My new Sunday afternoon hangout

The Rat Gym, where I will now be spending my Sunday afternoons. The two walls you can see in this shot are too difficult for me, though I have tried, and pulled some muscles in the process. I'm making gradual progress though, and with one or two regular visits to the Budokan traning room each week I'm slowly getting some strength back in my upper body. My arms shrank substantially after the fracture I had last year, and it'll take time to get them back to how they were before.

The Rat Gym is a chilled out place. The walls are in a big garage place, and most of the floor space is covered with mattresses. There's nothing there but the walls, a fridge with some drinks in it, and a stereo playing live Japanese jazz/rock. I like it for it's simplicity, and the same goes for the sport itself. All you need is some climbing shoes and a chalk bag and you're off.



These guys are really good climbers. The guy on the wall scaled the whole garage (five seperate walls next to each other) and didn't seem to break into a sweat at all. I get wet just doing two or three moves.

Hurricane Katrina.



Here are some links related to the hurricane and the science behind the hurricane. This and this. It seems the majority of climatologists and meteorologists agree that warmer oceans add to the power of hurricanes. This is something that should cause many Americans, and others, to take a more responsible attitude towards the issue of global warming, considering the scale of the destruction witnessed in Louisiana and neighbouring states recently, but whether it will or not is a different matter.



New Orleans.

If you consider the major shifts in policy that took place after the Twin Towers were attacked, and the number of lives that were taken, this hurricane really shoud have huge policy implications. But politics isn't as rational as that, especially the kind of politics that the current US government are thrashing out.

The result is more likely to be an increase in Hollywood apocalypse movies.