Oh. My. God.

Time for a post high in redundancy. So, the Shaolin Monks, huh? Holy crap, they're good! To be honest, it seemed like a couple of them took a while to warm up, but once everyone was firing on all cylinders it was phenomenal. Highlights? The two 12 year old kids doing flips higher than their heads and balancing on their staffs. The guy using his stomach for a chopping board (with cleaver flashing and cabbage flying). Iron bars smashing over heads (I have a big chunk), and really just a whole bunch of kung fu-y action. Under the banner of a loose narrative (a student asking his seifu what the point of the kung fu was - I think. it was in Chinese), they showed us acrobatic feats and feats of strength, different forms of the kung fu (animal forms and a very funny interlude of drunken boxing) and weapons forms.

One major difference to many of the other martial arts displays I've seen is the sensation of power behind the monks' technique. Many films (and demonstrations) that show martial arts are fast, many are tricky and many are complicated, but not many have a feeling of power behind the technique. The monks, on the other hand, apart from being able to do frankly scary things with their bodies, show an alarming level of power behind their technique. I'm not sure if I'm making myself clear, but if yer a martial artist I think you know what I mean.

Oh, and some episodes of Transformers: Enegeron are playing in the background and, apart from the fact that the animation is an annoying mix of smooth and really shit, I really can't help but think that when they talk about the omnicons, there's this little, racist, voice saying sotto voce "like the Mexicans" or "the Indians" or some other minority. The omnicons, according to one of the Autobots, search the universe for energon, busying their lives with simple tasks and hard work ("Like the Mexicans"). One Autobot was jealous of how they seem to know their low lot in life ("Like the Mexicans") and seem happy with that knowledge (all together now...). It might just be the voice-over actors or the translation, but there really is an aggravating patronising undertone of "they're less than us, but they don't mind". And Ironhide as a young blowhard might sound like an incrdibly clever, self-referential characterisation, but it really does get old quick.

Four things I've learned recently;

1. I might be a little too sensitive about issues that aren't really mine.


2. I need more than five hours sleep to function for 8 hours at work.


3. The dialogue writers for Energon must phone it in a lot of the time.


4. "Powerlinking" sounds just way the hell too sexual. This is a kids' show, for God's sake!

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"He's a nut-bag! Just because the fucker's got a library card, doesn't make him Yoda."
- Det. David Mills, Se7en