Pound and Ground (5.24)

Earlier in the week Chris and other “mature” tae kwan do students took a class with an Ultimate fighter, a six foot five mountain of rock named Nathan Kirby. Chris knew that I was terribly disappointed to miss a seminar on mixed martial arts combat, but he generously shared a couple of useful techniques that will serve him well at the university. I thought I’d share them with you because you might also be able to apply them to your daily struggles for power and glory. Lesson #1: When you’re battling in a cage, remember to “Pound and Ground.” Those simple words will inspire you to beat your opponent to a pulp. Lesson #2: In the rare event that your opponent does not want to remain in a prone position on the ground when you pound, simply break his (or her) arm. Apparently, the snapping of a bone and/or the tearing of cartilage demoralizes most people. Such life lessons learned on the mat truly validate our decision to study the martial arts with Luc.


Television
Have you read about the latest in the long line of excruciatingly painful dating shows? Age of Love premieres in the middle of June on NBC with 31 year-old tennis player Mark Philippoussis as the bachelor looking for love. The twist is that he will be choosing between “cougars” (40-somethings) and “kittens” (20-somethings). Just thinking of the potential for embarrassment makes my stomach turn.

I must admit that part of me was looking forward to the season/series finales of “American Idol,” “The Sopranos,” “House” and “Lost.” Without those shows tempting me into a vegetative state, I thought that I could boast to be something more than a couch potato. Alas, Fox brings us “So You Think You Can Dance” along with “On the Lot.” I am not strong enough to resist reality competitions centering on dance and movies.

Books
In The Ghost Map, Stephen Johnson gives a very interesting account of one of the last London cholera epidemics in 1854. He describes the events which led to the contamination of a public drinking well in a Soho neighborhood, the deadly consequences and finally the medical investigations of a local doctor as well as a minister. Peering over the shoulders of 19th century detectives while they hunt for clues is always fun if you have a weakness for Caleb Carr, but what impressed me most about The Ghost Map was the discussion of the reasons behind people’s resistance to notion that it was contaminated water and not miasma (noxious gases) which sickened and killed people. Nudged by Johnson, I found it fairly easy to draw a parallel between the 19th century skeptics he describes and the global warming naysayers in the 21st century.

Music
I’ve been resisting Amy Winehouse because a young, wild, buzzworthy Brit with a passion for 60s girl groups and vodka just didn’t appeal to me, but I have to admit to downloading “Rehab.” It’s a great song.

Ideas
In the latest issue of O Magazine, Helen Fisher observes that as far back as Plato (and no doubt even before then), students of the human condition have tended to place people into four categories. The names of the categories may vary but the qualities associated with each remain consistent (e.g. Artisan, Guardian, Idealist, Rational). Fisher suggests that there is a correlation between those four categories and a combination of genetic clusters, personality traits and brain chemistry. She goes on to argue that people are biologically driven towards others with different personality traits in order to ensure genetic variety and a working family unit. Fisher doesn’t supply any science to support her claim, but it’s something that is intuitively appealing and I’d like to see if there is any evidence to support her claims (If you’re interested in finding out what she calls your “love type,” you can take the test at: http://www2.oprah.com/omagazine/200706/omag_200706_lovequiz_form.jhtml )

Music and Ideas
While listening to some downloaded songs on my iPod that I chose based on a performance by Blake Lewis, “Time of the Season” on American Idol (“She’s Not There,” “For Your Love by” the Yardbirds, “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)” by Edison Lighthouse), I realized what an enabler technology has become for anyone slightly obsessed. TV leads me to Itunes and Itunes then reveals to me a whole slew of songs in the same category. Those songs can then be entered into www.pandora.com which creates a “radio” channel based on common musical qualities (i.e., mild rhythmic syncopation, minor key tonality, prominent organ). The channel, in turn, supplies me with more songs and the fire of my obsession is fed.

Conveniently, my intuition about the enabling power of technology was confirmed by Chris Anderson (http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail) who I read about in Time’s “100 Most Influential People” issue. He’s an editor of Wired, who published a book last year called The Longest Tail in which he explains just how technology has enabled obsessives or as he calls them, “niche markets.” In his words, it’s about, “the big-picture consequence of this: how our economy and culture is shifting from mass markets to millions of niches. It chronicles the effect of the technologies that have made it easier for consumers to find and buy niche products, thanks to the “infinite shelf-space effect” –the new distribution from digital downloading to peer to peer markets, that break through the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar retail.
The issue of Time in which I found Anderson also directed me to three thinkers whose work sounds very interesting. Craig Vector, one of the people behind the genome mapping project, is now mapping the microbes and proteins found in the ocean. In The God Delusion, Stephen Dawkins argues that religion is a virus of the mind, an artifact of cultural evolution. Working with his research on primates in Primates and Philosophers, Frans de Waal pursues the thesis that morality is not a higher trait we acquire late in our development but is something that etched into our institutions.
Technology and Media
It looks as if we’ll be able to watch movies at home on the day they preview in the movie theaters in the not so distant future. In spite of opposition by movie theater owners, Comcast has already tested the technology with 5 out of the 6 major studios.

Wellness
If you’re interested in mapping a biking, walking or running route anywhere in the world, check out http://www.mapmyrun.com/. I haven’t used it yet, but I thought it looked nifty.

Words of the Week (from the NYT Travel Magazine Supplement)
Volcanic: superhot. Buzzword for destinations that have rapidly and unmistabkalby become the must-tops of the moment as in, “What do you mean you haven’t been to Caragena? That city is volcanic.”
Ethnosphere: coigage by the anthropologist Wade Davis to describe the “cultural web” of unique attributes and customs around the world, from language to music to food to handicrafts. Increasingly a key focus in travel e.g. “Just when you think you know what the ethnospehere’s got to offer, you discover deep-fried eel spines in Japan.”