Never Tempt the Gods

So, after I allowed as how I couldn't wait to try the muscle-up, it appears that I will be able to wait after all. How long, I dunno, but after tossing my grandson, a well-appointed boy who is probably seventy pounds and tall for his age, into the air a few times, it appears that my failure to warm up properly has come back to haunt me.

I pulled something in my upper back.

Not fighting off nine ninjas whilst out walking the dogs; not even in silat class doing legwork. Hoisting my grandson up for "wheee!" Worse, while I was hoping it was the trap, I don't think it is, because of where the pain is, how much it hurts, and a couple of tests one can do to narrow down which muscles might be involved. That's the curse of having a little knowledge, you can't be blissfully ignorant of some things.

What I fear is that I tore my rotator-cuff on the left side. Just a partial, and probably in the supraspinatus, one of four itty-bitty muscles you can't get to from the outside -- infraspinatus, teres minor, and subscapularis being the other three. For years, I've done shoulder exercises to prevent just this.

I hope not. I hope I am out-of-practice in diagnosing such things, that's is just referred pain from a few strained fibers in the trapezius, and in a week, why, I'll be right as rain.

But: ice, eating ibuprofen like M&Ms, rest, and wishing it into the cornfield have thus far done little to make it ease off, so I expect that I'll be calling my doctor tomorrow and seeing if she can see me any time in the next eight or ten years.

And if'n it is what I hope it ain't, the options of doing what I'm already doing, cortisone injections, or surgery will be bandied about. None of which appeal, thank you.

Ick. Ick.

Best Rings Routine Ever

You gotta love this -- especially the dismount ...

Looking for an Upper Body Exercise?

Pound-for-pound, I've always thought gymnasts were high among those with useful strength. You must be strong and flexible to do gymnastics, and you can develop this kind of power using only your own bodyweight, no iron pumping necessary. (Though strength-training with weights can help, and some do that.)

There's a strong element of gymnastics in parkour, or free-running. I think this is an activity mostly suited for the young and bulletproof -- fun to watch -- but not something a man my age is going to take up and do well. It does, however, have some good training exercises I might be able to learn, one of which is called the muscle-up. You see this in ring competition in gymnastics, and it is a lot harder than it looks.

My chinning bar at home is in a doorway, and if I could manage this, I'd punch a hole in the ceiling with my head, but it's something I am going to try at the gym next time I go ...

Theology and Politics

So, I watched Bill Moyers' Journal tonight on PBS. Barack Obama's former minister, the Reverend Wright, was on for the full hour. When you hear him speak, and see more than just the soundbites cut from his sermons -- PBS ran longer excerpts -- you get different picture than you do via YouTube and Fox News.

Wright might be abrasive and maybe he gets a tad hyperbolic, but -- unfortunately -- a lot of what he was pissed off about, he had -- still has -- good reason to be that way.

I can see why Obama didn't cut him entirely loose. The Rev calls it like he sees it.

Context makes a helluva difference. This was a man who spent six years in the Marine Corps. Between that and growing up black in fifties America, he earned the right to do a little bitching.
And a lot of what he had to say made sense to me, and I'm lily white and a redneck cracker.

Looking for Place to Spend Your Tax Rebate?

Other than maybe filling your gas tank?

Technology Flops Again

And the same vid, via YouTube. Runs slower, but a lot more artifacts.

So much for seamless flow along the information corridor ...

This is a Test

A vid I shot last year, playing with a kerambit. Just looking to see if I can upload directly to blogger instead of going through YouTube. (Still has a few glitches -- like, am I that fast ? Uh huh, sure I am ... I went back in, slowed the speed by half, and reposted it, and this is what I got. Still buggy.)

Write Faster

I generally have a stack of books by the bed. I read less than I used to, but I'm still getting through maybe two hundred books a year, plus assorted 'zines, not counting the daily newspaper, blogs, and all like that.

As a reader, I have a gripe with my favorite writers -- they need to write faster.

If I find a book by somebody and I like it, I look to see what else they've done. If they have a series, I collect as many as I can find. Problem is, even if they have twenty books in print, I can read them all before they can get too far ahead of me. Pretty soon, I catch up, and then I have to wait on them.

There are a handful of writers that I will buy in hardback. With some of those in the $25-35 range, I can't afford too many on that list. So I go to the bookstore and prowl the aisles, waiting for one of them to come out with a new novel. Generally, this doesn't happen but once a year, sometimes longer. Sometimes way longer -- fans of George R.R. Martin's fantasy series have been drumming their fingers impatiently for several years now waiting on him.

It took two decades for Roger Zelazny to finish his Amber series.

Me, I have a dozen guys I'm waiting on at any given time.

One example: I got hooked on Robert Parker's Spencer books years ago. He now has three characters with whom he plays -- Spencer, Jesse Stone, and Sunny Randall. They are all variations on the same guy, even though Sunny is a woman, she is a lot like Spencer in a skirt. Parker is faster than most, so those characters show up more frequently, but since, if Dianne drives, I can almost finish one on the way home -- lotta dialog -- the novels are like fast-food -- quick, easy, over in a hurry.

(Gotta love that Hawk, who is the coolest dude in modern mystery novels. Bobby Crais's Elvis Cole novels give us the west coast version of the Bostonian Spencer, and his sidekick, Joe Pike, is the white trash version of Hawk. I'd love to see them in a book together. Hawk and Pike ...)

Um I digress, I digress, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers pressed ...

My gripe is that the writers I like need to write faster -- and today, I got an email from one of my fans, and, of a moment, found myself on the other side of the looking glass. You, he said, need to write faster ...

Huh. What goes around comes around. One more manifestation of karma.

F*ck 'Em If They Can't Take a Joke ...

Okay, I've never hidden it that my ethical and political suasion is mostly to the left of center.

Pigeon-holing somebody as a conservative or liberal is tricky, however, since a lot of folks don't fall completely into either category. Among my more liberal friends when I start talking about guns, their eyes go wide in horror; amongst my more conservative friends, the idea that I would pack up the American troops in Iraq and fly 'em home tomorrow gets the same kind of bug-eyed stare. Drives people crazy if you don't follow the party line unswervingly. They don't know what to do with you.

Want to screw with people's heads? Join the NRA and the ACLU at the same time ...

The New York Times hasn't been considered anything close to conservative for a long time, and I am more often in agreement with their stances than not, but, you have to give the Devil his due. Whoever came up with this one? S/he is funny:

A man is walking in the New York zoo when he sees a little girl leaning close to the lion's cage. Suddenly, the lion reaches out through the bars, grabs her by the cuff of her jacket, and tries to pull her inside!

Her parents scream, but are paralyzed. Nobody can seem to move --

The walker sprints to the cage, and without hesitation, reaches in and hits the lion square on the nose with a powerful punch.

The lion jumps back, roars, releases the girl, and the man grabs her. He delivers her to her terrified parents, who can't thank him enough.

A reporter nearby has seen the whole scene, and he comes over: "Sir, this was the most gallant and brave thing I have ever seen!"

"Why, it was nothing," the man said. "Really, I mean, the lion was behind bars, and I saw the child in danger, what else could I have done? Not like I had to have the faith of Daniel to actually walk into the cage."

"I notice a Bible in your pocket," said the journalist.

"Yes, I'm a Christian and was on my way to a Bible study group."

"Well, I'll make sure this won't go unnoticed. I'm a journalist, you know, and tomorrow's papers will have this on the front page."

The journalist leaves.

The following morning the rescuer buys the New York Times, to see if it indeed has news of his actions, and sure enough, it does, right there on the front page:

"Right Wing Christian Fundamentalist Assaults African Immigrant and Steals his Lunch ..."

Want to See Who I'm Supporting for Senate?

Kitchen Skulduggery

Sometimes on a lazy weekend afternoon, especially if it is raining and we can't do yard work, we watch cooking shows on the Food Channel. This requires little brainpower, and is amusing, and now and then, we are inspired to try a new dish we've seen presented.

One of the shows we like is called Dinner: Impossible. In it a chef, a big, bodybuilder Brit named Robert Irvine, is brought somewhere and told of this week's challenge, which involves cooking a meal from anywhere from a few to a few hundred people, given a theme he must follow, and time limit. In the past, Chef has been taken to Pixar and told he has to feed six hundred animators, and the theme is to use the Pixar movies, like Finding Nemo, Cars, and Ratatoullie. Or in Williamsburg, making a meal using only 17th century tools. Or at Hershey, PA, making a five-course meal for a hundred and fifty, each course of which had to feature chocolate ...

Silly stuff, but the chef seems a good-natured fellow, and he and his crew, mostly taken from the group he has to feed, run around like chickens with their heads cut off while trying to come up with dishes whilst missing half the ingredients they need.

Imagine my horror when -- only today! -- I found out that Irvine has been canned for lying about his resume. A month ago, he was outed, and today, his replacement announced. Hidden and murky depths in the chef ...

Oh, the humanity! Is there nothing sacred ... ?

Another Separated at Birth ... ?

My collaborator and the jester ...

Shiva Ki's Kerambits

Somebody asked for a picture of these ...

I Don't Care Who You Are, That There is Funny ...

Thanks to Larry the Cable Guy for the title.

Humor, as I have pointed out before, and I'm not the first to do so, is almost always at somebody's -- or some thing's expense. Almost always, somebody is the butt of the joke.

You don't think so, go over the ones that made you laugh out loud. Got one that wasn't making fun of somebody, pass it along. I collect them. (They'll all fit on the head of a pin, with room left over for a bunch of angels to dance ...)

Best stuff for me is when the teller makes fun of himself. Thus, a southern comedian talking about driving and getting pulled over by the Louisiana State Police: Cop swaggers up, looks at the guy. "You in a lot of trouble, boy. Here, take this ticket, and you write what I tell you ..."

Or the guy going to register to vote in Mississippi. Signs his name: X xx. Registrar says, "Well, okay, I know what X stands for, but what's with the two little xx's?"

And the guys says, "That stands for "M.D."

My best lawyer jokes come from lawyers; best doctor jokes from doctors; best actor, agent, producer jokes from among their number, too.

Politically-incorrect humor can be stretched too far, and when it steps over the line and is simply cruel, it commits the cardinal sin in comedy: It isn't funny. But one of my favorite panel cartoons, in, I recall Writer's Digest, is from years back. It was the last of three in a series, a racist toon, a sexist one, and a racist/sexist toon combo. This was the title over the toon -- a"A Racist, Sexist Cartoon."

This last one shows a white man in black face makeup kneeling on a stage, hands clutched to his belly, in obvious pain. And the caption is:

"Pre-minstrel cramps ..."

It was less a truly racist or sexist dig than it was a play on words. I laughed, what can I say?

(I don't watch South Park because for me, it's puerile. But I do like Futurama. Anybody can do fart jokes, but clever writing gets me every time. But, it's different strokes for different folks ...)

Armed Response

Another true childhood tale:

Summer I was nine -- I think, I'll speak to that later -- there was a strike at The Plant. This was a generic term for any of the companies in the petrochemical complex that sits next to the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge. This included the Esso Refinery (now Exxon-Mobil); Ethyl Corp., and Kaiser Aluminum, among others, and at the time, one of the three largest such complexes in the world. (We were #3 on the Russian's atomic bomb list, behind Washington, D.C. and New York City, and proud of it.)

Back then, the flare-stacks burned constantly, and on days when the rain was particularly heavy and they thought nobody would notice, they'd open the suckers up and pour crap into the heavens that would turn the clouds green ...

My father worked at Ethyl Corp., as an engineer, so he wasn't in the union, but considered management.

There was no way they were going to shut the plant down, and not going to hire scabs, so management decided to run things themselves. To this end, they set up cots and kitchens and everybody who wasn't in the union essentially moved into the plant and went into a rotation of twelve hours on, twelve off, for the duration. My father got to come home every few days, but then he had to go back. I don't remember exactly how long the strike lasted -- seemed like a long time.

But even then, I read the newspaper every evening -- we got the State Times, not the Morning Advocate -- and I came across an article that frightened me. Seems that some of the homes belonging to Ethyl managers had been vandalized -- rocks thrown through windows, paint sloshed on them, like that, almost certainly by disgruntled workers on strike.

Lotta kids had fathers who worked at The Plant, but on our end of the street, none of them at Ethyl Corp. save mine. So I organized a vigilante patrol. I, and several other boys my age, armed with our Daisy BB guns, marched up and down the street, or skulked in the ditches and azalea bushes, to guard against vandals, or worse.

I must have been at least nine, since I didn't get my first BB gun until the Christmas after I was eight, and the gun I carried wasn't the Daisy Pump or the blond-stock with the scope, which I didn't get until I was older ...

This was back in the day when boys wandering around a neighborhood could carry BB guns and nobody thought anything of it, as long as we didn't shoot the birds in their yards. Which, of course, we did at every opportunity.

That part of the summer passed, the strike was settled, and my father started coming home in the evenings again. We never did get visits from the angry strikers at my house, though I had secretly hoped we would so that our militia could lay them low.

Hey, we were nine. Way more guts than brains ...

Wooden Instruments

So we went to the show at Marylhurst. Lotta instrument makers there. Being a classical guitar guy, those are the makers I notice the most, and a bunch of really good ones showed up: Robert Ruck was one table down from Jeff Elliott. Woodley White, George Smith, Craig Wilson, Salvador Morales, Alan Perlman, Cyndy Burton, Keith Rhodes. Mike Doolin had his harp guitars there, others I probably missed.

Violin makers, mandolins, harps, even a marimba; flutes, lutes, wood, wax, the place smelled great, and if you like stringed instruments, you would have had a fine ole time just walking around and inhaling.

The mini-concerts this year were held in a different venue -- school was working on the grounds and the usual place was hard to get to, so it was in Flavia Hall. Not as nice a room, but you could hear everybody okay. We saw people do short stints: Mary Flower (steel-string and classical guitar); Peter Zisa and Dina Fergurgur, (classical guitar duet); Scot Mueller and Joe Majors played electric guitar and electric bass. Travis Johnson, who looked like he was all of thirteen, played an Elliot classical and did a fine job. David Franzen played a George Smith blackwood classical, after a touching story about a phone call from the wife of his guitar teacher, who is apparently dying, and who was listening to one of Franzen's CDs. Jeff Ashton did what he called his "chestnut set" on a classical by Woodley White -- started with Romanza.

Franzen used his own guitar, which was several years old, and you can really hear the difference between a spruce top that has been played and opened up, and one that is a couple weeks old.

The Morales family had a few nick-nacks on their table. My wife bought me a clock ...

Gorilla My Dreams

I may have told this story before. If not, I should have ...

Back in my childhood, exotic pets were more common than they are now. There were plenty of dogs -- most of them running loose and apt to bite -- cats, birds, of course, but you could also buy what were called tea-cup monkeys -- tiny little things advertised in the back of comic books, along with snakes, lizards, and various large cats -- I had a friend who had an ocelot. We knew a guy who had a bobcat, and one who had a panther kitten.

No licenses necessary, save for the dogs.

One bright spring day, my friend Bobby Harrison and I decided to go and steal plums. I have mentioned that such an activity was common amongst the nine- and ten-year-old boys where I lived. We located various trees, watched them from afar, and then when the fruit was just the right shade of green-turning-to-yellow, we'd hop the back yard fence -- most of the plum trees were in back yards and most of those were fenced -- fill our pillowcases, and haul ass.

What passed for crime in our day and neighborhood.

So, Bobby had found a tree not far from his house -- on Enterprise, two streets over from mine -- that we had somehow missed. We rolled by on our bikes, and it was full of just-right plums.
No time like the present, we parked the bikes, climbed the fence, and started stuffing plums into a brown paper sack, when, all of a sudden --

King Kong dropped out of the tree in front of us.

Well, okay, not really King Kong. It was, I later found out, a young chimpanzee. Wearing -- though I didn't notice it at the time -- a collar and chain that was connected to the tree.

But, picture it: Two scrawny little boys, going maybe sixty pounds each, and of a moment, beset by a swings-with-Tarzan furry monster as big as we were.

You have never seen, nor will you likely ever see, anybody move so fast. Bobby and I screamed and flew -- flew -- over the fence. I don't remember the trip home, only the end when I skidded my little Huffy into the front yard, still terrified and hardly able to breathe.

My mother was waiting at the front door. She glared at me.

"What have you been doing?"

A knee-jerk response:"Me? Nothing!"

"A woman just called me and said you were in her back yard, scaring her monkey."

I was astounded.

For two reasons: One, that anybody could possibly think that I was scaring that great ape who, I was dead certain, would have torn off my limbs had it been able to grab me.

Scaring her monkey?! Me?! It would have killed me!

And two, and more importantly -- how had that woman known who I was? How could she have called my mother in the time I tore up the streets racing home? That was the mystery.

Later, when I talked to Bobby, he swore he hadn't ratted me out, and I believed him. But to this day, I recall that event with great puzzlement. What kind of person keeps an ape in her backyard plum tree? How had she known who I was and managed to phone my mother in the five minutes it took me to flee home? Even if Bobby's mother had gotten it out of him -- and how would she have even known to ask? -- it would have taken a while to get my name and number to the woman so she could call my mother.

I didn't know the woman. Nor her monkey. But maybe she knew who I was.

One of life's unanswered questions. More proof that the universe is strange.

Over the Hill

Well, it seems that Todd is having a birthday today. Officially having crossed into middle age and now beset with forty-five years.

Happy Birthday, Todd.

They say that forty-five is the new forty-three, but it's all downhill from here ...

Art

While I'm here, a bit more about Mike Byers's art: I'm fortunate enough to own five glass pieces by him. Three are fused; one is etched and edged with neon; and the last is stained glass. (Oh, and there is a textile, Hmong, I think.)

Here are three of those pieces: Dirisha, Chromatic Sequence, and the etched/neon piece is a stylized version of our silat logo. (Fuhoni-te and In the Dreamtime are the other fused pieces.)

Dirisha is a bit weathered -- for several years, she dangled under the eaves overlooking the hot tub out back. When we re-did the deck, we had to move her inside.

High Quality Steel

One more, for those of you who missed it. If you are considering getting one of those reasonably priced -- read cheap -- "practice" katanas you see for sale? Have a look ...

P.S. You gotta love Odell ...