No no, not how to fight umbrellas, but umbrellas to use in fighting. John Steed shouldn’t be the only one who can fight using an umbrella. Looks like the Filipino Secret Services uses them as well. Definitely check the video out.

Last week a friend of mine from the tai chi school, William Nicholson, dropped dead. He was at the school joking with other students when he turned his head and fell to the floor. He died leaving his wife and two daughters. I don’t think that you ever fully appreciate the people around you until they are no longer there. William had an amazing positive spirit and great sense of humor. Work was secondary to him. Although he was a successful lawyer, work was merely a means to an end and not an end in and of itself. He was very active in the community. He took an active role with his eldest daughter’s field hockey team. He made sure if someone around him needed help that he found a way to help. In short, he was a man I could have learned a lot more from.Big Willy, as he was known at Great River, was an active martial artist. He had been studying taijiquan for nearly fifteen years. He was at the school usually twice a week. He and I roomed together in Estonia during one of our festivals there. Most recently, he was the head judge at the Traditional Chinese Sword League’s First Tournament. He also helped manage the school’s finances. He will be sorely missed. I’ve taken some time off. Ever since my grandfather’s death I have been working like a fiend. William’s death piled upon that. I really needed this time to clear my head. Though it may not be the most sensible thing to do, I headed out on a little road trip which has given me some time to process those things I should have processed sooner. I keep coming back to this lesson: do not wait. If there is something you want to do, do it as soon as possible. Do not wait. William was a fit 48 year old; you never know when your time is up. Do not wait. It doesn’t matter what those things are that you want to do, be they personal or professional, do them now. I didn’t learn as much as I could from William. What I did learn, I will incorporate into my life. I will not dwell on what I could have learned but did not. I will not wait.

So I just went to Amazon, and I got an HTTP/1.1 Service Unavailable message. Odd, eh? DDOS any one?

… without shopping at Archie McPhee’s? My life is far closer to being complete now.

Last week my grandfather died. He was the last of my living grandparents. His decline since the passing of my grandmother was extremely swift. One day he was a spritely 93 year old. He got sick and bang! He was struck old and declined from there. We were lucky to see him in decent shape over Passover.

Among the many many things that he taught me was an important lesson in human relations. “Always be ready to shake someone’s hand,” he once told me, “No matter who they are or how dirty the hand is.” (I think he said this in regards to shaking his car mechanics hand even though it was covered in grease.) It was a simply lesson but one that stuck with me since I heard it as a child. It is one I have tried to practice throughout my life.

In March of 2003, Dwayne Watson drove a tractor onto the National Mall. He stayed, sitting on his John Deere, in a small pool in Constitutional Gardens… for 2 days. Long story short SWAT team gets involved… blah, blah, blah… domestic terrorist… blah, blah,blah… caused lots of traffic in DC. And it is for that last point that he was sent to jail. You can read a more accurate portrayal of this in the Washington Post.

I believe that using double quotes around a word or phrase negates the word or phrase that is quoted. Let me demonstrate:

• “All beef” patties - Isn’t even all “meat”
• “Cheese” product - I shudder to think what this really is
• “Seafood and crab” cakes - sold by Trader Joe’s

From this list you may think that double quoting as negation only works for foodstuffs, but that is incorrect. People use air quotes to accomplish the same thing as well as a method for reinforcing a negation. For example:

This is a great summation of the points against our current, expensive, ineffective “security” at airports, written by a commercial airline pilot.

My grandmother died last week. I was quite close to her. I was her first grandchild and thus a testbed for grandparenting. I have to say, she was an incredible person. A mathematician who worked on one of the first few computers ever built, she worked for the military during World War II. She raised three kids and was the matriarch for a large extended family.

But that is not exactly how I remember her. I remember her as the person that really introduced me to art and music. Taking me to both the MFA and Boston Symphony, she spoiled me with an informal education in the arts. (It is all the time I spent as a kid in Boston Symphony Hall that has made me so picky about the acoustics of the halls in which I hear classical music. Sorry, Kennedy Center, but you just can’t compete to the warmth and richness of the sound in Symphony Hall.) Later in life, she studied art history at Wellesley College and was a docent at its Davis Museum.

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