Friday, September 30, 2005
Coach... coach... coach?
Some weeks ago
I posted about college football coaches, and the way they can turn around a floundering program. It's fun when Charlie Weis goes to Notre Dame and immediately takes them back to the top 10, or when Urban Meyer has Florida thinking undefeated after several years of mediocrity. Unfortunately, instant coaching turn arounds work both ways, a fact I was reminded of while watching a bit of TV Friday night, and stumbling onto Pitt @ Rutgers.
Pitt's new coach is Dave Wanndstedt, ex of of the NFL, where
he never won anything. Pitt was coming off of several respectible seasons, and went 8-4 last year, winning the Big East and earning a spot in a BCS Bowl Game (where they were
atomized by undefeated Utah, in Urban Meyer's last game before heading off to Florida). They were greedy though, and didn't renew their old coach's contract since they had their eyes in Wanndstedt, who was a local boy and who they hoped would take their football program to the top.
Well, he's taking them somewhere; they're now 1-4 on the season, their only victory came over a Division 2 school, and when I turned on the game Friday night they were losing to the perennially-dreadful Scarlet Knights of Rutgers by a score of 27-0 at the half. Pitt looked slow, disinterested, and uncoached on both offense and defense, and I thought their QB had perhaps the weakest throwing arm I'd ever seen at a major football school. His lefty passes were going out like shotputs, with no zip and a strange sidearmed sort of throwing motion. I figured he was injured or filling in for an injured starter, but I see by
the final box score that he's their
regular QB (though not a very good one), and that Pitt managed a few touchdowns in the second half and made the score respectible, and that their QB threw the ball 60 times for decent yardage. So I guess he's just always like that, and has found a way to be successful with it. Unlike his coach.
Wanndstedt may yet turn things around this year, or next year, and there's no way they can fire him after just one year, given how much they paid him to come coach there. It usually takes time to recruit players and remake a college team, and what with
Pete Carroll's current dynasty run at USC, every college will be looking to hire an NFL coach for their magic pixie dust of success.
Fun with Kali
I've not posted about Kali lately, so bear with me, since Gura's getting married next weekend, and she's (understandably) taking a couple of weeks off for the occasion. I'll be jonesing for it, and pestering Malaya to play some, and maybe even driving way the hell down south to a class or two at Tuhan's house. But that's for next week, and the week after. For now, I'd like to recount the fun class I had last night.
There were but three students; me and two guys who have been doing it for 2 and 3x as long as I have, and while they're better than me at most everything, I'm close enough that we can all work on the same stuff and interact somewhat evenly. That's one nice thing about Kali the way we do it; a 4th year student can go full speed with a brand new student, and both can get something out of the exercise. The new guy is just learning the basics, while the older student is doing those, but working in advanced techniques while still keeping the rhythm and form. Triple punches and kicks and elbows, along with the basic single punch the beginner is working on, for example.
Anyway, with three of us in class Gura had us do numerado with a wide variety of weapons. Numerado is basically a controlled type of sparring, where one person leads and the other follows. The lead initiates each exchange, always swinging first. The follow counters or parries the attack, lands a counterattack, and then waits for the next attack. It gets far more complicated, of course, with pace changes, sneaky lead attacks that you try to land with misdirection, combos, change ups, constant attacks without pause in between, and so on, but the basic form is one person throws and the other follows, rather than you both hitting at the same time, or going without any preset sequence, as in actual sparring. Leading is much less work, in numerado, and it's nice with three people since you sit out a turn, then follow and get tired, then lead and cool off, then sit out one, and so on.
We did that with, in order: stick vs. stick -- stick vs. open hand -- stick vs. double stick -- stick and dagger vs. stick and dagger -- double stick vs. double stic, and were just starting broadsword vs. double stick when 9 o'clock rolled around and it was time to quit (not that I or the other two guys had any desire to do so, since we were having a blast).
I could go into a long discussion of every permutation, how I did and didn't do, what the other guys were better and worse at, and so on, but eh... The most interesting thing for me was the double stick, since as I've blogged in the past, that's the weapon(s) that I most enjoy using, and that I feel the most natural affinity for. I like staff a lot too, actually, but we hardly ever use that, largely due to space reasons.
Anyway, after watching me do double stick vs. stick, and then double stick vs. double stick, Gura said that I looked the most natural, relaxed, patient, balanced, comfortable, etc that she'd ever seen me in Kali, and yes, that includes when I'm going open hand. Which, you'll note, doesn't mean I was great with double stick. Just that I was more relaxed and better with it than I am the rest of the time.
It's funny, since I've spent far, far, far more class time with single stick than double stick, and I don't work on doublestick all that much alone, or with Malaya, and yet I fully agreed with Gura. I do feel more comfortable with two sticks than with one, or none, and when I'm going smoothly I get into a mood where they aren't just sticks I'm holding in my hands, but are more like extensions of my arms. I don't feel them all the way to the tips yet, but I'm getting close, and I'm far closer with them than I am with just one stick, which seems illogical.
The trick, as Gura told me, is to transfer my confidence and comfort with double stick to all other types of Kali. Single stick, sword, knife, open hand, staff, etc. It's not possible to be equally good with everything, since everyone's got something they prefer or dislike a bit, but Kali is meant to make you a weapons master, and for that you need to have the same ease and control with any weapon (or none at all) that you do with your favorite. It's sort of a state of mind, or a type of confidence. You know you can do it, you've done it with a different weapon, so you just do. It's not about memorizing weapon lengths or weights or endless drills or anything like that; it's all about improvisation and having control over your body to do what you want it to do, no matter what sort of tool you've got in your hand. Tuhan dragged a shovel out of his tool shed at a past workshop and proceeded to dominate with it. A big ass heavy dirt-clotted shovel he'd never fought with before, against guys using sticks they'd handled every day for the past few years.
I can sort of see how that works at this point, but I'm far from putting it into practice. Of course we also get better with a given weapon the more we use it, but there are basic principles of movement and form and technique that transfer across all weapons. Students often make a breakthrough with one weapon, or empty hand, and then find that their new ability to fight very close with short punches (for example) translates perfectly to stick, or dagger, and that they can basically use those weapons in the same way they were using their arms in open hand. Finesse learned with open hand translates directly to the broadsword; fast swings and hard hits learned with stick translates to open hand, and so on.
As always with Kali, the theory is far easier to grasp than the actual. Anyway, class was a lot of fun, I enjoyed working with a variety of weapons quickly, and by doing that I could see how they translated across. People were trying or seeing others do things with double stick that they'd never thought of, and then taking those moves and using them with single stick, or with stick and dagger. Which is just what Gura wanted us to do, I'd imagine.
As for my Kali, it's odd, but I'm now far better attacking than I am defending. I was throwing for the best student there (and he was throwing for the 2nd best, who was throwing for me when we rotated and my turn came up), one who has excellent offense and defense, and that was a challenge. I could get in some hits, but only by being very sneaky and deceptive and clever. I could hardly touch him with single stick, though I had some luck with stick/dagger, and double stick. As I was landing my hits though, or watching him block combos I didn't think he could possibly have survived, I realized that I would have been nearly helpless against the battery of attacks I was using. If I'd been fighting myself, I wouldn't have had a chance and I would have had to turn down the difficulty of my attacks quite a bit to keep the numerado session interesting.
That was far from news, since I've worked with that student and others in the past, used tricky moves to get hits, and then watched them use it against me and score hits more easily than I did when I used it in the first place. You'd think that knowing how to do the attacks, and inventing many of them up in the first place, would make me able to block them. And I do, in theory, but getting the body to flow and react and do what I need it to do quickly enough is quite another thing. At this point pretty much any complicated or tricky combo will get through my defense, and while I'm improving, (I don't walk into simple attacks hardly at all, anymore.) my offense is improving as well, and more quickly.
I'm sure there's a Kali lesson in there as well; a parallel to the "translate your skill with double stick to other weapons" one. If I can do the moves, why can't I block them? I'm not (often) facing something that I've never seen, or that I don't know how to do myself. And I'm not being beaten by speed or power. So is it all mental? How much of it is muscle memory and control? And if I master the "see it/do it" principle, can that be applied to other physical endeavors? I can juggle 3 or 4 balls, which means I know the principle to juggle 5 or 6 or 7 or more. So why can't I do it? Could I if I believed I could? Do or do not, there is no try?
(Actually, with juggling it's all about the throw. Catching them is easy; you've just got to gain enough skill in your hands to make the throws consistently the same height and distance and angle, so the ball comes down within reach of your hand. Juggling five balls isn't really that much harder than three; you've just got to throw them a bit higher so you keep your hands don't have to move super fast. It's just that a higher throw means a harder throw, which means that any slight inaccuracy is multipled by the greater height up and then the longer fall back down. And no, I don't think it's mental; it's muscle memory training to get your hands to catch and release with nearly perfect accuracy, every single time. Perhaps a Kali/juggling master could convince me otherwise, though.)
Top Ten Creation Myths
Here's an educational article on Live Science that lists and ranks (based on nothing whatsoever) the
Top Ten Creation Myths. After all, since "Intelligent Design" is "science" based on Christian cosmology, and since some (Christian) people want it taught in place of actual science, it's only fair to consider some other creation myths, especially since most of them come from cultures and relgions that far predate Christianity. (Shouldn't we rank them by seniority? After all, why would the "one true god" wait thousands of years to reveal Himself and then provide a creation timeline that so totally contradicts observable facts?)
Needless to say, none of these myths are remotely plausible to any modern, educated, objective human, but it's interesting to compare them and see what you notice;
the Judeo/Christian one is easily the vaguest and least creative, for example. According to the Bible, some god just is, with no explanation for where he came from. One day he up and creates light and such, from nothing, and then he makes the earth and puts people on it and such. From there it gets more interesting, what with Eden and the talking snake and tree of knowledge and such, but on the whole it's a pretty impoverished myth, in comparison to most of the others.
Compare
the Hindu Cosmology, what with creator gods sprouting 1000 heads, hands, and feet, divine body parts turning into clarified butter, and universes with expirations dates set every 4.32 billion years. Wild! Take your seventh day of rest and shove it!
What I always wonder is how literally people believed in these myths, even back in ancient Summeria or Greece or whatever.
Norse Cosmology, for instance, has fiery lands and frozen lands before the current earth, which was formed from a dead god's body.
The sons rose up and killed Ymir and from his corpse created from his flesh, the Earth; the mountains from his bones, trees with his hair and rivers, and the seas and lakes with his blood. Within Ymir’s hollowed-out skull, the gods created the starry heavens.
It was obvious to the ancient Norse that mountains were not made of the same stuff as human bone, and that the oceans and rivers were not actually blood, etc. So did they take the myth as a cool story that explained something they lacked the science to even take a flying guess at? Or was it believed literally, and were ancient scientists/philosophers making up supporting myths about how Ymir's blood transubstantiated into both fresh and salt water, and how the stars actually formed the shape of the inside of a skull if you looked at them just right?
My natural inclination is to say that those ancient people had common sense and could see the obvious contradictions between their myth and reality, but given that plenty of modern humans can't manage the same trick, I may be giving our distant ancestors a bit too much credit.
As for the whole intelligent design being taught in schools issue, I of course think it's ridiculous that anyone would seriously consider it in science classes. As if American kids weren't dumb enough and the US weren't far enough behind the rest of the Western world in science already? Then again, if they just move the goalposts and change the entire definition of science and knowledge, perhaps we'll be in front again. You might do okay with the Kansas School Board, but good luck convincing your mathematical formulas that 2+2=5 once you're out in the real world, though.
More (and yet less) realistically though, I'm all for the teaching of religious creation tales in school; I'd just like them to be in a Humanities class, and to include at least the nine other cultural accounts in the aforementioned article. I'd love to see a teacher cover those stories of giant skull universes and serpent skirt goddesses and talking snakes and white bull semen being purified to create all the animals of the earth, and so on, and then at the end saying, "But of course we all know that the Christian story is the true one, since it's clearly so much more demonstrably-true than those other old(er) fairy tales. Most of the kids would just yawn and continue day dreaming about a new iPod or Ford Mustang, but wouldn't the few who actually paid attention have to start viewing the religion they inherited from their parents with a bit more skepticism?
Religion is bad for society?
It's hard to do much
with this article, since it's so vague about the methodologies of the survey in question, but it certainly makes for a provocative headline.
Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its "spiritual capital". But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.
The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: "Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.
"In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.
"The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so."
...
The study concluded that the US was the world's only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from "uniquely high" adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.
Hopefully this one will get some more media play (Though probably not in the US, where the media isn't so much "god-fearing" as is it "fearful of those who claim to be motivated by god.") and we can see some graphs and charts and figures, with which to properly evaluate the claims made. I do know that the US has the world's highest incarceration rate, and that most prisoners have less education than the population at large, and are also/therefore more likely to self describe themselves as religious.
Everything relates to everything else though, and the prison population is more about the lacking social safety net in the US, inequalities of race and class, and our ridiculous drug laws. I don't see religion, or lack thereof, as a major factor there. Not that my spur of the moment opinion is based on actual evidence, or anything.
Abortion is another interesting one, since I'd think a pretty direct connection could be made between level of sexual education, access to and knowledge of birth control, and abortion. After all, women who don't get pregnant virtually never have abortions, and if you know enough to use birth control you're unlikely to get pregnant. I recall reading that Russia used to have far and away the highest rate of abortions in the world, a fact that was directly tied to a chronic lack of birth control and nearly cost-free medical care, which included abortions. It had little or nothing to do with their believing or not believing in Christianity or any other religion.
Abortion, and unwanted pregnancies in general can also be tied directly to poverty, (as can incarceration rates, as mentioned above) and there is a huge permanent lower class in the US that I assume boosts the abortion rates. The flavor of Christianity many in the US favor certainly plays a part in that issue, since it discourages birth control and sex, and since people all through human history have inevitably had sex, no matter what their religion of choice said about it, the religious ones in the US just end up doing it secretly, guiltily, and without protection. Of course their religion says not to have abortions either, but... yeah. Eighteen years, and all that.
Anyway, it's a juicy issue for discussion and study, and I'm sure Christian researchers can and will chew up the same stats and facts and figures and come up with conclusions that directly oppose those of this study's author. Lies, damned lies, and statistics, after all.
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Cat Pursuit.
Jinx likes to run. Despite that inclination, she's not actually very good at it. Oh she's nimble, and she's got great acceleration, and a pretty good top speed. The part she's not very good at is path-finding, since she tends to crash into walls, jump too low and bounce off the front of the couch or the side of the bed, run full speed into the dead end hallway when the doors or closed, or back behind the couch when there's no other way out. Etc. She also tends to stop very quickly and for no apparent reason, a behavior that sometimes allows the slower Dusty to catch her, and one that has nearly gotten her squashed numerous times, when the two heavy-footed humans in her house occasionally indulge in her desire to be chased, and pursue her down the hallway.
The oddest "run Jinxie run" thing yet though, happened tonight.
She and Dusty have their yearly vet appointment tomorrow morning, so we've brought the two kitty carriers in from the storage closet. We leave the cages sitting out for a day or so before taking the cats anywhere, so they'll get used to the scent of the devices and not run at the sight of them. It works too; the cats don't show any fear of the cages, though that's more about their small brains than our clever behavior -- I think the cats just aren't smart enough to remember that those cages = travel in them in the car, even though they vigorously hate that experience.
The cages are sitting in the hallway, down near the bedroom and bathroom doors, and after watching hyper Jinxie charge around the living room, and grunt and race up and down the hallway a few times, I got up, and on my way to the bathroom I clapped and shuffled my feet and said, "Jinxiejinxiejinxie!" while charging her.
She leapt up and gave her little "Prrowrt brrout!" sound effect, and raced down the hallway, heading straight into the no-escape bathroom and jumped into the tub. When I rounded the corner on her heels and reached over to molest her in the tub, she leapt past me and ran... straight into the kitty carrier. Where she crouched down, as if I wouldn't see her.
Yes, this is the same cat that managed to avoid capture for a full half an hour the last time Malaya tried to bring her and Dusty back from Malaya's parents' house. And the same cat that will doubtless serenade Malaya all the way to and from the vet's office tomorrow, showing
her usual frantic desire to escape from the kitty carrier.
Is a cat's ability to be maddening and frustrating completely coincidental to their stupidity? Or a direct by-product? Sometimes it's hard to tell.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Yoga in Oz?
I have no idea
why this article about the growing popularity of yoga for men in Australia turned up on the US Yahoo most popular articles, but given my own newfound interest in the stretchy form of exercise, I had to read it. I'm not real fond of the whole "yoga is for metrosexual wimps" subtext of it either, but I suppose that's a reality for a "sport" that largely involves wearing tights, kneeling on a mat, and sticking your ass up in the air.
SYDNEY (AFP) - Increasing numbers of Australia's famously macho men are showing surprising metrosexual tendencies, ditching competitive exercise for the meditative calm of yoga.
"We are getting the rugby players, the body builders, the gym junkie guys," says yoga teacher Duncan Peak, a former parachute officer and first-grade rugby player.
"He now comes in here and gets humbled by the first posture."
It's also news to me that Australian men have such penis size issues. I thought that was strongest in the US (As the NRA, SUVs, and Hummers testify.) and macho countries like Spain, but I guess I'll have to add Oz to the list.
Peak, who runs classes at a gym close to Sydney's famous Harbour Bridge, says about 30 to 40 percent of his students are male, drawn to the 'power yoga', or vinyasa, brand his school uses.
Power yoga is practised as a flowing stream of poses done in a heated room to further loosen tight muscles and allow for deeper stretches.
Peak believes that power yoga is more accessible to men than more meditative versions because it allows them to practice poses without losing their masculinity.
"Australian guys are brought up on aggression and competition," says Peak.
"What we try to build up with them is getting away from competition or trying to beat the person next to you. That's what the guys are really learning."
I do like the sound of that power yoga though. Not so much the name, which reeks of yet more penis issues, (They'd probably call it "Xtreme Yoga" in the US.) but the stretching in a heated room. I'd suspect you'd be better off with 5 or 10 minutes of light cardio exercise first, to get loosened up and warm from your core, but perhaps it's got a decent placebo effect.
Being warm does help, though. I've been doing several minutes of leg and back stretches every time I take a shower lately, and then more once I get out, and those stretches feel great. I'd think the heated room would have to be sauna-hot to simulate that, and no one wants to do yoga sitting in a puddle of their own sweat, but the concept is cute. And if it makes people think they're stretching better, and makes them spend more time trying to get loose, then why not?
Celeb Safari
Cute site that's not really anything special, while remaining oddly-compelling. It's called
Celeb Safari, and that's pretty much what it is. Just lots and lots of photos of regular people mugging with celebrities. No skin, no action, no violence, and nothing newsworthy. Just celebs, out of their natural habitat. I enjoyed the
Celebs A-Z Page best myself, though they didn't have any of the celebs I thought to look for. The site is every growing though, so perhaps someday they will.
Chop Socky Review: Fists of Bruce Lee
Chop Socky Review Page here.
First score is compared to regular movies, second score is for a chop socky movie.
Fists of Bruce Lee, 1978
Script/Story: 2/4
Acting/Casting: 1/3
Action: 5/6
Humor: NA
Horror: NA
Combat Realism: 5
Eye Candy: 0/2
Fun Factor: 4/5
Replayability: 2/4
Overall: 1.5/3
This film is one of the many 70s films by martial arts guys that followed a simple plan: "I look sort of like Bruce Lee, so I'll change my name to a phonetic version of his and try to become a bigger star now that he's dead." This one stars Bruce Li, and no, there's no reason at all to include "Bruce Lee" in the title other than blatant marketing bullshit. It has nothing to do with him, or his Jeet Kun Do style, or anything else.
I don't usually worry much about eye candy in these types of films, but this one gets a special mention for being the single worst transfer I've ever seen on a DVD. They took the original wide screen movie and stretched it out to fill the full screen, top to bottom, but didn't do it very well. So the sides of every scene are cut off,
and the characters are 8 feet tall and skinny. Simply putting this one into a decent letter boxed format would have improved the visuals and the movie substantially. You can't adjust it either; wide screen and other options are grayed out on the display menu.
Story:The plot is hard to follow even if you don't fast forward over all of the talking scenes. It's set in modern day (well, 1978 modern day) Hong Kong, and has something to do with the Hong Kong mafia, rival crime bosses, and their struggle for power. Lots of different gangs fight in relatively non-lethal and non-weapon fashion, Bruce Li wins every fight he's in, and lots of extras get knocked out. There's a huge cast, with maybe 50 actors shown, of which at least 20 have multiple speaking scenes. The rest are just random thugs (If you can call 5-foot tall Chinese guys in eye-splitting 70s leisure suits "thugs.") who shout a word or two before heading into the heavily-choreographed combat.
Bruce is posing as an electronics expert who is installing a security system for one of the crime bosses, who just happens to have a cute daughter. Yes, I know, what are the odds? These are the least violent crime bosses in history, who have only unskilled and unarmed martial arts students for protection/muscle, so you've really got to wonder how they hustled up the money for the palatial mansions they inhabit.
Numerous fights ensue, none of them for any good reason, until eventually there's one last battle where all of the bosses are in the same place, and it turns out that Bruce is an undercover Interpol agent. He wins, of course, after doing the old, "Handsprings make me bulletproof!" avoidance trick, when one of the bad guys finally pulls out a gun. The girl survives too, but since these types of movies are always pretty much sexless, he doens't get any. Not exactly Bond, Bruce Bond, is he?
Martial Arts:This movie has a ton of fight scenes. I mean a ton, like 25 or 30 scenes of at least 2 minutes in length. Lots of them have multiple guys going, usually 4 or 5 after Bruce, but there are plenty of other random gang rumbles, where a dozen or more of the instantly-forgettable lesser characters are out there punching and kicking at each other at the same time. Almost all of the fighting is empty handed, though there are a few scenes with poorly-handled nun chucks, inexpertly-wielded knives, or horribly-swung staves. Do not watch this one for the weapon stuff, since it's just dreadful.
The fighters are fairly no-nonsense, and some of the moves look like they might hurt, but it's all pretty much touch style. Hit them, they fall down, you move on. No one ever does any arm breaks, or joint locks, or choke/submission holds, and no one is much on finishing off an enemy once they go down. They land a couple of punches, knock someone down, wait chivalrously while the punched guy does that "press hand to mouth to check for blood; then look intense and furious" bit, then go back into it. A few guys are killed by weapons, but mostly they just get bloodlessly punched out, with the occasional faux-Bruce Lee one-footed stomach stomp, which invariably results in the downed guy straining and holding the foot for a moment, before going theatrically limp.
Everyone in the movie can fight, at least, to some extent. They all do basically the same types of Kung Fu though, with nothing high flying. Some guys are more athletic and do some leaping kicks, and everyone is flexible enough to do head high crescent kicks and back kicks, but they never look very impressive or threatening. There's really no point in kicking if your kicks aren't any more powerful than your jabs, other than that it looks better on film. And since this is a movie, that's probably why they chose them.
If you've done any martial arts it's hard to watch most of these fights, since they are so obviously choreographed, and no one ever takes the openings they get. Fighters are constantly throwing long, slow punches, or swinging kicks that aren't going to hurt even if they hit. Step into them and land a hard punch, or kick out their plant foot and break their ankle or knee. Anything but ducking back, or just ducking the kick. They never even have any nice sequences, where one guy does a high kick, the other guy spins under it and throws his own kick, the first guy parries that, etc. They just take turns, politely and calmly, kicking at each other. Reminded me a bit of
the Tae Kwan Do tournament we attended a couple of weeks ago, though honestly, those kids had a lot more intensity and speed with their attacks than the guys do in this movie.
Overall:The combat scenes in this one definitely grade higher quantity than quality, but if you just want a to watch a lot of different guys punch and kick each other, over and over again, this film should scratch your itch.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Eragon Update
Speaking of Eragon, as I was (Sort of. Tangentially.) in the previous post, I'm about halfway through it, and it's not bad. It's not great, and it's probably not even good, but it's servicable fantasy, and I've certainly read
worse.
I feared it would be as big of a rip off as
its detractors say, but while it's not original, and most of the elements of magic, dragons, the world at large, etc, are certianly derivative, at least they're not
outright recreations.
I don't have any huge complaints so far; just lots of nitpicks. For example:
A lot of the dialogue is very flat and lectur-y. Not at all how real people talk, and way too, "Let me explain exactly how I feel in one short sentence." It's an immature writing style, and I mean that more in terms of the writer's experience than his age. I've read plenty of work by much older writers that makes the same mistake.
The lack of originality is a problem, and it seems very avoidable. The world is basically Tolkien's Middle Earth, with some of MacCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern grafted on, and magic heavily-influenced by LeGuin's Earthsea novels. Humans dominate the world and there are secretive, noble, and powerful elves, but they're fading away and seldom seen these days. Dwarves exist also, but are even more hidden away in their mountains. Evil orc-type monsters are massing and rampaging over the isolated human villages. Etc. Why not throw in a fourth non-monster race? Or make the dwarves be wood elves or something, rather than cut and pasting in short, bearded, mine-digging guys? Why not makes the elves be flighty and silly, or scheming and evil? Anything, just to break out of the Tolkien blueprint.
Christopher Piolini can't write dramatic scenes or emotion very well (yet?) so every time something that should be awesome happens, it's just sort of book reported on. It's very "telling" rather than "showing," as the old writer's mantra goes. We see the hero teenager falling down and sobbing when someone he loves dies, but we feel no emotion. We read about him running from a monster, but we don't really sense his fear, or his triumph when he slays a foe. Etc. I can't really say what is missing from his telling of such scenes, and I would have hated to hear this when I was a young writer, but maybe he just needs some more life experience. At 16 or 17 (his age when he wrote this novel) I didn't have enough first hand knowledge of such emotions, or the maturity to convincingly work them into words. I'm not entirely sure I do now, for that matter.
The main problem stems from the unorginality and lack of emotional intensity in the writing, and it's that I don't feel involved in things. I'm interested in the plot and the characters, but it's purely a "What's going to happen next?" sort of interest. I don't have an emotional connection to anyone, and I don't really care what they do. I think this is largely because the characters don't really feel alive to me; they're just people I'm reading about. It's holding my interest, but not compelling me to read very quickly, and I could stop right now and read an outline of the novel from some online FAQ and feel I'd gotten almost as much out of it as if I'd continued reading it myself. I'd rather read the book itself, and I'm going to finish it, but I'm not feeling much urgency to do so.
Perhaps things will pick up, though. The adventures have hardly even begun, and the stage is being set for an interesting series of confrontations through the remainder of the trilogy.
Home Schooling?
A topic Malaya and I often bat around is the coming education of our hypothetical children. The area we live in has very good public schools (there are regular newspaper reports of parents from all over the Bay Area forging residency papers in order to get their children enrolled), and there are some super expensive private schools (the type that call themselves "academies") in the area too, if we wanted to go that route. Nevertheless, Malaya often ponders home schooling them, while enrolling them in martial arts classes and piano classes and youth soccer etc, so they could be socialized by other children that way.
I'm not a big fan of the home schooling concept, in part because as a writer I'll be working at home, but also because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have the patience to teach my own kids. It's great in concept; you help them with vocabulary words, tutor them some in math, and their innate love of learning keeps them self motivated. The reality is probably that we'd get some lazy, video game obsessed kid who thinks staying at home all the time is a reason to play games all day, go over to his friend's house after school, and who screams and pouts if we try to get them to do their faux-school assignments. Teaching below the college level is an incredibly difficult job, after all.
On the other hand, I remember how miserable and bored I was all through high school, and how sitting in school for 8 hours a day did me virtually no good at all. I wasn't doing drugs or skipping school or being bullied or anything classic like that; I was just bored and uninterested, I wanted to do my own thing, and the endless time wasting bullshit drove me crazy. My high school had 6 periods a day, (or possibly 7, I honestly don't remember) with lunch before the last two. Classes were something like an hour each, and on average the first 5-10 minutes would be taking attendance, reading announcements, general chatter, etc. The last 5 or 10 minutes were no better, as everyone got ready to leave and the teacher hurried to wrap things up, which left maybe 30 or 40 minutes in the middle for anything resembling actual education. And that time was taken up at least three days a week with some busywork bullshit, or catch up time, "Now you're all going to read the chapter you should have read last week, and if you've already read it you can read it again."
I'm not going to go into a whole "my high school experience" blog entry, largely because I don't remember enough to write about and you don't want to read it anyway. You get the idea, though. I was bored and completely disinterested in everything about the high school experience, I wasn't doing the work or getting good grades or learning much of anything, and I wasn't part of any teams or organizations. So why was I there at all? I would have learned far more following independent study courses, and lately I've lately been wondering why I didn't do just that. Talking to Malaya today, she asked why I didn't just get my G.E.D. and quit going to school at 16 or 17, and I really have no idea. It never occurred to me at the time, and neither of my parents ever mentioned it or anything like it. Not that I'm blaming them for my teenaged malaise, but damn I wish I'd done that. Or been entirely home schooled from about 14 on.
It's easy to say in retrospect, and as many fights and disagreements as I got into (Looking back, they were almost stupid and almost all my fault, but try telling that to a know-it-all teenager.) with my parents during the 14-16 years, it probably wouldn't have worked, but who knows; maybe our dynamic would have been very different if I hadn't been pissed off and sleep deprived from the early wake up time required for school, 5 days a week. I don't see how they could have home schooled me really; just with the logistics -- they both lived in San Diego, but had been divorced for years and both worked full time. But I read at a college level by about 8th grade, and though I wasn't doing shit for school work (passive aggressive issues, largely -- I hated school so I didn't care about grades and I wasn't going to do school work if I could help it), if I'd been motivated, I would have. And what better motivation could I have had than the prospect of not having to go to school anymore?
I can't say for sure over the distance of years, but if someone had come to me after 9th or 10th grade and said that if I studied all summer and learned enough history, math, English, etc to pass the G.E.D. test and qualify for my diploma early, I could graduate and never have to go to 11th or 12th grade, I would probably have laughed and gone skateboarding. But if they'd kept asking, and I'd thought seriously about it after a month of utter boredom in September, with the new semester just underway, I might have taken the offer a lot more seriously.
As we were talking about this in the car today, and when I mentioned that I knew I wanted to be a writer by the time I was in 10th or 11th grade, Malaya said, "Just like that
Eragon kid!"
I'd forgotten about him until then, so caught up was I in my misery of high school memories, but yeah, just like that. Christopher Paolini is his name, and as
his bio says, he was homeschooled by parents who lived way out in the middle of nowhere, and finished high school, via correspondence courses, at the age of 15. He was already working on writing fantasy then, and while I'm not claiming that I could have or would have finished a fantasy novel and had it turned into a huge bestseller by the age of 17, as he did, I'd certainly have done something more with my teen years than I did.
I did graduate high school, just barely, after skipping several classes entirely during my last year or so, but I only went to graduation since my parents and grandparents came to town for it, took off the gown and cap as soon as possible, and immediately vandalized the tassle thingie that I hung from my rear view mirror, like most everyone else did. None of them pulled most of the strings out so they hung way too long and looked mangy, though. I was so down on school after the boring bullshit of high school that I didn't bother with any college applications, despite my 1300 SATs (good scores back when 1600 was the max, rather than 2400 now), and chose to live at home, paying fair market rent and working semi-full time, while trying to become a writer, rather than going to college, which my dad was willing to pay for and pay my rent and everything else while I went.
That lasted a year, at which point I owed dad like $5000 and decided that four years of him paying my bills wouldn't be so bad, especially since I was dying to move out of mom's house. So off I went to community college, and found, to my astonishment, that I really enjoyed it. Classes were just 3 or 4 hours a week, and better yet, you could set up your own schedule however you wanted, with night classes or whatever, and they even had variable lengths! I took most of my classes with 3 hours at a bang, one day a week, and was so happy that way. We got a lot of reading to do, but I didn't have to get up early and go every damn day, I didn't have to yawn through busywork in class, I wasn't surrounded by chattering 16 y/o idiots, etc. I would have loved college when I was 16 or 17, and would have gotten far higher grades than I did in high school, since the work was intellectually challenging, and there wasn't all the soul-killing boredom to suck the life out of me.
So, to belatedly return to the issue of my/our own hypothetical future children, I can't see us doing full home schooling, at least not on our own, though hiring some private tutors seems like a great idea. Simulate college in the home; private tutor in each subject who comes once or twice a week for a few hours each time. The kid doesn't get sick of the subject, there's no stupid busy work, they get individual instruction, etc. I don't know if we'll go that route, but I at least hope we're not wedded to the traditional, "You go to school to learn until you graduate from 12th grade and then you go to college." I certainly would have been happier with anything but that, and really, high school is pretty much complete bullshit. Skipping it won't mean a thing for any kid who isn't trying to get an athletic scholarship to college. Even for the kids who enjoy it, and who largely peak at 18 (setting them up for a steady downhill slide afterwards), virtually no one does anything in high school that still matters when they're 30. Or even 25. Or that couldn't have been done better in other ways. I had some good friends then, and still know one of them, but we hung out after school, not during it, and we could have done that as well or better if I'd been home schooled, or bettr yet, had my G.E.D. already.
College isn't that much different, but you have to get through high school before you can do anything interesting with your life, and you pretty much have to do college as well to support yourself as an adult, and you'll probably need grad school and maybe a PhD in 20 or 25 years, when our future hypothetical kids are getting up there. (If you don't already.) But at least in college you're meeting adults you'll know your whole life, making contacts that will turn into future employment, and taking classes in course areas you want to take them in, and learning useful stuff.
High school is like eating your vegetables (just go with the metaphor and pretend I'm not mostly a vegetarian); you might as well do it as soon as you can, so you can move on to the food you like. And dessert after that. And if you can get it out of the way at 15 or 16, do so. Remind me of this when I'm blogging about how my damn 13 y/o won't do his homework, in 2021? Kthx.
Monday, September 26, 2005
Chop Socky Review: Dragon Strikes Back
Cheesy martial arts movies! AKA Chop Socky!
Malaya and I enjoy watching bad martial arts films, and since I review every other film and book I consume, I might as well start reviewing these as well. The review will be a bit different than my usual reviews, since the films aren't really movies, in the same way. No one is going to sit through one unless they're a fan of the genre, so while I'm going to rate all the usual categories, most of my discussion will cover the story and the action. The story since I can make jokes about it, and the martial arts since that's why you're watching the movie, if you are in fact watching it. (Go with God.)
I use my normal review scale for these, but since those scores would always be very low, in comparison to modern movies with 50000x the budget, I'm also scoring them in compared to other cheesy martial arts movies. All of the reviews will be grouped on the Reviews page, and I'll put in links to my other, non-chop socky movie reviews.
I'm currently working on four reviews, for the four films I got in a box set called the "Martial Arts Marathon." Four films on two DVDs for $5; discount multimedia rack at Ross. The films?
Dragon Strikes Back,
Fists of Bruce Lee,
Blood of the Dragon, and
Bruce's Fist of Vengeance. Needless to say, none of these films star Bruce Lee, or anyone else you've ever heard of. They're low budget punch-fests set in Hong Kong, with entirely native casts (speckled with the occasional white or black guy) and plots that don't make much sense. Not that anyone cares about the plot; these are just fist-porn, when you get right down to it. I usually fast forward over the dialogue to get to the next fight scene, personally.
All scores have two numbers; the first in comparison to other movies, the second in comparison to other chop socky. The one exception is the "combat realism" score, since I'm holding these films to the same standards of, "Would that actually be effective/possible in real life?" that I do modern action films. In fact, I should probably grade these martial arts movies more critically on that score, since this is their genre, and if they can't do that right, what can they do?
Again: Scores are all 1-10. "All movies/chop socky only"
Dragon Strikes Back, 1972
Script/Story: 3/6
Acting/Casting: 2/5
Action: 6/6
Humor: NA
Horror: NA
Combat Realism: 6
Eye Candy: 1/4
Fun Factor: 3/4
Replayability: 2/4
Overall: 2/5.5
This film stars Chen Lee as a wandering monk type dude, in Texas. Yes, he's a Chinese cowboy, in the Old West. Curious about this one, we
looked it up on IMDB and found that it's actually an Italian film. It's a spaghetti western, as they call them, but one with a Chinese martial arts guy as the hero. No, it's not worth watching just for this novelty aspect.
StoryThe plot involves the hero, Shanghai Joe, arriving in San Francisco, popping in to Chinatown for a brief moment, and then buying a stagecoach ticket to travel east to Texas, where he pursues his dream of becoming a cowboy. Predictably enough, he meets with constant racism and physical attacks from one drunken white idiot cowboy after another. The movie gets monotonous about 2/3 of the way through, when Shanghai Joe has had at least half a dozen different groups of cowboys, ranchers, gamblers, etc, try to rob him, cheat him, trip him, insult him, and so on, always culminating with them attacking him and him kicking their asses.
The English dialogue was obviously dubbed in, so perhaps the original Italian version was better, but the dialogue during these scenes is frequently so bad that it makes them completely unbelievable and almost impossible to watch. Perhaps they didn't know enough words in English to translate the taunts and insults, but it's unpleasant to sit through several straight minutes of bearded, dirty white guys shouting "Slant" and "Chink" at a small Chinese man. I believe the joke, "Chinese use chopsticks because they're too stupid to use forks." was used twice in the movie. No, it wasn't funny either time, unless you perhaps take it as a clever attack on the white guy making the comment; I.E. he's so stupid that that idiotic comment was the best insult he could come up with? (
Just like Harlan Ellison?)
Eventually the plot progresses a bit, bounties are placed on the Shanghai Joe's head (understandably; he's killed or beaten unconscious like 30 people by then), and he discovers someone worse than the casually murderous racists; a wealthy landowner who is not only enslaving Mexicans to work his land, but is routinely slaughtering them, sometimes by standing them up on barrels, putting nooses around their necks, and then shooting them in their extremities until they lose their balance and get strangled. Why he's blowing away his own slaves is never quite explained, nor do they say what he needs slaves when he's a cattle rancher and the slaves only distract his men from doing their actual cowboy work. Basically, he needs slaves so he can be an evil slavemaster, and have extras to murder to prove his evil nature. They're sort of self fulfilling, in that way.
The plot really gets ridiculous at the very end, when we get a flashback to Shanghai Joe's training (this is while he's healing himself from half a dozen bullet wounds in like two days, without ever eating or drinking) and there's a standard training montage. It touches all the requisite bases, with him thrusting his fists into scalding sand, punching through boards and bricks, enduring beatings, and so on. The twist here is that another man was being trained at the same time as him, but they never saw each other, and were both blindfolded when they received their sacred lotus tattoos and graduated and headed out into the world.
Five points if you instantly realize that the final ultimate battle in the movie will be Shanghai Joe facing off against the other guy, who has turned mercenary and is serving the evil cattle rancher. It was funny, since I'd been wondering what the final battle would be, since so far Shanghai Joe had won every fight in like three hits, since none of the fat, lazy, racist white men knew how to do more than throw roundhouse punches. Fortunately the plot conjured up another martial arts master for him to battle, just in the nick of time!
Joe wins of course, after a final battle that's overlong, extremely brutal, and full of the nearly criminal misuse of various martial arts weapons. It's not the worst thing in the film, but it's far from the highpoint, largely since the main evil rancher has already been killed, leaving us to wonder why his merc is still fighting, since there's no one paying the bill. Plus there's no emotional weight to the fight, since this new bad guy just walked in; we have no reason to like or dislike him. Not that there's emotional weight to any of the other fights either, since we quickly get sick of every single person other than Shanghai Joe being an asshole racist who deserves the beating he's going to get, but hypothetically speaking...
I've spent far more words on the plot than I intended to, but there's not much else to talk about. The story was actually pretty inventive, and while it was ridiculous, at least it wasn't just another, "You have killed my master and I will avenge him." story set in ancient China. I didn't give it a very high score overall since it was repetitive, predictable, and one-note. And yes, that's pretty much par for the genre.
Martial ArtsAs for the martial arts, they weren't very impressive. Having drunken white guys as the targets was fun a few times, as the asshole racist cowboys got their deserved beatings, but it soon got old since they presented no challenge to Shanghai Joe. I don't know enough about Kung Fu to say what style he was using, but it was not high flying, and not very brutal. Lots of chops, kicks, and punches, none of which looked very powerful. Lots of jabs, basically, and every fight required him to hit the bad guys numerous times to knock them out. He never did any joint locks or breaks or submission or choke holds, and while watching him land a flurry of light hits, after which he stepped back and waited for the bad guy to come at him again, I kept shouting "Finish him!" at the screen.
He seldom did, and it wasn't like Shanghai Joe was beating them up to punish them before going for the knockout; his style was just not hard-hitting enough to win with less than a dozen strikes. Very inefficient, especially when dealing with multiple attackers, as he usually was.
Most of the fighting was relatively realistic though, without too many "Oh he so didn't hit him with that." shots. The early fights were heavily-edited though, much the way most modern action films do it, in order to hide the fact that the actors involved can't actually fight at all. I'm not sure why they did it that way, since the cowboys were just throwing huge right hooks, or swinging chairs, and all Joe had to do was dodge or parry and then land his hits. Surely most of those could have been done in one take, with a camera far enough away to let us see how he moved.
Only the last fight, when Joe faced off against the evil Chinese guy, was shot from a distance, and there were some decent scenes there, though the choreography wasn't that great. The weapon stuff was especially mediocre, with knives thrown from the shoulders, like darts, and swords handled very poorly, with big, slow swings and no real control.
OverallSince the only real draw for this sort of film is the martial arts, I can't recommend this one. There's not that much action, far too much of it is one-sided and takes place in dark rooms, and there's very little variety in moves and styles. The weapon work sucked too, even though there was very little of it.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Movie Review: Corpse Bride
Tim Burton's
Corpse Bride is an animated (well, stop action photography with puppets, along with various special effects) fairy tale that falls somewhere between Tim Burton's
A Nightmare Before Christmas, and Tim Burton's
Every Other Movie with Weird Characters Doing Weird Things in a Weird Place. The story is sweet and a little bit touching, the visuals are amazing and inventive, and the characters are alienated and sweet and misunderstood. And like in every other Tim Burton movie, we found ourselves nodding off as the "plot" wandered aimlessly, while giving us absolutely no reason to care one way or the other.
To the deceptive scores:
Corpse Bride, 2005
Script/Story: 6
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: 4
Humor: 5
Horror: 4
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 2
Replayability: 4
Overall: 4.5
I'm torn on my scores for this one, since this isn't a movie I disliked, or thought was poorly done in any way. Plus most reviewers seem to adore it, judging by the
82% rating it's got on Rotten Tomatoes.
It wasn't bad. The visuals and sets were great, the stop action worked very well most of the time (some of the fast movements and floating of cloth were distractingly-jerky), and the plot was coherent. It was just... boring. Malaya nodded off twice in the middle, and we were both thankful it ran a mercifully brief 76 minutes. (And let us not speak of the pre-movie trailers, which were all stupid trailers for horrible family crap like
Cheaper by the Dozen 2.)
As I said in the intro, it's every Tim Burton movie. The characters were the same misfit outcasts with hearts of gold, the setting was bizarre and disturbing, yet perfectly normal to the people living in it, the visuals were great, and the plot was slow, uncompelling, and pretty much beside the point. We didn't think much of the music either; there weren't many songs in the film, and they weren't very long, but that was a good thing since they weren't catchy or fun or funny. I'm not much on musicals, but I didn't mind and even sort of enjoyed the musical numbers in Burton's version of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Not so with
Corpse Bride.
I may add to this review in the future, but I'm keeping it short for now, and reviewing this like I think they should review music CDs.
I can't recommend it, but neither am I saying you should not see it.
Look, you've seen other films by Tim Burton. If you liked the visuals and imagery and concept of movies like
Edward Scissorhands,
Sleepy Hollow,
The Nightmare Before Christmas, and
Batman Returns enough to enjoy the films despite their slow, wandering, absurd and frequently boring plots, then you'll probably feel the same about
Corpse Bride. If you were bored by those others, you'll be just as bored in
Corpse Bride. Know thyself.
I'd have been perfectly happy to wait and see this on DVD, though I would have been bored then too, and regretted buying it. I think this film would be best seen about 15 minutes at a time, since the enjoyable visuals and the awesome skeleton puppets would get you through that much of it, and when you started to get bored as nothing of importance happened, you could stop it and do something else. And when you returned to the film a day later, it would be fun again.
Friday, September 23, 2005
The Infinite Cat Project
I don't know how I'd never heard of this before, but I saw a link tonight and it's just too damn cute not to post about.
The Infinite Cat Project. One guy posted a picture of his cat looking at a flower. Another guy took a photo of his cat, looking at the monitor displaying the first cat looking at the flower. Another person took a photo of their cat looking at the monitor showing the 2nd cat looking at the first cat, looking at the flower. And so on. And on. And on.
It's not quite infinite yet, but they're up over 1000 cats, and counting.
I'd like Jinx and the Puskers to participate, but since they're not allowed on the computer desks, I might have to sit close to the desk and use my laptop.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Site Donations
I don't believe I've ever
asked for site donations since I (with Malaya's help) switched the site over to the blogger format. In theory I should have; after all I'm doing more blogging now than I used to, so your entertainment value has increased. (No, I can't quite type that with a straight face.) I hate asking for donations though, and since one anonymous donor has been giving $10 a month for over two years, and he/she has been the only one giving anything for many months, there didn't seem to be much point in continuing to ask, when my hosting costs were being covered.
Mr/Mrs Anonymous is still contributing, but he/she sends me a check to avoid Amazon skimming their % off the top, which meant that no one at all was using the Amazon tip jar option. I haven't disabled it, but I have deleted the big button from the nav bar, since its only donation was visual displeasure. The "buy crap" button remains, since it's smaller, cuter, and people actually use it. So send me some money if you think I deserve it, and if not at least try and remember Black Champagne when you buy something from Amazon.com. Do it through the button over there and I get 4-5%, and think happy thoughts when I get that $12 or $15 quarterly bank transfer.
Thanks to everyone who has given or at least considered doing so, and with any luck this will be the last donation post I ever make/you have to read. It's just not worth annoying everyone over for like $10 a month. Just wait for the future "Flux gets published" days though, when I start putting up the old short stories and book bonus scenes and Flux porn and such into a pay area, only accessible to Black Champagne Members. You'll get special icons on your forum IDs too! Etc.
Unoriginal Fiction and Dan Brown
I've been annoyed for months by my too short and off topic
review of The DaVinci Code, and while adding in my recent reviews to the reviews section, I finally got around to revising it.
My old review said The DaVinci Code was just a rip off of Angels and Demons, gave it middling scores, and then launched into a brief and unsourced discussion of why the heretical Christian aspects of the novel weren't of much interest to me. The review now has more comments about the book itself, a more coherent take on what I thought of the fictional Biblical revelations Brown made, and several blog entries about The DaVinci Code added below the review.
While searching for those, I got to reading my old blog entries with a mention of "davinci" in them (courtesy of Google) and found one entry about the "similarities" between the two books by Dan Brown. The entry took off onto a whole discourse on formulaic writing, and I enjoyed reading it (as I almost always enjoy my old and largely-forgotten writing about writing) and thought it deserved inclusion in the writing section, so I threw up an
Unoriginal Fiction page with that blog entry, a quote from another book review, and a longish-introduction I wrote for the occasion. I know I've written other past entries (I just misspelled "entries" as "entires" for the 3rd time in this post. Yes, it's past my bedtime.) on that subject, and I'll add those to the article as well, someday. Yes, I need to hire or browbeat someone (or clone myself) into going over more of the old blog entries (first time I spelled that right tonight) and putting the good stuff into appropriate articles. At least the stuff on writing, since I am theoretically a writer. And stuff.
Anyway, check out the revised review and the other fiction page if you want to. And if by some miracle you remember other, thematically-appropriate writing I've done, and can find a link to it, please let me know. I shan't be looking for it anytime soon, since I can't think how I'd Google it. It's not like there's a keyword to search on that would lead invariably to the subject. Unlike all of my hundreds of other posts that could and should and eventually will be added to the existing articles pages.
Bananas and the real DaVinci Code
Two interesting articles I enjoyed reading and thought you might as well. You need to actually read them though; they're not just pictures of
Lindsey Lohan's return to redheadedness (and really bad dresses), or anything like that.
The first is about
the impending world wide banana crash. I've heard of this in the past and sort of ignored it because I don't really like bananas, but this excellent article from Popular Science explains the problem in detail, discusses potential solutions, the history of the banana and mass-produced fruit in general, and more. The "cavendish" is the only type of banana many people ever see, and while that's helpful for branding issues, it's not a real good thing in terms of biodiversity.
For nearly everyone in the U.S., Canada and Europe, a banana is a banana: yellow and sweet, uniformly sized, firmly textured, always seedless.
...
Americans eat more bananas than any other kind of fresh fruit, averaging about 26.2 pounds of them per year, per person (apples are a distant second, at 16.7 pounds). It also turns out that the 100 billion Cavendish bananas consumed annually worldwide are perfect from a genetic standpoint, every single one a duplicate of every other. It doesn't matter if it comes from Honduras or Thailand, Jamaica or the Canary Islands -- each Cavendish is an identical twin to one first found in Southeast Asia, brought to a Caribbean botanic garden in the early part of the 20th century, and put into commercial production about 50 years ago.
That sameness is the banana's paradox. After 15,000 years of human cultivation, the banana is too perfect, lacking the genetic diversity that is key to species health. What can ail one banana can ail all. A fungus or bacterial disease that infects one plantation could march around the globe and destroy millions of bunches, leaving supermarket shelves empty.
A wild scenario? Not when you consider that there has already been one banana apocalypse.
...
Once a little-known species, the Cavendish was eventually accepted as Big Mike's replacement after billions of dollars in infrastructure changes were made to accommodate different growing and ripening needs. Its advantage was its resistance to Panama disease. But in 1992, a new strain of the fungus -- one that can affect the Cavendish -- was discovered in Asia. Since then, Panama disease Race 4 has wiped out plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia and Taiwan, and it is now spreading through much of Southeast Asia. It has yet to hit Africa or Latin America, but most experts agree that it is coming. "Given today's modes of travel, there's almost no doubt that it will hit the major Cavendish crops," says Randy Ploetz, the University of Florida plant pathologist who identified the first Sumatran samples of the fungus.
On a purely selfish nature, I don't think I'd much care if the Cavendish was largely wiped out, since I don't really like the taste of it. I don't like them green, but I do tolerate them when they're just turning yellow, and ideally when they are refrigerated. Once they get some brown spots though, I pass. I don't like the gooey, cloyingly-sweet taste and I can't stand the mushy texture. Happily for me, there are hundreds of other banana varieties, and they sound damn interesting. And if disease brought about the end of the Cavendish monopoly, I might actually see some of the others in US grocery stores:
In an area about the size of a U.S. shopping mall, Aguilar, 46, is growing more than 300 banana varieties. The diversity of fruit in Aguilar's field is astonishing. Some of the bananas are thick and over a foot long; others are slender and pinky-size. Some are meant to be eaten raw and sweet and some function more like potatoes, meant for boiling and baking or frying into snack chips.
...
The Goldfinger was developed by painstakingly cross-breeding samples from the more than 350 banana types originally collected by United Fruit scientists. It is a highly versatile fruit, suitable for cooking and eating; it has a slightly tart, apple-like flavor and is one of the few bred bananas to gain significant consumer acceptance.
...It transported well and caught on in certain markets, notably Australia. But it didn't taste like the sweeter Cavendish and never took hold in the Americas.
The article runs 5 full pages and as a secret bonus, it might turn into barnyard porn by page four; I only made it through three, so I can't say.
The second article is shorter and not nearly as tasty, but
it's intellectually tantalizing. One of DaVinci's surviving works is a famous mural, the Adoration of the Magi. Its history is unclear, with some evidence that DaVinci sketched it out before someone else finished most of the painting. The interesting thing is that with infrared light, DaVinci's original sketches and outlines are visible beneath the surface painting. Has someone spent four years analyzing the painting and painstakingly-mapping out the hidden images? Does George Bush not care about black people?
Mr Seracini has examined the painting minutely using a technique that exploits the fact infra-red light passes through paint but reflects off the under-drawing.
As the photographs show, he and his team have conjured from below the amber-brown layer with which much of the panel is covered a collection of Da Vinci's drawings that were hidden for more than five centuries. They contain numerous previously invisible - or barely discernible - details. Some will electrify conspiracy theorists.
The Adoration of the Magi could have been dreamed up as a playground for semiologists. Even the visible work is packed with figures, faces, beasts, buildings, foliage and an extraordinary amount of activity, much of which bears no relation to the biblical account of the three kings' visit to the Virgin Mary and her newborn child.
...
Mr Seracini said Da Vinci created the under-drawing as an underpainting because he used a brush and a mixture of lampblack and watery glue.
"Otherwise it would just have faded," he added.
Was he saying that Leonardo might have suspected his work would not stay the way he intended it, and may have deliberately preserved it that way? "I'm not going to speculate on that," Mr Seracini replied briskly. "That's for art historians to do. But I cannot rule it out."
The article talks about a few of the more interesting under images, so check it out if you want more details. Or just wait for Dan Brown to fictionalize them in a future novel with an
entirely-recycled plot.
The article includes a link to a large PDF photo of the images, but since it took me some hunting around to find,
here's a direct link. It's one of those 350k Adobe Acrobat files that pretty well bring your computer to a standstill as they load, so be warned.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
More on Yoga
I posted last week about the yoga I was trying to get into, for some long overdue flexibility improvement. It's been going pretty well so far, with me doing 45 minutes or so (the length of the two 20ish minute programs on the DVD we got) each
morning afternoon when I get up. The two hosts (man and woman) on the DVD are downright creepy, and the poses they do on the two shows have a fair amount of overlap and don't target that many body areas, but the poses are useful for a beginner without much flexibility, and they hold them long enough that I can breath half a dozen times and stretch into them. It's a nice way to loosen up in the morning, and though the moves are just sitting still or kneeling or whatever, I always get enough energy flowing to actually get sweaty doing them. I then often go do some Kali outside, or head to the gym, before showing off and having some breakfast.
I'm getting bored with the same routine every time though, so today I tried the yoga shows I've been taping each night at 3am on Fit TV. Yes, they're on at 3am. No, I don't think it's exactly their biggest show.
Anyway, I was bummed by them. I had 4 shows on tape, I FFed through most of them looking for any useful poses, and while perhaps I just hit 4 that were not very good, this program doesn't look like it's of much use to me. I can't find a detailed description of it anywhere, (the
Fit TV page just lists a bunch of show times with zero info about the show) but
here is a page about it on something called the W network (East Coast cable? Canadian? Never heard of it.), that at least has a photo of the frightening host demonstrating the tooth baring grimace that passes for her smile.
It's not that bad, or good of a picture, but after just a few episodes the host is already scaring me. She's always got this scowly intensity to her, with what looks like fury and hatred behind her eyes. Her face reminds me of Rosie O'Donnell, circa late 90s, when she was still officially "in the closet" (not that anyone ever had any real doubts about her sexual preference), and was apparently the most pissed off human alive. No matter how she was dolled up with hair, makeup, clothing, etc, she always had eyes full of the most burning hatred imaginable.
The Breathing Space Yoga host isn't quite that psycho, but her smiles are these painful-looking grimaces that remind me of the real (non-Disney) version of
The Little Mermaid fairy tale, when the mermaid got her human legs, but at the price, so that every step felt like she was walking on knife blades. I'll bet she placed her feet with as much care as the yoga woman parts her lips. You can't help but wonder how tense and furious she'd be if she hadn't become a yoga guru.
Strange facial expressions aside, I could easily ignore the host if the show were useful. Unfortunately, it's not, at least not for me.
The main problem is the pace of things. It's a show for intermediate or advanced students, in terms of knowledge of the poses. They move from pose to pose very quickly, often with one or two forms in between, and you have to know all of the poses to keep up. I suppose you could follow along, even without great flexibility, if you knew what the poses she was naming were, but what are the odds of anyone knowing the name of yoga poses without having spent the time stretching to be able to do them? As it is I'm constantly pausing the tape to study their forms and figure how to get into them, and then after just five or ten seconds in the poses, far too soon for me to start breathing and trying to stretch into it, they move on to another one. It's sort of like trying to learn martial arts by watching a demo movie of it; useful if you already know and can do the moves and just want to run through them with a lead, but useless if you're trying to learn from it.
The poses themselves are pretty scary too. The show has four people doing the poses while the scary host talks, and they usually arrange the posers on a sliding scale of ability, which is helpful. There's one pregnant lady who has to modify everything for her impending maternity, there's a guy who does things halfway, and then two other women who have warm butter for bones and can be twisted into human pretzel shapes that would have landed them prominent spots in a freak show, a century ago.
So while I can sometimes sort of emulate the guy, or the pregnant lady, I usually get totally distracted watching the host talk while the boneless women contort themselves into forms I'd hoped never to see a human being assume. On one episode today they went from sitting cross-legged (which is about as far as I can go, since my hips, knees, and back hurt even doing that), to the full lotus position (with feet over the thighs), to reaching each arm across their back and holding the toes of the feet. So picture your right leg over your left thigh, while your right arm reaches around the back and holds the toes, and you then bend over to put your head on the floor. And they did that with both arms, which required their shoulders to move pretty much straight backwards.
"Ewww!" I exclaimed. Then followed that with another hearty "Ewwwwww!!!" I would have to literally double or triple the length of most ligaments in my body to even approach that pose, not that I'd want to. Seriously, if they pulled a mangled corpse out of a suitcase on CSI in that pose, people would change the channel in disgust.
Freak show poses aside, they never hold any of the postures long enough for me to get any stretching and breathing use out of them, so I'm thinking Breathing Space Yoga is useless to me at this level. I'll have to spend six months on beginner DVDs and poses, and maybe by then I'll have sufficient flexibility and knowledge of the poses to try and follow along.
Conveniently enough, a good friend of mine has a lovely new wife (we attended their wedding in Chicago a few months ago), and by a happy coincidence, she's a certified yoga instructor, something I did not know until
I posted about Yoga last week, and he replied in comments. He's also handy with a DVD burner, and hopefully I can prevail on him to mail me some useful beginner DVDs, perhaps with some advice from his wife on how best to ease myself into this discipline.
Further bulletins as events warrant.
Monday, September 19, 2005
NFL on HD TV?
HD TV offers amazing image clarity and it looks perfectly 3D and all that, but given how often the networks insist upon showing us the old white men who own NFL teams... I've got two bulletproof arguments against watching the NFL on HDTV. Jerry Jones and Al Davis.
If you need a third reason, you can add
aging starlets to the list.
Honestly, most people are pretty damn ugly, if you look closely. You don't want or need to see them that clearly, even after the make up artists have had at them. I was just watching some of the Monday Night Football game(s), and they showed a close-up of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones making a nuisance of himself on the sidelines, and I literally had to look away. And our TV is not large, and is certainly not high definition. He looks like he's turning into a skeletal lizard, one that's undergoing open face surgery to treat an outbreak of melanoma.
Tae Kwon Do follow up.
Much to my relief, a couple of readers wrote in with comments on Tae Kwon Do, rebutting many of the conclusions I arrived at after watching (
and blogging about) a TKD tournament on Saturday. First was Erik, who posted his thoughts in a comment. Quoting part of them:
..there are 2 styles, the WTF style, that you see at the olympics, and the ITF style. (that hopefully becomes olympic in 2012). In WTF style, full contact, it is allowed to kick someone knockout, but it is not allowed to punch someone in the face. Punches arent seen very much in this style, mostly kicks.
In ITF style, semi-contact, it is not allowed to knock someone out. It is allowed however to punch someone in the face. Here punches are seen quite often. I am not sure how it is with protection in the USA, but in Europe the WTF style use a chest protector and helmet, ITF style uses hand and foot-equipment. A helmet is allowed as well.
I'm glad to hear that there are (at least) two styles, since the tournament style we saw was not very impressive. I also like that one of them abbreviates as "WTF," since that was pretty much what Malaya and I thought after watching a pair of teenaged boys in heavy padding trade ineffective stomach kicks for an entire match. (
They are actually the initials of the two different governing bodies with differing rules; the World Taekwondo Federation and the International Taekwondo Federation.) The tournament we saw was apparently in the WTF style, since virtually no one punched, and those that did aimed them only at the chest.
I also heard from Marty, who had a lot to say. He's been taking TKD for 3 years:
Like most other martial arts, mainstream Tae Kwon Do teachings are divided into two categories: free-sparring and forms. The free-sparring that you saw is the most sport-like aspect of Tae Kwon Do, while the other area involves choreographed forms, fighting drills, throws, defence against weapons, and that sort of stuff. This other category includes the "this will kill someone" type of stuff; in one form, for example, a Tae Kwon Do student punches two impaginary "oppenents" in the solar plexus, breaks both of their legs at the knee, and crushes the second opponent's windpipe. This exact content of this category of TKD teachings varies depending on the school and the teacher one learns from.
The sparring as you described it is not typical of Tae Kwon Do, either. While Tae Kwon Do might not have as many fancy, elaborate moves as Kung Fu, a good sparrer will be able to use (and use quite often) a wider variety of kicks and strikes than you saw. TKD sparring mainly focuses on kicks, but sparrers can still use hand strikes in ways besides scoring points.
Also, good TKD sparrers always take advantage the energy of their opponents. The key to success is figuring out how your opponent will react to your advances before they even have the chance to do it themselves. A free, open tournament like the one you went to probably didn't have the highest level of sparring.
The point of my rather long-winded lecture is that in Tae Kwon Do, sparring is seen as just another exercise to improve a student's control, confidence, and physical endurance. It is much different than the style of fighting that a TKD student would use in a real fight. We practice THAT type of stuff as realistically as we can without mortally injuring anyone, but it is not something that is done
competitively.
Sparring is only one aspect of Tae Kwon Do teachings.
With all of this in mind, Tae Kwon Do is actually just as good (better, of course, in my opinion) as any other martial art for kids to learn. The important part of learning martial arts is not which one you do, but how you learn it. In my experience, many commercial youth martial arts schools focus on earning belts, because parents want their kids to have something to show for all the money that is being spent. Groups like the one you go to, and the one I go to at the local YMCA focus more on each student achieving as much as they can, because the teacher isn't paid for each belt test.
So good news there all around. I especially agree with his comments about how it's not the martial art, it's the teacher. Malaya and I train in Kali, but we're in a very small school, headed by a master who trained under some famous traditional Kali teachers, but then went his own way when he wanted to advance the art beyond the traditional forms, and didn't have the freedom to do that without starting his own school. In other words, Kali as done anywhere else in the world is likely to be quite different in approach and style from the Kali we're doing. The same is true of other forms, and taking TKD from some strip mall, belt-factory dojo is going to be an entirely different experience than learning it from a true master, or at least from serious experts, like Marty mentions.
(True masters are prodigies, and are extremely rare in any discipline; the head of our Kali school is one, and while he knows thousands of other martial artists, he only considers one of them a master, a man who does Kung Fu, and who isn't even teaching it now, largely because he could not find any students he thought worthy of passing his knowledge onto. Fortunately for our edification, our Kali master isn't quite so choosy.)
And yeah, as both commenters say, sparring or tournament fighting in TKD is a very specialized style, with very limited rules and styles. Comparing real martial arts, TKD or Kali or anything else, to the tournament stuff we saw is like comparing
ultimate fighting to junior boxing, if junior boxing only allowed jabs. (And even ultimate fighting is far more limited than true martial arts or street fighting, since in that sport they aren't allowed to do neck or joint breaks, they don't know pressure points, and they can't do anything really dirty, like eye gouges, biting, etc.)
I also like that Marty mentions that he of course thinks TKD is the best style. We feel that way about Kali, based on almost zero comparison, and isn't that the way it should be? After all, if you were doing one form and actually thought another form was better, wouldn't you switch? (You would if your goal was to be the best fighter possible; some people stay with a form they know isn't great just because they've put too much time into learning it already, or because their friends are using it, or whatever.)
It reminds me of a short argument I had with someone about my writing years ago. They didn't like a short story I'd posted on the D2 site, I did like it (obviously, since I wrote it and wouldn't have posted it if I'd thought it sucked) and the other person (who had absolutely no ability to write fiction, but could not accept that reality) said something like, "What, you think your writing style is better than mine?"
I said, "Of course. Everyone thinks their style is the best, or they'd be writing in a different style. Right?" That bit of logic pretty well shut her up, which was fortunate, since I was annoyed and close to launching into a savage discussion of the shortcomings of her painfully-labored and desperately-precocious writing style.
Funny how my posts never end up on the same subject that they began on, isn't it?
Fast Fun Free Online Game: Part 04
It's been a few weeks
since I last posted about a fun, fast, and free online game, and since I found one tonight, I thought I'd share. It's not really a game, so much as a logic/strategy puzzle, but it's fast and fun enough to be worth a recommendation. Click here for
Grow Cube!
The screenshots here are much reduced in size, but the game looks like the top image at the start, and below it you see a shot from halfway through a game that can
not be won at this point. Basically it's a puzzle game; you've got a big 3D cube, 10 icons, and you've got to figure out the correct order to make your 10 moves (each icon can only be used once) in order to solve the puzzle.
It's fun to learn, largely because the little men (they multiply, and yes, you want to get your little guy out first) run around and dig down into the cube and create a waterfall, irrigate the plants so that they grow, move a pot so the water boils, and so on. It's fun simply to watch the little dudes charge around, and I enjoyed figuring out what I had to do in what order. First the pot, then the fire, water before plants so they'll groww, and so on. It's not very complicated, as implied by the "fast" portion of this entry's title. It took me about half an hour to have an idea what I was trying to do, and then a bit longer to solve it. I was stuck about 5 moves into the sequence for a while, until I used some logic to figure what I had to do first and what I could wait until later/last.
Check the comments for a bit of advice, but not the solution, since that would spoil your fun.
You can also click here to see what the solved puzzle looks like, but you really should try it first, and check the final image only when/if you get stuck and need some inspiration. Looking at the solution won't give you the sequence though, so it's not going to ruin the game; just take away lots of the surprise and joy of discovery you'll get as you play it and trial and error your way towards victory.
News of the Weird
Do you read the
News of the Weird? I love the site, but can't recall ever linking to it, so consider this my overdue recommendation. Bookmark the site if you enjoy a weekly dose of capsule descriptions of bizarre news, and while there aren't any hilarious ones this week,
this one made me laugh. After all, how often do you hear a quote from a funny district attorney?
Elijah Walker, 35, who pleaded guilty to cocaine possession in Cincinnati in June, resisted complying with the state requirement that he also give up a DNA sample, in that he feared the state would use it to create a clone of him. (Said the prosecutor, reassuringly, "I'm not sure the state really wants another Elijah Walker.") [Cincinnati Enquirer, 6-30-05]
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Tae Kwan Do tournament thoughts.
Saturday afternoon Malaya and I drove over to an area college that was hosting a Tae Kwan Do tournament in the gynmasium. It was free, and we were curious, so off we went, before driving down to Lafayette and their annual wine and music and crafts festival.
As for the Tae Kwan Do... it was interesting to see a pure sport form of martial arts, in comparison to the "this will kill someone" stuff we mostly concentrate on in Kali class. They had 6 rings (well, squares) set up around the gym, with matches going on in every ring all the time. All different age groups and skill classes were represented, though by the afternoon when we got there, most of the little kids seemed to be done. That was our goal anyway, since while they're very cute all smothered in pads and such, we didn't have much desire to watch 7 y/o's take turns frantically kicking each other in the chest guard. The older students weren't a great deal more impressive, but we saw a few good moves, and one guy got sort of knocked out by a decent spinningg heel kick that got him in the mouth.
I have no idea how the tournament style TKD compares to other forms, but it was very energetic, but not in any way practical for actual self defense. There don't seem to be very many moves allowed; maybe 75% of the kicks we saw were basic side kicks to the stomach area, which is how they mostly score points, I guess. They weren't kicks to hurt though; they were just to score points, so they bounced off the heavy stomach padding like a bug against a windshield. Another 20% of the attacks were spinning heel kicks that hardly anyone had enough control over to actually aim, 4% were straight armed punches to the chest, and maybe 1% were leaping kicks, or kicks that went low, or double kicks, etc.
There was one skinny Asian guy who looked to be about 17 who could do it well enough to be a stunt man in a movie. He wasn't very accurate, but he had kicks that were fast enough to do some damage, and he could string three or four in a row, he could kick to the head with power, and he even did a couple of leaping double kicks. He won his fight by a mile, but even he never hit the other guy hard enough to do more than slightly stagger him.
All of the fighting was open hand; there weren't any weapons used at all, and everyone wore a ton of pads. I mean kicking foot pads, shin guards, knee pads, chest/shoulder pads, huge helmets with face shields, and heavy boxing gloves that went up over the wrists. If not for one guy getting a heel kick to the chin (he did a side kick and his opponent did one of the very few parry moves we saw all day; spinning away with a heel kick that happened to find the chin) and going wobbily with some mouth bleeding, we wouldn't have seen a single solid hit the whole time.
I don't know the rules of TKD tournament style, but it was very odd to watch. They've got so many rules to make it safe that it's sort of kabuki dance-like, in some ways. They never grab or do any throws or even shoves, and they hardly ever punch, only throwing a few straight shoulder punches that looked more like one-armed pushes. They never kick low or do any sort of sweeps, even though those were open all day with the awkward high kicks most people were throwing. They never catch the opponent's slow kick and throw him down, or pull him in for a kill, or hit him/her while they're off balance. They never circle away and get in a hit by side stepping an out of control charge. The never block and step inside an attack to hit in the opening their defense creates, and really, they never block at all. At least 95% of the matches we saw were basically two people taking turns hitting each other, with an occasional leap back dodge.
It reminded me a bit of Olympic fencing, where no one defends or parries anything; they just stab frantically, since they're padded up to be invulnerable, and since the first hit to land wins, and they've got electronic scoring to tell you who landed it, the whole goal is just to dive at your opponent and hit them 1/1000th of a second before they hit you. The fact that you both died in real life is irrelevant, in their sport.
The TKD wasn't that fake, and everyone got in lots of kicks and hits, and we could usually tell who was winning (they fought two rounds of about one minute each, before getting a decision), but it's been so ritualized into a competition form that it's lost any real connection to actual martial arts. It's like touch boxing would be, where the fighters go through all the motions but no one actually gets hurt so no one actually worries about defense or hitting hard; they just score their points and move on.
On the drive home, Malaya and I were arguing about the uses of it for our future hypothetical children. I didn't think it would be a bad thing for a kid to learn, since their young knees could take it, they'd enjoy dressing up in the pads and outfits and such, and it would let them burn off a lot of energy. I see it like a sort of light-contact gymnastics. She is more of a Kali snob than me, and was horrified at the notion. Why would we want our child wasting time on a sport martial art like that, it would teach him/her bad combat habits he/she would have to erase once he/she started doing kali later on, etc. And I agree with her, if the kid were over the age of 13 or 14 or something. By then I'd want the kid to learn something that could actually be used effectively in a fight. But for younger kids, I think the sport TKD would be fine, and probably less wear and tear on their knees than the soccer I played was, if not a whole long more useful in an actual street fight.
We did heartily admire the cash cow aspects of TKD, though. Everyone there must have had
$300 worth of padded equipment on, plus their $70-100 ghi, plus a $50 bag to carry it in. And you know those kids are outgrowing their gear every year, needing new colored belts every few months, wearing out the shoes like mad, needing extra uniforms if you can't do the laundry three times a week, etc. You know those TKD dojos are making more money on their equipment sales than they are on the classes themselves. And speaking strictly on a business level, I admire that. Great revenue stream concept, especially with the art being easy to learn for kids, who go through the equipment the fastest.
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