Krav Maga (by alaric)

I've always enjoyed combined mental/physical challenges. As a child, I often entertained myself with things like getting from one part of the house to another without touching the floor. This required planning, and finesse; the combination was exhilerating.

I enjoyed my time in the Combined Cadet Force, as many of the exercises we were set involved this combination; and I particularly enjoyed being in the school shooting team. Especially when we went out to electronic target ranges and did exercises involving running to checkpoints with an assault rifle, diving into the prone position, inserting the magazine, shooting at targets as they popped up, and then running to the next checkpoint. It was like playing Time Crisis!

However, that kind of thing has been missing from my life for the past decade or so. Also, I've been spending far too much of my time sitting in cars or at desks, with my main exercise being carrying heavy objects (such as sleeping children) for short distances. I was feeling a keen desire to exercise more.

Then about a year ago, Jean started doing Ju Jutsu, and I started to wonder about taking up a martial art. I remember, many years ago, a friend saying he was taking up Krav Maga, an interesting-sounding Israeli martial art that grew from self-defence techniques in the Jewish gettos of Hungary before World War 2.

However, my searches found no nearby Krav Maga groups; the nearest was in Bristol. So I gave up on this idea for the time being. But a few weeks ago I spotted a poster in a shop window in Cheltenham advertising local Krav Maga courses; sure enough, a group had started!

So yesterday evening, I turned up to give it a try.

It's delightfully pragmatic; most of the attacks seem to revolve around wacking your attacker as hard as you can in the softest bits of them you can reach, then running away. The first skill I started practicing was how to kick somebody in the groin, punch them in the face twice in quick succession, pull them down hard onto your rapidly-rising knee into their stomach, elbow them in the kidneys, and end up behind them (running away, of course), in one smooth motion. We then proceeded to have a try at being pinned from behind by one person while another ran at you from the front; there is a technique to escape the grip and leave the person gripping you curled up in a painful ball on the floor, but doing it while also dealing with the person coming at you from the front makes it a lot more interesting. There were also some more abstract exercises in dealing with large numbers of people coming at you, avoiding being cornered or surrounded, and getting them to get in each other's way. That involved some physical activity in keeping moving, but it was mainly a mental exercise, observing the paths of the attackers and planning your movements.

The practising was good exercise in itself, but we also did a bit of general fitness exercise, largely as part of the warm-up before getting into the practice. I left feeling tired but lively, and today I've been feeling the ache of growing muscle over much of my body, so it's been a good work-out.

I got on well with the other students, who were very helpful with the new people in their midst; and the instructor seems to be a truly intriguing and inspiring person!

It was good challenging fun, so I'm going to keep going, hopefully switching to the Gloucester group that will be starting on Mondays in September!

I turned up in a shirt and trousers, straight from the office, but most of the people there had track suits. Black ones, and t-shirts with martial-looking imagery on, were particularly popular. The contrarian in me is now wondering if I can get a glittery pink tracksuit in my size...

Make Good Art or Get Creative (by sarah)

This speech by the writer Neil Gaimon I found extremely powerful especially for someone like me who has to do creative things to survive.

But also the fact that I have not done things the normal way and that I keep hitting barriers such as I don't have an art degree so therefore do not count as an artist for some people. I am in a space inbetween. When I hear or read that others have not done it the normal way either it gives me hope.

Also I feel encouraged that I am not the only person who finds that trying to do projects for money fail and end up leaving you worse off than you started but the ones you do because it's a fun idea race ahead and are successful.

He mentions the changing landscape of publishing too which for me is an emotive subject - I really think I am going to continue on my own path with my blogs and getting my own CDs printed and what have you. I have tried traditional publishing twice now and both time the company has gone bust or something similar - one still having the rights to the work I'd done so I didn't even end up with it and worse they have not done anything with it :/

My first attempt at crowd funding has been a huge success 🙂 So I am very happy with that.

He mentions throwing bottles into the sea and then they all start coming back and you have to learn to say no. And you know - this is actually happening - though I would say I have been shouting into the void and now the echos are not only coming back but are bouncing and reflecting and propagating and I am having to turn things down! (But please still ask as I may not be doing stuff that weekend etc... or like with the Stroud Water Festival - what I was supposed to be doing may have been canceled).

I do feel a bit weird though it is just like suddenly I am this person that people know of - I'm getting pounced by people who I do not know who start chatting to me about my art (ok well this has always happened quiet alot but frequency has increased!).

It is bizar but I do feel like a fake - really? Me? That thing I made in the middle of the night? That story I wrote whilst breast feeding the baby at 5 am? The knitting I did at a festival whilst listening to my favourite local bands? That really? You like it?

It is not all positive feedback mind - one of my best friends hates my songs, I was accused at the Poetry Festival of being arrogant as my business cards say Artistic Scientist and Scientific Artist. Alaric cringes at my Wiggly Pet stories and visual puns. Performance poets see me as a page poet, page poets see me as performance or worse experimental and the artists are scared or the science part and the scientists are like 'you have no PhD!' and I have people ranting at me over spelling mistakes on my blogs...

But....

That is small compared to what is coming back to me at the moment. I keep thinking I'm so lucky how has this come about? But it is such a knife edge world really - I'm getting bookings now but 6 months down the line? And also it still isn't actually making money 🙁 And what it does make tends to be for charity.

But you know people are excited about Ballads of the Scientifica and there have been requests for a Wiggly Pet book and for t-shirts with things like my Normali Tea picture on.

If you watch/listen to Neils speech he says make good art, I would change that to Get Creative.

When I tore the ligaments in my ankle and had to be flown home from a field trip in the desert I GOT CREATIVE - I made Wiggly Pets

When I had to take a year out for medical treatment to my back - I GOT CREATIVE - I began writing and designed a series of childrens' science stories.

When I found myself having nearly died, and crippled from childbirth, boiling with anger and fear - I GOT CREATIVE - I started writing a novel and so was found in a cafe by the now Cheltenham Poetry Festival Director.

When our house was flooded I GOT CREATIVE and designed childrens activities to entrain my toddler.

When I got shingles and had to rest and give up the Master degree for the second time I found the Paleo Art community and began drawing trilobites and things.

When I was devastated about miscarriage I constructed The Punk In Pink personality.

When I was petrified of going to the hospital to have little Mary I wrote poems about that fear and about having a separated pelvis.

When we were being chucked out of our home I made a poem about how the home is not the building but the people with in.

And so on. There is an even larger list of good times and being creative but that would make this post silly long! 🙂

Basically as I have struggled to build my own serendipity funnel and have just reached my perceived tipping point and this talk resonated so strongly that it made me cry (yes I know that will be the hormones).

If you haven't already listen to it 🙂 But most of all Get Creative!

Mary and Jean (by sarah)

I thought I'd just do a little catch up on the girls - Mary is walking, saying Mumma, hitting people because she is teething, keeps trying to dress herself, when that fails she brings the clothes to me to dress her then once dressed she gets her shoes and tries to push the pushchair over to me. If she doesn't want something she will grab it and throw it just to show she really does not want it!

She has a favourite toy - a little hamster who is her baby, she tries to play the recorder and she loves drums. She giggles and cries at the slightest things and loves snuggles.

Jean is obsessed with acronyms especially recursive ones which she spells out and says ALL THE TIME. She is having stress attacks over where to put apostrophes when something belongs to a plural and is correcting my spelling. She has been moved up a class with some of her friends for spelling and things. She is obsessed with Harry Potter and wants me to do her hair in Hermione styles and talks in parseltongue.

She is sad science club has finished but is happy she is getting to do her dancing at school. She sings her beavers theme all the time and wants to take part in Jujistu competitions. She lies about having washed both body and teeth so keeps being in trouble and is getting sneakier about it by the day!

She has declared she wants four jobs when she is older:

She wants to be in bands (three of so she can play the drums, guitar and sing), then she wants to be a Vet as she loves animals and wants to make them better, then she wants to be an artist (specifically she wants to be the colour artist to comic book/animation line drawings and her colouring is fantastic!) and lastly she wants to be a teacher.

I have to ration the amount of time she spends reading and doing maths so she actually goes and plays - when her friends come round she organises them into bands and theatre groups and puts on shows for me.

I think that is everything currently.

Oh apart fromt he fact that Mary escapes all and any strap you put her in and has taken to posting what ever she can into the bin if you don't watch her!

Jean is picking up Lojban even though Alaric is only really speaking it to the baby and she keeps coming home saying things in Spanish and French. She is also doing her own writing ranging from poetry to stories though most of them involve Daleks.

Language Developement (by sarah)

Alaric is putting me to shame with Mary and teaching her lojban - Jeany and him have been learning this for a year or so - Jean is a bit erratic with it but evenings often find them both 'cooking' dinner and talking via laptop to the lojban community. With him raising Mary bilingual and him writing poems for WoPoWriMo in the language things are moving streaks ahead.

This does cause me a few problems in that Jean has a tendency to ask me what things are lojban when Daddy's not here which can be interesting but via the internet I have been able to help abit.

I really wanted to give my children the chance of being good at languages incase it was something they either wanted or needed when they grew up. This meant that when Jean was a baby I spent alot of time getting language tapes to play to her - I tried to get non European languages as they tend to be the least similar to English and therefore harder to learn for native English speakers. The first year of a baby's developement is very important as that is when they absorb into their little brains all the sounds of their native language.

There are sounds that adults can not hear in other languages which is why it is one of the reasons it is so hard to learn as an adult. Now I have had arguments with people about doing this - being told it would impede Jean's linguistic development but everything I had read in the research suggested that though being exposed to other languages may result in the child speaking a bit later - they would be capable of a) understanding the syntax and the actual structure of languages better and b) they would do much better in picking up other languages in future.

Not being able to get hold of everything I wanted with Jeany and being told by Al's family that the tapes would not be giving her all the higher sounds and stuff - I used to play music to her - a wide variety of styles - as wide as I could. Musicians tend to be able to hear those sounds in the other languages even if they can not reproduce them, now standard European music on has tones and semi-tones and so is quiet limited for this but stuff like Indian music has micro-tones and covers a wider range of sounds.

I even had a copy of the Koran being sang which my friend sent us.

The result of all of this? Is Jean a fantastic linguist? Well no but she has already suprised us and her teachers by appearing to be not interested in French leasons and then in the middle of supermarkets splurting out chunks of it which in like her first term when she'd only just turned four included counting one to ten in French - she can count the same in Lojban too.

Interestingly one of the things she is very good at is remembering tunes - not perfectly but more than would be expected for a five year old. Now this may well be genetic - I tend to remember a song 'roughly' from one hearing and infact can even sometimes start singing along during the first hearing (this works best with say hymns or pop music - both of which tend to repeat huge chunks of themselves).

She is also picking up guitar stuff faster than I thought she would! She has rhythm which we already knew from her dancing 🙂

(yes I know but I am a gushy proud parent!)

Sadly I lost most of the language tapes and CD's in the flood and the MP3's when my laptop died so I need to start from stratch with Mary - though with Alric and Jean speaking Lojban maybe it's not as needed.

The other thing I did was teach Jeany baby sign - she never learnt more than a few signs but she did understood more and on top of that has remembered them! To be fair I have stopped using 'wait' though it is a mangeled version using one hand as I found I never had two hands free whilst dealing with children and often I am on the phone or eating so can not vocalise a response!

I had wanted to develope it into proper sign language but unfortunatly we didn't have enough money for me to attend the course and the books on it where all quiet expensive - I know a little bit anyway like the alphabet and the names of school subjects. But I do have a slight problem in that baby sign British Sign Language and Mackatain (not sure of the spelling) are all different and I know bits of all of them :/

Again baby sign is very good for linguistic developement - not because it gets your baby talking quicker because it doesn't - but it improves the level at which the child starts to speak - so they are lickely to vocalise later on but they will be talking in sentences!

Baby sign was fantastic for preventing frustrated baby with Jean as well becuase even before she could of physically started speaking she was signing milk! at us. She learnt Milk first followed by poo - later we had more, yummy, wet, thirsty and hurt (followed by pointing to where) - this was also invaluable when it came to potty training 😉 She also made up her own signs like milk! with both hands - this meant she wanted food!

People always comment on how well Jean speaks - plus baby sign helps them develope fine motor movements and hey you have to spend a lot of time with your baby so it's not really like it was much extra effort. Sign languages are good in that though they are the languages that pick up the most dialects or regional variations they are also the languages in which people can all communicate and work out what the other person is saying! They are far more versatile - which is why I personally am sticking to sign language and not learning Lojban with Al and Jean.

I was keen on sign language again due to the issue of my own hearing when I was small - just in case - fortunatly Jean has good hearing (except when you are telling her off!). I think by the end of that first year my friends were sick of being handed a baby Jean and asked to 'speak foreign' 🙂 Oh and we always watch DVD's in the other languages as well as English 🙂

le jbocifnu (by alaric)

As I mentioned before, I'm teaching Mary Lojban.

The project that lead to Lojban was originally started to explore an idea - the Sapir-Worf hypothesis states that language influences thought; in its strongest form, one cannot imagine a concept one cannot put into words (but that's been largely discredited now). The weak version of the hypothesis is that language can hinder or help our cognitive processes.

Lojban was designed as a language with as much expressive density as possible - letting you clearly express precise concepts easily. The idea is that somebody who can think in Lojban can think more clearly than somebody thinking in English, for example.

I've been learning it myself, and I've certainly found it interesting - I'm limited by my slowly-expanding vocabulary, but already, I often find myself using Lojban concepts in my inner dialogue. There are concepts covered by a large class of irregular grammar in English that are just a single word in Lojban, and identifying the commonalities between all these bits of English into one thing is, in my experience, providing a lot of insight.

But it'd be awesome if I could teach my daughter to think awesomely. It'd certainly help us to attain world domination. Some of the more far-out possibilities in Lojban might take a few generations of native Lojban speakers to fully understand!

However, nobody seems to have taught Lojban to a newborn baby before, so I'm having to work out how to do it myself, based on advice from people raising bilingual children in other languages. I'm mainly starting with Lojban's attitudinals before, which are simple words used to attach emotional context - whereas in English, emotion is expressed with subtle yet crude changes in wording and emphasis, Lojban has a rich set of words to explicitly attach attitudes to sentences or any part thereof. They're useful on their own, too, to simply express the emotion on its own without making any actual statement.

They're perfect for the simple emotional world of babies, and they're easy to say. Here's the ones I've been using:

• {.uu .oidai} ("Oooh Oy-die") - "Aw, you're suffering/uncomfortable"
• {.ui .oinaidai} ("Whee, Oy-nie-die") - "Yay, you're comfortable"
• {.i'i} ("Ee-hee") - "We're together"
• {.i'isai} ("Ee-hee sie") - "We're very together" (eg, whole family cuddle!)
• {.oi} ("Oy") - "Grr, I am suffering" (eg, when something goes wrong for me during a nappy change)
• {.oipei} ("Oy pay") - "How are you feeling on a comfortable <-> uncomfortable axis?"

There's a vast repository of more and more subtle emotions that can be expressed as time passes.

But I'm also using some actual sentences, too. Mainly things like {xu do xagji} ("Hoo doe hag-jee"), "Are you hungry?" and pointing out what things are {ti mamta} ("Tee mamta") "That's your mum, that is!". And sometimes I throw in complex sentences, even though she won't understand, because it's useful to get used to the sound of sentences: {.iu lo mensi be do .e lo mamta be do .e mi cu prami do} ("you low mensee be doe eh low mamta be doe eh me shoe pramee doe") "your sister, your mother, and I love you" (said with a loving attitude, which doesn't quite translate into English).

But as she develops, I'm keen to explore the cases where Lojban and English don't match up well, as they are the mind-opening things that have already taught me more about language and thought. {ti mo} is a good question - it literally asks what relationships the pointed-at object is involved in or what properties it has, which invite a wide range of answers from "it's a cat" and "it's black" to "it exists in a three-dimensional space" (which sounds bizarre for a child in English, but {se canlu} ("Se shanloo") is a short phrase in Lojban that is the natural way to distinguish a real or toy cat from a picture of a cat).

All of these are rather verbose technical-sounding concepts in English, but that's part of the beauty of Lojban - they're simple words, forming parts of the core lexicon, and so they are easier concepts to teach in it!