Saturday, Another Hot Day for Swimming
On Saturday, RG came over and spent the day with us swimming in the in-laws’ pool. After dinner, his girlfriend O joined us. RG entertained the kids while the spouse, myself and O watched a movie.
Earlier in the day, the spouse got me these two magazines.
In Aikido Today, there’s an interesting article about Canadian Stephen Ohlman, a yoshinkan Sensei who owns and operates the Hiryukan dojo in Barrie, Ontario. There’s lots of interesting stuff in the article, but I especially enjoyed the part where he described the 11-month Yoshinkan International Instructors Course in Japan. He recalls that, "after an hour of continuous forward rolling followed by a half hour of continuous knee walking, blood soaked his pant leg." He also remembers that in the winter, "there was no heat. Steam would rise from their bodies like fog obscuring their forms. Sometimes the tatami were like blocks of ice… Suffering from a cold or running a high fever was no excuse to avoid training." To anyone who disagrees with my opinion that yoshinkan is too macho of a style, I invite your counterargument.
Myself, I agree with Robert Kent of Aikido Kids who, in the same issue, writes, "To try to rate aikido on the scale of its effectiveness as a fighting art is to ignore O-Sensei’s crucial realization that we shouldn’t be fighting in the first place… The real purpose of aikido training is to eliminate anger, competitiveness, and egotism within ourselves… Training in his art is not training to be a person who is feared by everyone else but a person whom nobody would want to attack in the first place."
Switching topics entirely, I noticed more flowers growing in the weedy, neglected part of the back lawn. These are my new WTF flowers (as you know, the others became my WTFlox flowers). Again, the question is: to pluck, or not to pluck?
Earlier in the day, the spouse got me these two magazines.
In Aikido Today, there’s an interesting article about Canadian Stephen Ohlman, a yoshinkan Sensei who owns and operates the Hiryukan dojo in Barrie, Ontario. There’s lots of interesting stuff in the article, but I especially enjoyed the part where he described the 11-month Yoshinkan International Instructors Course in Japan. He recalls that, "after an hour of continuous forward rolling followed by a half hour of continuous knee walking, blood soaked his pant leg." He also remembers that in the winter, "there was no heat. Steam would rise from their bodies like fog obscuring their forms. Sometimes the tatami were like blocks of ice… Suffering from a cold or running a high fever was no excuse to avoid training." To anyone who disagrees with my opinion that yoshinkan is too macho of a style, I invite your counterargument.
Myself, I agree with Robert Kent of Aikido Kids who, in the same issue, writes, "To try to rate aikido on the scale of its effectiveness as a fighting art is to ignore O-Sensei’s crucial realization that we shouldn’t be fighting in the first place… The real purpose of aikido training is to eliminate anger, competitiveness, and egotism within ourselves… Training in his art is not training to be a person who is feared by everyone else but a person whom nobody would want to attack in the first place."
Switching topics entirely, I noticed more flowers growing in the weedy, neglected part of the back lawn. These are my new WTF flowers (as you know, the others became my WTFlox flowers). Again, the question is: to pluck, or not to pluck?
posted by ax174 at
5:37 AM
