This is probably going to be an inappropriate analogy here, but nowadays, going to Judo is feeling more and more like being a veteran Infantryman in WW2 - you can be careful, good looking, have all the superstitions, rituals and good luck charms you want, but if there's a bullet with your name on it, there's bugger all you can do.
Not so much bullets, explosions and general threat of violent death in my case. Just horrifying, debilitating injury.

Judo is, IMO, quite an injurious sport. Mostly it's minor stuff like sprains, pulls and bruises, but in my experience, there's a reasonable chance of bad injuries.
For example, in my club, one of the guys snapped his forearm cleanly in half a couple of years ago.
Another guy recently was unlucky enough to have a 19 stone bear fall on him and break his leg in 3 places.
That one, understandably, left us all a bit queasy.

There hasn't been anything too bad for a while now, and this lack of agony has been making me twitchy.
I've been going along to class half expecting something awful to happen to me. I've been playing careful, taking falls properly and not doing stupid things, but there's only so much you can do.
Like the poor guy with the broken leg I mentioned. There was not a damn thing he could have done to stop that from happening.

So, I'm hugely grateful that the angry God of Judo's bloodlust may have been sated for a while last night. Not at my expense either!
One of the bigger guys took a bad fall during Randori. He was getting desperate and tried an O Soto Makikomi throw on his partner. This is a real high amp, power throw. Which is fine for competition or the street, but is a bit much to be trying on your clubmates.
Basically, the throw smashes you heavily onto the ground, generally closely followed by your partner's entire bodyweight slamming into your upper chest and shoulder as you lie there.
Not fun.
Well, this guy missed his throw and fell onto his outstretched right hand, half carrying his partner.
He's lucky he never snapped his arm, but as it is, his hand looks like this.



I know, I know, shit hot illustration skills, eh?

No more injuries for a while, hopefully.
The lack of sympathy is astounding. As one of the black belts put it in the changing room, "your not a judoka till you've broke something".

Fuck.

I was looking at this blog just now and noticed in the top right hand corner of the page, a wee button marked "next blog"
Being bored, nosy and suffering from what I call "Record Shop Syndrome", I clicked it.
Big fucking mistake.
Or Timetable Moisturiser Iraqi Referendum, as my neighbour would probably put it.

"Record Shop Syndrome" - when out shopping for CDs, I often find myself afflicted by a sudden lack of any idea what kind of music I like or wanted to buy in the first place.
This also occurs in bookshops.
It applies here, as while idly browsing at lunch, with the entire cornucopia of the Web at my fingertips, all I could think of to do was to click "next blog".

Chewie has a blog!
Crackin!

That said, his views on Iraq mark him out as a cunt of the highest order.
Very disappointing.

Still am, in fact.
A dork that is, not a teenager.

I played RPGs as a teenager. Not something I'm proud of, but I admit it. Fuck, I even enjoyed it.
I had a little tin that I kept all my dice in. Mostly D20's. This, apparently, is some kind of sin nowadays amongst modern day dorks.
I once played a couple of all night sessions. Nothing major.
I even once, shamefully, oh how shamefully, with my mate who was our GM, played out an encounter between my character and one of his NPCs while pissed on the late bus home from up the toon.

Excuse me while I stare blankly into space in contemplation at the bleakness of my life for a moment.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The thing was, we knew this kind of behaviour was pretty wanky, but we felt as if it was ok, cos on the whole, we were ok guys. We had a good laugh, we went out on the piss on a Saturday, some of us got high, were mostly not bad looking and did ok with girls or even had girlfriends. On occasion.

But, I'm here to tell you now, this sort of carry on is a poison.
It leads to fear.
It leads to fear and anger, anger and fear. It leads to fear, anger and hate.
RPGing leads to fear. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to to Hate. Hate leads to suffering. And an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.
I'll come in again.

It's a drain on society and leads to ill humours of the brain and madness. Clearly.
Do not be tempted.

However, never even in my darkest (dorkest! HAH!) moments, was I as bad as
this.
It could have come close once or twice, but I think I got away with it.

Bas Rutten, famous MMA fighter, has pitched into the heated Traditional Martial Arts v modern Martial Arts debate with this, a wonderful example of a MMA style defence against traditional Drunken Monkey style Kung Fu.
It has a terrible, brutal beauty about it.

In related news, everyone's favourite French Hyper Battle Cyborg, Jerome "Geronimo" Lebanner shows exactly why we love him.

MMA Fighter, Heath "I'm not gay" Herring, got a little upset at a recent K1 match in Japan.

And finally, while we are on the subject of homo-eroticism in combat sports, it is often said that Brazilian Ju Jitsu is a very gay sport.
This is simply not true.

Here's a heart warming tale of a well meaning teacher who left her UK job to teach street children in some third world shithole.

Ah, Britain.
Home of public hysteria and media witch hunts.

On a side note, anyone else think that Ruth Kelly is a smug faced, smarmy boot?
And with that reasoned discourse behind us, I am off for some lunch.

I'm bored and wanted to write something, but can't actually think of anything decent, so here's a stupid wee anecdote, inspired by my comment here regarding student activism as a sexual tactic.
I can't quite remember when this actually happened. Some time within the last 4 years, certainly. Probably during the buildup to the latest round of Iraqi unpleasantness.
The fact I can't be arsed to remember key details probably tells you everything you need to know about how shite this is going to be, but stick with me. It'll be...eh...worth it.

Anyway.

At work, one grey springtime morning, the jungle drums started beating about a demonstration planned that very day, at lunchtime, outside our front door by anti war activists.

Anarchy! Violence! Tear gas! A hauf day!

These were the rumours that swept the building as the morning wore on.

We were issued with dire warnings not to leave the building if things got ugly and given directions to the special secret exit that comes out in Hubbards on Great Western Road, up to this point only ever known by the most senior of senior managers.

Time wore on. The polis presence grew.

The phalanx of security guys protecting the front door and the line of self important suits from Facilities Management got twitchier as the drums and chants grew ever louder. Then the Horde rounded the corner.
Students. Thousands of th....no wait, hundreds...no thats wrong too. About 50 of them.

What a sight. Iraqi flags fluttered bravely in the air. They blocked the front of the building and the whole of Queen Margaret Drive. The cry was taken up by earnest girls and sex-starved, hairy boys - Intifada!

This single event, I think, did more to solidify my support for the war than anything else. I already served my time as a hairy, sex-starved idiot. I simply cannot allow any sort of association with my youthful transgressions, ANY sort. It would result in a catastrophic revocation of my parole into decent society.

It was all I could do to stop myself fashioning an impromptu US flag to hang out my office window, to at least try and rile the fuckers into some dignified violence. But, sadly, no.

This wore on for a while. Weedy students flashed a fang of impotent rebellion to try and impress each other, while bored office denizens desperately tried to find some amusing diversion in it all.

Then, as all things must, it came to an end.
How, you may ask, did it happen here? Under the batons of charging Riot Polis, perhaps?
Maybe even boredom?

No.

One of the camera crews drove up and asked them to get the fuck out of the way, as they had actual news to go and film.
You know what the protesters did?
They got the fuck out of the way. Then embarrassment kicked in, for everyone involved, and they drifted off.

And I didn't get a half day out of it.
Bastards.

This occurred to me, as my Brother in law asked me to look at his PC recently, as he's having some problems with it.
From the sound of things, it's hoaching with spyware and trojans, just like every other home PC I've ever been asked to "have a look at".

Most people just don't know the basics to keep their systems running smoothly. I get the feeling most people view their PC the same way they view their TV or stereo - it's an appliance and it should just work. They shouldn't have to tinker about inside it.

Luckily, one of my favorite bloggers, Rob Redmond, published an excellent article on home PC security.
I'm referring everyone I do homers for to it from now on.

As an aside, this article sums up the perils of being the family "computer guy" pretty well.

Shades of the glowing, green pigs in a weird wee conversation I had today.

A colleague was keeping an eye on a Geiger Counter on Ebay recently.
This puzzled me.
I had visions of him preparing to go all Road Warrior on us, but when questioned, he came up with this.

"As far as I know, Supermarkets don't say if they test their fish for radioactivity, so I'm going to check my own fish."

So here's the scene in the CO's office: we've got two heads on the floor, a really messy carpet they probably had to throw away, and a desk jockey General who was probably wondering if these wackos were going to add him to the pile of skulls or leave him alive to explain to his superiors how his base got seized by a gay novelist and his four boyfriends. That's a rock and a pretty durn hard place for a career officer.

Go and read War Nerd, Gary Brecher's column in The Exile.
You won't regret it.

I've got no clear idea as to what I'm doing this blogging malarkey for, other than it's a pure cool as fuck internet buzzword, which by association, must make me cool.
Ok, so I'm a dick and cannae see shite. I am well aware of that.
But, it is kind of fun, even though the stuff I've chucked up here has about as much substance as Victoria Beckham's desire to be taken seriously.

So, I've taken to looking around at several other blogs out there in the blogosphere, to come over all wanky, and all my favourites so far all have well written articles on politics, society, media or are really funny.
See, that's what I'd like to do. Would be doing, in fact, if it wasn't for some serious obstacles.

• I don't particularly care much about stuff that I can't change, so can't get all worked up enough to write a 2000 word article on Iraq or Immigration.
• I'm not funny.
• I suspect I'm probably a bit of a dumbass.

So I was thinking I should maybe set a kind of benchmark right here, just to kind of see where I stand on things.
It'll be an education, even if only for me.

Politics, Society and that.

I was always a typical student lefty, not particularly through any ideological choice, moreso due to natural working class Clydesider's inertia. Plus it seemed like a good way to get off with girls at college and uni.
Not that it ever fucking worked, mind you.
Lately though, I've been getting a bit conservative. Not Conservative, but conservative. Big difference. For example.

• Taxation now causes me physical pain and I'd quite like to hold on to more of my hard-earned.
  Rob Redmond published an interesting article on taxation thats worth reading.
• I think we have a right to defend ourselves and our property robustly, but appropriately. If I could legally own a gun, I would.
• Asylum seekers are perfectly welcome here, as long as they fit in and are productive members of our society.
• The world is a scary, violent place and humanity has proved itself to be worse than animals plenty of times. It would be better to accept this and deal with it appropriately than try to fix the impossible.
• I was for the Iraq war. Ok, in my world it would never have taken place, as Saddam would have fallen way back the first time round, but fuckit. He had to go. At the very least, it gets our forces some combat testing and experience, which I have a horrible feeling is going to come in handy this century.
• I'm pro American but not anti Europe. I quite like the EU, but it's too bureaucratic and inefficient. I value our alliance with the US far more.
• Scottish Devolution is probably a not bad idea, full independence probably isn't. After all, look at the shite that comes out of the Scottish Parliament and imagine what'd it be like if they actually were in charge.
• Western society is pussified and decadent and will fall to one of the more robust and energetic societies of the East. I realise this makes me sound like a fatigue wearin, gun totin, tinfoil hat wearin loon, but honestly, every time I hear about some stupid piece of PC driven legislation, I'm reminded a little bit more of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
• Please stop banning things and campaigning to ban things. Knives, swords, airguns, smoking. All dangerous things, for sure.
  I'm a law abiding, tax paying adult and if I wish to lawfully own and use a knife or an airgun, then I should be able to. Instead of gunning for us law abiding fools, why not make it so everyone knows it's not socially acceptable to, I dunno....fire airguns at fire crews, for example?
  Maybe if the brainless cunts that did this sort of thing got educated better, or had better prospects or had to face proper penalties for their actions, it wouldn't happen so much?

I apologise. I rambled on a bit there, but these things tend to take on a life of their own.
To lighten the mood a bit, or to prove how unfunny I am, here's a joke, courtesy of German Joke of the Day.

Waiter! This duck is only skin and bones!
No problem, I can also bring you feathers!

I fear and mistrust "kids", purely because the lucky wee bastards are younger than me.
I miss the happy, carefree days of binge drinking, substance abuse and self-centred stupidity of my youth and, hence, blame them for it.
So, I was enormously happy to see
this today.

Geritrightupye!

The turn of the year, while thoroughly depressing mostly, looks to be pretty good for TV.
February sees the new series of 24 and series 2 of Lost is on sometime in the Spring - must need to kick my internet-downloading habit for that one. I'm up to series 2, episode 9!
Head and shoulders above those two, stands the remade Battlestar Galactica.
It bears very little simliarity to it's kitsch 70's forebear. Instead, it's claustrophobic, dark and desperate.

Mustn't forget the hawt lady cyborgs either.


For my money, it's the best Sci Fi broadcast on TV. Better even than Firefly.

It's on Sky One, Tuesdays at 9pm, repeated Saturday at 9pm.

Taiwanese Scientists have bred flourescent green pigs.

Now, I've watched, listened to and read much of whats been said about this, that it will be of great benefit to stem cell research.
I almost believe that.

Almost.

I can't however, shake off the sneaky feeling, that at heart, every single Scientist in the world really wants to be Professor Denzil Dexter and do stuff like this, just, you know, because it's cool.

A bit late, but little brother was 21 this week.

Amongst the booze, toys and firearms he got as presents, was this little gem, being modelled by the boy himself.

Classy.


It's like a scene from "Thriller" but with more drink. And worse clothes.


John, Tracey and Ed find out about the free bar.

The Plan
Lose a stone to a stone and a half.
Sort my running out. Get into a decent routine that I can stick with.
Compete lots in Judo and get my brown belt.
Depending on fitness, weight and training schedule, maybe do a Muay Thai fight.

Dagnabit.

First week of the new year, feeling fine. Getting the legs used to some regular running, back into training and back at work.
Good stuff.
Good start to The Plan.

Then it hit me. The Lurgy.
Sniffles, cough, sore throat, tiredness, dizzy - I suspect Dengue Fever, Ebola or at the very least, Bird Flu.
The Wife reckons it's just a cold.

So, that's another week of lazing about then.
No work.
No Judo.
No Muay Thai.
No running.

Shite.

I've turned into a very flabby shadow of my former self.

On the plus side, the buzz you get from drinking Caol Ila single malt when you've been taking Lemsip Max Cold & Flu capsules is a fucking beauty!

I suppose, playing DoD:Source online while ripped to the tits on single malt and over the counter cold medicine could be viewed as a good time.

This is possibly the funniest or most tragic thing I have ever read.
I haven't decided which yet.

Havoc

mum-of-three Suzanne, a childminder, said: "I had to take action. Nobody is going to hit my daughter and get away with it.

Mayhem

"There could have been a stone in that snowball and it could have done some real damage.

Fury

"I just want to be able to get on with my life without worrying about these people next door."

Baws

"It is all very well to see this as a bit of a joke, but the police obviously thought it was serious enough to charge the woman.

Obviously though, it is heartening to see the Polis treat this case with all due seriousness.
We should get big Mags Haney round there right now.

MP, George Galloway is in the new series of Celebrity Big Brother.

Is it possible to have negative credibility?
Anti credibility?

What d'you think happens when Anti Credibility meets Credibility?
It's possible the resulting reaction could be exploited as a cheap, efficient and clean source of energy.

I feel this should be researched forthwith.

A guy at work sent me a link to Wannaspell today.
After a fruitful few minutes trying to spell out such gems as "penis", "Wank" and "tits", I hit on a brilliant idea.

You know that Welsh town with the outlandishly long name?
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
I gave up trying to spell it out after about 10 minutes because my nose started bleeding and Great Cthulhu started talking to me again.

Bastards.

First day back at work in the new year today.
A troubling realisation on the way in - I say hello to dogs.
Not like "why hallo thar" or anything. I make a clicking noise with my tongue. Not thats any less strange mind you.
Even worse, I do this with every fricken dog I meet. Yet I ignore the owners!

I'm absolutely sure the dogs give every impression of appreciating the civility.

So, my Brother got a rather nice electronic drumkit for Christmas/21st birthday.
I was initially a little dismissive of the whole idea, after all, he can't actually play and has never actually touched any drums, ever.
This all changed after I had a shot, and now I covet a kit with every fibre of my consumerist soul.
So, as you do, I had a look on Ebay for electric drums.
I found this.

That link has everything. It's compelling and rich.
Domestic turmoil, feckless husband, shrewish wife, badass drumkit and shocking spelling.

I'm going to rip it off and punt it as a story idea to River City.