the tweney review

My Taijiquan teacher, Mark Chen, has written a book: Old Frame Chen Family Taijiquan. It’s a terrific introduction to the principles, techniques, philosophy, and history of Taijiquan (aka Tai Chi Chuan). It is also the best-written martial arts book I’ve ever read. Mark’s approach is very concrete, practical, and rational; there’s none of the mumbo-jumbo and fuzzy thinking that clouds other Taiji texts. Instead, he presents a clear-eyed, helpful, and sympathetic overview of Chen style Taijiquan–perhaps the most martial, and certainly the most dynamic, version of Taijiquan. I definitely recommend it.

(Note: This is not the book’s actual cover … but it’s what Amazon has, so I’m using it for now.)

Spotted just outside Santa Rosa, a hand-lettered cardboard sign tacked to a telephone pole:

Martha Stuart for President!

There’s this guy on my block who is always walking around, grumbling and growling and laughing to himself. He’s tall, his hair is wild, and he walks around with his eyes cast down, mostly, sometimes pulling on a cigarette as he grumbles along. He’s such a permanent fixture of the neighborhood that I’ve long since stopped worrying about him, even though I’ve never heard an intelligible word out of his mouth–and he’s never responded to a single hello. So this morning as I was switching the car seats around, he walks by on the sidewalk behind me. Suddenly he stopped, mid-growl, and said, clear as the morning sun, “Say, do you have the time?”

Scared the bejeezus out of me.

Amazing photos of Chernobyl today, by a Ukrainian woman who likes to bike through the area on her 147hp Kawasaki Ninja.

Note to Google: Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to launch Gmail on April 1.

Note to Slashdot, BoingBoing, Engadget, and nearly every other tech blog: Running fake stories for April Fool’s Day might seem funny to you, but none of these stories were actually all that funny. Worse, they had the unfortunate side effect of making every single thing you posted that day, including Gmail announcements, completely suspect.

Sheesh. And bloggers wonder why journalists are still in business.

UPDATE April 4: Engadget didn’t run any bogus stories, other than linking to that left-handed phone thing, and they’ve corrected that. Apologies to Peter Rojas for lumping him in with the rest of the blogetariat.

NPR : Study: Pricing Less Competitive Online

A study by MIT finds that the Internet, where customers can easily comparison shop, is actually less price competitive than traditional store retailers.

Sorta: NPR guides us to the budding Appalachian phenomenon of hick-hop. Holler 2 the hood, y’all!

Somewhat more successful: this collaboration between Dirk Powell and DJ DanjaMowf.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone, but cnet reports that the rise of moblogs is being driven in large part by risque photos of pretty young things. (Sometimes with octopi.) After some bloviating by the analysts about how the real future of camphones are in the real estate business (yeah, right) the story gets to the point: “I might not want my 5-year-old on the site,” says Chris Hoar, a founder of moblog site TextAmerica. “It’s risque at best.” No better way to keep people racking up the minutes on their calling plans.