Synova

First of all I really didn't do anything significant to the holiday. I went to karate camp. I packed up four kids, a tent, and a van-load of gear and drove a bit less than 20 miles to unload it all again. My 9 and 11 year olds wanted to camp and this way we were close enough to bail out if they couldn't handle the reality of "out in a tent overnight." Camp was great. Primarily it seems to be about gathering upper level people from all over, who may have their own Kojosho Karate schools, so they have an opportunity to compare notes and get some instruction themselves. A handful of color belts who are local get to go too and it's just mind-blowing. The most fun thing was applying the wind element to self-defense holds. I'm talking about those "someone grabs you and ends up with their arm twisted behind their back" things. I hate those. It's not just that I forget how to do them, it's that I can never figure it out to start. ...

I'll admit it, disaster is not my genre. I prefer action-adventure. But I may just change my mind. If I do, you can blame Komodo vs. Cobra. I'm flipping along past the sci-fi channel and there's a huge komodo dragon and three scared people standing in a river and the old guy says... "Don't move! Whatever you do don't move!" Seeing as komodo dragons are big on eating carrion I find this rather confusing. Does dead stuff run away? Or do they just not want the big lizard to get tired before it eats? One guy runs and gets eaten. Cut to a scene with a guy in uniform with hair over his ears. So I go make dinner and come back to my puter for the next installment. A bunch of highly photogenic young people with backpacks along with an even more photogenic reporter and camera-man enter a huge house to find that no one is there. The camera man goes outside for a smoke (Don't do it! You're gonna get eaten!). An incredibly cute brunette wit...

For all of you wondering what to do about Murtha. It's just too bad I can't vote for her.

According to this article, 40% of us. I'm calling BS. Seriously folks, what is going on here? If I were a woman who *was* abused I'd be pissed. Well, okay, probably I wouldn't be angry at all. Probably I'd have such a poor concept of my own worth that it wouldn't occur to me to be angry on my own behalf. 13% of women reported that the abuse went on for 20 years. Now that makes more sense to me. I've known abused women, had co-workers who were abused... and most of them would stay for 20 years. The rest of us have arguments or bad days and exchange snotty, pouty, and hurtful remarks. Some of us grow past this and have our tear filled shout fests *without* the hurtful remarks. Most people have good times and bad times in their relationships. This is normal. Most of us can tell the difference between being abused and our partner (or ourself) having a bad day. Typically women who are abused stay with their abuser. The reason that this is *...

Nothing wrong with that. He's anti-war. Nothing wrong with that. But that doesn't give him the right to misrepresent either facts or information in the service of that agenda. In his interview of Sully from Godsmack (which was mostly about Jay, but nothing wrong with that) he talked about doing research on the issue and that he was right. A post to the comments section questioning his "facts" gets deleted. A post that points out how disrespectful of young people he's been gets deleted. A post suggesting that the military respects young people gets deleted. So someone posts a comment about how all the defenders of Godsmack use profanity and call people fags. Well I can explain that too... post a critical comment that *doesn't* use profanity or call Jay Babcock a fag and it will get deleted. Unlike most blog owners or forum administrators, rather than delete profane posts he leaves them, and deletes the non-profane rational arguments. Anyone who reads t...

The Kojosho Karate shaving team! Donations can be made for the next three months, though by that time they'll have HAIR. Who needs hair? It just gets in your face. (That's my husband in the back.) People with long hair sent it to Locks of Love. (I don't know who had the longest hair but I think that Taylor's was the prettiest. Some little girl with cancer will get a fantastic blond wig. I don't think she'll worry much about boy-cooties.) People with hair over two inches long put it in a baggie. I'm not sure what they did with it. The Klingon Princess. I'm not old enough to have a son who looks this grown up. (Actually, I am, some of my friends have kids out of the house already. EEep!) Prettier than Natalie Portman. :-) I'm told the donation pages will be active for the next three months. Donations can be made to the team or to individuals (scroll down and click on their pictures.) Hey, it's a good cause and it will really give the...

I find all the different sorts of bumble bees in my garden fascinating. Where I grew up in Minnesota we just had one sort... a big black and yellow bee. Here are two that were on my lilac today. The first is a tan bee about twice the size of a honey bee. The second is just huge, probably three quarters of an inch long and nearly as wide. The orange band around it's middle was absolutely vibrant in the sun. This is at 6800 feet in the Sandia mountains. I wish I knew the names of them.

Why do people not trust science or intellectuals? Maybe because this article never mentions anything at all about how infant mortality is counted in different countries. It's just too much fun to have a headline that shows the US in a bad light. This is the kind of stuff we get all the time from one source or another. Why do we not trust scientists who say the sky is falling or anything else? Because over and over and over again we see that *facts* don't matter. Who believes that medical care in the US and pre-natal care in the US is sooooo bad that we've got one of the very worst infant mortality rates in the 1st world? Hint... we count births differently .

I have a question, should anyone stop by who might know. I'm writing a scene where my SF/SF trainer guy takes off into the woods to find a missing Airman. I've given him a .45, one extra magazine and a knife and figure that he'd have brought water (canteens? camelpack?) and some sort of food bars. (He's got zero expectation of combat.) He is probably expecting to find the missing person suffering from some degree of exposure. What items might he be expected to have at hand and bring with him? His start point is a camp in the mountains where SF have been training. If he originally brings a pack of some sort he's going to lose it, so mostly I need to know what is tied to him or in his pockets. Help?

Good nutrition pays off. A friend of mine had a special red silk dress made for her wedding (her husband is chinese) and sent her measurements to have the dress made... they just couldn't believe that her measurements were *real* so she had to have the dress re-done to take the waist *way* in. It's a fabulous dress. :-)

I believe her. It's too bad, really, and unfortunate, but I can see it happening the way she says. The thing is, if you *were* copying someone elses work you'd change the things that were left the same, wouldn't you? But if you'd read something many times and were writing your own novel with a similar "voice" and cadence and you're humming along making stuff up as you go, it makes sense that some descriptions might come out the same. I do that sometimes with my *own* stuff... not copying someone elses words (I hope) but my own... every now and then I'll think, hey wait... have I written that before? But you re-read and revise and after a while it get's all jumbled up. Read any author who's written a lot of books and after a while phrases will start to pop out at you that are repeats from one book to another. They don't do that on purpose either.

This has got to be the diffinitive answer to the "retired generals." American Citizen Soldier : Demigods and Generals.

My son took this picture from my parent's dock last summer.

"Thus the pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless. If it is formless, then even the deepest spy connot discern it or the wise make plans against it." Very cool. I like this part too... "Men all know the disposition by which we attain victory, but no one knows the configuration through which we control the victory. Thus a victorious battle [strategy] is not repeated, the configurations of response [to the enemy] are inexhaustible." If I'm understanding the little notes right "disposition" and "configuration" are translations of the same word. "Now the army's disposition of force is like water. Water's configuration avoids heights and races downward. The army's disposition of force avoids the substantial and strikes the vacuous. Water configures it's flow in accord with the terrain; the army controls its victory in accord with the enemy. Thus the army does not maintain any constant strategic config...

My oldest daughter and her friend (in the head gear) in April. I wish I'd got into martial arts when I was a kid, but I have to be honest. I'd probably have gotten hit in the nose and quit.

It's no secret that I'm a fan of Kung Fu movies. If I had to chose between meeting Spielberg or Jackie Chan I'd want to meet Jackie. Jet Li is pretty darned impressive, too. And let us not neglect Bruce. Not to favor the chinese overmuch but Steven Segal and even the incredibly sexy Van Damme come in second. Plus, they have the same problem as Chuck Norris, which is that their movies don't really age that well. The aging problem could well be cultural. A movie set in Hong Kong or China, even if "modern" rather than set in an Historical time period, is always going to be foreign in so many ways. Maybe to a movie-goer in Hong Kong their movies age badly too. I mean, the female lead can be a complete ditz in a Hong Kong movie and it's no big deal, yet this is what I find most annoying in US movies that are a few years old. Stupid women. On second thought, even the oldest Hong Kong movies I watch... say, like the ones Jackie made when he was in his early 20...

Instapundit had a link about how embarassed some people are by the Pledge of Allegiance. That's not particularly news. Patriotism has been seen as unseemingly simple-minded for quite a while now. Reciting the pledge is very Old School. But I had a thought today putting this together with another trend that seems to be happening. See if you think this follows or if I've gone off the deep end. Something that is weirdly incomprehensible to most Americans are the posters, calendar pictures, public display of foreign leaders' likenesses in their countries. If it's Putin or Qaddafi or some far East monarch... it's just *weird*. Do we put up tributes to Bush? To Clinton? Heck no. We even think that the (small, tasteful) framed portraits of the chain of command mandated in our military facilities is weird. (If occasionally useful.) The only larger than life likenessess of our leaders are protest effagies and those are weird, too, like trying to chann...

Argh. I keep forgetting to click on the picture to get the bigger version and *then* set it as wallpaper. The auto-focus bit and the little lcd screen means I end up with lots of unfocused pictures but I didn't think it was *that* bad. The violas are popping back up after winter even before the tulips.

How funny! I wonder who googled that question? There's a company with the name. I think they do something tech related. In my case though, I Anglicized a Norwegian proper name which happens to be my Grandmother's middle name. I like it. I tried to convince my husband to name our youngest daughter Synova, Nova for short... maybe she'd grow up to be an astrophysicist, eh? But he said it sounded too much like an automobile. No imagination at all.

Lake Lida, July 2005