Ippoippo

A small break from Kendo

It’s half term, so that means the school gym is closed… and that means there was no Kendo for me this week.
So, Yuko decided to drag me along to her Yoga class which she goes to with a friend from work, and said friends husband.

The yoga class she does tends to focus more of the stretching and breathing, as opposed to any underlying spiritial background to Yoga (there was none of that really).

Must admit, it wasn’t bad. Some of the excerises were relatively easy for me to do as it’s muscles I’ve started to exercise as part of the Kendo. There were a couple though which I’ve discovered would be a good warm up exercise which I should before I do kendo. Then there were a couple of exercises which I found just plain old difficult!

What I did find amusing though was Yuko can’t stop herself giggling when she see’s (or hears) something amusing. So much for Japanese being able to focus and block things out. So, there were we stretching away when the little old lady in front was obviously getting too relaxed and broke wind (a common occurance apparently). So, whilst I maintained my focus and composure, there’s Yuko giggling like a little school girl. Tscchhh.

Gordon… “Oiii, give us some more oil!!!”

Gordon Brown wrote an open letter in the Guardian paper, regarding the current oil and energy situation. There were some interesting ‘admissions’.

The cause of rising prices is clear: growing demand and too little supply to meet it both now and - perhaps of even greater significance - in the future.

Little, break it gently to the masses, kinda comment there?

And we are becoming increasingly aware of the technical, financial and political barriers to the production of more oil. Every country must find ways of being more efficient and diversifying supply. And as continuing high oil prices present us all with an immense challenge, the way we confront these issues will define our era.

Is this an admission of ‘Peak Oil’ (or getting close to it), without saying those dreaded words?

The BBC reported on it as well.

Now, if this is the PM coming clean (in a somewhat subtle manner) is it because they already know the came will be up come November when the IEA releases it seriously revised forecasts of future oil production? (See “IEA worried over oil supply”, where “Birol said the study, which will be released in November, was prompted by concern about the volatility of world oil markets and uncertainty about supply levels.”) Of course, any chance to blame somebody else for the problems regarding the whole tax issue as well was to grabbed too

Finally, the front page of the Independant newspaper was quite interesting on Friday too.

Oooo errrr! Nothing saucy in that topic though…

Yesterday, I progressed from the Kendo beginners lessons now into the full class.
So far, the class of 9 learners are all still there, but it will be interesting to see who keeps up with this.

We now take part in a lot of the exercises with the main class, including the formal etiquette. We still don’t have our “Gi”, which is the basic clothing and certainly not the armour.
However, the real step up was having to take part in doing the suburi (素振り) with the others. That was hard work, but a great bit of exercise.
We’ve also started looking at doing kata, using bokken.

Next week is half-term, so the school gym used by the club is not available… which is a real shame. I’ve just got to keep practicing a little everynight getting all the foot/arm coordination right (though it’s hard to do in the house on a carpet floor, and with not enough ceiling height to swing my shinai or bokken.

Kendo is proving to be most enjoyable. This week, did some more foot work, plus started to introduce using the shinai in some moves. Right at the end of the evening, we had to start shouting kiai [気合]. In this case, it was simply ‘men’ because we were simulating a blow to the head.

Still haven’t worked out if I should just shout it in a gruff manner, or go for the full blown Mifune Toshirō accent!
I need to ask an old work colleague of mine for advice on the later

Anyway, with all this Kendo going on at the moment, I spent some time looking around the net when I came across an old National Geographic programme about the 8th Dan tests for Kendo. This was a programme I saw a while back, and seemed to have sparked a little bit of interest in it.

What is more impressive, is a small segment about 10th Dan kendōka (people who do Kendo). There are no 10th Dan graded people alive, and nobody has recently ever been granted 9th Dan status!

Unless you’ve been away from the TV, you’ve probably been seeing scenes like this on the TV.

According to Uncyclopedia, what we are actual witnessing is a new Extreme sport, called Extreme Torch Relay. As you can see, France is currently leading the scoreboard!

Seriously though…

Part of me thinks these protests are great. Given Chinese actions in Tibet (though, it’s not all a one-sided issue), then it’s all well and good.
However, I think some of the French protesters took it a little too far when they went for the torch at a stage when it was being carried by a lady in a wheelchair.

Also, I get the feeling that a large number of these ‘protesters’ are actual just a bunch of troublemakers who’ve found a nice excuse to kick things off. It’s a real shame because this is a real chance to have a very public protest against the Chinese government.

I also see that in Japan, they don’t want the Chinese security runners there, when the flame gets to Nagano.