Get stupid.

I've got a buddy like this. The only difference is he "gets" what people are talking about, but fakes he doesn't, in order to send people into an apoplectic fit and frustrate the shit out of them. [Hi Jr!]

HARDCORE ZEN: GUESS I'M DUMB:

"...I find it remarkable how I'll say something, then someone embellishes what I've said with their own imagination, then that person proceeds to comment upon the stuff they've imagined as if I said that stuff. That's such a weird thing to me.

...I'm just wondering how much trouble we human beings cause each other by reading into things, by embellishing what we hear and see with our own invented details and then acting upon what we've invented. A great blessing/curse in my own life is that I'm too stupid to do that to any great degree. I mean if you intend to insinuate something to me, watch out because I probably will not get what you're driving at. Stuff has to be spelled out really clearly.

One thing that's helped in my practice has been that I no longer try as hard to figure out what people "really mean" when they say something to me. I just take nearly everything totally at face value. I don't usually "get" sarcasm, for example. I can tell when people are using it. But more often than not I have no idea what they're implying with it. And I won't usually put in the necessary effort to try and work it out.

I think Zen practice tends to make you more like this over time. I've noticed my teachers do it even more than I do. You develop a kind of dumb approach to life."

Best UFC HL I've seen in a while.

Of course Dougan's "Clubbed to Death" soundtrack doesn't hurt.

Via Fightlinker

Careful what you wish for.

Overheard Everywhere | No Good Ever Comes of Communication:

"Wife: Do you like my new hairstyle?
Husband: Yep.
Wife: That's it? Just 'yep'?
Husband: Looks very different. It'll be like having sex with another woman.
Wife: Asshole! Should have kept my mouth shut.
Husband: Yep.

Circle Centre Mall
Indianapolis, Indiana

Overheard by: Shatmandu"

Ya gotta have criteria.

Overheard in New York | I'm Beginning to Regret Teaching You That Word, Granny:

"Girl: I saw that movie when it came out, The Passion of the Christ.
Grandma: What movie?
Girl: The Passion of the Christ. You haven't heard of it?
Grandma: Yes, but I'm not interested in watching it. Mel Gibson produced it.
Girl: Oh. So it's a principle thing.
Grandma: No. It's an I-don't-like douchebaginess thing.

--JFK Airport"

So my computer died.

And that suuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks.

Thankfully, most of my important stuff was backed up. Mostly online. Picasa, Google Docs, etc, etc.

In thinking about it... what I lost that I can't replace... the one that really bugs me - especially 'cause of my eye debacle this week, and missing the school sports day - was the approximately 200 pics I had snapped of the kids rehearsing for the event over the last week and a half. And the videos too. I hadn't finished editing them yet, so I hadn't backed them up online. That really sucks. I really wish I still had those.

And there was a bunch of random comedy internet pics I had planned on posting on the blog, and a bunch of comic books jpegs and other ebooks, that, honestly I hadn't gotten around to reading and wasn't sure if I would. But some of that is backed up too.

And some music I hadn't backed up. Though most of the music I had - I've got a bunch on my mp3 player I can load back onto the new computer, I imagine. I can't imagine ripping all those CDs/music I had on my old laptop - again - to the new computer. Time consuming as hell.

Overall, it could've been a lot worse. Frustrating though.

Back up your stuff, kids.

Training 43 - 49.

So, given the great eye debacle, associated medicines and pains and travails and so forth, plus the limited computer time I've got till my new laptop arrives from the states [so I'm not gonna waste my time going back to write out the details]...

Suffice to say, from Monday to Saturday I managed to squeeze in the planned workout everyday, even if some of them were kind of half assed and haphazard. And I mostly stuck to my planned eating regimen, except for a bit of fried chicken on Thursday night. And tomorrow's a rest day/high carb day, so consider it already logged. Back on Monday with more [detailed] training stuffs.

Another gruesome eye photo.

Continuation of the spider bite saga.

Back from the doc. All is well. Used Sandy's cell to snap a pic of the pic they took just before they cut on me [on Wednesday.] Here 'tis.

And here it is on just 3 days later, thanks to the wonders of antibiotics and western slash/cut and burn medicine.

Spider bites are way not cool.

In more cheerful photos...

Sandy playing around with the Engrish attire.


The next door neighbor was kind enough to share some precious, precious caffeine... I mean, coffee... in kind for some strawberries Sandy took over.


On last Friday Sandy went to a farewell for a coworker at Antonio Inoki's restaurant in Fukuoka. If you don't know Inoki, he's probably best known overseas for his match against Muhammad Ali back in the day.

Antonio Inoki - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"Antonio Inoki (アントニオ猪木), real name Kanji Inoki[1] (猪木寛至 Inoki Kanji), born February 20, 1943) is a professional wrestling promoter and retired Japanese professional wrestler and mixed martial artist who now resides in New York City. His stage name was inspired by Antonino Rocca, a professional wrestler. In his career as a wrestler and later New Japan Pro Wrestling owner, Inoki is an icon in professional wrestling and mixed martial arts."

You cannot, in fact, do whatever a spider can. [Or why Peter Parker is a goddamn liar.]

Getting bit by a spider does not actually give you superpowers.

So, the first reason my week sucked... here we go. Warning, less than pleasant pics ahead. Last Saturday I noticed some swelling around my right eyebrow. Pimple? Mosquito bite? Maybe.

Pre-emptive Mom Snider paragraph - Yes, I'm okay now. Yes, I went to the doctor. Yes, twice. And I'm going again tomorrow. I'm taking all the medicine they gave me. It hurt before but it's okay now. Thank you and I'll be careful. Love you too.

So I wake up Sunday morning and uh-oh. The swelling is worse. And kinda sore and painful. And Sunday is my school's sports festival. Fuck. Go into school, make my apologies. Sandy takes me over to the hospital. Hospitals on the weekend here in the land of the Rising Sun are not Japan's finest hour. Doc gives me some ointment and some pills.

Sunday pic.

Monday pic. Worse. You can't really tell, cause it's taken face-on to the swelling, but it's swollen pretty far out to the side. Called out sick from work.

Tuesday pic. Starting to get a little gruesome here. Definitely called out from work.

Wednesday PM pic. Wednesday AM, my trusty BOE supervisor took me back out to the hospital and the doc took one look at me and broke out the scalpel. A bit of local, a cut, and then the doc focused all of his bodyweight through his fingers as he pushed blood, pus and infected material out of the hole in my eyebrow. It was not fun. And it hurt like a motherfucker. BUT. While this pic looks about as bad as the previous, it relieved a whole lot of the pain and swelling. And that drainage + the awesome antibiotics they gave me started me on the road to recovery.[And I don't even care if the superbugs kill us all. My eye feels better.]

Thursday. Recovering! You can now see the white of my eye again. Huzzah!

So Friday, today, it's even better. Back to school to teach classes, have dozens of students ask me whatsup with my eye, and show gruesome pictures to other teachers so they know I wasn't out goofing off. [Not that they would, but you know...]

Final tally - the docs can't say for sure what it was, but most likely an insect bite of some kind that got infected. Through my own internet sleuthing, it was most likely some kind of spider bite. I had something similar in Hawaii once, on my torso, and another one the last time we lived in Japan, but that one was only on my knee. This was probably the worst of the three though, especially since it was so close to my eye. Not being able to see right was frustrating as hell. Ah well, done is done.

But yeah, my week sucked.

"Hitler Plans Burning Man."

The meme, she grows. She continues. Hilarious.

The earlier one I posted - on the Clinton campaign - is here. Still funny.

"Cory Doctorow: Our dangerous statistical ignorance"

Great article to counter the fear mongering of the early 21st century.

Cory Doctorow: Our dangerous statistical ignorance | Technology | guardian.co.uk:

"...The rare – and the lurid – loom large in our imagination, and it's to our great detriment when it comes to our safety and security. As a new father, I'm understandably worried about the idea of my child falling victim to some nefarious predator Out There, waiting to break in and take my child away. There's a part of me who understands the panicked parent who rings 999 when he sees some street photographer aiming a lens at a kids' playground.

But the fact is that attacks by strangers are so rare as to be practically nonexistent. If your child is assaulted, the perpetrator is almost certainly a relative (most likely a parent). If not a relative, then a close family friend. If not a close family friend, then a trusted authority figure.

And yet we continue to focus our attention on the meteor-strike-rare paedophile attack instead of protecting our children from the real, everyday dangers they face from the familiar. This has the twin effects of making our children less safe, and of making adults less free, because we are all subjected to scrutiny on the grounds that we may be hunting children.

This is the same calculus that allows the fear of terrorism to take away our liberty: the statistically super-rare terrorist attacks present, on average, a much lower risk to our health, safety and person than, say, depriving us of our liquid medications, or of requiring us to leave our bags unlocked in flight so that sticky-fingered handlers can make off with our laptops and financial data and valuables.

The everyday threat of having our goods stolen, our ability to travel and earn our livings curtailed, and our personal information harvested by every junior terrorist fighter who wants to see your ID before letting you do anything is overshadowed by the one-in-a-billion confluence of someone with terrorist goals, the means to accomplish them, and the intelligence to bring them off (hint: you can't really blow up an airplane with hair-gel and iPods).

...Terrorism is a lot less common than one in a million and automated "tests" for terrorism – data-mined conclusions drawn from transactions, Oyster cards, bank transfers, travel schedules, etc – are a lot less accurate than 99%. That means practically every person who is branded a terrorist by our data-mining efforts is innocent.

In other words, in the effort to find the terrorist needles in our haystacks, we're just making much bigger haystacks.

You don't get to understand the statistics of rare events by intuition. It's something that has to be learned, through formal and informal instruction."

Exactly.

Good guys? Bad guys?

Tell me.

Reason Magazine - Hit & Run > Red China Sends Secret Police to Cuba, With U.S. Blessing:

"U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay allegedly softened up detainees at the request of Chinese intelligence officials who had come to the island facility to interrogate the men − or they allowed the Chinese to dole out the treatment themselves, according to claims in a new government report.

Buried in a Department of Justice report released Tuesday are new allegations about a 2002 arrangement between the United States and China, which allowed Chinese intelligence to visit Guantanamo and interrogate Chinese Uighurs held there."

The FBI, brave defenders of freedom *AND* retarded idiots.

Awesome, because they do this - Crooks and Liars » DOJ Inspector General Report: FBI Concerns About Torture “Ignored”:

"The Department of Justice’s inspector general has finally released its report on the FBI’s involvement in detainee interrogations in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Reuters reports that the “Bush administration’s top security officials ignored FBI concerns” and that the “FBI, alarmed by interrogation techniques such as the use of snarling dogs and forced nudity, clashed with the Defense Department and CIA over their use.”"

Retarded morons because they do this - FBI looking for vegan potluck terrorists - Boing Boing:

"'FBI tries to convince man to infiltrate vegan potluck events to look for terrorists in Minneapolis/St. Paul, site for the 2008 Republican National Committee Convention this summer.'"

"...it doesn't matter one way or the other."

HARDCORE ZEN: HELL MEETING AT WORK TODAY:

"...Whenever you try to explain the problems you have at work to someone outside your company or outside your specific industry they never make much sense. In fact they always seem incredibly trivial to anyone not directly involved. That’s because they are...

...in this case I did not make any of the past mistakes he wanted me to admit to. But even if I had there would be no real point in discussing them. And the people I'm talking to never seem to really get that. I want to fix the problem that exists now given the conditions that exist now. That seems to be one of the hardest areas to move these kinds of discussions into, though. In the past I've gotten drawn into that sort of trap and it never goes anywhere useful."

Systemic Corruption.

Reason Magazine - Hit & Run > Adventures in Police Professionalism:

"...a coda to the Kathryn Johnston botched drug raid case in Atlanta: Arthur Tesler was the only officer on the raid who didn't take a plea bargain. Despite admitting that he lied, helped cover up Johnston's murder, and stood watch outside while other officers handcuffed the bleeding 92-year-woman—allowing her to die while they planted marijuana in her basement—he was convicted today only on the charge of lying to investigators. He'll face a maximum of five years in prison.

The one good thing to come out of the case is we got to see just how vast, deep, and pernicious the culture of corruption and disregard for civil rights ran in Atlanta's police department. Tesler testified that narcotics officers were required to serve nine warrants and make two arrest per month, or they'd risk losing their jobs. This led to routine lying on warrants and bullying and intimidation of informants. What we don't know is how many people were wrongly raided, arrested, and jailed because of all of this."

Hello Raleigh NC!

Overheard Everywhere | Not Without My Fainting Couch and Fan Nearby:

"Drunk girl: I went to the University of Alabama, so you don't have to tell me about sex.

Sammy's
Raleigh, North Carolina"

Doomed.

Warren Ellis » Headline Of The Day

"16% of US science teachers are creationists"

No excuses. Now get to work.

Sig Klein at 22.

...and at 57.



Via Straight to the Bar - all things strength

Lovely.

From The Magazine : Radar Online : Is the government compiling a secret list of citizens to detain under martial law?:

"According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, 'There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously.' He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention."

Double KO.

Crazy.

Power... corrupting... yadda, yadda.

There's a testable mathematically inverse equation.

Overheard Everywhere | Do I Need to Show You the Algorithm Again?:

"Guy: I would ask her out, but she's just so dumb. I mean, like, soo dumb.
Girl: Can't you just overlook that for one night?
Guy: She's not quite cute enough.

San Jose, California"

Roxanne Shanté got the record label to pay for her doctorate.

That's brilliant.

Roxanne Shanté - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"At the age of 25, Shanté retired from the recording industry to become a psychologist. She continues to make occasional guest appearances and live performances, as well as mentor young female hip-hop artists. .. She earned a PhD in psychology from Cornell University — paid for by her record label via an unusual contract clause—and has a practice in Queens."

Gotta look where ya can, I guess.

Overheard Everywhere | How Jessie Got Us Arrested:

"[Three intoxicated college girls are walking along the street. One trips, falls, and all three laugh hysterically. An unmarked police van passes by]
Cop, yelling out of the window: Looks like three underage drinking tickets right there!
Girl #1: We're all 21!
Cop: Well, it looks like you're 4!
Girl #2: Looks like you're 37 and looking for a boyfriend!

Madison, Wisconsin"

Training 42.

Food
Carb loading/free
1L diet soda
1 M reg soda
1 cup coffee w/equal, milk
2 sausage egg mcmuffins
Chips&dip
Bread and butter

PT
Sunday - rest

Bed@2245

Inspiration -

Crossfit Glory Box Video from Ben Weger on Vimeo.