Here’s something I noticed about the crowd at UFC 88: They booed every fighter that wasn’t American or white.

They booed Rousimar Palhares when he entered the cage. He’s Brazilian, and Brazilians are pretty commonplace in the UFC and in MMA in general, so my guess is that they’re not longtime fans. Katt was surmised that they were probably the kind of people that wanted all Brazilians to go back to Mexico. And unsurprisingly, at the main event, they booed Rashad Evans, who’s American, but also black.

When Korean fighter Dong-Hyun Kim walked out, they broke out the “U! S! A! U! S! A!” chant. When he won by split decision, they booed like crazy to take away from his win.

Now, decisions in MMA and pretty much any other combat sport are subjective and always subject to controversy, and I could understand this fight being called either for Kim or his opponent, Matt Brown. Kim easily took the first round. Brown had the second. In the third, Brown threw more strikes and Kim’s takedown attempts were mostly unsuccessful. However, Kim landed a very heavy elbow shot to Brown’s head, the only significant event of the round.

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If you’re using the Text Replace WordPress plug-in (I use it mostly to autolink judo terms) and would like it to replace a term only the first time it appears in a post, all you have to do is change one line.

In the function text_replacem in the file text-replace.php (it should be found in wp-content/plugins/text-replace), change this line:

$text = preg_replace("|(?!<.*?)$old_text(?![^<>]*?>)|$preg_flags”, $new_text, $text);

To this:

$text = preg_replace("|(?!<.*?)$old_text(?![^<>]*?>)|$preg_flags”, $new_text, $text, 1);

You know, the kind that people love to post about.

The person in this case is the fairly brilliant comic book writer Alan Moore.

This isn’t a “never give up” kind of talk, however. It’s more of a “hey, you should actually start, here’s why” talk. He makes the point that people that wait to do what they really want to do often end up not ever doing it.

Am I one of those people? Sort of.

I think I’m getting better, though.

I’m sure you’ve all noticed, especially lately, that religion is great for justifying pretty much anything. Wars, stunting kids’ scientific education, stopping contraception in the midst of an AIDS epidemic - these are all things we’re used to seeing pushed forward by the great shoehorn of religion.

But what about sex between a father and a stepdaughter?

By 1985 Cooke [one of the wives of Mormon Fundamentalist Tom Green] couldn’t help noticing that her thirteen-year-old daughter, Linda Kunz, was “showing feelings” toward Green. Linda liked to sit in her stepfather’s lap and would “hang on to him for the longest time.” She talked about him constantly, and eventually asked Cooke if she could marry Green. Cook consented, and in January 1986, Linda married Tom Green in Los Molinos, Mexico, a polygamous outpost on the Baja Peninsula. “I was happy for my daughter because she was happy and it was what she wanted,” Cooke said afterward. “I was happy to share her with a man I loved very dearly and thought was a very special person.” Linda Kunz Green was pregnant with Green’s child before her fourteenth birthday.

–Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven

I knew about polygamy as a Mormon practice from times past, but it never occurred to me that it was considered a holy practice. Catholic priests may sexually abuse young boys, but the Catholic Church brushes it aside. It doesn’t say that a prophet said that this is a great thing to do.

This really drives home for me that a religion can be used to push anything. Never again will I wonder at evangelical Christians pushing regressive tax policies or opposing environmental measures.

Under the Banner of Heaven, by the way, is a very eye-opening read, as you can tell. I’m only four chapters in because I started two other books at the same time (polygamous reading!), but Katt, who’s a really fast reader, went through it already and confirms that it’s good all the way through.

OK, I’m not sure if this is really worth writing about, but hey, I feel like doing it anyway.

A lot of people are lauding The Dark Knight as an amazing film, something that’s transcendent. I don’t see it that way, so turn away now if you’re uninterested in a bit of rain on your parade. (Also turn away if you want to avoid spoilers.)

I feel about The Dark Knight the way Katt told me she felt about Brokeback Mountain: I was expecting to be overwhelmed, but I was merely whelmed. To me, it was another entertaining Batman movie, and certainly one that was more flawed that the preceding one.

On the radio, I heard Christopher Nolan say that what he wanted in this movie was something very gritty and realistic. This might be part of the problem: Batman is gritty, but by design, he can’t be all that realistic.

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“A kick in the nads, school, Free Willy - those things are all free. And they all suck.

“On the other hand, it costs like, $1500 or something to buy a car, or take a chick out to dinner, or have someone killed.”

– Butt-Head

This really cocky new kid showed up at judo last night, at the fundamentals class. That doesn’t happen very often. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone come in with ‘tude.

I don’t think he’s brand new, or he’d be working on his breakfalls and rolls with his own instructor instead of working out with rest of the class. However, he hadn’t been around long enough to lose his inflated sense of ability. The kid, who I’d guess was eighteen or nineteen, went on about how he was a natural, talked up all the high school wrestling he did, and generally screwed around a lot. He kept trying wacky moves instead of working on the technique being taught.

The head instructor of the judo club happened to be teaching that night, and he noticed. The sensei’s a friendly guy, so I wondered how he’d deal with this. However, he teaches a lot of classes, so I should have been able to guess that this was not really a new situation for him.

First, he agreed to roll with the kid during a water break. He ran over him, but while he stopped to talk to someone, the kid jumped on his back. The sensei took it with good humor and turned around and choked the kid, with what looked like ryote jime.

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The original Notes of Chaos met its demise a couple of weeks ago.

It was hosted on a server that, unbeknownst to me, had changed hands a couple of years. It went from my reliable friend Dan to a guy that runs a popular webcomic. Dan had been running the server for this guy, and since the guy generated most of the traffic for the server, he started paying for it and took ownership from Dan.

Recently, some other users’ processes on the server had been bringing it down. The webcomic guy got irritated that these guys that were using his server for free were interfering with his livelihood and didn’t want to figure out whose process it was, so he locked all of the users out. He didn’t give any notice but did later at least send Dan the other users’ files. It was basically an eviction - we were locked out, and our stuff was at the door. He was all EVERYBODY GET OUT NOW THIS IS MY SERVER YOU ARE TAKING FOOD OUT OF MY MOUTH AND I ALREADY STARTED CHEWING IT

It’s understandable, but I’d like to think I wouldn’t do it that way. Who knows, though. Maybe he was losing thousands of dollars a day and couldn’t give people a couple of weeks.

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