CleverBlogName

It’s nice when what seems like common sense is borne out by closer inspection; indeed, mangrove destruction aggravating disasters of the sea got a bit of play in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Not that I expect it to make much impact on the chronically, criminally stupid. One can but hope the motley crew are on the beach to reap the consequences of their handiwork one day.

The quote of the final piece must go to “engineer” Andre Labonte, who is ripping out magroves to improve the views of a coastal subdivision. I wonder where he will be if it gets flattened—suggesting the survivors contact the taxpayer for disaster relief, perhaps?

While looking at ways to make Grendel, Jaques, and Isis co-exist more comfortably in our house, Kris recommended some Feliway, which has a good record, in the CPL’s experience, of helping cats stay happy under changed circumstances; it replicates some key cat pheremones and makes the place smell (to a cat) like everything has been thoroughly marked safe.

Unfortunately, I’ve discovered it’s got one drawback: if, like me, you’ve got cat allergies, having Feliway gently disperses through the whole house automatically is not such a good thing. In fact, it turned out to leave me with a constant haze of asthma and migranes. I’ll probably try it again in case it turns out that it was something else causing the problem as a coincidence, but it looks like Feliway isn’t for everyone.

Maire has already detailed a bit about Grendel: he broke into the house last week, and got into a hell of a fight with our cats. Once it became apparent he was injured and appeared to be a stray—a reasonable assumption about an adult tom cat with dreadlocks growing down his back—we dropped him off with the SPCA, thinking they’d help him.

That turned out to be a bit of a mistake. I got a ring the next day at work from someone at the SPCA’s office explaining that he was dangerous and they couldn’t handle him, and it was most likely they would put him down; they were having to sedate him just to treat his injuries.

I couldn’t have that.

Having—albeit unintentionally—trapped the bugger and handed him over to the SPCA, I feel repsponsible for him, at least to the extent that he doesn’t end up getting killed. He’s a massive, healthy tom, and dreads, the fight, and a few fleas aside, is in pretty good nick. I did a little reading and decided I’d have a go at socialising him to people, with a view to getting him a good home next year. Maire agreed to this plan, and we solicited the help of Kris from the Cats Protection League to offer us some advice on whether I was off in la-la land with my web browser; she suggested it was actually doable, if fairly difficult.

So I asked the SPCA to neuter him and shave his back. After all, the latter option is quite popular amongst the modern male, so it moves the big bruiser into the metrosexual set. We collected him on Christmas Eve; unfortunately there’s no way of explaining to the lad that his Christmas present is not having his nuts chopped off, it’s getting to live. He also gained a name: Grendel, after the Old English monster that invades halls and eats the occupants.

Kris had bought around a holding cage of the sort the SPCA and the CPL use for their resident cats as a first place to begin acclimatising him, and we installed it, Grendel, and some creature comforts in the spare room. So far he’s been easy to handle—I haven’t had a bite or scratch yet, or even an attempt at same. He’s eating, drinking, and yet to develop a clue about his litter box. But he has gone from squatting in the corner of the laundry in terror to glaring out from his new bed:

He’s absolutely enormous: his muscles have muscles. What look like big, fluffy cheeks are actually massive jaw muscles with a bit of fur over the top, and his neck is roughly the same size as my arm. He’s beginning to develop a little more confidence, going as far as to hiss a couple of times when being take out of his cage for a cage cleaning.

This is one of the most mealy-mouth, cop-out pieces of crap I’ve ever seen in the Economist. For a publication that appeals to the notion of absolute, objective economic realities when dismissing government programs it dislikes, this piece of horseshit masquerading as journalism is one of the most malodorous pieces of hypocracy I’ve seen recently.

The UC system wishes to ensure people taking science courses understand actual science, rather than religious studies. How, precisely, is this unreasonable? Science courses do not accept students, contrary to the final assertion, whose entire understanding of physics is predicated on a rejection of logic as a patriarchial tools of oppression, either. This is just as absurd.

Really.

This is a nifty little mod_rewrite calculator for the specific purpose of helping build allow-by-referrer lists. Neat-o.

On the one hand, this is repulsive shit that makes me very, very angry indeed. On the other hand, “White Crusaders of the Racial Holy War”? Perhaps you ought to move out of mummy and daddy’s basement before you start your white supremecist movement.

So, having had a go at it before, I’m left to wonder if the newest fad in religious abuse of children in Britain is real, or yet another hysterical nonsense, mostly driven by a different stripe of religious fanatic.

“I am sure cases are under-reported. Spirit possession is almost certainly under-reported.”

Actually, I’m fairly spirit possession is, in fact, massively over reported. Now, if the good inspector meant that belief of spirit possession, and odd behaviour based upon this belief, is under reported, I might believe him.

Seriously, WTF? Hopefully the judge is in the mood to administer a good hard kick up the arse, but I can’t even begin to imagine why attacking someone for speaking Chinese to their friend, on a train, would seem like a good idea.

A couple of weeks ago we had a visit from Dutch 6th dan Jaap Niezen; Jaap is a a specialist in the kata of judo, and tours Germany and the Netherlands to hold clinics. His sons had shouted him a trip to New Zealand for his seventieth birthday, and he visited our dojo because, as one of the sons put it, “he can’t spend 4 weeks with no Judo.”

All the better for us.

Alan had let people around the area know that Jaap would be there, but we seemed to get fewer non-Budokan judoka than you’d expect, and most of them were spectators rather than on the mat. Oh well, their loss.

And it was their loss. I can see why Jaap is in demand; while he’s capable of putting a stern face on, he’s a very charistmatic guy who had the class in the palm of his hand; his admonishments are just hard enough to be taken seriously, but without the kind of venom or sense of singling out that could make a student feel like giving up rather than persisting.

Probably his most valuable attribute as a teacher is a good sense of what he needs to tell people—it’s easy when someone reaches a high degree of skill to forget all the little things that bedevil the less able, and Jaap has a real knack for working out what you don’t know, and focusing on that. Since we were, for the most part, a kyu class doing naga-no-kata, he put a lot of focus on drumming proper terms and concepts into us; he went into more detail around the more sophisticated kata toward the end, with the dan grades.

The format was fairly straightfoward; Jaap pulled two of the senior (brown belt) students out (Dave and Simon) and had them run through a throw as tori and uke. Jaap would identify weaknesses in their execution; for example, after uki otoshi, Jaap quizzed Simon as to what otoshi means—and given that it means “fall” or “drop”, could Simon please re-do the throw dropping his uke down, rather than hurling Dave into the distance. For some throws Jaap would put questions to the class, and for others he would demonstrate himself. Once he felt we had a good example to work from, we would be turned out on the mat to practise as tori and uke, with our own instructors assisting Jaap. The only thing lacking was time.

The best thing I took away was his very clear explanations of why we do things; as I mentioned before, I’d been doing the three-step when practising technique, but no-one had mentioned why it’s three steps. Now I have a better handle on it. Jaap’s insistence on Japanese terms for techniques, and breaking those terms down to explain how the throws work, was also valuable[1], since it’s done a bit to drum some of the terminology into my head.

One pleasing moment that had nothing to do with technique was when an older visitor who’d come to see Jaap asked about techniques he felt were “impolite” to perform with women. Jaap drew himself up, pointed to one of the women dan-ranked players, and announced, “When I do judo, I am judoka. When she does judo, she is judoka. There is no difference.” Which is how it is in our dojo, but it’s nice to see an older teacher spell it out so clearly.

[1] Japanese martial arts tend to have functional names for techniques, as opposed to, say, some forms of kung fu. There most poetic name that comes to mind is the jigoku jime. Which is the “hell strangle.”