Another Fascinating Book

It's nice to know I've still got it. I borrowed a book from work because it looked interesting, and proceeded to complete reading it in approximately one day. Started reading it last night, finished about an hour ago, and that's including sleep and work. Yay me.

But it helps to have a good book to read. And I was reading American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An odyssey in the New China by Matthew Polly which has too many subtitles but is made of several parts of awesome. I picked it up at first because it looked interesting, what with the title, and the "Iron Crotch" bit, and the pic of the monk carrying a bag of Burger King. I almost put it back, but then I flipped it over and read the blurbs on the back. The last one sold me completely. Allow me to quote it in full.

"A lot of people talk about becoming a real live ninja and don't do a thing. That's bullcrap. But this guy actually did it! In conclusion, Matthew Polly is the complete opposite of a wimpy baby."
--Robert Hamburger, author of REAL Ultimate Power: The Official Ninja Book.

When a book has Real Ultimate Power, how could I NOT read it? And that's not a bad description of what he did. In 1992, he dropped out of Princeton for a couple of years, and went to China to find the Shaolin temple and train in Kung Fu with the monks there. Seriously. He spent two years in China, training, and eventually became a Shaolin disciple. The book is a description of those two years and the weirdness of China in the early 90s, and of a 21 year old on the opposite side of the world than he grew up on. And learning to kick ass. It's really awesome. You can read a more detailed and eloquent review here, which the author even commented on.

And the last little bit about this book, besides the fact that it made me feel even more like I've never done anything? A little bit of synchronity. I was taking a break from reading it before work, and turned on the radio, and guess who was getting interviewed on NPR? The author. Yeah, it makes sense that the author'd be on the radio around the release of the book, but it was still an interesting bit of timing.

And no, I won't tell you the secret of Iron Crotch. But it's exactly what it sounds like, just ask Monk Dong.

I'm Scared

One of the things about the Bush administration that scares me the most? They always manage to get worse than I thought possible.

This whole latest thing with the firing of attorneys because they weren't investigating enough Democrats is making John Ashcroft look good as the AG. John Friggin Ashcroft! He was a scary fundie and more than a tad crazy, and had a thing against stone breasts, but he also at least had some standards of professionalism.

What He Said

A short and to the point blog post by a guy named Tom Gara about the threat of terrorism. Writer Thomas Mallon asked ""Are American writers, artists, and thinkers truly prepared to admit that Islamofascism is a real, and even imminent, threat to everything they are accustomed to thinking, saying, and creating?""

And Tom Gara gave him the answer he deserved. "This gives way to much credit to militant Islamists, and way to little credit to the human spirit and western civilisation.

So how big is the threat? For me, it just isn't that big. Islamic terrorists, if they are lucky, will manage a couple of medium profile bombings of tourist sites each year, and maybe something larger (New York, London, Madrid) every few years. This sucks, and our security services should relentlessly hunt down these people and take them out of the game. But is it really that much of a threat to the world?

Our societies, cultures and economies are just too strong to be even mildly shaken by this lame bullshit. Just because some gaggle of religious lunatics manages to kill a bunch of westerners once every 6 months, does anyone really believe that "everything we are accustomed to thinking, saying and creating" is under threat? I call bullshit."

That's exactly what I've been trying to say for years now. Well, that and that "Islamofascism" is a really really really stupid term.