Dear everyone,
This letter is a week late.
I was busy the last two weekends (see below), and also, we are leaving
with Andy and Gail the upcoming weekend for a two-weeks in Kenya. This was a trip that has had a lot of snafus
already - - it was originally booked for last August - - there may have been
insufficient people booking it, and also after more research, the itinerary was
changed. In any case we were all prepped
to travel this May with the star academic - - Bruce Patterson, the emeritus
curator of mammals at the Field Museum (and Barbara’s old boss), but practically at
the last minute he had to cancel for unspecified health reasons. I hope that this is the worst that happens on
this adventure, and that Bruce recovers.
Usually, I’m playing pickleball this time of day on Mondays,
but I hurt my back rising and twisting several weeks ago. I think I strained my right latissimus, and I
continued playing for a couple of weeks, and it has yet to heal. I’ve decided I need to take it easy this week
to be as injury free as possible for our trip. Pickleball is dangerous! I’m pretty sure I have a small tear in my
left knee from months ago that has not gotten much better, and it certainly affects
my ability to sit seiza (kneeling) when doing aikido.
Speaking of which, I’ve been doing a lot more martial arts
lately. Sunday April 19th, I
did my usually two-hour aikido class, but then stayed at the dojo for a four-hour
seminar with Steven Vasilakis. Some
people from my tai chi group had told me about his ability to thrown them
around, and now having experienced it, I believe them. Steven is a tallish guy with a burly build, probably
over 100 kg. Like my deceased instructor,
Bill Grizzle, he is a long-time student of Master Liao in
Oak Park. I’m not exactly sure how
Steven was pushing me around, but I don’t think it was a mystical force. He’s a pretty big and strong guy. I can tell I have a lot yet to learn.
This past weekend I was in Lake Geneva at Sensei Diane Costanzo’s dojo. I used to train with her on occasion in Oak
Park, but she sold that place and moved to Wisconsin post-covid. Her new dojo is 15-20 minutes away from Lake
Geneva, in other words, in the middle of nowhere, and I’d imagine this is
really a vanity post-retirement project for her. Some of her old students may drive up for classes,
but I doubt she is attracting much local interest. Anyway, Ed Gemanov from Bulgaria was the
(usual) main headliner, but we were also lucky enough to have Hiroshi Tajiri
from North Carolina also present. Sensei
Tajiri is pretty old (one of Toyoda's oldest students), and has had some health problems over the last couple of
years. You may recall that we have commissioned
several sumi-e paintings from him over the years: Meeko, Daisy, and Guido. The seminar was fun, and as others remarked,
like a family reunion where you see old friends on the aikido seminar
circuit. I carpooled there with Bob
Garza and Joan Dehnert in Bob’s enormous ford F-150, and we stayed at a Holiday
Inn Express in Elkhorn. The first
evening was pretty hard, and I would guess that I had over 500 falls over the three
days. We ate a lot of food also, with meals at the Flat Iron Tap, Zaab, and the Next Door Pub Lakeside.
Meanwhile, Spring migration has started in earnest. I have been going to the Little Red Schoolhouse
a few times a week, in between the rainy days (although today Jami Walloch and
I got pretty soaked). It’s only
been ok so far - - we’ve seen the usual yellow-rumped, yellow, and palm
warblers, blue-gray gnatcatchers, chipping and song sparrows, but also
Blackburnian warblers, and orchard oriole, and a barred owl. Already a lot of
the early spring wild plants have shown their ephemeral flowers.
Just a couple of days before the aikido seminar, Cindy and I
went to the Brookfield Zoo to see their Glow Wild exhibit. We had planned to go with the Wallochs, but
they had to cancel because they had to make a trip to emergency vet as one of their
dogs was sick. We had dinner at the Little Owl Social Club, and
then got to the zoo a touch to early (around 7). We really shouldn’t have started until after
7:30, because the figures looked much better in the dark. I was a bit underwhelmed by the exhibit, but
Cindy liked it, and it was a nice evening.
I think this would be a fun event for the under-10 crowd. We also got to
see a lion dance performance. We were
surprised to see a large number of people at the zoo, especially for a
weeknight; the tickets were not cheap, especially with a 20% ‘processing’
surcharge.
Interesting books:
Non-Fiction
Someday
Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This. This is a 2025 National book award winner by
Egyptian – Canadian – American author Omar El Akkad. It’s mostly about the destruction of Gaza,
but plenty of conflation with the Western world’s other sins of
exploitation and climate change. El
Akkad is very angry – but is he angry because of the moral injury in itself, or
the lying and hypocrisy associated with it?
It reminded me a bit of People Love Dead
Jews. I guess one can either feel rage if the horror of life
strikes you as novel idea, or cynicism as you realize that the ills he
describes are the same as what has been happening for all of human civilization,
or maybe pre-civilization (re: chimpanzee civil wars).
A different dismal take on human history is Pathogenesis:
A History of the World in Eight Plagues.
Here the author traces a lot of human history and pre-history to the
effects of infectious diseases.
According to this thesis, this is the reason why the Cro-Magnons crowded
out the Neanderthals, why Europeans were able to take over the New World, and
why Africa was so inimical to would be colonists until the end of the 19th
century.
A bunch of books about man eating lions
and the colonization
of Kenya
Fiction:
A
History of the World in 10&1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes. A very clever book of 10 (and one-half)
interconnected stories, fairly amusing.
Daughter
of Crows by Mark Lawrence.
Acceptable grimdark fantasy
The
Listeners by Maggie Steifvater: Set
in an opulent West Virginia hotel in the early 1940s, this novel is about the
federal takeover of the venue to house enemy diplomats during WW2
The
Afterlife Project by Tim Weed: This near
present and far post-apocalyptic novel takes place about 50 years as well as
10,000 years int the future. It could be
depressing, but it’s not
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