More Sayings

Ability to laugh makes us human, ability to laugh at ourselves makes being human more fun

Russian smile

Saw comments in one of the forums I regularly read about how Russians rarely seem to smile, compared to Americans, especially on the streets or in unfamiliar company.

The way I understand reasons for this is that a smile in Russian (or rather Soviet) culture is part of conversation. Are you having a conversation with everyone you pass on the street? You don’t even know them.

And even in conversation with someone you know, smile appears where appropriate in the context of conversation. People who smile at everyone all the time are usually percieved as insincere (and also as retards, if in addition to smile they shake their head a lot and have saliva runnung from their mouth)

What pisses me off

There are two categories of drivers that really piss me off (and it seems that people who belong to one category also often belong to the other as well:

• People who take the left lane on the freeway and drive side-to-side with a car to the right of them without overtaking, giving way or letting others overtake them from the right. And you are just stuck there behind them. Nothing like driving on two-lane road with two cars taking both lanes in front of you and no one in front of them for miles… My punishment for people like that – when I do overtake them eventually, get in front of them and start slowing down; when they finally get a clue that they are about to stop and do change lane, pedal to the floor and into the horizon I go. Trouble is, most of the time this happens I’m really in a hurry, so they go unpunished, if you don’t count the bad karma they undoubtedly acquire.
• People who drive v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y on one lane roads and refuse to pull out to the side to let you pass (you and oh about 20 other cars they are holding back). I’m not prone to road rage, but if it ever happened, these people would be the most likely victims.

Double touch

Double touch is one aspect of epee fencing that I would not mind doing without. Back in the days when the score was kept in “touches against” a fencer, assigning a touch against both fencers on simultaneous touches made perfect sense. With the switch to keeping score in “points for” a fencer, that sense seems lost. While it can be argued that the change was purely semantical, under old system double touch was interpreted as “you are both dead, so each of you has a touch against him”. Under the current system it’s “you killed your opponent, so you get a point and, oh, he killed you too, so he gets a point” – again, it’s the same action, but semantic interpretation is different.

More Sayings

If atheism had a deity, its primary attribute would be omni-impotence

Why I am needle?

I get asked very frequently where the nickname came from. Needle has been my handle for longer than I can remember and the reasons for picking it at the time were:
1. Some people seemed to consider me sharp – I’m still amazed by their poor judgment
2. I’m a prick
3. I like to poke people with sharp pointy things as well as with words
4. In my younger years I was often found hard in haystacks

Starting again is hard

I started fencing when I was 8 or 9 and had to quit at 14 after very serious knee injury. Tried to start again at 20, very briefly, but didn’t find the right club/coach …
Started again at 33 and really glad that I did.
But it’s almost like starting from the start – the only thing that I still have with me from the childhood fencing is footwork. Technique was completely off, working on that quite a bit, point control took a lot of work to recover, still not as good as I would like it. The worst is dealing with not having the reflexes to react fast enough and not having enough experience yet to outsmart those that are faster.
I have no intention of quitting though – I’m having too much fun even if I’m not as good as I’d like to be yet.