"A god / ... bade betwixt their shores to be / The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea."

[larryhammer]

Sometimes the YouTube random-walk takes you from koto to taiko: a kids' troupe sends off a cruise ship in Nagasaki part 1, part 2. Bonus link: a high school troupe winning a national competition despite being afflicted with bad camerawork. (Hello, intensity. If anyone admitted to crushing on the young woman in the front center, I wouldn't judge.)

Gustave Doré's illustrations for Poe's famous bird poem. (via)

"Because" because reasons. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from "To Marguerite: Continued," Matthew Arnold.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Regarding intensity:

Over time the "adult" class at our karate dojo has shifted more toward older kids (basically, a combination of lack of time and lack of money meant a lot of the actual adults went away, and the older kids got promoted.) Technically the cutoff for joining the adult class is now twelve years old, but if there's a pair of siblings at the dojo and one of them gets promoted, Shihan will often shift both kids at once, to make things easier for the parents.

Enter a girl I shall call S.

Her older brother A was thirteen or fourteen when he got moved up, I think. S was part of a large flood of kids into the adult class, many of whom were used to having somebody stand over them and tell them what to do; our less structured format meant they would stand around talking when they were supposed to be working on kata.

But S? She was there to do karate.

She was all of ten years old when she joined us, and roughly knee-high to a grasshopper. (She's twelve now, and taller, though still not very big.) But when she does kata . . . I think she could probably burn a hole in the wall through force of gaze alone. And there is something unspeakably adorable about an itty-bitty little ponytailed Japanese-American black belt looking like she could kill you with her mind.

[larryhammer]

Yes. THAT.

---L.