Notes from a Fiery Nest

We have a European Goldfinch visiting our balcony birdfeeders. The default assumption is that he's an escape from domestic captivity, because its natural range isn't exactly close to here, but it's acting wild, hanging out with a mixed flock of Common (American) Goldfinches, Redpolls, and House Finches, and it arrived with an Arctic air mass. We're hoping that experts can establish its subspecies from pictures, because if it's from a Northern one (rather than, say, the subspecies particular to Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia), it might be judged a genuine wild bird way out of its range.

If so, the trickle of interest we've had for visiting our viewing area may get rather more substantial!

Alex Feinman on the stupid "rules" our society foists on guys. Snarky, hyperbolic, and very pointful.

An excerpt:

Man Rule 1. If you don’t show it, you aren’t feeling it
“Men aren’t allowed to have feelings.” This is, of course, inaccurate—men are allowed to have feelings, provided they show them in some sort of caricatured, over-the-top way. If they don’t show it, they aren’t really feeling it.

Angry? You have to smash something. Punch a wall. Shoot your TV. Hit someone. It’s justified: you were angry.

Upset? You can’t cry; that’s for sissies. Get really drunk and wreck your car. Glower into the darkness smoking your cigarette, making sure everyone *sees* you glowering and brooding.

Attracted to that woman? Better make sure you tell her. In fact, be ridiculous about it, invasive and over-the-top. Stand outside her window and throw rocks, or yell, or hold a boombox over your head. Buy a thousand roses and scatter them all over. Wolf-whistle at her and call her names. Bitches love names.

The analysis shows how this relates to homo- and transphobia, too.

Cat Pictures Please by Naomi Kritzer.

This article illustrates core problems with corporate personhood pretty well.

It's been a pretty stereotypically surburbanite day... lunch and shopping at the Carp Farmers' Market, more shopping at Pesto's Deli, Jojo Coco, and a hardware store, a bit of gaming, weeding the back lawn (there were some pretty impressive bull thistles growing there, up to well past 4 feet) and dinner cooked on the BBQ. Well, the organic pork chops were cooked on the BBQ, the organic greens went into a salad with an Italian dressing made with fancy olive oil and balsamic vinegar from the deli, and we warmed up the organic dark sourdough bread in the oven.

We so yuppie.

Chameleon vine imitates host plants; mechanism unknown. (Ganked from theweaselking.)

In other plant news, the walking palms apparently don't actually migrate by growing new roots as they are alleged to... it made a good story, though.

The Expert: a 7.5-minute comedy sketch depicting something which is excruciatingly familiar to most tech-employed folks. Neither soul_diaspora nor I could watch it all the way through on first viewing, so painful was it.

Dark Dungeons is coming, a movie based on the famous graphic novel!

I'm off to Costa Rica on Sunday morning with soul_diaspora!

We're going for two weeks, staying at a timeshare via my parents near Quepos. There will be nature-watching, ziplining, sailing, snorkeling, and lots of general relaxing. We went 15 years ago on honeymoon, and this is our first time back. I gather things have changed some, modernizing a bit; it'll be interesting to see.

I expect to be pretty much internet-free while we're down there; don't shut down LJ while we're gone, m'k?

This is an important thing: The Department of Justice Public Consultation on Prostitution-Related Offences in Canada.

On December 20, 2013, in the case of Bedford v. Attorney General of Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada found three Criminal Code prostitution offences to be unconstitutional and of no force or effect. This decision gives Parliment one year to respond before the judgment takes effect. Input received through this consultation will inform the Government's response to the Bedford decision.

This is your chance to influence a socially significant law... speak up!

In a couple of weeks, one of the folks I met in Edmonton last year will be coming to teach a kenjutsu seminar here in Ottawa. The schedule is rather more substantial than most of our aikido seminars, which run 6 hours spread over 2 days: this one will have almost twice that over the 2 days. I will likely do most or all of it... wish me luck!

It seems that quite a few great creators worked only in the mornings. I don't exactly consider my reflections as being in the same league as these folks' work, but I certainly find that I write them in the mornings, generally on Saturdays, before interacting with anyone else. Design work, I can do anytime, but inspiration-driven writing seems to require more specific psychological conditions.

I wrote this in the context of a discussion in my parish's LGBT & Straight Alliance group. The question of the duality and complementarity of gender as expressed in Genesis (and referenced specifically by Jesus) was raised, and how to square that with homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderedness, etc.¹ This is a rather deeper and harder question than addressing the "clobber passages" which refer specifically to various kinds of homosexual activity.

( Thoughts on tradition, myth, modernity, and diversity. )

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1: ETA; see comments.

This seems to happen to me whenever I get close to a bookstore.

First off, it was great to see so many of you at Pride last week!

My mother-in-law has been in town for a while, and we went up to Quebec City Monday and Tuesday for a whirlwind tour: we mainly hit the Old City, Aquarium, and Montmorency Falls. There's a lot of good food to be had in that town, too!

Work has been crazy busy this week; I think I have to give up these mini-vacations as a failed experiment, since they are just too short for people to feel the need to deal with anything in my absence, so stuff just piles up and rots for the couple of days I'm away. Henceforth, I think that I'll generally take a week or more at a time, so that people know that they can't just let everything wait for my return.

Today and tomorrow, I'm participating in a kenjutsu seminar. A teacher of a style even older than the one I practice is visiting town, and offered to teach a seminar for folks with some sword experience. The schedule is a bit odd, with a late-evening session tonight (see previous post) and a midday session tomorrow, each running 3 hours. I'm looking forward to it: this is the oldest martial art with a continuous lineage in Japan, and was the art studied by the founder of the style I study.

I'm also looking forward to some quiet time with soul_diaspora tomorrow evening and Monday, after all this excitement!

The kenjutsu seminar was very enjoyable, and very different from last year's adventures at Aikido Summer Camp. There were perhaps fifty of us in total, and I met nearly everyone who is currently practicing this style at a senior level. The hardwood floors were good for traction and stability, but hard on my feet; I wore socks for some of the practice, and was far from alone in doing so. The soke (head of the school) is a brilliant, enthusiastic, and energetic man; I enjoyed his classes immensely. The sempai (senior students, singular sempai) were great to train with and learn from, too.

All told, I figure I got somewhere a little over 20 hours of practice during my trip, at various venues: the community center where they usually hold classes, the school where the seminar was held, and my host's home: I stayed with one of the senior students, who has a dojo in his house (it replaced an indoor pool), but was unfortunately unable to practice due to injury. He also has a couple of cats, to which I was surprisingly unallergic, and a pretty good wine and scotch collection, which he was quite happy to share.

One of the students who had been to Japan recently brought back a bunch of hakama storage cloths to give away, so I now have a very nice blue and bronze one. I may also have a line on a second-hand iaito (metal practice sword, blunt, not designed to be sharpened or used in combat) at a good price; we'll see what comes of that.

A couple of us went to visit the Muttart Conservatories, which were nice, but not all I had expected: I had the idea that there were birds and butterflies, but no, just plants. Pretty and interesting plants, of which some pictures may show up (here or on soul_diaspora's LJ) sometime, but very much vegetable-kingdom plants. A few of us also went to the Heritage Festival, where we ate some interesting food, saw a few demos, and generally relaxed a bit between fairly intense classes.

To finish the trip, my luggage just got delivered: WestJet mistakenly off-loaded it when I transferred in TO, but to their credit, called me over as I got off the plane in Ottawa and told me so right away, rather than making me wait for it to fail to show up on the carousel. As usually happens, they delivered it directly to me when it arrived.

I'm glad I have today to recover, and will likely skip tomorrow's aikido practice too. Friday, I'll teach the kenjutsu class, since my sensei and sempai are all away. I'll introduce a couple of the changes and refinements from the seminar, but not overload students with all of it in one go.