Category: Life

Chi and chi don’t even rhyme.

Well, that’s what English gets for borrowing words from other languages. Like squaw but without the aggrievement for fun and profit.

Lileks ain’t even humblebragging:

And apparently I am in the 1% of people my age who can do 50 pushups. I’m sure that’s absolutely scientifically and empirically true and I will hear no argument about it.

In other news, I should not challenge Lileks to a push-up duel any time soon. For although I was able to do fifty push-ups in my martial arts class yesterday, I shook my arms at the thirty and forty push-up marks.

I’m actually, apparently, working myself back into shape–I have an indoor triathlon in a month, and I’ve been trying to attend more martial arts classes these days (holidays and the school’s abbreviated schedule aside), and I’ve found that I have tired legs. I’d worry that my physical fitness ceiling has lowered as I have aged, but in all likelihood I just need to build back into it. After all, I do remember aching legs when I first started to do 5Ks six years ago (and my last was, what, three years ago? Two years ago?)

Ah, well, there are some things that money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s Advil.

By the way, back in those early days of martial arts, we put a bottle of Advil in the glove compartment in the car to pop one before class. So I suppose I am working too hard to discourage myself and to convince myself that the 2023 Winter Reading Challenge is a more important personal goal.

For The Love Of All That Is Holy, Stop Backing Into Parking Spaces:

It would not be unreasonable to assume a couple of thousand cars are coming and going from my neighborhood strip mall on a given day. Given that much traffic, there’s a basic formula for efficiency here: The time it takes to get your car into a space added to the time it takes to pull out of the space.

Now a great many drivers seem to be under the impression that, because being able to pull out of parking space when you’re already facing forward is a little quicker than backing straight out of a space, this somehow makes up for any extra time it took to back into the space. Please go to your local busy parking lot with a stopwatch. I assure you, it does not.

But, ah, my foes! And, ah, my friends! The timing of it is not what’s important. It’s a safety issue and a vision issue.

When you’re backing up, you are in an uncomfortable position with reduced vision just because you’re craned all the way around to see where you’re going–or you’re just using the context-free backup camera, in which case you’re already behaving unsafely enough that my advice won’t help you. So you have two choices as when to back up:

• When you’re pulling into the parking space. Which means the things in your peripheral vision will be stationary parked cars. Not many people on foot are going to dart between your car backing into a spot, as the space between the rear of your car and the other cars diminishes.
   
• When you’re backing into traffic from either direction and with pedestrians appearing on either side of your car and on either side of the traffic lane. Not to mention other cars backing out into the traffic lane that might be turning into the traffic lane in your blind spots.

Note when leaving driving forward, your position will generally be forward of center, which means you will not only have easier and better visibility into the traffic lane because you’re facing forward, but you’ll also have an earlier increasing field of view because you will be abreast of the edges of the other cars sooner than when you back out. When you’re backing out, you’re not only doing this:

via GIPHY

But more of your vehicle is exposed in the traffic lane before you get that increased visibility of clearing the parked cars.

Yeah, no. Pulling directly through an unclaimed parking spot so you can pull straight out is the best (mostly when the parking lines are parallel–when they’re at an angle, it’s less good as you have to cross more of the traffic lane to make sure you don’t clip the car next to you), but after that, backing into a spot is best, followed by parallel parking, and only then, as a last resort, backing into traffic.

I can’t believe I even have to point this out. But it’s a blog, and that’s what we do on blogs. Go on at length in spurious slap-fights.

So I called our portly cat The Big Kahuna this morning, and I got to thinking: Is that from the Annette Funicello/Frankie Avalon beach movies such as Bikini Beach or the 1960s television show Gidget starring Sally Fields? I’ve never actually seen any of the former, and although the latter was in syndication on channel 11 (KPLR) in St. Louis through the 1980s (along with The Flying Nun, another Sally Field vehicle from the 1960s), if I have seen any of them, it’s bits from when the television was on in the background–I cannot remember actually watching a full episode, much less multiple episodes of either.

Welp, gentle reader, it was neither.

Frankie Avalon’s character in the Beach movies had a nickname, but it was Moondoggie. Although there’s an episode of Gidget that features a character named simply Kahuna, it’s not probable that I picked that up as the source of the trivium.

No, gentle reader, The Big Kahuna is a character in…. Gidget, the 1959 movie starring Sandra Dee as Gidget. The movie, based on a novel of the same name, probably launched the beach movies and perhaps the California beach sound of the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, and so on. And, clearly, the television series which might have been closer to the books than the original film was.

A movie I have not seen, either.

I picked up a lot of trivia by reading things about popular culture, much more than experiencing popular culture. Which is just as well, since I don’t tend to watch streaming services as a matter of course and because:

1. Trivia nights timeline of trivia has reset so that all knowledge, and it’s mostly pop cultural knowledge, began in 1990;
2. When I caught sight of Jeopardy! at the gym earlier this week, it had questions about streaming television shows, and although I could name some of them, I’m a little less clear on the actors in them.

So I have some studying to do. Perhaps after I finish the Winter Reading Challenge 2023. And if only they had TV Superstars ’20 and TV Superstars ’22 books to clue me in.

An article in the New York Post entitled Gen Z shocked to see what 45-year-olds looked like in the 1990s got me to thinking.

A popular 1990s film has sparked a discussion about how Hollywood portrayed people in their 40s in the late-20th century versus today.

Filmmaker Jessica Ellis started the conversation when she tweeted a poster for “Father of the Bride 2,” featuring stars Steve Martin and Diane Keaton in their classic mom and dad get-ups.

* * * *

“An unbelievable thing that has changed in 30 years is that in 1995, this was supposed to be what 45-year-olds looked like,” Ellis wrote, clarifying that she was referring to the movie characters — not the actors themselves.

This led me to two separate musings, which I will sketch out into two bullet points instead of developing two full themes for them:

• The previous generation always looks older.
  If you’re of a certain age, gentle reader, you might think old looks like beehive hairdos and big sideburns. Because that’s what you might have seen on your parents when you were young and they were older than you. I am pretty sure I have hammered on this theme before, but I still think it’s true, although it will probably be less true for later generations since Gen X and onward has always dressed down.
   
• Movies are changing to reflect changing audiences.
  I have remarked on this before regarding music–that modern music has changed to reflect the tastes of the people who attend live music concerts and clubs–but the same could be true of movies. You’ve probably seen articles about how families are not going to the movies, and who has time to binge watch streaming services–it ain’t parents with families. So movies are now R-rated comedies, superhero movies, and whatnot–the big ticket ones, anyway. The people you see in the tabloids tend to be people who go to events and who are struggling to remain young and in the spotlight. So the actual depiction of adults in popular culture might skew to younger-striving people instead of people with the responsibilities of actual adults.

  Perhaps one could wonder what changes to the employment marketplace has also altered the business-casually dressing parents in the intervening years. Fewer and fewer people have to adhere to the dress codes that would put a man in a shirt with a collar or a woman with a skirt during the day, which likely would alter depictions and memories of them in the future.

I dunno. I do wonder if my boys will be outliers amongst their peers in the future for having a father who looked old. I do spend a lot of time in business casual clothing and a fedora, which made me look old in the 1990s, and older now that I am not a kid in a fedora.

We took our Christmas decorations down on New Year’s Day, which is a bit earlier than normal–we’re not hidebound to leaving everything up until Epiphany–and we usually take them down the weekend after New Year’s Day. As it turns out, that holiday was on a Sunday, and it would have seemed weird to have them up for a whole week after that.

This year seemed to take longer, or perhaps it was part of the diminishing experience I have with Christmas as I grow older, but the two hours of untangling lights from trees, boxing ornaments, and moving oh-so-many boxes to the understairs storage area and banging my head on the top of the doorframe 8% of the time, we got everything put away. We have an extra tree this year, handed down from my mother-in-law, who was inspired by my sainted mother’s Christmas tree protocol. At the end of the season, my mother would put a large bag over her fully decorated tree and have me boost it into her attic intact. My mother-in-law would throw a bag over her tree with the lights on it and have one of us carry it to her Spartanly appointed garage. So for most of this year, it was intact in our garage, which Marie Kondo herself with Herculean effort and perhaps a diverted river could only reduce to “extremely cluttered.” Yes, gentle reader, as you can imagine, the garage has more garbage (that is, raw ingredients for crafts from inspirations years past, a little something laid up, underused Nerf guns and unused sporting equipment, and all sorts of tools and yard gear that we use once every couple of years if not only once) than this sentence, the preceding sentence, and perhaps this whole paragraph which has wandered quite afield from its topic sentence.

At any rate, the mother-in-law tree was on our lower level, and the one the kittens played in the most (see also). We didn’t have a box for it, and I battered it into some bags to stuff under the stairs–which has gotten really full as I repackaged some items, which probably means we put underpacked or empty boxes under there).

But, as you know, we often find one Christmas decoration set in an out of the way place, leading to almost annual posts on the topic. But this year, with the kitten protocols in place, we limited our decorations. We didn’t put much breakable out. Mostly, we put up plush or stuffed decorations along with a couple special photos and a couple of pine cone and pine bough things that are in pretty rough shape and that the kittens could probably not damage. So this year, I was pretty sure that we got everything.

Then I sat down to watch a little football.

Friends, that is pretty far afield of where we had the tree.

So even though I was careful to look on the bookshelves next to the tree’s location for ornaments we had picked up and placed on books after the kittens knocked them down, apparently, I was not thorough enough in looking for Christmas ornaments elsewhere.

So I have picked up this ornament and another, but given kittens, it’s entirely possible we’ll find a feline soccer team’s worth of ornaments elsewhere throughout the year.

On Friday evening, as I grilled our steaks for the evening, I told my beautiful wife that we might need a new chimney starter soon, as our current one is showing some buckling from its constant exposure to fire and flaming coals.

On Saturday, I got this ad in my Facebook feed interspersed amongst pictures of David Gilmour–for some reason, probably because I liked the official Pink Floyd page a decade ago, suddenly I see all kinds of Dave Gilmour and other Pink Floyd fan pages’ posts as “Suggested for You”:

I did not text this to her. I said this to her in passing in the kitchen as I was getting the steaks to put on the grill.

Coincidence? A false pattern spotted by my brain because I was looking for a pattern? Or the truth?

Although from the image, it might not be a chimney starter. It looks fairly industrial. Perhaps something for smelting metals or tempering steel.

Having kittens means you get to enjoy the, well, joy of decorating the Christmas tree every day when you replace the non-breakable, non-heirloom decorations and hitch up the lights like loose trousers dragging towards the floor. But, still, they’ve been a joy.

That’s one Christmas tree our kittens did not invade–because we kept them away while we built it.

My beautiful wife wanted an image for one of her LinkedIn posts, so we built a book tree like you see on the Internet from our old tech books. The books include:

• Primers on operating systems such as VAX, OpenVMS, Windows NT, Windows 95, and OS X
• Computers like Apple II, Commodore 84, and PET/CBM
• Programming languages from Machine Language, J++ (Microsoft’s brief attempt at replicating Java), a pile of ASP.NET (which probably belonged to my wife who has now tricked me to tuck them in with my tech library to free space on her shelves), C, C++, C#, VisualBasic, Java, JavaScript, PHP, iOS SDK / Objective C, SwiftUI
• Hardware and networking books from the turn of the century, when I studied those topics briefly at the community college and got a large collection from eBay for $100, a real steal but it would have been a better steal if I’d ever read them
• A couple of testing books like the ones from James Whittaker
• A handful of security books, including one that prompted this comment on my wife’s post on LinkedIn:

  

I know, I know, it’s not the reason for the season, but we will attend church this morning and exchange gifts and eat turkey, but our normally small gathering will again be diminished by immobility and continuing COVID fears.

It will also be the last day for listening to Christmas records, and, no, I won’t have made it through all of the Christmas records we own, which is a substantial number.

But we will make time for this Christmas classic:

Merry Christmas, gentle reader.

The Just Like Cats and Dogs comic from last week’s The Licking News:

That’s a pretty cut rate treadmill. The ones at the YMCA all have two places to put things, and I have been known to bring snacks and drinks to treadmill time. When running or biking during indoor triathlons, I bring fruit snacks to savor as a reward for each segment of the time on the equipment.

Even the elliptical we have at home and barely use has slots for water bottles and whatnot. So either the cartoonist is unfamiliar with actual treadmills or the cartoonist is only familiar with the basest models.

Look at me, correcting and talking back to a cartoon. I must be a blogger.

I might have mentioned that my Facebook feed is basically ads, promoted posts (Suggested for you, I suspect, is just an ad by another name), a couple things from people I went to high school with, a posts from Gimlet’s wife showing their kids, bible quote posts from that guy who runs 5Ks in a Speedo and then his, erm, saucy comments on the posts of Influencers who showcase their legs, rock music posts, and old movie posts. I’m not sure whether the algorithm has improved my engagement–sometimes I slow down a bit on some of the posts, but I don’t click buttons on them.

But they do give me blog fodder.

Like this one from some twee pop culture site which is going to tell me about martial arts:

A spin kick (or a jump spin kick) or something like a spin knife hand can be just as powerful or more powerful than a lift or step kick. A spin heel kick, for example, can combine the motion of the spin with the motion of just the leg to knock someone’s block off. And we’re not allowed to throw spin ridge hands in touch sparring because it’s too powerful–and, to be honest, too easy to miss your distance and timing so that you hit someone full power, that is, hard enough to hurt them.

You don’t throw a spin kick first, though, because the wind up is quite visible. However, if you want to throw two strikes from the same side, or if you want to use the momentum from the twist of your body to add power to a second strike, you use the spin. Say you’re in a guard stance with your left side forward (if you’re right handed, this is kind of natural). When you throw a turn round kick with your back leg, you pivot on your left leg as turn your body to strike with your riight leg.
Your body is already rotating counterclockwise, so you can put the right leg and continue the momentum, pivoting now on your right to spin and kick with your left leg. It’s one motion, and it can be quick and smooth.

As to flips, I agree, that’s cinematic. But rolls have their place. My current school does not emphasize forward and backward rolls as much as the bujinikan dojo where I studied for a few months. Rolls are helpful when you lose your balance and have to regain your feet relatively quickly. Standing back up is slow, but carrying the momentum of the fall a little further until your feet are under you is not. This is most useful for martial arts that emphasize strikes from a standing position, not necessarily grappling arts like Brazilian Jui-Jitsu.

Of course, that’s only the experience of a experience and perspective of an eight-year student of martial arts who’s off to get his but kicked in a black belt boot camp later today ahead of perhaps rank confirmation testing next weekend and not that of an actual instructor or an Internet listicle writer.

And, no, I did not click through to the actual listicle to see what the other 11 dumb things. No need reward the algorithm for showing this to me.

Namely, “Two Tramps in Mud Time“:

Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard,
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily “Hit them hard!”
I knew pretty well why he had dropped behind
And let the other go on a way.
I knew pretty well what he had in mind:
He wanted to take my job for pay.

Good blocks of oak it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.
The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good,
That day, giving a loose my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.

Not the complete poem; That’s the first two stanzas. Gentle reader, you would most likely know it from its closing lines:

Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

As you know, gentle reader, that is the source of the title of Robert B. Parker’s Mortal Stakes, back in the old days when his writing was deep and rich. Or, if not deep and rich, before he went Hollywood and his prose got thin.

So how, exactly, am I living it?
Continue reading “Brian J. Lives Out The Robert Frost Poem” →

Well, this is probably no true diagnostic, but….

I pronounce Francis different than Frances.

C’mon, man, one sounds like sis and one sounds like ses.

So my youngest son has decided he is a numismatician. Apparently, this hobby has fallen to the point where spellchecking does not recognize it. But he has been watching YouTube videos on different errata coins and their value. He has gone to the bank to buy rolls of coins to look through and see if he can find a rare coin amongst them. So to encourage him in something that is mostly off the phone or video game system, I took him to a coin and stamp show at Relics this weekend.

They had a special program for the youth, where not only did they get a little sack with a couple of low value coins in them and a five dollar voucher to use at the booths, but they also gave him a quiz worksheet where he could stop at certain flagged booths for the answer, and when he filled the worksheet out, he got another three dollar voucher for a total of eight bucks in free coins, essentially.

I was a proud poppa, impressed that he knew most of the answers on the worksheet without having to ask the people in the flagged booths. And he could talk to the collectors about the different patterns in paper currency that made them valuable for collectors.

But among the various things I accumulate, I have never felt called to gather coins. I mean, as a kid, I had some folders that I think started out at my mother’s with pennies from the wheat back era. I might still have those, as a matter of fact, nestled amongst photo albums. And although I have some foreign notes (and, as I mentioned, previously owned a collection of foreign coins which I sold a long time ago). I considered getting a couple of collectible folders so the boy and I could do them together, but I have not acted on them.

And then we came to a booth with foreign currency. The man behind the table told us that he used to collect American money, but when he turned fifty, he started to collect foreign coins instead. And I looked into one of his cabinets and saw Japanese coins from 1868, and I thought, “That’s the Meiji restoration period.”

So they got me. Not just foreign money, but historical coins. So I bought a couple.

I bought three Japanese coins from the Meiji Restoration era (1868, 1881, and 1883) and a well-worn Roman coin. I looked through the Roman coins–the ones at this table had later emperors on them. I did see a nice coin with Marcus Aurelius on it at another booth, but it was $95, and I am neither far enough into the hobby to warrant it. In times when I am feeling flush with cash, I might have bought it, but we’re not in that period now. So I forebore.

So they saw me coming. Well, probably not, but I am definitely interested in historical coins. I mean, Tom Cruise’s character from The Last Samurai might have handled these coins! Well, no, but when I’m reviewing the history of Japan or ancient Rome, I will have bits of the history to touch.

Now, let’s see how much of a collector I actually become. Most likely, not much, as I don’t think I’ll go to coin shows on my own. But one never knows.

Also, I have learned that people collect smashed penny souvenirs that my son has collected from an early age, and I saw numerous video game and other tokens on tables, so there’s some market for those. Which is good, as I have a box full of tokens from various arcades that closed before I used the tokens (or changed over to electric card readers). Maybe I can realize some value in them. But not much.

WAIT A MINUTE. Clearly, I am not a keen-eyed coin collector, as I see in previewing this post, where the photo of the coins is larger than actual size, that one of the Japanese coins is from 1668 and not 1868. So from the Tokugawa Shogunate period, not the Meiji restoration. Ah, well. Still cool.

Ducks Unlimited offers some cutlery for a donation:

This knife set includes an 8″ chef knife and a 3½” paring knife for all of your kitchen needs.

Gentle reader, I could get by with that, I mean, dubious quality of the free knives aside (probably about as good as a Ginsu knife, ainna?), I cut some vegetables sometimes and maybe a melon or two.

But my beautiful wife is a cook, and she has needs that far outstrip mine. I mean, you cannot safely spatchcock a chicken with either of those.

So two knives would certainly not meet all of our kitchen needs.