what i learned in grad school:

. i can create new knowledge.
. data is real. love your data.
. theory is changeable. love your data!
. brains are baroque.
. brains are beautiful.
. language is baroque.
. language is beautiful.
. humans take "troop primate" to totally astounding levels
. the p3, the p600, and the n400 are what it's all about.
. broca's area, wernicke's area, the arcuate facsiculus, and their right-hemisphere counterparts are what it's all about.
. girls can do physics as well as anybody else.
. nouns and verbs are different. verbs do more syntactic work.
. experimental design is really important to do well.
. "lies, damn lies, and statistics" is a damn lie.

Poll #1427820
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None

i'm coming to aikido seminar tomorrow.

transport?

if one of the middle two, where's somewhere, and if you're offering, how many?

say what ya gotta say

may you all celebrate in appropriate manner :)

Race for the Galaxy has recently become my favorite portable game. It's very easy to carry a set around, plays quickly, can be easily walked away from, and is complex enough to be interesting without being so complex that it's impenetrable.

I recently went looking for the Faq, to confirm that I was playing a particular rule correctly, and stumbled over a very interesting set of blog posts - one player's strategy guide, based on playing several hundred games.

1. Race for the Galaxy Strategy - A Preface
   
2. Strategy Fundamentals, Part 1
   
3. Stages of the game
   
4. Some additional terminology
   
5. Card Flow and Discounts
   
6. Thoughts on Phase Selection
   
7. Cards that change the Game
   
8. The Second Tier of cards
   
9. The Race for the Galaxy Strategy mind-map
   

I assume that there are more articles coming in the series, but it's quite good so far.
Now if someone would only implement an online version of Race, we'll be set...

just a memo really:

katatori static to ki test, comi-nage
katatori with push, elbow down kokyunage
katatekosatori static nikkyo
katatetori pull ikkyo tenkan
ushiro tekubitori kneeling kokyunage front fall (if time and ukemi)

"i swear, you just can't leave these people alone for two minutes."

"may i repeat, derisively, 'amateurs'?"

RIDING LOGS

last couple rides were "i get on to show students gaits" mostly, plus a lesson in which our trot was imho much improved but we couldn't canter for shit. today i went on a proper long trail ride, all by my only and my pony in the drizzly green day, and we're still all about the trot and not so much on the canter (though we got one SPECTACULARLY NICE canter, in which my seat worked properly -- in the old wintec saddle at that -- towards the end). stjarni's feet are too soft, b/c of all the rain we've been having i think, and he ended up coming home with chips on all four feet. i went around and rasped them smooth; hopefully my barefoot trimmer won't hate me. (it was her idea and her rasp....)

SILKS:

made it back to silks last night (my fourth remedial, fifth of this session -- i missed one). made it up to tap the biner on my secondary leg, go me! still teh suck on flamenco hand, though i can pull it off on one silk when in double footwraps. attempts to change the hip key/arabesque to use hand changes went terribly, with me going the wrong way somehow, so that the key was hard as heck and then the arabesque didn't work at all, and i got tired and frustrated and it was all bad, and then eventually i got turned the right way and it was infinitely easier that time. and there was something called the "rebecca wrap" which was a total freebie, so that was fun :) ETA: oh yeah, and there was cross-back pike-over, or something like that. which i could do either with the aforementioned one-half flamenco grab, or a different and probably more elegant grab over the head.

Please link and publicize this as much as possible.

The organization I have volunteered with for fourteen years, The Virginia Avenue Project, is holding an auction. It's a mentoring group for kids in Los Angeles. They do amazing work, which I have personally witnessed.

100% of the Project kids graduate from high school. 90% of them continue to college. 85% of them are the first in their family to do so.

And one is currently a White House aide!

Because of the horrible economy, they recently lost funding. This has had many effects, including cutting their usual summer program, which this year will serve half the number of kids that it usually does. To make up for this, they are holding an auction.

Please help out in any way you can, either by offering something, by bidding on something, or by mentioning this in your blog or Facebook page. The sidebar at the auction site explains how to participate.

Mirrored from Dailies.

Couple of quick notes before I forget:

• Returned my loaner wheelchair to Helen Hayes on Thursday last. On a purely practical basis, we now have its previous parking space (in our capacious bathroom) to store a stroller. (Q: Should either of these things really be parked routinely in one’s bathroom? A: Welcome to New York City, and specifically Manhattan.)
• On an emotional level, returning to HHH was interesting. It still felt completely familiar, so I’m guessing that somewhere in my head I still occasionally expect to wake up in room 12, my feet somewhere in Nebraska and an empty urinal hooked onto the railing of the bed. We saw lots of the people who saw me through from horizontal skeleton-man to vertical ambulator, and got lots of hugs. Amusingly, in some senses I was still everyone’s patient — Russ wanted to see my trach scar, Connie wanted to know what I’m tolerating in the gym, Laurell looked at my hands more than once and joked about carrying the baby… not entirely surprising, but funny all the same.
• Returning highlighted just how different I feel now than I did when I left. No braces; no crutches; no frustrating attempts to open bottles, cans, or my pants. My feet are half-numb and frequently painful and I can no longer pick up pencils or fallen oreos from the ground with my toes. I feel guilty for having survived and improved and I feel like the luckiest man on the planet for having survived and improved.
( Read the rest of this entry » )

Oyce wrote this up in great and hilarious detail, but that STILL does not convey the effect of actually watching it!

It's a Chinese drama without English subtitles, but Oyce kindly translated for me. After a while, despite literally only knowing one word of Chinese (xie-xie) that is not a food item, martial arts term, or uncle/auntie, I began to translate for myself, with disturbing accuracy.

The son of the house is having it on with the maid. The father maniacally beats him! And beats him! And beats him! With a huge stick! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!

Oyce (as Dad): "You are not my son! I disown you!"

Oyce (as Mom): "Nooooo! Stop! Nooooo!"

Me (as maid): "Noooo! Stop hitting him! Nooooo! Hit me instead!"

Oyce (as herself): "You're right!"

The son and maid flee, but are chased by villagers with torches and pitchforks servants with torches, assisted by the incredibly guilt-tripping mother and her possibly femmeslashy personal maid. They escape across the river.

But then! It is one year later! The main house is decorated for Dad's birthday, but meanwhile, paper coins sadly flutter from the sky! It is a gigantic funeral procession with a huge black coffin! The maid (now widow) walks sadly, clutching a baby!

Oyce: "The sign says, 'Dead husband.'"

Me: "WTF???"

Oyce: "It's a little more formal... 'Deceased spouse?'"

The funeral procession arrives at the House of the Dad! The NEXT HOUR consists of hysterical mourning around the coffin.

Dad rips down the birthday streamers and hurls them at the widow like angry confetti! She almost falls down!

Oyce (as Dad): NOOOOOOOOO!!! MY SON!!!!!! NOOOOOOO!!!! HE'S NOT DEAD!!!!! HE CAN'T BE DEAD!!!!!

Oyce (as Mom): NOOOOOOOOO!!! MY SON!!!!!! NOOOOOOO!!!! HE'S NOT DEAD!!!!! HE CAN'T BE DEAD!!!!!

They open the coffin. He's dead.

Oyce (as Dad): NOOOOOOOOO!!! MY SON!!!!!! NOOOOOOO!!!! HE'S NOT DEAD!!!!! HE CAN'T BE DEAD!!!!!

Oyce (as Mom): Oyce (as Dad): NOOOOOOOOO!!! MY SON!!!!!! NOOOOOOO!!!! HE'S NOT DEAD!!!!! HE CAN'T BE DEAD!!!!!

They shake him. He's still dead.

Me (as Dad): NOOOOOOOOO!!! MY SON!!!!!! NOOOOOOO!!!! HE'S NOT DEAD!!!!! HE CAN'T BE DEAD!!!!!

Me (as Mom): NOOOOOOOOO!!! MY SON!!!!!! NOOOOOOO!!!! HE'S NOT DEAD!!!!! HE CAN'T BE DEAD!!!!!

Oyce: "You're right!"

Oyce (as Mom): How did this happen???!!!

Oyce (as Dad): How did this happen???!!!

I should note here that this was subtitled in Chinese, and that I can read the following hanzi: "rain," "big," and "mountain." Apart from numbers, those are pretty much the only ones I know.

Me (as widow): "It was raining, and our house was soooo cold!"

Oyce: "You're right!"

Me: "My husband decided to climb the great mountain... in the rain... and the cold... to get us firewood so we wouldn't freeze!"

Oyce: "You're right!"

Oyce (as widow): "We begged him not to go! But he went anyway!"

Me (as widow): "He returned soaking wet... and cold... clutching a bundle of firewood!"

Oyce: "You're right!"

The widow finishes her tale, which went on and on and on, and featured useless attempts to revive him with ginger tea. She then runs to the coffin and tries to commit suicide by banging her head against it! This fails utterly, but since she's wearing a white headband and bleeds in a perfect circle, it produces the rather inappropriate effect of her seeming to wear a patriotic Japanese flag headband.

Oyce (as Dad): "YOU KILLED HIM!!!! MURDERER!!!!"

Oyce (as Mom): "YOU KILLED HIM!!!! MURDERER!!!!"

This went on for quite some time, as they had to individually accuse each member of the funeral party.

Me: "MURDERER!!!!"

Well, it was extremely entertaining. I plan to watch more later when Oyce and I visit Taiwan! And also another C-drama from her childhood, whose hero wears a Phantom of the Opera mask because he was horribly burned and possibly is also dead and a ghost.

ETA: Youtube clip showing torch-bearing villagers and guilt-tripping Mom.

This rocks. Much better than average Torchwood or Who. Just shows what you can do with a bit more time for plot and character development.
( Spoilers )

but anyway i keep meaning to mention: i had been having some (non-ptsd-related, some kind of strain injury) pain in my left deltoid or maybe some underlying tendon or ligament. and a couple weeks ago starphire worked on it, and it's been better ever since. i'm still recovering a little strength there, and sometimes i have to make sure to stretch it out a bit extra. but it's still been amazing, to someone with my usual relationship to physical pain, to have some taken care of.

This trip contained several firsts for me: getting to meet yeloson and badgerbag, doing karaoke, and accurately translating an unsubtitled Chinese drama. The last will be covered in a later post.

Oyce has an even more detailed report up on Armageddon and karaoke.

Oyce persuaded me to do karaoke with yhlee, yuneicorn, and rilina. I drank several shots of plum wine to get up the nerve into the mood. Shortly afterward I was rapping Eminem’s “Without Me,” apparently memorably enough that when the same song played days later in the car, both Oyce and Yoon exclaimed, “It’s your song!”

It was great fun and I’d do it again, as long as it’s also in a private room and not a public bar. I now know that Andrew Lloyd Webber and Queen are good for karaoke, and that “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and “Desperado” are much harder to sing than one might think. So is the tongue-twisting song from Utena. In fact that one is nearly impossible unless you’re Yoon.

On Sunday I met yeloson and badgerbag! (Separately.)

yeloson showed me some of his martial art, Penjak Silat. It’s very beautiful and intriguing. I was especially interested in the knife fighting techniques, which are different from anything I’ve ever seen before.

We then went to a Hong Kong style café, which had things on the menu I’d never seen before, like “sea coconut” (not sure what that it – possibly related to the “vegetable of the ocean” I failed to identify in Japan,) toast with condensed milk and peanut butter (very Hong Kong, said Oyce), and a mysterious dessert item whose name I didn’t note down. I asked the waiter, and he said it was frog eggs! “Good for the complexion,” he added. (Hopefully not prompted by observation of my complexion.)

“I guess it’s hypocritical of me to be grossed out by the frog eggs, considering that I eat fish eggs,” I said.

“They’re just like tapioca,” suggested Oyce.

“I’ve never liked tapioca,” I said. “It reminds me too much of frog eggs.”

We had rice with preserved meats and bok choy, unagi with melted cheese (!) over rice, a chicken and cheese dish, and a beef and egg dish. And for dessert, egg cakes (not as good as in Taiwan), mango pudding, and black rice with mango and coconut cream. If I lived in the neighborhood, I would be at that café all the time.

We then met badgerbag and her family. I was thrilled to discover that she has read many of the very obscure books that I thought no one else ever has, like Sydney van Scyoc, many old girls-at-boarding-school books, and the lovely just-barely-fantasy House of Thirty Cats, by Mary Stolz. ETA: Mary Calhoun, not Mary Stolz.

We attempted to explain the plot of Vonda McIntyre’s Superluminal to Oyce, which badgerbag possesses in a very colorful 70s hardcover edition. “People with regular hearts can’t be spaceship pilots because it kills them, so they have to have their hearts removed and replaced with artificial ones. The heroine falls in love with this guy who wasn’t qualified to be a pilot, but it turns out that his regular heart is incompatible with her artificial one, so his heart nearly stops every time they have sex. Not in a metaphoric, good way. So it’s very tragic. Oh, and there’s killer whales.” Then, as if there wasn't enough crack already, we sicced Gundam Wing on her.

There we saw a mother raccoon and several adorable baby raccoons, which live under their deck. It was dusk, a magical moment. In hushed voices, we tried to figure out how many babies there were.

“There were three,” said badgerbag. “But sometimes they die.”

“Way to break the mood!” someone said.

“It’s true,” said badgerbag, and proceeded to break it further. “Last year one of them died and stunk so much we couldn’t live in the house for three weeks. I was like, ‘Rot faster!’”

Saturday July 11, 2-5PM

Littleton Kokikai Aikido, at Flying Squirrel Consortium: Littleton Mill Building at 410 Great Rd, Littleton, Ma

cost $20, working scholarships available for financial hardship

. Theme: "Harmony and Contact: Grab Attacks"

. Ukemi: front and back falls, work on rolling, two attacks (katatori, katatetori: shoulder and wrist grabs)

. Ki voice practice (counting, kiai, possibly misogi if there's time)

All levels (no experience -> black belt) welcome. To be taught by yours truly, chief instructor, Littleton Kokikai, with my fellow instructors and y'all :) Wear comfy, easy-to-roll-around-in clothes or gi, plan to be barefoot if possible. BRING A WATER BOTTLE OR REFRESHMENT DRINK!

RSVP or questions in comments (email to this account @ lj works too :)

because everyone needs to know this:


Unit of Measure

All can be measured by the standard of the capybara.
Everyone is lesser than or greater than the capybara.
Everything is taller or shorter than the capybara.
Everything is mistaken for a Brazilian dance craze
more or less frequently than the capybara.
Everyone eats greater or fewer watermelons
than the capybara. Everyone eats more or less bark.
Everyone barks more than or less than the capybara,
who also whistles, clicks, grunts, and emits what is known
as his alarm squeal. Everyone is more or less alarmed
than a capybara, who—because his back legs
are longer than his front legs—feels like
he is going downhill at all times.
Everyone is more or less a master of grasses
than the capybara. Or going by the scientific name,
more or less Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris—
or, going by the Greek translation, more or less
water hog. Everyone is more or less
of a fish than the capybara, defined as the outermost realm
of fishdom by the 16th-century Catholic Church.
Everyone is eaten more or less often for Lent than
the capybara. Shredded, spiced, and served over plantains,
everything tastes more or less like pork
than the capybara. Before you decide that you are
greater than or lesser than a capybara, consider
that while the Brazilian capybara breeds only once a year,
the Venezuelan variety mates continuously.
Consider the last time you mated continuously.
Consider the year of your childhood when you had
exactly as many teeth as the capybara—
twenty—and all yours fell out, and all his
kept growing. Consider how his skin stretches
in only one direction. Accept that you are stretchier
than the capybara. Accept that you have foolishly
distributed your eyes, ears, and nostrils
all over your face. Accept that now you will never be able
to sleep underwater. Accept that the fish
will never gather to your capybara body offering
their soft, finned love. One of us, they say, one of us,
but they will not say it to you.

Sandra Beasley

Poetry
July 2009

Those of you who speculated that I'd already come up with a parody were right.

I performed it several times at Fiestacon and got laughs. Trying to moonwalk on carpeting while wearing rubber-soled shoes isn't easy.

Anyhow, for those of you who are curious...( the parody is behind this cut-tag to hide it from those who might squick out at the thought. )

Not the Ben Affleck Armageddon, the Andy Lau Armageddon.

A disjointed, over-stuffed, intermittently coherent movie (or possibly several movies jammed together) made watchable and, if in company, extremely amusing, by the presence of the gorgeous Andy Lau and by its high WTF quotient.

I began watching this by myself. In the first two minutes, a priest spontaneously combusts. Then it cuts to sad computer scientist Andy Lau, moping adorably on his yacht. One of the very best features of this film was Andy Lau curled up sadly in chairs, sofas, etc. Oyce and I kept wanting to hug and cuddle him.

And then something happened that made me fall off my sofa laughing hysterically. I stopped the film, deciding that I needed to watch it with Oyce to watch her reaction to this.

( Dehydrated humans can be reconstituted -- just add water! )

Armageddon

me & roommates going -- paraphrased from e -- rsvp if you wanna come too!!

****


Holy [cow].

coraline and I (and 8 other people we know) are getting tickets
to go see the Warsaw Village Band. "...brings a modern vitality to
Polish village music, creating a self-coined 'hardcore folk'. Yelping
vocals [...] float above fiddles, cello, frame drum, trumpet, Polish
hammered dulcimer, hurdy-gurdy, [...] the plosk fiddle, and the suka,
a 16th century fiddle played with the fingernails."

I'd never heard of them. I just listened to excerpts from their latest
album (Infinity) on iTunes, and I'm more than sold.

The show is 8pm November 6, at the Somerville Theater; tickets are
$25. Who's in? Invite your friends! I'm happy to buy a giant block of
seats for divvying up; if we get 10 9 3 more people, we
get a discount. =)

that was a FANTASTIC escape. dodge is much the same as i remember, and the kitten is still home and doing well :)