Island Passage

Every time I pass through a supermarket checkout line I see what Hodding Carter III called "The Dark Side of American journalism." No, not National Review , but the tabloids. I have never spent a penny on these strange papers and never will. I cannot imagine how they stay in business. Not because I think that most people share my scruples (the tabloid's continued success puts paid to that theory), but because as you pass them by you can read the headlines. And from the time or two I've (guiltily) opened the pages and looked inside, the headlines are the publication's best parts. Years back, Dave Barry supposed that the tabloids composed headlines by reaching into a series of buckets and pulling out a series of names, verbs, and nouns: "Donny and Marie--are--Negros!"* In the last few years, the old names in tabloids, National Enquirerer and The Star, seemed to have attempted to re-invent themselves as varieties of down-scale People Magazines. But one pape...

For those of you unfamiliar with Aikido, ukemi translates as "receiving with the body." What ukemi means is falls and rolls. It is the collection of techniques that allow a person to be on the receiving end of an Aikido technique with the least possible chance of injury. At the end of each lesson's beginning warm-up period, Sensei calls out, "Two lines for ukemi please!" And all the students answer, " Onegaishimasu !" We then form two lines and proceed to do rolls down the length of the dojo. As we reach the end of the mats, we file back to the head of the line and roll again; once forward on the left, once forward on the right, once backward on the left, once backward on the right, twice jumping over a person kneeling halfway down the mat. That might be all, unless Sensei feels that we need more ukemi practice, and he dispassionately watches as we stagger dutifully back up to the head of the lines. I hate ukemi . Apparently I'm not the only one....