I may have to check into this book about SUV drivers. (Apparently it's fairly old: here's the original Salon review.) My automatic disdain for SUV drivers has grown over the years, as I in my fuel-efficient little plastic Saturns have been rear-ended by a Chevy Tahoe at a stoplight by a moron who didn't know how to drive his car in the rain (news flash: 2.5-ton trucks don't exactly stop on a dime), and nearly been broadsided by some stupid woman doing a 9-point turn in her fucking Canyonero, and plenty of other incidents.

Holy shit, the 2005 Chevy Tahoe is 6500 pounds, up from the 1999's 4500. Asshats.

Well, now that I'm done making friends...

Last night was Naomi Sushi's Beer & Sake Festival, with lots of food and a few different beers and sakes. The big surprise of the evening was Asahi's new Kuronama dark beer, which is very, very good. Japanese beers, like Mexican, all taste roughly the same to me, and I expected a Japanese attempt at dark beer to be about as successful as the Mexican attempt at dark beer (Indio), which is passable but not worth deviating from the routine of guzzling low-taste light beers with a slice of lime. But Kuronama is rich, thick, full of good molasses flavor without being too clingy, with a good clean finish.

I got to taste all of the Takara stuff for the second time in three days, and still recommend the Sho Chiku Bai Ginjo, Organic Nama, and Nigori (unfiltered) sakes, and the Koshu plum wine. The Ozeki Ginjo is tasty, but avoid the Nigori/unfiltered: it doesn't taste very good, and it has chunks in it. Particulate is unavoidable, it's unfiltered sake...but chunks? Nuh-uh.

And that concluded the week's drinking for at least 48 hours.

Following on my recent rants about fencing and games, we did some actual fencing in fencing class tonight, and I am startled to report that I view most of the sport as being bunk: the way the right-of-way rules call the points, it's a perfectly acceptable (necessary, even) technique to just impale yourself on your opponent's weapon in the process of scoring a point, because as long as you've set it up so you have the right of way, your touch counts and not your opponent's. In aikido training, of course, we train as though the weapons were real, and you step off the line of attack and neutralize (well, in weapons training I guess it's usually more like crack the skull of) your attacker. Both of you getting hit is ai-uchi, "mutual strike" or "mutual kill", and amazingly enough, we train as though that's a bad thing. So I suppose foil isn't my thing; epee doesn't have right-of-way, maybe I can learn that.

Summer's over. I feel better, it's not so relentlessly sunny and warm, and I can accept the universe's gifts again. W00t!