PERHAPS PREDATING ALL WRITTEN LANGUAGES, tattooing has been around for many millennia. The oldest mummified and tattooed human being dates to roughly 3,250 BC, and perhaps scientists will one day find the remains of tattooed individuals thousands of years older still. Tattooing sprouted from many different cultures for the multi-use purposes of decoration, identification, ritual…
REMAKES ARE A DIME A DOZEN in television and movies these days, but every now and then something special comes along where the child outshines the parent. “Battlestar Galactica” comes to mind, as well as John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” and possibly the upcoming premiere of Netflix’s “Lost in Space” reboot series. In the case of…
The question is, does the “Book of Five Rings” have meaning in our modern world, in the martial arts as we practice them, and even in life more generally? It is important in reading the Rings to understand what Musashi has to say to our modern world, and what he does not. As such, it…
I’ve seen the movie, and yes, it is as deeply emotional and cerebral as all the previews and reviews make it out to be. Praiseworthy? Certainly. But startlingly original? Well….. The premise of ARRIVAL is that 12 mysterious spacecraft (gargantuan split ovoids) touch down (actually hover several feet off the ground) across the globe and…
IT WAS A LONG TIME COMING, but the Sorcerer Supreme of the planet Earth has finally made it to the big screen! Doctor Steven Vincent Strange, decades-long mystic hero from Marvel Comics is gracing 3-D Cinema all over the world, and raking in the big cash hand over fist… and rightfully so! The special effects…
Musings on Miayamto Musashi and the Book of Five Rings (Go Rin No Sho) Statue on Ganryu Island depicting the duel between Miyamoto Musashi and Sasaki Kojiro A long time ago in a land far, far away, there lived a very strange and dangerous man. He is known to us as Miyamoto Musashi (also called…
THE MORNING AFTER! The candy haul is in, gourds need to be bagged and disposed of, and for those unpopular neighbors trees and lawns have been decorated in long white streamers. Halloween is over, and those post-scary-night blues are starting to hit you. Some words of advice, get up an hour or two earlier. If…
Space is not simply a hole into which money that could be better used for food stamps or worker retraining is flushed. It fundamentally helps economies and the poor. The single most powerful example of this is the weather satellite. Storms that sank ships and destroyed cities are now spotted early enough for avoidance and…
A mere chunk of rock is survivable. It’s not likely to get all of us, though it could. Even if it didn’t wipe us all out, would a technic civilization ever arise again? We’ve mined most of the easily reachable resources around. Could we start over again? There are greater terrors in space that could…