Fortuitously, while I was searching for the video to embed in Saturday's post, I found out about a two-thirds Irish, one third Cornish (shoutout to Chickpea, who you really should be reading) band named I Am Not Lefthanded. The internet being what it is, I had to seek out the band's music... how could one not seek out a band described thusly?
Playing sparse but uplifting post-grunge music, they’ve been described as sounding like ‘Natalie Merchant fronting Death Cab for Cutie’.
Anyway, here's a pretty, wistful number called Lifelines:
I'm glad I hunted down that old movie clip to embellish Saturday's post. One of the benefits of blogging is that it inspires one to chase down all sorts of leads on the t00bz, sometimes finding things of beauty. In this case, Inigo Montoya did all right by me.
Monday, March 9, 2015
Sunday, March 8, 2015
Signs of Spring
Anyone reading this blog for more than a month or so will know that I've been kvetching about the weather this past January and February. This weekend, though, gives me hope for the onset of spring. Besides the weather (two days of above-freezing temperatures!), there are other signs that Spring is imminent. Yesterday, a bunch of our seasonal workstaff came back to my principle worksite for a meeting concerning our upcoming season. I work nights, so I didn't see most of the attendees, but I did see the manager who has been boarding Fred and Ginger for the past three weeks of bone-chilling cold, and he will be bringing our beloved feline co-workers back sometime this week. We also had a lot of people pulling into the parking lot to check out our picturesque site, and I spent a good spell of time talking to a charming couple from Manhattan that had come up to the area on the train for some sightseeing. I had the good grace not to mention that I had been in Manhattan for the better part of the day- better to maintain the illusion of suburban tranquility. After giving them some restaurant recommendations, I told them to come back in a month, and earlier in the day, so they could have a nice tourist experience, because there's not of lot of "there here" in the off-season. Years ago, when I exchanged contact information with Radomir, he took one look at my 914 area code and quipped, "Oh, so you are a villager!"
Today, it was a positively balmy 46F (about 8C), and I could espy the shadows of a flock of birds on the dashboard of my car as I pulled out of my parking spot. This being the first day of Daylight Savings Time (did all of you dudes follow Tengrain's advice?), there was a good hour and a half of sunlight after I arrived at work. There was a gentleman who had parked in our lot to take photos. I did my regular start of shift inspection tour and found the site to be a muddy mire, but it was warm enough for me to take off my tuque and expose my glossy pate to the warmth of the sun for a while. Tomorrow, I'll probably indulge in my yearly ritual of shoveling show while wearing shorts, so I can break up some of the big snow piles in the neighborhood.
About an hour and a half ago, I found a car parked in our lot. I usually give people a "grace period" of ten or fifteen minutes before I give them the mildly accusatory, "Can I help you?" There was a middle-aged couple in the car, who turned out to be the parents of one of our seasonal employees, waiting for their daughter to come back from a workshop that she and some of our other employees had carpooled to. I joked that my usual line when I found couples in the parking lot was, "Get a hotel room!", which elicited a jocular, "We're too old for that!" response. I'll make sure to check out the parking lot later on to make sure they didn't get any ideas.
It is getting springlike, after all.
Today, it was a positively balmy 46F (about 8C), and I could espy the shadows of a flock of birds on the dashboard of my car as I pulled out of my parking spot. This being the first day of Daylight Savings Time (did all of you dudes follow Tengrain's advice?), there was a good hour and a half of sunlight after I arrived at work. There was a gentleman who had parked in our lot to take photos. I did my regular start of shift inspection tour and found the site to be a muddy mire, but it was warm enough for me to take off my tuque and expose my glossy pate to the warmth of the sun for a while. Tomorrow, I'll probably indulge in my yearly ritual of shoveling show while wearing shorts, so I can break up some of the big snow piles in the neighborhood.
About an hour and a half ago, I found a car parked in our lot. I usually give people a "grace period" of ten or fifteen minutes before I give them the mildly accusatory, "Can I help you?" There was a middle-aged couple in the car, who turned out to be the parents of one of our seasonal employees, waiting for their daughter to come back from a workshop that she and some of our other employees had carpooled to. I joked that my usual line when I found couples in the parking lot was, "Get a hotel room!", which elicited a jocular, "We're too old for that!" response. I'll make sure to check out the parking lot later on to make sure they didn't get any ideas.
It is getting springlike, after all.
Saturday, March 7, 2015
A Sinister Plan
Today was the second-to-last session of this semester of my volunteer gig. Next week, we have one last session, then we gather together for a luncheon and an awards ceremony for the kids who have shown the most progress since October. We had two classes, one class of girls aged eight and under (the youngest kids are typically four, usually the younger siblings of other program participants), and one class of girls aged nine and ten. The younger group was large, about twenty kids, while the older group only had five participants (we have a lot of attrition to school and municipal athletic programs, which is a good thing).
One thing I always stress to the kids is that if something feels "weird", it's not correct. Gripping an opponent's gi is fundamental to the sport, and occasionally I'll see a kid torquing their arm and gripping their oppponent's gi with their thumb facing down. I'll invariably comment, "Feels weird, no? If it's not comfortable, it's not judo." Similarly, when doing forward rolls, there's no need for an exaggerated "lunge". A normal step prefaces the not-so-normal-roll that we try to drill into our students so it becomes so natural they can execute it even if, say, they fall off of their bicycle while commuting home from the office, so they can dust themselves off and continue the ride home.
After the "official" program is over, we stay in the dojo so really motivated kids can spend an hour, from noon to 1AM, for more intensive instruction. Today, we had two students stay after, a girl of seven and a boy of nine. For me, the ideal class is eight to ten kids with a decent range of ages and sizes. Because of the size disparity, I decided to teach the kids some great "sneaky" techniques that are useful for dealing with larger opponents. Sasae tsuri-komi ashi is tailor made for a situation like this- as one's opponent circles around, you block the leading ankle so the top of their body continues to move while the bottom of their body is stopped. I also went over okuri ashi harai with them, because it's fun to practice- it looks like a dance.
After teaching these two new throws, I decided that I would devise a sinister plan- I would make the kids practice using a left handed grip. It's important to develop both sides of your body in the interest of symmetry and, to be perfectly honest, to make yourself a better fighter. I had the kids practice o soto gari, which is the first throw almost every judoka on the planet learns, switching from a right-handed stance to a left-handed stance, with the necessary changes in grip and a shift from stepping in with the left foot and "reaping" with the right leg to stepping with the right and "reaping" with the left. I told them, "Nice and slow, shift your grips and merely 'tap' your opponent's leg, then switch to the other side."
The boy, trying out the left-handed grip, told me, "But this feels weird!" I quipped, "It does for you, but it feels natural to me... that's why I'm making you practice it. If you feel comfortable but your opponent feels weird, you already have an advantage."
I'm a lucky bastard, one of my early sensei's was a lefty.
UPDATE: How could I be so remiss as to forget one of the greatest scenes in cinema?
I should have thought of embedding that video earlier, as I am aware of all tropes (warning, link is a major time-sink, click at your peril).
One thing I always stress to the kids is that if something feels "weird", it's not correct. Gripping an opponent's gi is fundamental to the sport, and occasionally I'll see a kid torquing their arm and gripping their oppponent's gi with their thumb facing down. I'll invariably comment, "Feels weird, no? If it's not comfortable, it's not judo." Similarly, when doing forward rolls, there's no need for an exaggerated "lunge". A normal step prefaces the not-so-normal-roll that we try to drill into our students so it becomes so natural they can execute it even if, say, they fall off of their bicycle while commuting home from the office, so they can dust themselves off and continue the ride home.
After the "official" program is over, we stay in the dojo so really motivated kids can spend an hour, from noon to 1AM, for more intensive instruction. Today, we had two students stay after, a girl of seven and a boy of nine. For me, the ideal class is eight to ten kids with a decent range of ages and sizes. Because of the size disparity, I decided to teach the kids some great "sneaky" techniques that are useful for dealing with larger opponents. Sasae tsuri-komi ashi is tailor made for a situation like this- as one's opponent circles around, you block the leading ankle so the top of their body continues to move while the bottom of their body is stopped. I also went over okuri ashi harai with them, because it's fun to practice- it looks like a dance.
After teaching these two new throws, I decided that I would devise a sinister plan- I would make the kids practice using a left handed grip. It's important to develop both sides of your body in the interest of symmetry and, to be perfectly honest, to make yourself a better fighter. I had the kids practice o soto gari, which is the first throw almost every judoka on the planet learns, switching from a right-handed stance to a left-handed stance, with the necessary changes in grip and a shift from stepping in with the left foot and "reaping" with the right leg to stepping with the right and "reaping" with the left. I told them, "Nice and slow, shift your grips and merely 'tap' your opponent's leg, then switch to the other side."
The boy, trying out the left-handed grip, told me, "But this feels weird!" I quipped, "It does for you, but it feels natural to me... that's why I'm making you practice it. If you feel comfortable but your opponent feels weird, you already have an advantage."
I'm a lucky bastard, one of my early sensei's was a lefty.
UPDATE: How could I be so remiss as to forget one of the greatest scenes in cinema?
I should have thought of embedding that video earlier, as I am aware of all tropes (warning, link is a major time-sink, click at your peril).
Friday, March 6, 2015
Countdown to the Solemn Feast of St Patrick: The Good Coulter
In keeping with tradition here, I spend the first couple of weeks of March counting down to St Patrick's Day. Today, I'll post a weepie that I posted before as a tangent to another post. The Town I Loved So Well, by Phil Coulter, describes the transition of his native Derry from a hardscrabble working-class town with not enough work, to a shell of a town, bombed out by The Troubles.
Grab a handkerchief, you're going to need it. At best, the life that Mr Coulter describes is far from idyllic:
In the early morning the shirt factory horn
Called women from Creggan, the moor, and the bog
Whilst the men on the dole played a mother's role
Fed the children and then walked the dog
And when times got tough, there was just about enough
And they saw it through without complaining
For deep inside was a burning pride
For the town I loved so well
With his talent, he was able to find a way out of the hard-knock town, the dream of many a striver:
There was music there in that Derry air
Like a language that we, we all could understand
I remember the day that I earned my first pay
When I played in a small pick-up band
There I spent my youth, and to tell you the truth
I was sad to leave it all behind me
For I learned about life, and I found a wife
In the town I loved so well.
Upon his return, though, he finds that his town has been riven by sectarian violence and government repression:
But when I returned, how my eyes have burned
To see how a town could be brought to it's knees
By the armoured cars and the bombed-out bars
And the gas that hangs on to every breeze
Now the army's installed by that old gas yard wall
And the damned barbed wire gets higher and higher
With their tanks and their guns, oh my god, what have they done
To the town I loved so well?
The song ends on a cautiously optimistic note, a wish for peace, though Mr Coulter mourns a past which is irrecoverable... so as not to spoil the climax of the song, I'll let you listen for yourselves:
As with a lot of modern Irish music, the song has been covered by a plethora of performers, with Luke Kelly and the Dubliners and Paddy Reilly singing particularly choice renditions of the song.
Wipe your tears, my dear readers, Phil Coulter didn't only write tearjerkers... along with Glasgow's Bill Martin, he wrote this bouncy little number:
You can't cry all the time... especially not on a Saturday night.
Regarding the title, the bad Coulter would be the one perhaps best known for her upcoming role in Sharknado 3.
Grab a handkerchief, you're going to need it. At best, the life that Mr Coulter describes is far from idyllic:
In the early morning the shirt factory horn
Called women from Creggan, the moor, and the bog
Whilst the men on the dole played a mother's role
Fed the children and then walked the dog
And when times got tough, there was just about enough
And they saw it through without complaining
For deep inside was a burning pride
For the town I loved so well
With his talent, he was able to find a way out of the hard-knock town, the dream of many a striver:
There was music there in that Derry air
Like a language that we, we all could understand
I remember the day that I earned my first pay
When I played in a small pick-up band
There I spent my youth, and to tell you the truth
I was sad to leave it all behind me
For I learned about life, and I found a wife
In the town I loved so well.
Upon his return, though, he finds that his town has been riven by sectarian violence and government repression:
But when I returned, how my eyes have burned
To see how a town could be brought to it's knees
By the armoured cars and the bombed-out bars
And the gas that hangs on to every breeze
Now the army's installed by that old gas yard wall
And the damned barbed wire gets higher and higher
With their tanks and their guns, oh my god, what have they done
To the town I loved so well?
The song ends on a cautiously optimistic note, a wish for peace, though Mr Coulter mourns a past which is irrecoverable... so as not to spoil the climax of the song, I'll let you listen for yourselves:
As with a lot of modern Irish music, the song has been covered by a plethora of performers, with Luke Kelly and the Dubliners and Paddy Reilly singing particularly choice renditions of the song.
Wipe your tears, my dear readers, Phil Coulter didn't only write tearjerkers... along with Glasgow's Bill Martin, he wrote this bouncy little number:
You can't cry all the time... especially not on a Saturday night.
Regarding the title, the bad Coulter would be the one perhaps best known for her upcoming role in Sharknado 3.
Thursday, March 5, 2015
Last Gasp?
Today, we received another four-to-six inches of snow in my neck of the woods. Luckily, yesterday was warm and rainy, so a lot of the dingy stuff on the ground melted before a mass of cold air moved into the area around 4AM and the snow started falling. I woke up around noon and commenced shoveling, joining my next door neighbor in our snowday ritual. After clearing the snow in front of my place and a couple of neighbors' houses, I went inside to have a cup of coffee and put a pot of split pea soup on the stove. An hour later, I was shoveling again. The weather report on the radio had mentioned that the snow was tapering off... nice joke.
After sweeping the bulk of the snow off the car, I made sure to clear a patch of street behind my car so I could pull out of my parking spot easily when it came time to leave for work. Dealing with this weather is like a chess game, you have to think a few moves ahead.
The drive to work was pretty uneventful, once I got off the not-so-well-plowed side streets in my neighborhood. I had enough time to stop at a supermarket on the way, and, among the staples, bought a can of sweetened condensed milk so I could make snow ice cream:
When life hands you lemons... I had never had snow ice cream before, but have been curious about if ever since reading Charles Portis' Masters of Atlantis. My favorite chapters in the novel involve an unlikely collaboration in a harebrained get-rich-quick scheme between all-American grifter Austin Popper and Mu-obsessed Romanian crank Professor Cezar Golescu (one of the greatest comic characters in American literature). In the novel, a young woman wooed by Austin Popper comes to call on him at the ramshackle house in which he and the Professor live, with a can of sweetened condensed milk among the dinner items she's bringing. Hilarity ensues.
The snow ice cream has a really nice texture. I wish I'd thought to bring some vanilla extract to jazz it up with, but the plain flavor was not bad at all. As nice as the snow ice cream is, I really am done with snow. I sure hope that this was winter's last gasp. If it's not, it might be mine!
After sweeping the bulk of the snow off the car, I made sure to clear a patch of street behind my car so I could pull out of my parking spot easily when it came time to leave for work. Dealing with this weather is like a chess game, you have to think a few moves ahead.
The drive to work was pretty uneventful, once I got off the not-so-well-plowed side streets in my neighborhood. I had enough time to stop at a supermarket on the way, and, among the staples, bought a can of sweetened condensed milk so I could make snow ice cream:
When life hands you lemons... I had never had snow ice cream before, but have been curious about if ever since reading Charles Portis' Masters of Atlantis. My favorite chapters in the novel involve an unlikely collaboration in a harebrained get-rich-quick scheme between all-American grifter Austin Popper and Mu-obsessed Romanian crank Professor Cezar Golescu (one of the greatest comic characters in American literature). In the novel, a young woman wooed by Austin Popper comes to call on him at the ramshackle house in which he and the Professor live, with a can of sweetened condensed milk among the dinner items she's bringing. Hilarity ensues.
The snow ice cream has a really nice texture. I wish I'd thought to bring some vanilla extract to jazz it up with, but the plain flavor was not bad at all. As nice as the snow ice cream is, I really am done with snow. I sure hope that this was winter's last gasp. If it's not, it might be mine!
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
The Annual Run-Up to the Solemn Feast of St Patrick Begins
In keeping with our annual tradition, every March I put up a series of videos of Irish music, trad and otherwise. I'm going to kick this year's countdown off with a great folk-rock number by the terrific (and Bastard-approved) band Horslips. King of the Fairies is a traditional set dance, which takes on a particular awesomeness when given the rooftop rock-out treatment, complete with awesome 70s 'staches and wide collars:
Me being me, my favorite part is the tin whistle solo beginning at the 2:23 mark. Damn, that's some badass tootling!
The "fairies" of Irish folklore are a far cry from the "Tinkerbell" style little winged critters. More properly known as the Aos Sí, they are the remnants of the old pagan gods of Ireland, the Tuatha Dé Danann, a entirely more "dangerous" category of otherworldly beings than that of the nursery tales. As one noted folklorist described them:
They're the things that you see
When you wake up and scream
The cold things that follow you
Down the boreen
They live in the small ring of trees on the hill
Up at the top of the field
Nobody's going to be clapping to keep these types alive!
Me being me, my favorite part is the tin whistle solo beginning at the 2:23 mark. Damn, that's some badass tootling!
The "fairies" of Irish folklore are a far cry from the "Tinkerbell" style little winged critters. More properly known as the Aos Sí, they are the remnants of the old pagan gods of Ireland, the Tuatha Dé Danann, a entirely more "dangerous" category of otherworldly beings than that of the nursery tales. As one noted folklorist described them:
They're the things that you see
When you wake up and scream
The cold things that follow you
Down the boreen
They live in the small ring of trees on the hill
Up at the top of the field
Nobody's going to be clapping to keep these types alive!
Sunday, March 1, 2015
In Like a Polar Bear
As the cliche goes, the month of March "comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb". Today, we're expected to receive three to six inches of snow. Walking around the jobsite, it looks like four inches have fallen. I have to confess that I slept until 2:30PM today because yesterday utterly wiped me out. Getting three hours of sleep, teaching for four hours and then going to work will do that to a guy. Some days, my activity cycle resembles that of a python or a crocodile- intense bursts of activity interspersed with periods of torpor. I just needed twelve hours of sleep today.
The drive to work was no fun at all, but it was uneventful. It was pretty much a 25MPH slog up the parkway, with one burst of higher speed to get myself out of an inexplicably bunched-up group of drivers. Really, people, give yourselves room to maneuver. When I exited the highway, I sang out, "Goodbye Sprain, goodbye Taconic, I felt your pain, and it was chronic!" Not sophisticated, but extemporaneous.
It's supposed to warm up later in the week, with the temperatures expected to be above freezing for the next three days. I'm sure glad that March has finally arrived, even though it's come in like a polar bear rather than a lion. Never mind the fact that it only has twenty-eight days, February is the longest month of the year.
The drive to work was no fun at all, but it was uneventful. It was pretty much a 25MPH slog up the parkway, with one burst of higher speed to get myself out of an inexplicably bunched-up group of drivers. Really, people, give yourselves room to maneuver. When I exited the highway, I sang out, "Goodbye Sprain, goodbye Taconic, I felt your pain, and it was chronic!" Not sophisticated, but extemporaneous.
It's supposed to warm up later in the week, with the temperatures expected to be above freezing for the next three days. I'm sure glad that March has finally arrived, even though it's come in like a polar bear rather than a lion. Never mind the fact that it only has twenty-eight days, February is the longest month of the year.
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