In No Particular Order...

ONE
A friend of mine at the Diamond Mines was (is?) a Bando practicioner (he goes fishing with the grandmaster occassionally). We were talking about my kamagong/ironwood problems. Well, not really "problems," as I still have two intact sticks -- but, for how long? Anyway, he related an analogy of a relative who travelled abroad who made himself drink the local water to acclimate to whatever nasty buggers might be in there. Anyway, this guy suggested to me that we could be having a parallel problem, transplanting tropical ironwood sticks for use here. So, he offered me some spare ironwood from his property. That was his name for it... "ironwood" (probably Ostrya virginiana, but I'm not sure). I asked him to cut me a pair at serrada length. I even gave him my cannibalized serrada stick I got from a broken training stick at Fight Club. Yesterday, he showed me a sample and returned my stick. This wood is pretty damn hard... one crack with it, and I destroyed my old stick. The only thing is, my friend doesn't have a lathe, but I don't care. The diameter is right, they're straight and with a pair of them - that sounded very homoerotic, didn't it? Anyway, the point is that they'll make good weapons.

TWO
I'm at the coffee shop right now, and again all the hipsters know a cool, genuine vintage leather 1972 coat when they see one and can deliver the appropriate compliments.

Speaking of the coffee shop, I'll be damned... someone's sitting at a table right in front of me with a cup from the freakin' Starbucks! Got'damn, that's just rude. I wish I had a camera right now.

THREE
Here's a bit of hilarity from American Conservative - could the Right end up scared of itself? Good.

February 14, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative

Hunger for Dictatorship

War to export democracy may wreck our own.

by Scott McConnell

[snip]

But Rockwell (and Roberts and Raimondo) is correct in drawing attention to a mood among some conservatives that is at least latently fascist. Rockwell describes a populist Right website that originally rallied for the impeachment of Bill Clinton as “hate-filled ... advocating nuclear holocaust and mass bloodshed for more than a year now.” One of the biggest right-wing talk-radio hosts regularly calls for the mass destruction of Arab cities. Letters that come to this magazine from the pro-war Right leave no doubt that their writers would welcome the jailing of dissidents. And of course it’s not just us. When USA Today founder Al Neuharth wrote a column suggesting that American troops be brought home sooner rather than later, he was blown away by letters comparing him to Tokyo Rose and demanding that he be tried as a traitor. That mood, Rockwell notes, dwarfs anything that existed during the Cold War. “It celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US is God marching on earth—not just godlike, but really serving as a proxy for God himself.”

Ah, the things that make you smile. If people in their own party are raising eyebrows, I wonder just what it'll take for the average Joe Blows to fall into mass hysteria. You'd have thought it would've happened by now.

FOUR
I don't know, but I hope the GOP's worst fear comes true and Bill Clinton somehow ends up the Secretary-General of the UN.