sources of news

The U.S. media are so sanitized I've taken to reading random web sites. Have any to trade?

iraqbodycount.net: count of Iraqi civilian deaths.

debka.com: hawkish Israeli rumors.

iraqwar.ru: pessimistic Russians.

dear_raed: Iraqi(?) blogger.

kimsoft.com: Korean nationalist news.
(Iraq is a distraction.)

yesterday: yard pics, graph theory

I cleaned up the kitchen (moved stuff in bulk-foods bags into jars), and shelved the new batch of non-fiction. (Shoved more dups to perch on the top of the shelves, and rearranged to fit things in. Many more and I'll just break down and go with LOC cataloguing.)

In the yard:
currant tree is blooming.
(blooming in closeup.)
grape hyacinths are taking over the world and blooming.
shallots are sprouting.

Refooted the chairs.
0) the null feet scratched the floor.
1) sticky footdisks did not stick to convex plastic feet -- had a half-life of a few days.
2) denim and rubber-band feet had a half-life of a couple weeks.
3) felt and wide-masking-tape feet had their tape fail overnight.
4) felt and duct-tape feet.
Time will tell.

dr4b's RPGing was called off, so instead some of the group played alternate games: Monkey Ball and Odysseus. Odysseus was a very German game. It's a game of speculative traversal of an edge-3-colored graph, but I guess even in Germany "A Family Game of Speculative Traversal of an Edge-3-Colored Graph" will not sell, so it has the perils of Odysseus mapped onto different vertex colors. Not just perils, in fact, so the epic plays out like "Cyclops, Go Home, Cyclops again, Sirens, Go Home again, Scylla and Charybdis...". I found this amusing. The gameplay seemed kinda random, at least in the manner we knew how to play it.

Swept the floors. Ewwww.

things you find when you google for "bombycinous"

Careful scrutiny will reveal that it combines 'hyssopic' (c192), under which it is usually classified in the dictionary, with 'piliform-polumeous' (c059) both under the cover of 'kalyptroid' (c014), with 'keramic' (c121) above flanked by 'dendrological' (c075), left and right, i.e. 'dendrological' doubled yielding 'woods', but split apart for calligraphic purposes. The character means, among other things, 'dense growth', 'over-grown', 'rampant'.

kajukenbo

Stomping on knees. Slow and just brushing against them really, but squick. This as part of intro to self-defense, w/ three "primary targets": eyes, throat, knees.

Previously, some new strikes. "Bear claw" ("why bother?", I thought; then the briefing with the eyes), strikes with the back and the inside of the elbow.

Extrapreviously, some sequences of steps+strikes+blocks. Turn eensy-weensy-spider-style in horse stance, with up and down cross blocks; advance in forward stance, punch into down block.

Anteëxtrapreviously, exercise with various stations with the sticky notes. New jump rope: just one notch down from the velvet ropes that banks use to delineate where you wait. Slow-motion side thrust kick is still ownz0ring me.