Finnish Eurovision Song 2010

In pop music, the listeners expect to hear a riff in the first 20 seconds. Good composers know this, and they use this expectation by implementing it, breaking it or gaming it in creative ways. Fundamentally music is communication. These expectations make the song comprehensible.

First I'll prune the contestants based on the riff in the first 20 seconds. Here are the criteria:

• Riff is established. 1 point.
• Riff is decorated. 1 point. When the riff is repeated, some instruments play differently in the background.
• Riff variation. 1 point. When the riff is repeated, the riff ends differently.
• There is a transition between the riff and the first verse. 1 point. Transitions are short bursts of less composed playing. They signal that the song is moving to another phase. They demonstrate communication by expectation.
• Demonstration of speed. 1 point. In general, good composers and musicians are used to quick play. This makes slow play a conscious choice to express simple and clear message. After demonstration of speed, the listener takes slow portions more seriously.

These additional criteria flunk the song as too strange:

• Drum challenged. Rhythm is really important for me. If there are no drums nor other rhythmic instruments, there's no point for me to rate the song, as it works on channels which I don't hear.
• Alien style. Communication is not getting through.

Round 1 - Drum challenged or alien style

• Nina Lassander: Cider Hill. Drum challenged, but a good song anyway. Goes to final round.
• Antti Kleemola: Sun Puolella. Alien style. I've never understood these kinds of ballads.
• Pentti Hietanen: Il mondo e qui. Drum challenged, sounds like music for people with sleeping disorders.

Round 2 - Pruning by riff

Kuunkuiskaajat: Työlki ellää
0 points, fails to establish riff. The first 25 seconds are musically just blank white paper, and then it starts to repeat the verse until the listener is bored out of his skull. You can see that when the girls emphasize the futility of working, they practise what they preach during composition work. I wonder what the girls "trade" as their hourly wage is so high that they get rich with it.

Heli Kajo: Annankadun kulmassa
1 point. Establishes a riff. Too much repetition.

Amadeus: Anastacia

2 points. Establishes a riff and decorates it at 0:13. Overall this is
too repetitive. It is amateurish to repeat the riff 8 times and then forget transition.

The dancers have prepared a fine choreography. Too bad that the video director had to cut it to pieces.

This is the only song where the first 20 seconds don't tell the whole truth, as the song gets quite intense towards the end.

Linn: Fatal Moment

4 points. Riff, decoration, transition and demonstration of speed are there. The first 10 seconds are quite good. The only room for improvement is that the second rep of the riff could introduce new musical elements. The rest of the song is somehow too slow and Alien Style so I drop it at this round anyway.

Sister Twister: Love at the First Sight

5 points. Great intro. One minus point for lacking riff variation, but one plus point for gaming listeners expectations at 0:07 - 0:14 (before riff), complete with a nice transition to riff.

Maria Lund: Sydän ymmärtää

6 points. The first 10s have all elements of a good riff. Extra point for Maria Lund for using her voice as a rhythmic instrument in the "pappa, pappa, padappaa" phase.

Eläkeläiset: Hulluna humpasta

7 points. One extra point for humppa-style opening in the first 2 secs. Another extra point for playing with listener's expectations by introducing the riff only after singing the verse once.

Round 3 - Whole songs

3th: Maria Lund - Sydän ymmärtää
Maria Lund is a great performer and musically this is good, though it should introduce new musical elements also after the 1:00 mark. However, the words are just plain wrong. For example, it says "The best men worship and understand a woman / if you find one, you won't need another kind.", while all seduction blogs warn against pedestalizing women, and also a female blogger (Vera) mentioned that signs of worship are major red flags.

2th: Eläkeläiset - Hulluna humpasta
Musically ingenious and humorous performance. But let's face it - we've been hearing Eläkeläiset since 1993.

1th: Sister Twister - Love at the first sight
The music is strong. The other areas are ok.

Honorary Mention: Nina Lassander - Cider Hill
Good but very different from others. I'll have to listen to it 20 times to find out what's the name of the game here. Can't make up may mind about it yet.

Mobile phones in Haiti

Telecoms Sans Frontiers was one of the first crisis aid groups to reach Haiti. They work to restore telecommunications. Hat tip to Marginal Revolution for linking to this story.

Mr. PAUL MARGIE (Representative, Telecom Without Borders): They would go and they carried a satphone with them. And again and again, the people wanted access to that satellite phone even more than the clothes or the food that they were bringing. And so they changed and they said, let's make an organization that focuses on the communication.

The traditional argument against transhumanist solutions to speed uneven development is that those people need clean water, nutritious food and economic development, and only no-life tech nerds could suggest that geek toys like mobile phones matter. However, communication is very basic human need and also important to those who live for a few dollars a day. The quoted story about how the founders of Telecoms Sans Frotiers discovered the need for their organization illustrates that.

In Hyderabad, we had local mobile phone SIMs (they worked more reliably and were much cheaper). They were prepaid SIMs. We loaded time by visiting a phone shop. The shops also logged the bought balance to written books (no idea why), and there you could see how people had bought talk time a few euros at a time. Mobile phone operators have strong incentives to run their profitable business also in countries where average incomes are extremely low. For this reason, mobile phone service is available in many areas where no foreign aid group has ever visited.

The top 4 roadside ad categories I remember where construction cement, apartments, IT courses and mobile phone operators.

Mobile phones are as close to transhumanist technology as we have today - the only reason we are not amazed by telepathic ability to talk with anyone anytime is that we have lived with the technology for 15 years, and we had fixed lines before that. Privacy is the only reason they don't implement clairvoyance, where you input a GPS coordinate and see an image stream from the closest observation camera.

People in the developing world also grow from genetic blueprints, so transhumanist solutions are going to play new roles in the future.

Shooting sprees are good for Finland, because we are now more recognized.

According to a Haitian consul in Brazil, the earthquake was good for Haiti, as it made their country more recognized. Finland is more developed country also in this respect, we can make global headlines by killing just 6 people rather than 60000.

He also blamed the ills of his country on the fact that every place where there are Africans is fucked.

The last frog that leaped from his mouth, that the practise of macumba and muti and other witchcraft has brought a curse on Africans, is actually an excellent metaphor for the fact that no matter where they go and no matter how much development aid they get, they still can't build a civilized country.

As long as we exclude imperialism - importing enough smart fraction from outside to keep the countries out of trouble - no one has the social technology and knowledge to solve their problems. So it is anything but a joke to talk about illiterate goat herders at the same time as benevolent superintelligences and uplifting and genetic engineering - transcendental technology really is needed before their societies can organize themselves to provide what we consider basic human rights.

To cut the consul some slack, most of his relatives live in Haiti and he hasn't heard about them since the earthquake, and he thought he was talking off record. Who wouldn't be out of his mind in such situation.

In Haiti, a recently failed state is setting new standards in just how dysfunctional a government can be in the face of a crisis. Based on HS reports they don't seem to be doing much anything.

Functional states have an institution called army which is supposed to be a master of logistics in hostile terrain. Not in Haiti. They are not getting excavators to collapsed buildings. They are not getting injured people from streets to faraway cities with free hospital beds. Nor can rescue aid squads get transported to needed locations - HS reported that only 6 out of 27 squads had actually reached Haiti.

Fortunately, civil society is stepping in to maintain order - but not by rule of law but by rule of gun for the few minutes it takes to grab the valuables and run.

HS follows a crisis relief squad which carries a few Finns. They expect a few Haitian soldiers to join them in the border to protect against threat of robbing, which has happened to some food convoys. In some other country, those soldiers would be doing crisis relief by themselves.

My father visited Dominican Republic some years ago, and also Haiti for one day. He said that there were security guards with shotguns at every corner of the public enterprises, indicating very low trust and very low rule of law.

Next opportunity to see the top pole dancers of Tampere

This time in more classy setting, and without misleading advertising. Hat tip: Ashta.

Videos don't need cutting

Yesterday I saw the special effects movie 2012. Having watched too much Youtube videos where the same shooting angle lasts for 5 minutes, I found the cuts confusing. It did contain spectacular scenes of destruction (but no mosques were harmed while the film was made). The effects would have been even more spectacular had they not been cut every 5 seconds.



For example in this video the singer clearly has a choreography for hands, but frequent cuts make it hard to match hand movements to musical patterns and dramatic peaks. Half the time hand movements are cut away or too far to be seen. No cutting at all would have been better.

High-budget movies made by pros contain a lot of cuts while amateur videos often contain none. This does not make cuts any less distracting.

2010

Some main goals:

• Clean up the blog. A year ago, this blog had about 5 readers, most of which I could name. There were no consequences whatsoever from writing embarrassing stuff. Quite the contrary, writing produced clarity and I got some valuable advice on a difficult area of life. (A difficult area of life is one where you make mistakes, so it is embarrassing almost by definition. On the other hand, a difficult area of life benefits most from extra clarity.)
  During 2009, this blog took first steps as a channel from which people hear about me for the first time. So embarrassing posts should be restricted a bit.


• Year of bodyweight training. Hopefully by the end of this year I can do some headstand-to-handstand push-ups. If not, then it's time to move back to iron. I pretty much stopped going to gym after the post about one year training diary.


• In the intellectual hobbies front, I should get Chinese to some kind of completion. This means that there is no longer need to set goals and allocate time for it - instead, I'll just read Chinese news and blogs and books in relaxed manner, slowly strenghtening vocabulary and routine. Currently that is not the case, but it's close as I've already started to slowly read Chinese trash lit.


• More active social life is in my wishlist, and I have 2 promising approaches to get it. Should both ones fail (it always depends on other people too, so it's not possible to set fixed goals) I'll have to consider postgraduate studies as a way to make progress and use leisure meaningfully.

Last year:

• Year of gym. Got my first spell of healthy lifestyle.


• Year when going to India had fucked with my head. Fortunately it's over now.


• Year diagnosing the problem. The problem is losing in the game of talking. Didn't make any breakthroughs solving it, though.

Looking good and getting the girl

In India I realized that it is my surfacial skills which are the bottleneck. Doing microeconomic analysis about the situation at hand went fine; connecting with people by talking to them did not.

Most people develop these surfacial skills as young adults. Unfortunately, you can't skip the development of social skills. If you fail to complete this developmental task as a young person, it will continue to haunt you and drag you down until you solve it.

My current diagnosis is that the root cause of problems is constant losing in the Game of Talking. The best way to solve this is to get exposure to new social situations. Going alone to bars is lousy practise, since I've failed to get much positive reactions that way. Sports courses on the other hand look promising, since they offer an abundance of natural conversation fodder without any need to ponder ways to open up talking. Besides, as a side effect they produce better physical condition while bars only produce hangover.

Body as a mute create

In this poetic and insightful piece Megan compares your body to a mute create. Your body knows what it wants, but can't speak it, so it sends signals. These signals are reliable. They need to be interpreted correctly though, for example aching from new kind of training does not mean "go to bed and don't do that ever again" - it means "stretch the aching away".

Your poor body. It is mute and it is trapped there with you. It can't say what it means. It can only send you signals, sensations that your bossy, dominant mind can ignore. Your mind wants other things, like information to chew on or distractions. It will find them while your body tries to get attention. It sends lethargy or a pounding heart to tell you you didn't eat what it needs. It sends an ache to ask you to please twist and bend and lengthen it in more directions. It sends joint pain to say that you've gotten out of alignment, please come back to your spine and work from there. It gets weak when it wants you to know that you should fight your limits. As soon as you do, it will rejoice by pushing those limits away and teaming with you to charge down the new limits.

As soon as you are moving in the right direction, you have no greater cheerleader than your body. It LOVES you. It is SO EXCITED to do things with you. ...

My other natural instincts don't guide me well, nor do they give reliable "raw" information which just needs to be interpreted. Concentration instincts tell me to get immediate satisfaction, like playing World of Warcraft. Social instincts mainly tell me to withdraw from conversations. But signals from my body are exceptionally reliable.

Yoga and stretching

Last weekend I was in an elementary yoga course, where I learned the sun salutations, the deep ujjayi breathing and some asanas.

First, a quick description of Ashtanga yoga for those who don't know (like me 2 weeks ago). In yoga you do a precisely defined series of stretching movements and light gymnastics. They are called asanas. Each asana also defines when you inhale and exhale. If yoga was a state machine, then "states" would be the stretching postures while "transitions" would be inhalations and exhalations.

Yoga is primarily a meditative exercise, secondarily a breathing exercise and only then a physical exercise (although meditative component emerges only after you are so familiar with the asanas that they "empty your mind"). Lots of emphasis is placed on breathing and recruiting all the muscles below stomach for deeper breathing.

Now, back to the main topic.

Parapara stretching

Parapara is a dance for hands. The hand movements are quick and simple. The aesthetics concentrates on 45 and 90 degree angles and big, symmetric hand motions. In parapara, choreographies are song-specific. Everyone dances the same way. Professionals make choreographies for popular Japanese disco songs and distribute them as DVDs.

When I was in India, after I came from gym I danced at least 15 minutes of parapara as a form of stretching. 30 minutes wasn't exceptional. The big circular motions ensured that every part of my hands got stretched.

Parapara stretching was effective, since I didn't have much soreness or snapping, even though I had only begun strength training and therefore my technique was lousy and my body was unprepared.

Traditional stretching

Shoulder snapping started only after I returned to Finland. Gym was far away from my flat, so I did final stretching in the gym with the traditional movements they teach in school, for example:

• grapping some wall corner with your hand and strethching it backwards,
• putting your hand behind your neck,
• pushing the wall, or
  
• trying to reach the ground while keeping your feet straight.

These are solid movements to aid recovery, but they didn't quite cut it. First of all, I had some serious shoulder snapping, which forced me to stop exercising for some weeks. My weightlifting book says that most people's shoulders are woefully unprepared for strength training. For a beginning weight trainer, the question is not if you will have shoulder problems but in which specific lifts they emerge for you.

Nor did these stretches increase flexibility. I still couldn't reach the ground while keeping my feet straight despite having done that particular stretch after every gym workout for almost a year.

Yoga stretching

So parapara worked well and traditional stretching didn't. Yoga combines the best of these two so my hopes are high.

In parapara, you do lots of movements but each single movement is light and easy. Similarly in yoga, you don't lock your feet and don't try your flexibility limit, as the next breath takes you to the next posture quite soon.

In traditional stretching, each stretch is easy and everyone can complete them. In yoga, each asana has a posture which no beginner can complete. You do it as far as you can while focus on breathing keeps the stretch light.

Parapara has the weakness that it only stretches hands and needs videos. Yoga seems to provide equally efficient dynamic stretching system for the whole body, enabling me to avoid soreness and increase flexibility.

I can barely walk now.

Went to rope skipping group exercise at gym. Lacked both the technique and the aerobic fitness. In addition to just jumping, the girls did one-leg jumping, double-speed jumping, running rumping and moving sideways while jumping. I had more than enough trouble with just jumping.

It was preceeded by gradual warm-up and followed by stretching, so all the soreness and stiffness hit only 24 hours afterwards. Before that, nothing but normal tiredness. Seems that stretching really works.

It's a long time since any exercise hit my weaknesses so surgically. A rope cost 4 euros, so price is not an excuse to not own one.

Miss Pole Dance 2009

The difference between the gymanst's bar and the dancer's pole is that one is horizontal while the other is vertical. The versatile sport of pole dancing combines striptease-influenced sensual dancing and gymanstic circus acrobatics. Next I'll present videos from three pole traditions - striptease-influenced pole dancing, mallakhamb and Chinese circus.



This is a good combination of acrobatics and striptease influences:

• At 0:15, she's first doing a split and combining it to striptease-style leg-waving.
• At 0:32, more split variations follow.
• At 1:15, she's doing a cartwheel and some handstand walking.
• At 2:10, leg-waving upside down (!)

Mainly women practise Western pole dancing. In contrast, Chinese pole acrobatics needs so much strength that you only see men doing it. The aesthetics is about quick, explosive transitions and grace instead of cute sensuality.



The Hindi word Mallakhamb means "pole gymanstics". The influence of yoga is visible, when the man puts his leg behind his neck in Sirasana style.



Women do Mallakhamb with ropes.



This last video is from an American pole dancing competition. It is the most striptease-minded, but what I've seen in strip clubs is nothing like this. In theory, I'm all for sexually explicit dancing. In practise, the few times I've gone to strip clubs the strippers have mainly rubbed themselves against the pole and done a few swirls. They rely too much on naked skin. If I want to watch sexy dancing, I'd rather go to some electronic music event, where some girls put effort into dancing well. Wearing stylish clothes enables them to stay in relaxed mood and put up much better show.

In Friday, I was in a pre-Christmas party and Miss Pole Dance 2009 was held next door. I expected something like in these videos, but the overall level was quite low. The venue, Be-pop, was the tackiest nightclub I've seen anywhere. In general, pole dancing in Tampere seems to be about tattooed prole girls doing striptease gestures and basic gymnastics in 15cm tops and 10cm pants.

Satanic mass@Klubi, Tampere

Cavus, Behexen and Mayhem played a gig at Klubi yesterday. It's disturbing how much I liked it. I mean, satanic metal is for the schizos and adolescents who think it's cool to be bad, right?

First, Behexen lit up some candles and started an intense ritual of witchcraft, enchanting the audience under their spell, creating a serene atmosphere to get intoxicated and ponder fundamental questions like Why do I want to live instead of killing myself? or Why doesn't this show just stop in everyone bursting to laugh at it, and are the same tricks used to delude us every day?

Something in the evening created a whole which immersed like nothing before. Maybe it was black metal's fast, monotonic drumwork and its novelty. The dedicated audience. The witchcraft theme taken first to its logical conclusion and then over the top.

Mayhem is a good showcase of what happens when spirituality starts to wag the dog. The band had five members in the beginning of the 90s. One committed suicide, another was murdered by a third band member who went to jail, the fourth one resigned and only the fifth one was left to reinvent the band with new musicians and more professional attitude.

The old band's antics were so batshit crazy that they cross the parody horizon, and then some. Here's Panu's feeble failure to parodize metal:

Zombie Metalissa sun pitää niiku osata olla zombi jo eläessäsi. Zombi on niiku pystyynkuallu ihminen joka kulkee hei sillai niiku ropotti-rops eikä oo niiku missään kontaktissa niiku todellisuuteen. ... Zombiuteen kuuluu vittu että sun pitää olla vittu lähellä kualemaa, niin lähellä ku vaan voit.

One of Mayhem's dead band members was called Dead:

He (Dead) didn't see himself as human; he saw himself as a creature from another world. He said he had many visions that his blood has frozen in his veins, that he was dead. That is the reason he took that name. He knew he would die.

Wow, he could see into the future!

Before the shows, Dead used to bury his clothes into the ground so that they could start to rot and get that "grave" scent. He was a "corpse" on a stage. Once he even asked us to bury him in the ground - he wanted his skin to become pale. During one tour with Mayhem he found a dead crow, which he collected and stored in a plastic bag. He often carried it around with him and would smell the bird before performing, in order to sing "with the stench of death in his nostrils."

Now you may say "But yoga-style new age spirituality is different, because it aims to heal people!" The harmful beliefs of new age spirituality, like homeopaths opposing H1N1 vaccinations, are masked under the veil of healing. Should this mask make large audiences to buy their lies, the lies may cause more damage than the openly repulsive satanists.

Mainstream music is by definition something that you hear from many channels. This familiarity breeds boredom and contempt in me. Nowadays all the good and original stuff is made by bands on the fringe that I've barely heard about. By the way, this good fringe is not just metal, here's a sample of twee by When I Was 12.(Hat tip to 1000 Sparks.)

Hopelessly Romantic Harmonies from Kate Kell on Vimeo.

Liberating the consciousness with yoga

A Finnish couple living in Vancouver used to write a blog named Dragon/Kolibri. Dragon was the male. He wrote rarely but well, mainly about weightlifting. The blog is now offline.

The woman was an active yoga practicioner. She took steps towards becoming a yoga teacher. She also had a mild psychiatric condition and medication for it. The final entries of the blog were about a pang of anorexia nervosa which was decimating her appetite - apparently quite seriously, since her mother flew to Vancouver and the couple stopped blogging. I haven't heard anything about them since.

Yoga has a reputation for attracting superstitious people for some of whom it becomes "religion lite". This emphasis on spirituality and healing is visible also on the web pages of various yoga schools in Tampere.

Tampereen Astangajoogakoulu has a list of moon days in which energy levels are low and practise should be lighter. In other respects they have the best pages. They even list specific asanas for the courses. The elementary groups are guided, while in the last "mysore group" each practicioner trains his own asanas and teachers introduce new ones when the old ones go well.

Om Yoga presents yoga as just another group exercise. I can already exercise in groups at my gym, so thanks but no thanks. They have lots of mild spirituality/energy/healing references dispersed around the pages. Somehow, I find this more scary than Astangajoogakoulu's honest division, where some pages have spiritual tint while others treat yoga as a physical sport.

I'm not freaked by spirituality in itself, but by people who can't identify and reflect their own spirituality enough to turn it off when talking to non-spiritual people. Clear division to between spiritual and physical content sends a message "We are stating these spiritual facts because we believe in them. You are free to follow the advice and traditions taught by our yoga masters, or to follow the Western tradition of ignoring them as superstitious."

Tampereen työväenopisto offers the best prices, and good enough courses for all but the most active enthusiasts.

Ashtanga yoga and gymnastics

Some sports train juniors into top athletes, while other sports enable adult hobbyists to stay fit. In team ball games, ice hockey is the serious sport while floorball is the sport of choice for amateurs. Many schools and companies have a floorball field reservation for their students or employees. In martial arts, wrestling trains young professional athletes while krav maga, kickboxing and various schools with Japanese names train adults.

For gymnastics, the closest matching adult sport is Ashtanga yoga. Yoga covers those parts of gymnastics which are realistic for adults, and which are not better trained at gym.

• Flexibility exercises - included in Ashtanga Yoha
• Static strength positions - included in Ashtanga Yoga
• Pulling and pressing - better trained in gym
• Dynamic acrobatics - out of reach for adults

Many static positions are part of both gymnastics and Ashtanga yoga, with different names:

• Handstand is Navasana Vinyasa Out
• Frog stand is a fundamental preparatory exercise for plance and handstand. Kukkutasana and Marichyasana B Vinyasa Out are more difficult variations of frog stand.
• Planche is called Mayurasana
• Headstand is called Muka Hasta Sirasana A
• Going to Navasana and back to the ground is called a V-up in gymnastics.
• Split is not part of Ashtanga Yoga, but Supta Parsvasahita is close.
  

Alexandra Kroha in a split.

Twice this year I've used the kind of approach recommended by Janka - highly personalized one - to open up conversation with a woman and both times I got a good reaction.

The first time was in an electronic music event. I saw a girl with 3 Chinese characters tattooed to his arm, and recognized that the middle one was 佛, which means Buddha. So I told her that I can recognize one of the characters and asked what the other ones meant.

The second time was in gym. A woman older than me had 2 Chinese characters tattooed to his arm, and I recognized that the last one was 火， which means fire. I didn't open that time, but memorized the first character and later tried to search it from dictionary without success. The next time I saw him I started with line "I see you have a fiery tattoo". She told me that the tattoo is a Chinese horoscope, fire horse.

Both conversations lasted for solid 10 lines, and were very much limited by my own approach anxiety. I saw the fire horse woman third time, greeted her and she greeted back, so there is reason to believe that it was a positive experience also for her.

Few girls have Chinese character tattoos, so I didn't consider these relevant from the seduction point of view. Thanks to Janka for pointing out a way to generalize these success stories.

A clarification

At some point in my life, I got bored of drinking beer and went to the dancefloor, gradually developing a way to move my body to unknown rhythm, especially at electronic music events where dancing is the main thing and dancing alone isn't creepy as in discos.

Then I found the parapara style, and it was love at first sight. It is a Japanese dance form where the emphasis is on simple and fast hand movements, there are ready choreographies for songs and everyone dances in the same way. It is one of the few dance traditions that can be directly applied to the modern dancefloor.

In India, my standard daily routine after work was to go to gym and stretch hands by repeating parapara videos. When I returned to Finland, I taught myself improvisation with any music by just playing something on Winamp and doing some parapara moves.

Nowadays, I got zero inhibitions to go to the dancefloor with confidence. I wasn't making just any pick-up attempt, but trying to find a dance partner.

There was a time when "Saanko luvan?" was a standard opening. But judging from the really repulsive vibe that I got from the evening, and the complete lack of positive reaction on their behalf, this approach is by today's standards too enthusiastic and crude and has to be preceeded by complex and unintuitive things like personalized negging.

Why I don't usually go to bars to chase skirt

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
- Albert Einstein

The Way of the Pickup Artist would be to just go and get repeatedly rejected until you get comfortable with the appoach anxiety and find some working methods to start conversation.

My take is that it might perhaps be beneficial for me to repeat last night's attempts once a month to benchmark possible progress of social skills. It would also aid in conquering approach anxiety (a big factor which made me fail last night's surprise opportunity to witness seduction.)

However, Game is not very relevant when the issues I'm dealing with are the lack of eye contact and 2-line conversations.

The Lost in Music night was fun. Last night wasn't.

A different kind of bar evening

Today, I went to Inferno nightclub, a heavy metal disco. I went to pick up women (anticipating mainly rejection) as opposed to dancing (the main thing in electronic music events) and drinking beer (the main thing in non-discos.)

So, my plan and goal was that I'll propose to 3 groups of women, get rejected and leave the bar.

My first proposal didn't count, since the girl just ignored it, probably not hearing it.

The second proposal was to a group of 2 women with jacket (jakkupuku), as opposed to some rock/metal-spirited garment. Naturally their clothes were black, after all this was a metal nightclub. A song started which they liked and they went to dancefloor. I asked one of them if she wanted company for dancing. She said generally that this dancefloor is free-for-all. I said "great". Then I started to dance, trying to make eye contact with her, but she rejected me by moving opposite to her girl pair and dogmatically maintaining eye contact to her. I exited dancefloor after 3 minutes.

In the third case, there was a pair of girls. One of them got picked by another man, and one was looking bored. I went to ask her if she didn't feel bored to stay in place while others danced. While doing this, I noticed that she was probably older than me. I didn't hear what she answered, but she didn't raise from her chair.

The third case was again with the other girl from the jakkupuku group. She was dancing alone in the floor while the second girl was already sitting at a bench. I went to dance in front of her, trying to establish eye contact to start some chat ("You need company for dancing?"). She looked the other way and after 30 secs I went away.

Having reached my quota of 3 girl groups, I went to toilet. A man there started a chat. He asked how my evening was going, and I told that 3 groups of girls rejected me as a dance partner and after further inquiries that I was bored and open to suggestions. He suggested that I should join him and he would introduce me for some of his friends. After me showing enthusiasm he emphasized that I should behave smarter and less enthusiastic and talk less. I followed him.

Then the bad luck stroke. He went to talk to the same 2 jakkupuku girls which both had rejected me. When this tall, handsome man went to their table and laid his hands on the table, smiling, the girls returned with eye contact and the interested smile which I see in photographs all the time but which is never directed for me.

Now I had the opportunity to witness seduction by a natural alpha, but I failed even that. I said that I got rejected by exactly both of these girls, and I probably should leave. This violated his explicit instruction to act more smart and talk less. So I exited the bar...

Despite lack of success, this was a better result than my earlier bar evenings. When me and the natural alpha exited the toilet, a man entered it. This man had been dancing alone in the dance floor, trying to dance opposite to the girls, oblivious to their rejection and lack of reaction. The natural alpha laid some insult towards him ("idiot") probably for his dance floor behaviour.

This bar evening was the first time someone noticed I was making a conerted attempt to pick up girls, and enlisted my support for his own efforts, although I failed at giving this support due to drunkenness and situational factors.

Earlier, that alone-dancing idiot would have been me.

Hardcore gymanstics book

"Gymnastics for ironheads" sums up the spirit of the book. The goal is the same as in weight training - to develop strong and functional muscles. But it only uses bodyweight exercises from gymnastic tradition.

Gymnasts are famous for superhuman acrobatic feats where they fly from pole to pole or do multiple cartwheels and aerials on a narrow beam, but this book is nothing like that. It deals with dips, pull-ups, headstands, handstands and other strength exercises. The main claim is that gymnasts who start by systematically developing a strong body will also find acrobatic movements easier.

I ordered it based on this article, and got what I wanted. My old weight training book classifies exercise to 8 categories for different parts of body. A good program covers all categories to achieve balanced development. This new book has bodyweight exercises for all the categories. (The categories are knee dominat, hip dominant, core, vertical/horizontal push/pull, and explosive force.)

So if pig flu strikes, I can stop going to gym and get full exercise with my bodyweight using just walls, mats, a pull-up bar and rings.

The funny thing is that the author is a coach for a national team of young gymnasts. So all the pictures are about 9 - 15 years old boys. It also classifies the moves with 5 stars. I can currently only do 1/2 star movements and hope to progress some day to 1-star moves. Luckily, it lists much more exercises in the easy end. It ends with a motivational story about the benefits of strength training for gymansts.

A gymnastics based workout of the day
...
After a four hour workout and completing their ring strength training, the general physical preparation assignment was to complete, in 15 minutes, as many rounds as possible of the following: 10 muscle-ups followed by 20 pause-jump squats. The winner would be the one who completed most rounds in 15 minutes.
...
The pause-jump squats were simply a jumping squat with a 2-3 second pause at the bottom with hips parallel or slightly below the knees. I placed these here primarily to provide a break for their upper body before the next set of muscle-ups. (As a side note, towards the end of the workout, one of my athletes became bored with the pause-jump squats and began adding a back flip to the jump portion.)

The results were as follows: Chris and Greg chased each other throughout the entire fifteen minutes, completing 12 rounds each and were begining a 13th round when the clock ran out. Chris was crowned champion as he finished his 12th round of muscle-ups one rep ahead of Greg. Greg was, needless to say, quite annoyed to have been defeated by one rep. ... They were not extremely fatigued and would have been fine had I extended the time of the general physical preparation to twenty minutes.

Allan and Zach were tied for third with 10 rounds apiece for 100 single bar muscle-ups and 200 jump-squats. As an interesting aside, Allan ... had only recently turned 9 years old that March.

We finished off our workout with 50 flairs on the pommel horse. ...

So if you want to be able to do 100 pull-ups in 15 minutes once you reach the age of 9 years, this book tells you how!