Most tai chi chuan (aka taijiquan) videos are New Age snoozers of the yoga-hippies-on-the-beach variety. You’d never guess from them that tai chi is originally a martial art with serious defensive and offensive applications. That’s why I applaud Internal Damage: Advanced Tai Chi Chuan for Combat (DVD, $40).… Read the rest
Month: July 2006 (Page 2 of 2)
“Gee, what a beautiful sunset! If only I had an inspiring Zen poem to make this moment last forever.” Mr Haiku (from the engaging Duke of Uke)… Read the rest
Without trying to defend the clueless Senator Ted Stevens, I still have to ask: Why was it stupid for him to say the Internet is a “series of tubes” but it’s smart when people in the know call it a “bunch of pipes“?… Read the rest
Here’s a story I wrote a couple months ago that I really had fun with. The working title was “the palimpsest in the synchrotron,” which I loved, just because I got to use the words “palimpsest” and “synchrotron” in the same sentence.… Read the rest
After pulling my hair out for a few hours, I learn that Internet Explorer doesn’t render table widths exactly as you specify them in the “WIDTH” properites, unless you add “table-width: fixed” to the table’s style sheet. Aarrgh. IEBlog : Table Rendering… Read the rest
I can’t find a decent explanation anywhere of why the #1 soccer player in France would headbutt another player in the final moments of the big game. This is as good as any: “the lofty hermeneut within me saw it as the supreme existentialist gesture—le grand refus—at the very moment of being inducted into multicultural sainthood by Chirac.”… Read the rest
Kyle MacDonald started with a single red paperclip, and, through a series of trades, managed to exchange it for a whole house: one red paperclip… Read the rest
Leaving aside the tiresome journalists vs bloggers debate for a moment, here’s a chewy piece by Tom Stites about the failings of newspapers over the past 10-20 years to address the needs of all citizens. In fact, newspapers have been deliberately turning away readers from the bottom tiers of the economy, Stites persuasively argues:
… Read the restWhat really makes me twitch is that the amount and distribution of serious reporting that people can read are both dwindling, and they’re dwindling in a way that all but cuts off citizens who are less than affluent – the hourly wage earners, the marginally self-employed, the Wal-Mart shoppers, the regular folks of America.
Excellent guiding principle: “Concrete is much easier to work with before it is poured.” Todd Lappin – 15 Minutes of Madness… Read the rest