All ninjas, all the time

Senei Hoshino's mastery of the yari is apparent in this exchange.

Net fight!  It's a net fight!

Kick to the groin!  To the GROIN!

One of each, please.

  If it wasn’t clear, we took ninja-ism pretty seriously back then.  I recently unearthed a stack of musty Ninja magazines.  We used to pore over them religiously, learning how to Play the fool and win the fight, Win the fight with advanced spear-fighting techniques, and Master the art of net-fighting.  My favorite article was Secrets of the snow ninja revealed.  My dad actually bought me some authentic split-toed ninja tabi boots one year, and I wore them until they literally fell apart.  With them, I could sail up trees and over fences like a homesick monkey, and I was convinced that they made my feet impervious to the cold.  So here are some wacky pics from the good book Ninja.

  In other news: I’ve been putting sauerkraut in everything, because it seems to work. It was hailing today.  I think Twitter is stupid and I will never buy into it.  Also, I slept for a grand total of seven hours over the weekend, but made up for it by sleeping 14 last night.  Taking a course, y’see.  I awoke this morning like a, you guessed it, newborn giraffe.  Turns out the instructor of the course lived in Gimpo at the same time as I did for an overlapping three months in 2005, but I never met her back then.  Small world.  We knew some of the same rabble, and the first foreigner I ever met in Korea was her drunken roommate Jeff, who pulled me over to Wa Bar and forced me to sit down and drink yogurt soju with him on my second day in country.  Small, small world.  A few weeks later at Wa Bar I witnessed an insane running fist fight that lasted for the better part of 20 minutes.  Hectic, bru. 

  That was an entirely different lifetime ago.  I went to Korea in 2005 not knowing a seoul.  Heh.  I met some good folks there though, including a fussy Mancunian girl that I improbably became involved with for three years, and the singular Ham King.  Then I left Korea, and returned, not knowing a soul in my new town of Ilsan.  I met tyrann-E, B-Dogz, and T-Bagz, among others.  Then I left again...and returned again, not knowing a soul on Jeju.  I smell a pattern.  Since my co-workers weren’t big on getting crazy, it took me a month or two before I met the members of what would become The Thunderbots on Jungmun beach at the Penguin Swim.  B-Mil is back in the USA, in my boat, J-Rock is back in Canada with his woman back in school I believe, and Piss-Bottle-Man is up in Seoul, livin’ the dream and working hard on killing his liver, as you do in Korea.  Jeppuh is in Kenya building karma, Cobain is up in Yeosu for now, and our boy The Joelster is back in NZ, selling time shares and doing exactly whatever the hell he wants.  Makes me wonder what kind of misfits I’ll meet when I go back to Korea for the next round.  Holy fuck, I did not just write that.