they were still like M&Ms though, in that all the hues tasted exactly the same. I can still remember when I was a kid and used to separate them into piles by color, and then eat them separately while trying to notice if they tasted different. I was an analytical little shit too; and I'd sometimes do a blind taste test to see if I could tell red from orange, or lemon. I even remember arguing about them with some kids in school, when one other kid insisted they tasted different, and that he didn't like the yellow ones.
Anyway Malaya, that's why one box is missing from the cereal assortment. I was going to try an blame Dusty, but since he only eats non-food items (even more non-food than artificially flavored, Skittles-colored puffed corn rings) I didn't think that one would fly.
Love,
Fluxor
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Fiction and Martial Arts
After my last
Kali-related post, Lanth made a comment that I liked enough to save and answer in separate post. I didn't mean to wait 3 weeks to do so, but like all good questions, this one is timeless. Or something like that.:
Do you find with your experience in Kali that it's changed your book-writing ('the fantasy novel') at all? Have you introduced characters who are experts at particular styles you use, or changed some of the characters slightly now that you've experienced it more (ie someone who only ever used staves becoming someone who uses staves and daggers and swords when forced to)? Are the general fights now more thought-out to be realistic rather than appearing and sounding cool on paper (although I know it's hard to write realistically and describe it without losing the audience).
And following from that last patenthesised interlude, have you found that your writing in these blogs about kali all the time has helped you in your ability to describe battles/fights, now that you've had plenty of practice at struggling to convey your actual real-life experiences on 'paper' for so long?:
I haven't mentioned the fantasy novel lately, but it's going well. I'm definitely more than half finished, and I've recently figured out how the conclusion is going to come about. I've known the conclusion (and the brief, surprising, sequel-setting epilogue) for like 3 years, since the early days of my plot planning, but I also had a long list (and it kept getting longer) of interesting scenes and character revelations and plot twists that had to fit somewhere in the last third of the novel. I just wasn't sure quite where they would all fit, or how they would all fit together. I have them all mapped out now, and while they aren't 100% set, they're at least 90% there.
I'd end up making changes from the 100% version anyway, if I had one. I always do as I write it and get better/new ideas for how to arrange things.
That aside, the questions were about, 1) how Kali has influenced my writing about combat, and 2) how my blog writing about Kali has helped (or not) my writing about combat.
As for #1, I've stolen a great amount of stuff directly from Kali and stuck it into the combat in my novel, to the point that if I don't stick my Kali teacher into the acknowledgements, she'd have as good a case at suing me for royalties as Tolkien's estate would have had with
Terry Brooks bestselling fan fic. Not every character does Kali, and it's never called Kali, and no one character's fighting is entirely in the Kali style, but the influence will be very clear to anyone who knows them both and reads the novel. Hell, anyone whose read a few of my blog posts on Kali and then read the novel would see it.
It's not a huge change from what I'd intended to do with combat in the novel, oddly enough. I'd always planned on the old Necromancer character being a sort of martial arts master, in terms of moving sinuously, dodging and turning aside hits rather than hacking away like a knight in shining armor, using guile and technique rather than brute strength, etc. If I hadn't started doing Kali (almost a year ago) I would have had to just be creative and invent his style as I wrote it, and it's actually damn convenient that I'm now practicing a style myself that's very much like what I envisioned Quinoss using long before I'd ever even heard of Kali.
As for #2... sort of. I've always known that combat is very difficult to write about in the blow by blow style. Physical choreography is just hard to describe, whether you're writing about wrestling, boxing, sword fighting, sexual positioning, dancing, or anything else. A common lexicon is a great help, but you can't assume people have that with martial arts or any type of combat, though that depends largely on your audience.
I can write in detail about exact moves and counters and techniques and footwork about Kali, and have it perfectly understood... by other Kali students. For a while I was trading long emails about class with a fellow student, and she understood just what I was saying, since she had shared the experience regularly. Yet that same email posted here, or sent to my mom, would have been greeted with incomprehension. It's the same in sports writing; anyone with a level of knowledge about baseball, or basketball, or whatever, can understand a quick game summary, or a description of a great move. Imagine trying to write about a crossover dribble move with a 360 spin that ended in an alleyoop dunk and have it be understood by someone who doesn't know anything about basketball, though?
That's pretty much were I'm writing from with my novel.
I can assume people know what swinging a sword means, and an uppercut, or a downward slash, or a stab, or a block with a shield, etc. But if I want to describe detailed movements, say a slash thats pulled through high, then swung around over the attacker's head to a leg cut on the opponent, which bounces over to the other side of the neck for the kill... I've already lost most of you. And I didn't even describe the hip and shoulder turns of the attacker to give his hits speed and power, his hand position on the sword to turn the blade from side to side, or anything about how the defender was positioned, how he blocked the first hit, why he was too slow to block the second, and so on.
So I don't bother with that style of writing, much though I might like to do so. I envision every fight scene in the novel in detail, act it out sometimes standing up and moving around the room to do so, playing both parts in the battle, etc. I've even had Malaya stand still or hold an arm up or something from time to time, so I could see just how the other character would react or move or dodge. Unfortunately, very little of that makes it into words. Doing so would make every fight scene painfully long on the page (and take so long to read that the excitement and speed of it was lost), would confuse most readers unless they read it several times, and would give them far more than they needed or wanted to know.
I have far more interest in that sort of thing than most people, based on my ongoing martial arts training and sparring, and I try to keep that in mind as I write, so I don't get carried away. It's not an article for a martial arts magazine; it's a fantasy novel, and while I put in enough of the move-by-move details to let the reader know what's happening, and to give them an idea why one guy is winning and the other guy/girl is losing, I try not to go overboard. That's the theory, anyway. How well it works will be judged by others. Malaya's enjoyed the fight scenes so far, but she likes fight scenes, and she knows as much or more than I do about Kali, so she would get it even if I had far less detail. I'm curious to see what my mom thinks (she and Malaya are the only 2 reading the novel as I write it) since she doesn't have any kali experience. Will mom be able to follow the action and movement and style? Will it interest her, or will she wonder why I'm once again writing about how one character is learning to move sideways and backwards and to cut rather than slapping with her sword?
That reminds me; this is more about question 1 than 2, but the way I'm putting in most of the Kali stuff is from the POV of the character who is learning it and seeing how useful it is. So she's basically standing in for the reader, describing what she's being taught and giving her opinion of it. In this way I'm able to write more about the theory and style, rather than just having some guys fight and writing how one of them moves, which would involve a lot of physical detail of the type I said I'm not using, for reasons elucidated above.
So my short answer to #2 would be that writing about Kali on the blog has had little effect on how I write about combat in the novel, and if anything the blogging has reminded me of why I don't do much play by play style fight discussion. Now when it comes time to work on the screenplay... that will be full of physical action and movement descriptions. All of which will be ruined by some eventual rewrite, long after I've taken the money and washed my hands of the entire thing due to their insistence that the entire thing be set in 2206 on Mars, and feature at least three cyborg laser battles. But hey,
I'll be in good company, at least.
Things of the Day: Forgetful Edition
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don't fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgment, repeated every day."
--Jim Rohn
Soul-Devouring Worry:Things of the Day amnesia.
Answer of the Day:Because if they didn't constantly state the obvious they'd never fill three hours of non-stop football non-action.
Curse of the Day:May you either speak too much or too little.
Books Lying Open:Poisons, by Peter MacInnis
Depraved, the shocking true story of America's first serial killer, by Harold Schechter
Fiend, the shocking trues story of America's youngest serial killer, by Harold Schechter
Harry Fricking Potter 6, by the richest woman on earth
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova
Savage Pastimes, by Harold SchechterMovies to probably-not-see list:The Aristocrats, August-ish, 2005. (
Waiting for the DVD?)
The Brothers Grimm, August 26th (Doubtful.)
Wallace and Grommit: The Curse of the Wererabbit, October 5 (Oh yeah.)
Saturday, August 20, 2005
Props to Bob Costas
I've always thought Bob Costas was pretty much a dildo. Prematurely smug, George Willian, and destined for bow ties. He's probably a nice guy, and he knows a great deal about sports and seems sincere and all, but he's just unlistenable. It's half his voice, which is guaranteed to drive me to the mute button whenever they let him talk during a baseball game, but mostly just his mannerisms, which are very nerdy, in the most unendearing way.
That being said, I've got to hand it to the guy for having some decency and integrity. Apparently he's been guest hosting the Larry King Show this summer, and when the producers insisted on doing a show on Natalee Holloway, he said he was not going to drag his career through the muck, and they had to find
a guest guesthost for that night.
NEW YORK - While some cable TV hosts are making their living off the Natalee Holloway case this summer, Bob Costas is having none of it.
Costas, hired by CNN as an occasional fill-in on "Larry King Live," refused to anchor Thursday's show because it was primarily about the Alabama teenager who went missing in Aruba. Chris Pixley filled in at the last minute.
"I didn't think the subject matter of Thursday's show was the kind of broadcast I should be doing," Costas said in a statement. "I suggested some alternatives but the producers preferred the topics they had chosen. I was fine with that, and respectfully declined to participate."
...
There were no hard feelings at all," Costas said. "It's not a big deal. I'm sure there are countless topics that will be mutually acceptable in the future."
Wendy Walker, senior executive producer of "Larry King Live," described it as a mutual decision for Costas not to do the show because he was uncomfortable with the subject matter.
"We love having Bob... and since `Larry King Live' covers an extremely extensive palate of subjects, there will always be shows that he will enjoy hosting," she said.
Natalee Holloway, if you're like me and had long since forgotten, was the mildly-attractive blonde female college student who was murdered and dumped down a dry well or buried in a garbage heap somewhere, while on vacation in Aruba some months ago. I can't really imagine why she's still news in some quarters, and I haven't seen a mention of her on TV or any of the blogs I read in months, but apparently someone's keeping the non-story alive. The media does love their young white females in jeopardy.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Aeon Flux Trailer
Since I previously complained about the Aeon Flux trailer only being visible through some crappy Mtv viewer, I suppose I must point out that
it's since been added to the Quicktime Trailer Page, in a format we can all enjoy. As for the trailer... eh. It starts off looking like the Trinity movie, with a raven-haired woman in a black bodysuit leaping off buildings and carrying guns. They then get a bit more into the plot, which has numerous bits taken directly from the original Aeon Flux series. The weirdly anarchaic futurism of the movie seems to be gone, replaced by some sort of of faceless totalitarianism, in which Aeon is the ultimate assassin. Basically it's her running around some futuristic city and killing people with futuristic weapons... but for a noble cause!
I'm not putting it on my "to see" list just yet, but it's definitely got potential to not suck.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Book Review: The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova
For my latest overlong review, here's one about the best selling book in the country. I liked it overall, while thinking most of the parts could have been improved. There are no spoilers in this review, at least no more than you'll see in any short review.
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. This hugely-hyped debut novel received a ton of attention and numerous fawning advance reviews, got press for the author's record $2m book advance, and even knocked
The DaVinci Code off of the bestseller list, while being relentlessly compared to it. Are those comparisons accurate? Is it a good enough vampire story to wade through 650 pages of very formal prose? No and
yes sort of.
First, the scores:
The Historian
Plot: 5
Concept: 8
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/6
Characters: 5
Horror: 4
Humor: NA
Fun Factor: 3
Page Turner: 4
Re-readability: 4
Overall: 6.5
I actually like the whole more than the parts. There were lots of good things in the novel, and I liked the idea of the plot and the way it was told. In the end though, the novel doesn't quite work. It's not quite an exciting mystery, it's not quite an interesting character study, and it's not quite clever enough to work just as a stylistic exercise in storytelling. I didn't dislike it, but I only had a couple of "Wow, that was a great plot twist/revelation." moments while reading it, and I never felt nervous about the danger the characters were in, or joyful for their successes, or sorrow for their losses.
Kostova's writing skill is in arranging flashbacks and other plot elements, working in historical details, and describing physical details. All good traits. Unfortunately, when it comes to writing an exciting scene, or crafting fascinating characters, or fashioning believable dialogue, she's not in her strong suit.
Checking out
the scores on Amazon.com, I see that it's got a 3.5/5 average out of 400 reviews, and that quite a few (13 out of the top 20, currently) of the most-recommended reader reviews are 1 or 2 star scores. I didn't score it that poorly myself, but I can see why other people would, since there's really no excitement or climax, and you don't really care about the characters. You either enjoy it for the complete package, including the historical info, the globe-trotting setting, the intricate use of flashbacks within flashbacks, etc, or you find it a lackluster, un-exciting, failed thriller, and wonder why anyone else enjoys it.
I also wonder about the
DaVinci Code comparisons (some have called
The Historian, "The Dracula Code") since the books really have very little in common. True, they're both historical mysteries with clues to an ancient mystery found in the present day, through art and literature, but the focus is so different that they really have nothing in common. They are very similar if you've only read the quick paragraph-long blurb about each novel. If you've actually read them, not so much.
I don't have
a real high opinion of Dan Brown's writing or his most famous book (the story was better when he called it
Angels and Demons, before he thought to shoehorn in a Christ-angle for the publicity), but he can at least craft a thriller. His writing is puff, but it's entertaining puff, and it moves quickly and keeps you turning the pages. Judging her by this one book, the author of
The Historian does neither.
The DaVinci Code has a real mystery, and it's a thriller; a race against the clock to save some lives, but with vastly higher stakes than that, as the entire Vatican faces certain destruction (Or possibly not; there's really no way to keep the plots of
Angels and Demons and
The DaVinci Code straight in your memory.). In
The Historian an old college professor vanished and was maybe killed. That's pretty much it for the impetus to investigate, and there's no real time pressure at all. Furthermore, the mystery in
The DaVinci Code is an exciting race against the clock, and it's solved by the characters while we watch, with clues found in very famous works of art that still exist today. In
The Historian we see hardly any investigation, almost all of the info comes already assembled in impossibly-detailed letters from one main character to another, and the ancient books and manuscripts they're getting the info from aren't real; they were just invented by the author to advance her plot.
Here are some more specific comments about the scores.
Plot: 5The concept is brilliant, so this middling score reflects how it was actually executed. It's a very complicated story, told in multiple levels of flashback. The main character is a scholar's daughter, who goes after him after he goes missing. While she's pursuing him across Europe, she's reading letters he wrote decades ago, when he went searching for Dracula's tomb, and he is in turn sometimes reading letters written by his advisor, 20 years earlier, about his search for Dracula's tomb. So we've got a girl in 1970 hunting for her missing father, who wrote about his own search in 1950 for Dracula's Tomb, a search much aided by letters from his advisor, who did the same search in 1930. And these tales are all told at once, in overlapping style. So as the girl is on a train from Paris to some other place, we get the flashback letter from her father, written in the same area, when he was on his desperate hunt to find Dracula's tomb and try to rescue his missing father-figure.
Got all of that?
The plot also relies on a ridiculous number of implausible coincidences, and has quite a few holes in the behavior of the main characters, the absurd ways they only meet people who can aid them on their quests, and especially in the physical reality of Dracula and vampires in general. What the vampires can and can not do didn't seem to be thought out very well at all, and while I played along during the book and kept hoping it would all be explained or make sense in the end -- it never was.
Concept: 8Great idea, mediocre execution. I'm also deducting potential points for the conclusion, which was incredibly weak. Kostova also thought out the middle very well, but apparently couldn’t think how to end the novel, since it ended with a confusing muddle of a whimper.
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/6She's not a bad writer, but would probably be better doing non-fiction. Her descriptions of cities in Europe and retelling of ancient fictional-history were great. She just can't write action or suspense or characters or dialogue.
Characters: 5This one was a high score halfway through, until I realized that every single character spoke and wrote with the same voice, and pretty much thought with the same mind. It reminded me of Lovecraft a bit, in that everyone is polite, scholarly, erudite, shy, modest, etc. Even when characters do something because they're supposed to be madly in love, it seems calculated, almost as if some "how to write characters who are madly in love" guide was being referenced, with heavy highlighting in the "how often characters should do something impulsive and rash" section.
Horror: 2This was a real failing of the novel; there was supposed to be fear and terror, and we know for a fact that Dracula or some other vampires are out there, stalking and disappearing characters, but we never worry about it happening to any of the principles, and they never seem to worry about it themselves. So they blithely walk down into dark, dank crypts, face the prospect of killing vampires with no more than a silver dagger, and sleep in lightless French farmhouses without seeming to harbor a worry in their heads. This one had the ingredients to be a thriller, and a horror novel, but shied away from both possibilities.
Humor: NANot a laugh to be found; at least not that I remember.
Fun Factor: 3Nope. Not a joyless read, but there aren't any big payoff money scenes. Even at the conclusion.
Page Turner: 4Nope. I often went a day or two between reads, and took a couple of weeks to get through the whole thing. I did read the last 150 pages or so in a go, but that was simply because I was sick of the book lying around unfinished and I wanted to get on to something else.
Re-readability: 4I can't see why you'd want to. It's not even one of those books where you learn some amazing revelations at the end, and then suddenly realize why character X was acting the way he did the whole time.
Overall: 6.5This is really a very generous score, given largely on the concept, the potential, and the skill with which Kostova organized all of the flashbacks and made them work together, more or less. If this story had been told in as many pages, without the intricate structure and interesting pseudo-historical info, my score would be closer to a 4.
It's easy to generalize and think that the author is just like the girl in the story. Raised in an international style, knowledgeable about the world, but only from books and reading, not from actual living in it, and a product of an earlier, more stately an formal age. I knew nothing about her when I read the book, but after going through
a few online interviews, I see that my preconceptions was pretty much right on the money.
I don't know how the woman reached 40 in this day and age without being more reflective of the modern world and popular culture, but she should get out more, or if she does she needs to let her getting out reflect more into her writing. Every character in
The Historian is like an upper-crust white Englishman from an old Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot mystery, and while they're not stupid or completely oblivious, there's just a sameness to the characters and the writing that began to bore me. There's a difference between writing characters who accurately reflect the time in which they lived (most of the book is set in the 50s and then in the 70s, in the two long flashback narratives) and writing a bunch of bland people who all act the same.
Overall, you'll enjoy this if you love reading and history and especially works written in classic literary style (I.E. long and slow).
Live off the Land, Die off the Land
I may have to reconsider my whole, "I only want to play computer games that take a few minutes for quick break now and then." theory. It works at times, when I'm really into my writing and just want a 10 or 15 minute break every couple of hours. But at other times, when the creative juices aren't really flowing and I'd like to completely distract myself for an hour, a longer, more intense game session can be useful.
I speculate on this since Malaya played some Diablo II a couple of days ago, as a reward to herself for finishing most of her writing projects. At first I was surfing and blogging some, but as she ran around Act One with her new Assassin and tried to remember what the the skills did (she hadn't played the game at all in months), I finally admitted to myself that I would enjoy playing a new character as well. I didn't want to do a big one though, one that would last forever and that I'd feel a need to set up with great equipment from my other characters, etc. So I did my first "live off the land" character. Hardcore, of course.
Rules for playing a LotL character vary in purity, but the basic concept is that you make a brand new level 1 character, and play them while using only what you find in the game, and without ever going to town for healing, to buy equipment, to repair your items, to sell anything, etc. Some people allow trips to town to identify items with Cain, and some allow potions to be bought, but I did neither. I could only use what I found, I could not repair it or buy any other equipment, and I never went to town other than to click on the NPCs required to advance in the quests.
For my first try I picked a Paladin, and found it pretty easy. Going on "Players 8" for the first half of Act One, I was lvl 15 or so before I even entered the Barracks, and from there I went on "players 2" and quickly got down to Andariel's lair. I did her on "Players 1" and had little trouble tanking her. I even kept my quest reward rogue alive for the entire act, and leveled her up decently in the process. I had no close calls with death, and my only differing play style was to put a few more points into vitality than I usually would have.
Act Two wasn't much harder, though I had a hell of a time in the Arcane Sanctuary. It wasn't hard to kill things, but there I realized that I'd been getting most of my potions (red and blue, since I didn't have any leech I had to keep drinking a lot of both to keep using Zeal and Smite) from barrels and chests, rather than monster drops. And since there aren't any chests in the Arcane, except for at the three tips of the branches that do not have the Summoner on them, I was soon going very slowly, letting my rogue merc get the kills from a distance, and standing around with Warmth on all the time, to try and heal up a bit.
My first big mistake was being careless and letting the merc die in the temple on the way to Duriel. I had endless skeletons and greater mummies there, and I kept running into rooms to lure the skeletons away so I could kill them out of resurrection range. That worked fine until I ran around one very large room, and my merc followed me in and got hung up somewhere and never made it out after me. Since I was playing LotL I couldn't just go to town and get her resurrected, anymore than I could have hired one of the superior Act Two mercs in the first place. (Even having a merc at all is sort of dubious in the LotL rules, since talking to Kashya to get one as a gift isn't strictly required to advance through act one.) So she was gone forever, and I was alone... alone... alone...
My second mistake was more costly, in that I found the entrance to Duriel's Lair at about 6:25pm, Tuesday evening. Kali is at 7, and I usually leave around 6:15 since it's a fair drive and there's traffic, but I didn't want to fight through the whole damn tomb again later on, and I had a fair stock of healing potions, so I figured I could either do Duriel now, or not at all. As it turned out it was not at all, since I went down and started beating on him, and I wasn't taking that much damage, but I wasn't hurting him that much either. I went toe to toe and had him about 1/3 dead, but all of my healing potions were gone, I was low on blue potions, and after trying it for a bit, I realized I didn't have the patience to run around him in circles with Warmth on as I tried to heal up organically. I also needed to leave for class, and I didn't want to be pussy and exit that game, so I just stood still and hit him until he killed me off. RIP Forager_I, lvl 23 Paladin.
It was fun to play the guy though, and he gave me what I wanted going in; some distraction, some fun, but nothing too involving or long term. In retrospect I should have leveled up to 25 or so, filled my entire inventory and cube with red potions, and found some sort of weapon with crushing blow, or at least socketed something with a sapphire to slow Duriel down. Keeping my merc alive wouldn't have hurt either, since the best weapon I found in the entire game was a rare bow, and she was using it with excellent effect.
I found some funny things while playing that way too. Besides the discovery that most of the potions fall from chests, rather than monsters, my most desired commodity in Act One was... ID scrolls. Through out the entire act I had ten things in my inventory that I wanted to ID, but couldn't. Eventually I stopped picking up jewels at all, since I didn't have the space (can't use the stash in town) and didn't think I'd ever find enough ID scrolls. None of the ones I ID'ed were useful anyway, and overall there are far fewer ID scrolls dropped than magical items in act one.
This changes in act two, when you have a few decent items and are therefore no longer picking up every magical cap, sash, leather gloves, etc. Then I ran into the opposite problem, when I began to develop a huge backup of ID scrolls, and had 9 or 10 of them clogging my inventory. Eventually I went back and hunted through the Jail in act one until I found one of those rooms with a bookshelf, and got an identify book just for the space savings. I died with about 15 charges in it too, lot of good those did me.
Invigorated by that two day experience, and the solid amount of writing I got down between play sessions, I started Forager_II off last night. She's an Amazon, one I'm going bow with, though I'm using Jab with a rare spear for nastier creatures in close. I considered doing Jab only, since that's a very effective technique early in the game, but realized it wouldn't be viable simply because so few spears drop. Not being able to repair the good items you find really changes your strategy, and my Paladin must have broken 15 or 20 weapons even during his brief two acts of life. Using a bow is more sensible, since it won't break and I just have to find arrows, but since far fewer bows drop, getting a decent one, much less two so my rogue merc can help, is going to be a challenge. I also don't see how I'll beat Duriel, unless I can find some damn nice spear to dice him up with, but at least I won't make the mistake of going in without being fully prepared. I can't see leveling all the way to 30 in Act 2, which would give me a Valkyrie to use as a tank, but I can make it to 24 and use Decoys, if I need to stand back and shoot him with arrows for a bit.
Best of all, I wrote for two hours last night, played the new Amazon for an hour, then wrote for another solid hour, before playing her a bit more just before bedtime. I often write a bit, then head off to play a quick game, and next thing I know it's two hours later and I've been surfing half the Internet. I suppose that's the danger of browser-based gaming; it's so easy to take interesting detours. I have no idea how long I'll be entertained by starting up new characters and marching them along until they die, but I'm just going to try and enjoy it while it lasts. They're certainly more fun than playing any of my lvl 90ish v1.10 characters, who have no fun other than boring Baal runs to try and find one of the very few super high level items I might actually have some use for.
...Where the Pronghorns and the Cheetahs Play?
Concept
that seems outright wacky at first, but then gradually grows on you. Some "scientists" are looking to transplant various wild African animal species into the vast American interior. And they're not talking about birds or mice or something no one would really notice. They're talking lions and herdbeasts and such.
The idea of transplanting African wildlife to this continent is being greeted with gasps and groans from other scientists and conservationists who recall previous efforts to relocate foreign species halfway around the world, often with disastrous results.
But the proposal's supporters say it could help save some species from extinction in Africa, where protection is spotty and habitats are vanishing. They say the relocated animals could also restore the biodiversity in North America to a condition closer to what it was before humans overran the landscape more than 10,000 years ago.
Most modern African species never lived on the American prairie, the scientists acknowledge. But some of their biological cousins like mastodons, camels and saber-toothed cats, roamed for more than 1 million years alongside antelope and herds of bison until Ice Age glaciers retreated and humans started arriving.
The rapid extinction of dozens of large mammal species in North America — perhaps due to a combination of climate change and overhunting — triggered a landslide of changes to the environmental landscape. Relocating large animals to vast ecological parks and private reserves would begin to repair the damage, proponents say, while offering new ecotourism opportunities to a withering region.
...
The scientists' discussion expanded to consider long-extinct Pleistocene species that have modern counterparts elsewhere in the world.
For example, a larger American cheetah once stalked pronghorn on these lands, with both species evolving special features that enabled them to accelerate to 60 mph. Today, pronghorns rarely are chased, except by the occasional pickup truck.
In Africa, modern cheetahs are being exterminated as vermin, with fewer than 2,000 remaining in some countries. Relocation could help both species retain important traits, the plan's proponents say.
Whlie it's just never going to happen with lions in the wild, given that they, you know, eat people, I could see them living in some sort of game park with high fences and such. Poaching would be a problem, with every redneck in the state wanting to come and take a few pot shots from the back of their pickup, roaming free in some park in Utah or New Mexico would certainly be an upgrade from the "pacing behind bars" life lions suffer in the hands of so many private collectors and small zoos. And the idea of cheetahs roaming the wild and running down antelope or perhaps jack rabbits is certainly attractive.
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