I've really slacked off on these things.

Present: Kaya, Darcy, Mike F, Kyle, Brett, Brandi (sp?), Ashleigh (sp?), and of course Yours Truly.

Darcy led us in a common warm-up. Then I worked with Kyle and Brett, both of whom had some minimal exposure to throwing and grappling, while Mike worked with Kaya on some throws, and Darcy worked with Ashleigh and Brandi on the basics.

Brett and Kyle learned uki-goshi and ippon-seoi-nage tonight, followed by the four main ground holds, a couple of turnovers (sankaku-jime and a more basic one), and two strangles, gyaku-juji-jime and okuri-eri-jime.

One of the videoclips from the Senior Nationals that I captured:

One-armed entry for sasae-tsurikomi-ashi

From Monday's training diary entry:

If you're fighting for grips, and your opponent snags your lapel, you can reach around behind to take a grip on his far shoulder. This puts you in a cross-grip (ie, same-side lapel) position, and it will fold his arm and keep it tight. Feint as though you're trying to snag his free arm with your hand. If he pulls back (which he probably will), step across, facing him, hook his armpit with your elbow in a rising, lifting motion, pull his lapel-side arm across and around, and block his lapel-side foot with yours in a classic sasae move.

Easier to show than to describe, no?

Woops, I haven't been doing these for a little bit now. Let's get up to speed…

Monday, April 17th: Didn't work out, since my knee was still hurting.

Wednesday, April 19th: took it easy, served as Darcy's uke for a couple of demos. We worked on a nice combo — an advancing de-ashi-barai into o-soto-gari/o-soto-guruma. Very slick. Make sure you do the sweep first; if it works, great, and if it's not quite a success, you've got the space to move in for a very tight o-soto-[gari|guruma].

Tonight:

Present: Mike F, Jeff P, Marc, Alex, Herb, Me.

Did: Warm-up, moving uchikomis, then Mike did an impromptu self-defense seminar. Not a lot of sweat but an interesting lesson. Things to drill into the lower ranks: The first rule of self-defense is to get away without a fight.

Hey Darcy (and others),

Here's the first crack at the print ad for the Senior Nationals program. Let me know what you think.

Vertical (full size about 4" × 5")

Horizontal (full size about 10" × 2.5") [New!]

click images to see more detail

If you haven't seen the documentary on John Malkovich's unique fashion show, featuring judokas wearing his line of clothing and throwing each other on stage, you can now purchase the film online. It's ten bucks (presumably in US currency) and it's available here.

I saw this when it aired on one of my cable channels. It wasn't exclusively about judo—a lot of it was about the challenges of putting together such a show, and there was a fair amount of John Malkovich talking about whatever crossed his mind as he drove around Italy trying to co-ordinate the whole deal—but it's an interesting look at an unexpected intersection: judo and high fashion.

If nothing else, you can watch the trailer for free, and decide if it's something you want to pay for.