Conformity at its best

Four jobs you've had in your life: Martial arts instructor, ride operator at Disneyland, editor in chief of a racing magazine, sales manager for a publishing firm.

Four movies you could watch over and over: Gladiator, Lord of the Rings Trilogy (I consider the extended versions all just one long movie), Oh Brother, Where art thou?, Thunderbolt

Four places you've lived: Hong Kong, LA, SF Bay Area... and those are the only places I've really lived, so for the fourth one, I'll put Tokyo, since I've spent a total of well over a year there.

Four TV shows you love to watch: House, Lost, Heroes, anything on Discovery.

Four places you've been on vacation: Jamaica, Tokyo, Philippines, and South Carolina.

Four websites you visit daily: NPR, World of Warcraft, Penny Arcade, BBC

Four of your favorite foods: Curry, Korean BBQ, Pizza, BB Chicken

Four places you'd rather be: Tahoe, Tokyo, New Zealand, Tibet

Four albums you can't live without: Soviet Kitsch by Regina Spektor, Winter Solstice II, Deluxe by Better Than Ezra, Ten by Pearl Jam

Score one for Pandakind

Drunken tourist bites panda

Man bites panda after zoo attack drunken Chinese tourist says he bit a panda who attacked him after he jumped into a zoo enclosure to "hug" the bear.

Zhang Xinyan, 35, had drunk four draught beers before deciding to enter the Beijing Zoo pen belonging to six-year-old male panda Gu Gu. The startled Gu Gu bit both legs of his intruder, who responded by biting "the panda on its back", Mr Zhang was quoted by state media as saying. Mr Zhang said he had not realised pandas could be violent.

He told the Beijing Morning Post that he had come to the Chinese capital "only to see the pandas". "The seven-hour train ride was exhausting, and I drank bottles of beer when I arrived then had a nap," he added.

The newspaper said Mr Zhang had a "sudden urge" to touch Gu Gu with his hand, so he jumped over the waist-high railing into the enclosure.

Then he got closer and was undiscovered, he reached out to hug it," the newspaper added. Mr Zhang was bitten first on his right leg, and then on his left. Newspaper photographs showed him lying on a hospital bed with blood-soaked bandages over his legs. "I bit the panda on its back but its fur was too thick," Mr Zhang recalled.

He went on: "No one ever said they would bite people. I just wanted to touch it."

Zoo spokeswoman Ye Mingxia said the panda was unharmed and they were not considering punishing Mr Zhang yet. "He's suffered quite a bit of a shock," she told the Associated Press by telephone.

Now I don't know what kind of retard you need to be in order to think it's ok to hop a zoo fence to go and try to hug a panda.

Pining for the past

There's a certain point in your life when you come to realize the immortality of youth isn't as long lasting as you thought it would be. Having done martial arts for 22 years, you gain a high tolerance for pain; actually it's more displacing the pain than anything else. I never thought I would see the day where I would be asking....err...more like begging my Dr. for pain killers. I always thought because of the way I conditioned my body it would always remain such. I think deep inside I knew what I was doing to myself but always kept myself in a state of denial.

While sciatica is not a serious condition, it's irritating and painful enough to disrupt your daily life. Something is putting pressure on my left sciatic nerve causing the entire erector spinae on the left side to be perpetually cramped and spasming. Because of this, pain has been radiating down into my elbow and left knee. The sad thing is I know what needs to be done to fix this.

I've learned stretching is the most important activity a person can do as they get older. There is going to be a point in my life where I won't be able to rigorously do the same work outs I've always done. I won't always be able to do 720's, butterfly twists, aerials and other fun tricks. While I have always understood age will eventually limit me from doing these things I never thought by not maintaining them that my body would also retaliate against me.

Because of how badly my body has been treated (doing flips and landing on your back on concrete isn't the most beneficial recreation) and now since I've been on sabbatical from my martial arts training I'm finding my body is starting to turn into cereal; it goes snap, crackle and pop in the morning. Doing the some of the things I used to consider mundane are now becoming difficult. I can no longer drop into the splits on a whim. I can no longer land as gracefully after a jump as I used to. My stomach isn't as close to my spine as it used to be. My gait is different because of my hips adjusting itself. Worst of all, the pain.

Like a rubberband that has been stretched out and then snapped back into place, my muscles are doing the same thing. This leaves me with a couple options which will ultimately determine my well being possibly for the rest of my life.

1) Pain killers and physical therapy. While this sounds like a fun option I would rather be in control of my own pain management rather than what a Dr. is telling me to do.

2) Surgery. This is the least favorable option of all. I've never been under the knife in the past and I have no intention of doing so. Not because the medical arts scare me, heck I even wanted to be a surgeon. It's because I have taken pride in myself as being whole and unaltered. Surgery has the highest risk for me in regards to recovery. Dr.'s can't tell me if I'll be able to do the splits again. They can't tell me if I'll ever be able to do a jinga or an au batido again.

3) Do martial arts and stretching for the rest of my life. This would be the ideal choice given I had enough time to do it. But where there's a will there's a way.

So with that in mind, I hope one day I can go back to being what I used to be.

It's all about the cheese

So, I introduced my World of Warcraft guild to the guilty indulgence known as Musha. Since we're primarily a group of friends that know each other by the digital polygons and the only activity we know we have in common is slaying monstrous beings, it's no small wonder why many of us were a bit apprehensive about meeting each other in person. That is until I posted the picture you see here.

By the end of the night we had ordered 8 servings of cheese risotto, 4 orders of roast pork, 3 orders of sashimi salad, 3 orders of garlic marinated mushrooms & asparagas, 3 orders of fried chicken, 3 orders of spring roll salad, 4 orders of cheese baguettes, 4 rounds of "Demon Killer" sake, and two pitchers of Kirin beer. Between the 9 of us it only came out to about $30 each.

I think we've found our monthly guild gathering spot.