Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

I wonder if it might be a demonstration sport at the Olympics there in five years!

From the article: "Combatants fight inside a circle marked in tape on the floor. Strikes to the head or body are worth five points; to the arms or legs, three points; on hands, one point. The winner is the first to reach 15 points or, if they don’t get there quickly, the fighter with the higher score after three minutes is the victor. If both fighters reach 10 points, the bout enters a “sudden death” stage, in which the first to land a head or body blow wins."

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/feb/19/light-saber-duelling-official-sport-france-star-wars

When we were going to Prague from Berlin last June, as we crossed the border on our train I happened to look out the window and saw a large building, a warehouse or industrial something or other, with Je Suis Charlie on it. It was quite moving, though I'm not entirely sure why. Perhaps because it was strategically graphittied so that mostly only people on the train would see it.

Yesterday afternoon I was reading Ars Technica, a story about the Paris Orleans airport being shut down because a computer running Windows 3.1 crashed. Very amusing, until someone in the comments mentioned that Paris had been attacked. Sort of drained all the comedy of a 25 year old operating system running a critical part of an airport.

I have a friend whose cousin survived the first World Trade Center bombing, he was an armored car driver or guard and was in the basement when the bombs went off. As it happened, he was at Ground Zero when the planes hit. He did not survive. Another person that I know had a ticket to go to the top of the WTC on 9/11, fortunately she partied too hard the night before and missed the scheduled tour. And she lived. Likewise, the Asian martial arts film star and comedy legend Jackie Chan was filming a movie on the WTC and they had some technical issues that prevented them from filming that day. That movie was abandoned.

There can be no doubt that the 9/11 attacks on the United States were horrible, especially for the people in New York City and that were on the planes. But this is somehow more gruesome, even with the much lower body count. Because France will be happy to provide ISIS with a real war, complete with some of the best-trained military forces in the form of the Foreign Legion knocking on their proverbial door. ISIS has been wanting to drag the USA in to a ground war to validate their narrative for forming their caliphate that The Crusaders are there to kill them, to justify their killing others. And the USA has to a limited degree avoided giving ISIS that, which I think is the best thing to do. This is an Arab/Muslim problem, and the Arab/Muslim countries in the area should have taken care of it, they cumulatively outnumber ISIS by probably 100 to 1. Saudi Arabia by itself has an army that outnumbers ISIS by a good 20 to 1.

Well, it looks like France will be paying them a visit in the very near future.


(What's really sad is that as I entered TER to get the terrorism tag, the names Terry Gilliam and Terry Pratchett also came up. It's sad that two masters of comedy and entertainment should be so proximate to such a horrible thing.)