What trumps equality?

Okay, I gotta admit that this is a new one.

Now, I admit that they have a point here. I suppose that, technically, insisting that the girls on a co-ed hokey team change separately is discriminatory; but at the end of the day, even equality is trumped by safety.

We are talking about 14-year-old males here. Kids right at the age when girls stop having cooties. Right when girls start getting all curvy and cuddleable. Let's face it, you show a 14-year old male a linoleum tile, and they'll think about sex. Now you want to show them an athletic young woman around their age changing into and out of hockey gear? Maybe I'm being a little paranoid, but that strikes me as a perfect recipe for disaster.

Bill C-38.

To a few people's surprise, I've been somewhat quiet on this issue for the last little while, even after the bill passed, I didn't write anything; largely because I considered that the end of the issue.

This happens to be an issue I believe in quite passionately; which, for some reason I can't really explain, seems to come as a surprise to a lot of people. Especially when they find out that a) I'm not gay (which, frankly, some people find a little too surprising), and b) I'm not married.

But, for the moment, let's consider the fact that very shortly same-sex marriage will be the law of the land in Canada.

For the bulk of Canadians, this will have absolutely no effect; in eight provinces and one territory, it's already legal. Of the remaining provinces, PEI was planning on making it legal anyway, and Nunavut already recognizes same-sex marriages performed outside its own borders; even if they're not performed there.

So, the only stronghold against same-sex marriage in Canada is the good ol' redneck province of Alberta. Our premier has promised to fight Bill C-38 tooth and nail to keep this "nonsensical bill" (his words, for the record) from becoming law in Alberta. Stephen Harper, who was elected overwhelmingly in a riding in Calgary, has sworn to make this an election issue in december; which means that he's basically planning on getting elected at least in part based upon the promise to be the first Prime Minister in history to use the Notwithstanding clause.

And in the middle of this huge maelstrom; which really shouldn't be an issue at all; we have my MP, Jim Prentice, a high-ranking member of the Conservative party who voted in favor of Bill C-38.

My interest in this bill is rather deeply personal, but not for the reasons one would expect.

It was with grave disappointment that I watched the US Federal election last November. While it was deeply saddening to see 51% of voters decide that a bible-thumping redneck moron was fit to run the country for another four years; much more disappointing was the fact that eleven states voted overwhelmingly to ban same-sex marriage within their respective borders.

I have yet to hear someone give a secular reason why same-sex couples should be denied the right to marry. The closest anyone has ever come is that same-sex couples cannot have kids. What they fail to observe is that we do not force married couples to have a fertility test; we do not deny marriage certificates to sterile couples; and we do not declare any marriages which fail to produce offspring to be invalid. In short, from a legal perspective, getting married in no way requires the couple to bear children.

In other words, in a country which has written into its constitution the Separation of Church and State; a country which is supposed to have a secular government; a laws for which nobody has yet provided a secular basis were passed in eleven different states.

That is rather disappointing. More disappointing is the fact that in a country which announces itself to be the "land of the free" passed laws in eleven different states, whose only purpose was to limit the freedoms of a specific minority.

Canada didn't do that. Canada made same-sex marriage seem natural and healthy and logical. Granted, immediately after the bill passed, you had people in the streets screaming that the sky was going to fall and that civilization as we knew it was about to crumble; all because a single freedom had been extended to a small minority. A freedom which will affect nobody except for that minority in any measurable way. Ignoring, for the moment, that the sky has not yet fallen, the fact of the matter is that the extending on freedom to one's fellow man isn't something to be lamented. This is something to be celebrated.

While the US has been trying for years to get a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, Canada legalized it in the political equivalent of overnight. While the US bowed down to pressure from the Religious Right Wing; Canada found a way to allow religious freedom and marital equality to exist side-by-side.

The US could learn a lesson or two from Canada.

I'm an American, and I approve this message.

Human Beings are Assholes

Not all Human beings are assholes, admittedly; but I'm starting to think that at the very least a sizeable majority are.

I spent this weekend feeling rather sick. A stomach flu of some kind; but that's not what I want to talk about.

I finally recovered from the aforementioned sickness on Tuesday morning, and as I got to my car, I realised that there was a lot of broken glass filling the two front seats; that the front windshield was broken, and sitting in the back seat was a large rock.

I was not pleased to see this.

So, a day that I would have spent working was instead spent contacting my insurance broker, contacting various shops to get it repaired, arranging to have it towed to be repaired, since I couldn't legally drive the thing with it's window missing; and calling the police to report the incident.

I have access to another car, fortunately. So I go out this morning to said car, and I realize that the rear driver's side window had been rocked on this car as well.

Suffice it to say, I'm not exactly happy about all this.

Dammit!

April and I went to see War of the Worlds last night. And again, I enjoyed it.

Dammit.

So now, I've gone to two movies this summer which could have been ridiculed quite nicely, but neither one was ridicule-worthy.

Dont' get me wrong, this movie isn't Spielberg's best work, and he seemed to be borrowing substantially from his own past works (Jurrasic Park, Minority Report, ET, AI, Close Encounters of a Third Kind, Schindler's List, to name a few), and borrowed from others as well (Signs immediately comes to mind), but overall, I must admit that this was a quite enjoyable movie; and eerily realistic to just how screwed we would be if ever an alien intelligence decided that they wanted to rid themselves of us.

Without giving away the ending, the movie was relatively true to the spirit (if not the content) of Wells' original work.

A quick note on Dakota Fanning, who plays Tom Cruise's daughter. Wow. She was easily the most talented actress in the entire movie, and I don't mean that in my usual fascetious/sarcastic way. To say that I was awestruck at the acting talent she displayed in this movie would be a gigantic understatement.

Tom Cruise actually can act, surprisingly enough. Not particularly well, mind you, but he does manage to pull of his role in this movie rather convincingly.

The ending falls a little flat and isn't quite tragic enouch, but all in all, I rather enjoyed it.

Damn.

Acupuncture

So... Acupuncture.

I consider myself sceptical of just about anything. I guess that's why I got into science; where being a sceptical sonuvabitch is actually a good thing. Science still hasn't fully worked out how, exactly, acupuncture works; it could be just an advanced placebo effect, or there's a theory coming through the pipes called "gate theory" which suggests that by probing specific parts of the body; you can open "gates" which increase blood flow, circulation, and basically reinforce the body's own healing mechanism. The short answer is that we don't know.

And, let's face it, relieving pain by shoving needles in various parts of your body seems somewhat contradictory just on its own.

So, after we did our Kung Fu demonstration on Friday (which went well, by the way, but I was pretty dead at the end of it), our Daai Si Ying invited a few of us over to his place for what he calls quality control. Which is a nice way of saying "run a select few students through the wringer and see if they can still walk at the end of the day." The good thing is that you learn an enormous amount in a relatively short period of time. The down side is that you can't move the next morning. Usually because you've got such a buildup of lactic acid in your muscles that even rolling over in bed makes you wince in pain.

Then there are the bruises.

Most frequently, they're the natural result of some rough sparring sessions. I had a black eye for a while from the last no-holds-barred sparring session. Made an interesting conversation topic.

Then, there are the self-inflicted ones. These tend to be far worse because they're generally inflicted when you're in the process of breaking something that doesn't want to be broken.

A rock, for instance.

Now, as a quick primer: when a rock breaks, you don't feel anything. It's practically as if you sliced your hand through air.

When it doesn't break, it hurts like a sonuvabitch.

And at the moment, unfortunately, I'm at the point in my training where the rock breaks a lot less frequently than it doesn't.

In a rock-break attempt last night, I hit the rock exactly wrong, but with enough force to break it; and it hurt. A lot. For a second I was sure that I'd shattered at least a couple of bones in my hand. Turns out I was wrong on that one. But I'd definitely hit it hard enough to bruise it badly. Very badly.

So one of the seniormost students, who happened to witness the event in question sat me down and informed me that I had a bad deep-tissue bruise. Something I already knew, but it was nice to have some confirmation. I figured I was just gonna have to suck it up and deal with the fact that my hand was going to swell to roughly the size of a small canteloupe, and turn a nice, deep purple. I've had bruises like that before; they always take about three or four days until they're back to something resembling "normal," but they do heal.

He calmly grabs my hand and asks me how I am with needles. Then goes on to ask if I've ever had acupuncture. I replied, honestly, that I was somewhat sceptical about acupuncture. He replied that was okay; it would work regardless of whether I believed it.

That, I admit, threw me for a loop. One of the defining characteristics of a placebo effect is that whoever's receiving treatment has to believe that the treatment could conceivably help them. If he was right, Placebo was looking less likely. I shrugged it off and said I was willing to try.

So, he proceeds to stick me with a few needles. One in the tip of my pinky finger, two more just distal and proximal to the injury respectively, a third in my wrist, a fourth in just on the inside of my elbow, and a fifth in my leg, just distal to the knee. He left them in for a few minutes, then carefully removed them.

Suffice it to say that I woke up the following morning far less sceptical about acupuncture. It wasn't a cure-all, certainly. My hand is still a little sore; but swelling is practically nonexistent, and it's not purple. None of the typical morning-after results of this kind of injury are there.

Admittedly, one sample isn't exactly representative; but it definitely shows more promise than I'd previously thought.

Neat stuff, that acupuncture.

Sometimes I wonder if your average turnip could outsmart me.

I'm not dumb. At least I don't think I am. I'd like to think I have at least average intellect. I'm not saying I'm a genius either, because let's face it, I'm not.

What I do have is a complete lack of anything that could even remotely be described as common sense.

My Kung Fu school is giving a huge Bak Mei demonstration on Friday in Medicine Hat. Being the enthusiastic martial artist that I happen to be, I decided that I'd do a few demonstrations. Four of them, in fact. Two empty hand fist forms, a staff form, and a two-man fighting staff demo. This doesn't sound like much, but the two fist forms are the longest in the style (and at full-force, they're somewhat exhausting); I hate staff forms with a passion; and the two-man fighting staff demo involves having a huge guy named Tom try to beat me to death with a stick. And that one's going to be performed last, so I'm gonna be exhaused, and Tom's still gonna be trying to beat me to death with a stick.

And all that doesn't include the Lion dance I'm doing before the Kung Fu demo.

No, I take it back, I am dumb.

Note to self: obtain defibrilator before demo on Friday....

Geek sex appeal

This actually might explain a lot.

I'm an enormous geek. I admit it. You don't get through a degree in physics, minoring in biology and mathematics without being something of a geek. You don't then go on to do a PhD. in physiology and biophysics without developing a further layer of geekdom.

And yet, I'm now rapidly approaching the two-year mark on a relationship with a young woman who, two years ago, I would have described as "waaaaaaay the hell out of my league; no, scratch that, playing a different sport."

Suffice it to say, I'm in pretty deep smit. But that's pretty understandable from my end of things. Women who are funny, intelligent, beautiful, and will voluntarily hike 75 kilometers with 50 lbs on their backs are rather hard to come by for some reason. Drews, on the other hand, are pretty dime-a-douzen-y. I think a buddy of mine from my Kung Fu class phrased it best: "You're never gonna find another woman like her, so don't screw it up."

Batman

April and I went to see Batman Begins yesterday, and I feel the sudden urge to comment on this small facet of my childhood.

I enjoy ridiculing Batman. The old-school Batman, anyway. I mean, let's face it, he's a character who practically demands ridicule. He's an untouchable icon. He can figure out exactly what his enemies are thinking; he can look at a poison and figure out an antidote for it; he can leap across rooftops; can figure out the most convoluted, twisted scheme of whatever over-the-top villain he's facing; he has a car which is armed with every toy, weapon, and device imaginable; and he can beat the snot out of an army of evil henchmen without breaking a sweat.

And let's face it, he dresses like a giant bat, and doesn't think that's weird.

This was not that Batman.

I went into this movie prepared to ridicule it. Instead, I saw a superbly-made movie that dissected his motivations, and made him a human being, instead of a guy in a suit.

So I'm totally bummed.

Maybe Fantastic 4 or War of the Worlds will provide me with more ridiculing opportunities.

Be Water.

Bruce Lee, in an interview not long before his untimely death, offered the following dictum:

Empty your mind: be like water. Put water in the cup, it becomes the cup; put water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle; put water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, or it can crash; it is formless, so it assumes all forms. It's simple, direct, and free.

Be water, my friend.

And that is the sum of my available wisdom for today.

75 kilometer Torture Tests

You know, there are some out there who would tell you that dragging your girlfriend on a 7-day, 75 kilometer jaunt around Vancouver island is somewhat unwise; or at the very least, an act which is ill-advised to strengthen the relationship. And, I confess, there is likely some validity to that viewpoint.

April and I hit the West Coast Trail on the 12th of August, and hike for 7 days from Port Renfrew to Bamfield.

My Dad's describing this as the Make or Break trip. I'm not sure if that kind of pressure is really warranted, but there may be some truth to that. We're going to be hiking for seven days. Just the two of us; alone, over rough terrain, sharing the trail with a bunch of slugs.

Lots of fun, that will be.

And yes, I'm really looking forward to it.