Rise of the Machines

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2004

A part of me groks the intro to Rise of the Machines:

Alex Proyas never got a high school diploma — a fact he blames on Isaac Asimov. It was Asimov’s short story “Nightfall” that derailed Proyas’ academic career. “It’s a wonderful vision of how the world can suddenly descend into anarchy,” says Proyas, 41, describing the chaos that ensues in “Nightfall” when all six of a planet’s suns set for the first time in 2,049 years. “I tried to convince my English teachers to assign us some science fiction, but they wouldn’t. It opened a rift between my creative desires and what the system wanted me to explore.” So Proyas quit school and took his education upon himself, reading the works of Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip K. Dick.

When I was in junior high, I received a copy of Asimov’s I, Robot. It was my first dose of “real” science fiction — well, aside from The Twilight Zone. It was just “thinky” enough to enthrall me.

But I didn’t drop out of school.

Nightfall also captured my attention. Unfortunately, the Nightfall movie was one of the most awful movies I’ve ever seen. It’s the first movie I can remember debating walking out of.

Anyway, who’s Proyas? You may or may not recognize the name.

It makes sense then that Proyas’ career as a film director has been defined by fantasy. His 1994 movie The Crow, based on the James O’Barr comic book, immediately gained cult status after Brandon Lee (the only son of kung fu master Bruce Lee) was killed in a freakish accident on set. In 1998, he directed Dark City, a visually rich and haunting movie about the surreal wanderings of an amnesiac accused of murder.

I can heartily recommend both The Crow and Dark City.

This July, Proyas turns again to his favored genre with I, Robot, an adaptation of Asimov’s nine-story collection of the same name. “This is the definitive movie about robots,” says Proyas. “It’s the most faithful cinematic reworking of Asimov’s stories to date, true to the spirit and ideas, yet reenvisioned.”

Suddenly, I’m not expecting another Wild, Wild West. This could work!

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Air-Dropped Fish Affecting Amphibians

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2004

I couldn’t let a headline like Air-Dropped Fish Affecting Amphibians go by without reading the article:

Throughout the world, frogs are dying en masse, a phenomenon that concerns scientists because the extremely sensitive amphibians are among the first species to react to wider environmental problems. Global warming, increased solar radiation, windblown pesticides, pollution and diseases all are being explored as possible reasons why the populations are croaking.

Yet Vredenburg found a simpler explanation is one major cause: They’re being eaten by trout air-dropped into pristine mountain lakes across the West and in areas as remote as the Andes in South America, on every continent except Antarctica.

It’s not just air-dropped trout — or even just fish:

San Francisco epicureans introduced Eastern bullfrogs a century ago because they liked gourmet frog legs. The bullfrogs have since devastated the population of red-legged frogs thought to have inspired Mark Twain’s Gold Rush-era short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

More recently, voracious northern pike dumped into the northern Sierra’s Lake Davis a decade ago are eating the lake’s trout and costing the state millions of dollars to eradicate.

Late in the 1800s, anglers and hatchery managers began hauling fish into high mountain lakes in modified milk cans lashed to mules. But in the 1950s, wildlife managers discovered they could drop the fingerlings from airplanes, easily seeding thousands of previously inaccessible lakes.

Now thousands of lakes across the West — many of them in designated wilderness areas — are regularly stocked with trout, accounting for about 95 percent of the larger, deeper lakes that once were prime frog habitat.

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Sylvia’s Break is Mir’s Fortune

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004

One of the first things you learn as a grappler is when to submit. Tim Sylvia missed that lesson. Sylvia’s Break is Mir’s Fortune describes their UFC bout from last Saturday night:

The closest man to the action saw what happened. Truth be told, he heard it too. With 253-pound Frank Mir applying as much pressure as he could to six-foot-eight Tim Sylvia’s gangly right arm, it shouldn’t have been such a surprise. Yet when referee Herb Dean jumped between Mir and Sylvia just 50 seconds after their UFC heavyweight championship contest commenced Saturday night, a cascade of boos showered down from the 10,000-plus fans inside the Mandalay Bay Events Center.

Moments later, when the six big screens throughout the arena simultaneously aired a Sylvia’ forearm move in a way it wasn’t designed to do, the ‘boos’ turned into ‘oohs.’ And with that, Dean was vindicated, Frank Mir (8-1-0) was the proud owner of a new belt, and Tim Sylvia (18-1-0) was on his way to a local Las Vegas hospital with two broken bones following the first loss of his career.

Sylvia had plenty of time to tap out, but he didn’t, and he paid the price.

Frankly, I didn’t know what happened when the ref jumped in. Sylvia’s elbow was slipping out, so I thought he was safe. I guess he was safe — from having his elbow dislocated. In the replay, a spot in his forearm (an inch or two below the elbow) visible pops out. That’s what the ref saw — and heard.

Tap early, tap often, kids.

The fact that Sylvia then acted unhurt makes me wonder, was he on drugs?

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Cobra Kai Jiu Jitsu

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004

I can’t believe that somebody (Marc Laimon) already took the name I wanted to use if I ever opened a jiu-jitsu school: Cobra Kai Jiu Jitsu.

(In case you’re not quite the martial-arts geek I am, Cobra Kai was the evil karate dojo in Karate Kid.)

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Girls Just Want To Have Fun

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004

Girls Just Want To Have Fun reviews Alexandra Robbins’ Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities:

In one of the few scholarly articles ever written on white sororities, published in American Sociological Review in 1965, John Findley Scott argued that sororities served mainly to provide their members with high-status husbands. The striking thing about the early-’60s sororities that Scott described — with their status-consciousness, their public courtship rituals, and their obsession with sexual reputation — is how much they served the interests of their members’ parents, who traditionally sought to control their daughters’ sexual behavior in order to preserve their marriage value. In serving parental ends, sororities also served those of the colleges and universities charged with overseeing the moral and physical hygiene of their coeds.

But college women have considerably more control over their social status these days. [...] With the old marriage goals pushed aside, the rules about ladylike comportment and sexual chastity, designed to reassure future husbands, are increasingly irrelevant. Nonetheless, the old spouse-hunting rituals have been retained — the endless Greek mixers and formals. Add a general relaxing of sexual mores, and combine it with the expanding role of alcohol and drugs in post-1960s campus life, and the battery of courtship rituals designed to enhance the marriage value of sorority women by rationing their sexual availability becomes something rather different.

From one angle, then, sororities have become the problem that they used to be the solution to.

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The Good Bad Boy

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004

You probably think you know the story of Pinocchio. Not likely. From The Good Bad Boy:

Originally, Pinocchio was published as a serial in the newspaper Il giornale per i bambini (“The Paper for Children”). It appeared in eight parts between July and October of 1881, and then in eleven more installments from February 1882 to January 1883. The form of the story was that of a picaresque novel, in which, perhaps because of the pressures of time, some of the chapters are more original and better integrated into the whole. Some of these episodes — for example those in which Pinocchio meets a giant serpent, is caught in a trap and made to serve as a watchdog, rides on the back of a pigeon, and is mistaken for a fish by a monstrous green-haired fisherman — are often left out of the condensed English-language versions.

The Disney film omits even more of the story, and changes it drastically. Geppetto, Pinocchio’s foster father, appears to be a prosperous toymaker, and the town where he lives looks Swiss or Bavarian: his workshop is full of music boxes and cuckoo clocks. In the original story, however, Geppetto is a desperately poor Italian woodcarver. When the film begins Pinocchio is a lifeless wooden toy; he comes to life only when a fairy grants Geppetto’s wish for a child. In the book Pinocchio is alive from the start. Though he is only a nameless stick of firewood in the shop of the carpenter Master Anthony, he can already speak and move. When Master Anthony strikes the stick with his axe, it cries out “Ouch! You hurt me!” The carpenter is terrified, and offers the piece of wood to his friend Geppetto, who wants to make a marionette. It continues to act up, mocking Geppetto, and striking Master Anthony, provoking two fistfights between the old friends.

When Geppetto gets home he begins to carve the marionette. But as soon as Pinocchio’s mouth is finished he laughs at Geppetto and sticks out his tongue, and once he has arms he snatches Geppetto’s wig off his head. When his legs and feet are finished, he runs away.

From the start, Collodi’s Pinocchio is not only more self-conscious but far less simple than the cute little toy boy of the cartoon. He is not only naive, but impulsive, rude, selfish, and violent. In theological terms, he begins life in a state of original sin; while from a psychologist’s point of view, he represents the amoral, self-centered small child, all uncensored id.

The original Pinocchio kills the talking cricket who gives him advice. And he’s not an idealized five- or six-year-old; he’s a rebel, more like Twain’s Tom Sawyer

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Olympic Games

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004

Olympic Games, a review of Miller’s Ancient Greek Athletics, debunks a few cherished myths about the ancient games:

The idea that the ancient games were apolitical celebrations of amateurism, for instance, is an invention of the late Victorians, who projected their idealizations of the Greeks back onto a reality that was as obsessed with money and prestige as our own times. To be sure, athletes in the stephanitic (‘crown’) games like the Olympics received only a crown made of olive leaves or celery, but the prestige attending victory in these games often produced more practical benefits, such as free meals for life at public expense, gifts from the city, and exemptions from taxes and civic duties: rewards as profitable as today’s endorsement contracts for Olympic victors.

Then there were the “money” games, numerous competitions besides those held every four years at Olympia, in which the value of prizes could reach as high as what today would be half a million dollars. Theagenes of Thasos, active in the early fifth century B.C., earned what translates as around $44 million from his fourteen-hundred athletic victories. The late-sixth-century trainer Demokedes earned the equivalent of a quarter-million dollars a year after rival city-states twice lured him away with better offers.

Such lucrative payouts encouraged a professionalization of training and competition that by the Roman period had turned athletes into full-blown professionals who earned their living solely from sports. (Pliny the Younger, for instance, records the complaints of athletes who felt their free room and board provided by the emperor during training wasn’t generous enough.) And this professionalization was attended with the same evils — fixing, bribery, trade unions, and raiding athletes and trainers — that characterize the modern world with its greedy, peripatetic free agents.

No description of the ancient games would be complete without a rant about their brutality:

The frequent brutality of ancient sports reinforced this vision of life’s hard limits. Important functionaries of the games were the rabdoi: judges armed with willow switches who punished fouls and false starts with a flogging. Even more indicative of the Greek acceptance of life’s brutal limits were events like boxing and the pankration, a fierce combination of wrestling and boxing, with strangulation, finger-breaking, and eye-gouging (ostensibly forbidden) thrown in. Boxers fought with hard leather strips wrapped around their fists and pounded each other’s heads until somebody gave up. Blood flowed freely, and fighters died, none more spectacularly than a certain Kreugas, who had his guts torn out by his sharp-nailed opponent.

Ostensibly forbidden? In soccer, kicking someone in the head is ostensibly forbidden too — but it happens. Boxers [...] pounded each other’s head until somebody gave up? Is it better that we expect boxers to pound each other’s heads until one of them falls unconscious?

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Sins of the fathers

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004

Sins of the fathers describes the rise and fall of the Piarists:

The Piarists began as a religious order dedicated to teaching poor children. A Spaniard, Jose Calasanz, founded the first Pious school in 1597, in Rome, at a time when free education barely existed. The order exists to this day, although now its schools are more exclusive. Past pupils include Mozart, Goya, Haydn, Victor Hugo — and Egon Ronay.

In marked contrast to the Jesuits, Piarists taught in the vernacular, not Latin, and over philosophical mathematics they favoured “abbaco”, or mercantile arithmetic. Children learned how to calculate the interest on loans, exchange rate mechanisms and geometry. Calasanz hoped that these skills would help them to find jobs “in banks, in warehouses, in counting houses and in other trades”.

Not only were his teaching methods innovative, but Calasanz’s staff included some of the great men of the time, including Ventura Sarafellini, the calligrapher who created the inscription “Tu Es Petrus” around the inner ring of the cupola of St Paul’s. Calasanz also knew Pope Gregory’s barber and doctor, and found them useful intermediaries.

Even Galileo became involved with the Piarists when a group of scientifically minded priests was sent to start a Pious school in Florence. Their espousal of his heliocentric theory, at a time when Galileo was falling foul of the Inquisition, was to prove very dangerous for the order.

Alongside their modern teaching methods, Piarist brothers practised an austere Christianity. They wore horse-hair habits and were expected to eat little and badly. Calasanz was so dedicated to discomfort that he ate his meals with one foot lifted in the air, “to suffer even while eating”, or lay on the floor and made the other brothers trample him on their way to the refectory. Piarists were not allowed to swim, play the guitar or kiss their mothers. They were never supposed to be alone with a pupil.

Its austerity notwithstanding, the movement grew quickly, with schools opening across Italy (including one at the summit of Vesuvius, which was promptly swallowed up by the volcano). By the 1630s the expansion was so rapid that Calasanz wished he had another 10,000 teachers to meet the demand for new schools. Yet by 1646 the order was discredited, and banned by Pope Innocent X. What had happened, in one decade, to quash such a flourishing movement? (It was only restarted at the end of the 17th century.)

What did lead to the fall?

The reason given at the time was “internal dissent”, but Karen Liebreich stumbled on what she felt to be the real answer while researching a doctorate on public education in a musty Florentine archive. Calasanz is the patron saint of Catholic schools, and Liebriech had been dutifully wading through his 4,869 letters – not a joke among them, she notes grimly – when she came across the telling euphemism: il vitio pessimo — “the worst sin”.

Liebreich’s Fallen Order: A History explains:

We learn about the sinister Father Gavotti, who wore gold-trimmed stockings under his habit, and whose paedophile tendencies, said a contemporary, caused “a terrible stench to everyone nearby”. There is nasty Mario Sozzi, who shopped his enemies to the Inquisition, and was struck down by a kind of leprosy. His treatment involved being wrapped naked in the still pulsating body of a recently slaughtered ox. Sozzi died anyway – but his colleagues enjoyed eating the ox.

The real villain of the piece is Stefano Cherubini, headmaster of the Naples school, who threatened to destroy the order if allegations of his abuse of children were made public. Cherubini was the son and brother of powerful papal lawyers, so Calasanz pandered to him, promoting Cherubini away from the scene of his crime. “Your reverence’s sole aim,” he wrote to a colleague, “is to cover up this great shame in order that it does not come to the notice of our superiors.”

The more things change…

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Lollapalooza

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004

I didn’t realize that the Lollapalooza tour was still going — well, until today’s announcement:

Even with what has been touted as the best line-up since its inception in 1991, with such eclectic and respected artists as Morrissey, Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey, and The Flaming Lips, among others, and the most competitive ticket prices in the marketplace for a tour this size, it was not enough to counter the weak economic state of this years summer touring season. Therefore, it is with the utmost regret that due to poor ticket sales across the board, the Lollapalooza, 2004 tour has been cancelled. This morning, tour organizers and concert promoters faced with several million dollars of losses, made the very tough decision to pull the tour.

Morrissey, Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey, and The Flaming Lips? Yeah, that’s a great alt-rock line-up…for 1991.

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Feeding the Minotaur

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004

Victor Davis Hanson’s Feeding the Minotaur opens with yet another à propos classical reference:

As long as the mythical Athenians were willing to send, every nine years, seven maidens and seven young men down to King Minos’s monster in the labyrinth, Athens was left alone by the Cretan fleet. The king rightly figured that harvesting just enough Athenians would remind them of their subservience without leading to open rebellion — as long as somebody impetuous like a Theseus didn’t show up to wreck the arrangement.

Ever since the storming of the Tehran embassy in November 1979 we Americans have been paying the same sort of human tribute to grotesque Islamofascists. [...] The terrorists believed that they were ever so incrementally, ever so insidiously eroding America’s commitment to a pro-Western Middle East. We offered our annual tribute so that over the decades we could go from Dallas to Extreme Makeover and Madonna to Britney without too much distraction or inconvenience.

Interesting summary of the situation:

Nearly three years after 9/11 we are in the strangest of all paradoxes: a war against fascists that we can easily win but are clearly not ready to fully wage. We have the best 500,000 soldiers in the history of civilization, a resolute president, and an informed citizenry that has already received a terrible preemptive blow that killed thousands.

Yet what a human comedy it has now all become.

I wouldn’t expect Hanson to use “comedy” there…

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Mongolians seek to make a name for themselves

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004

Mongolians seek to make a name for themselves by bringing back family names:

For more than 80 years, everyone in Mongolia was on a first-name basis. After seizing power in the early 1920s, the Mongolian Communists destroyed all family names in a campaign to eliminate the clan system, the hereditary aristocracy and the class structure.

Within a few decades, most Mongolians had forgotten their ancestral names. They used only a single given name — a system that eventually became confusing when 9,000 women ended up with the same name, Altantsetseg, meaning ‘golden flower.’

Frankly, I’m surprised that most Mongolians forgot their ancestral names. Anyway, they’re coming back:

By the mid-1990s, Mongolia had become a democracy again, and there were growing worries about the lack of surnames. One name might be enough when most people were nomadic herdsman in remote pastures, but now the country was urbanizing. The one-name system was so confusing that some people were marrying without realizing they were relatives.

In 1997, a new law required everyone to have surnames. The law was largely ignored, but then a system of citizenship cards was introduced. Slowly the country of 2.5 million began to adopt surnames.

Today, however, there are still 10,000 people without surnames. So the government is trying to solve the problem with a mixture of incentives (a discount on the registration fee) and heavy-handed pressure (a threat of financial penalties on anyone who fails to get a citizenship card before the June 27 national election).

Of course, everyone now gets to choose a surname, and “Borjigin, the tribal name of Genghis Khan, has become the most popular name in the country. It means master of the blue wolf, a reference to Mongolia’s creation myth.”

Can you imagine literally have a name like “Skywalker”?:

Mongolia’s Defence Minister, an earnest, bespectacled man with a “Hero of the Soviet Union” medal on his jacket, is the proud owner of probably the coolest name in the country.

The 58-year-old minister, Gurragchaa, is a former cosmonaut on a Soviet spaceship — the only cosmonaut from Mongolia. And so when he was unable to discover his ancestral surname, he chose Sansar, the Mongolian word for the cosmos. His children will use the same name.

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Islamic Democracy? Mali Finds a Way To Make It Work

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004

Islamic Democracy? Mali Finds a Way To Make It Work:

All over Mali last month, the boisterous pursuit of votes unfolded with hardly a hitch. Candidates focused on everyday issues like garbage removal and roads. Their lively campaigns showcased something highly unusual in the Muslim world: a thriving democracy.

Islam and democracy haven’t had a good record together, especially where mixed with deep poverty such as that of this sprawling West African country. While much of the world has moved away from authoritarian rule, the New York think tank Freedom House ranks just two of the globe’s 47 Muslim-majority nations fully “free.” They are Mali, a democracy since 1992, and neighboring Senegal. Mali’s rare success thus stands as both a hopeful sign and a measure of the task the U.S. faces in seeking to seed democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I can’t say I knew much about Mali:

Democracy might seem to face particularly long odds in Mali. The former French colony sits astride one of the world’s most violent neighborhoods. To the north is Algeria, wracked by a lethal Islamist insurgency, and to the south the Ivory Coast, rent by ethnic civil war.

Mali — bigger than Texas and California combined, with 12 million people — is a hodgepodge of ethnic groups. Listening to Mr. Cissé campaign were black Songhay farmers in Muslim skullcaps, Arab traders with goatees, Peul cattlemen in conical leather hats, and olive-skinned Tuareg nomads whose full-face turbans left only sunglasses exposed. The diversity reflects Timbuktu’s past as a caravan crossroads where the Sahara meets a bend in the muddy Niger River.

Mali’s “intricate social fabric” includes taboos against violence among castes and ethnic groups:

That tradition is known to locals as “cousinage,” and arose as a way to preserve peace as empire succeeded empire in medieval times. The descendants of winners and losers were usually made “cousins” in order to bury grievances. The tradition of loyalty to multiple cousin groups still defines social relationships in Mali, in contrast to the tribal allegiances that are the rule in much of the Arab world and tropical Africa further south.

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WSJ.com – At Used-Book Stores, Unintended Mysteries Are Often the Best

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004

WSJ.com – At Used-Book Stores, Unintended Mysteries Are Often the Best describes a surprisingly common scenario:

A book is a good place to stash personal, valuable, embarrassing stuff. Unless, forgetting all about the stuff, you sell the book to a used book store.

For instance, Richard Ryan, a former student protester, left his rap sheet in a book he sold to the Strand, New York’s oldest and biggest independent used-book seller.

Some more examples:

Erin Thompson, who enters new buys into the Strand’s computer, found a key in a book and wears it on a string around her neck. Ephemera drift up on her desk: the Louths’ hand-drawn family tree. An ink sketch dated 1901 — hidden in a 1969 Christmas card — of a horse pulling a plow. A doctor’s prescription pad with the following notations: “Wednesday — mambo, lindy, spins. Thursday — rumba or tango. At work — angry. Really got angry. How to use?”

Imagine finding this:

Adam Davis, a 25-year-old from Oregon, took a job as a Strand clerk when he came to New York three years ago to write fiction. One day, he opened a copy of Barbara Tuchman’s medieval history, “A Distant Mirror,” and discovered a birth certificate. The baby’s father was listed as “not known.” An attached rider, dated years later, named the father.

Wrapped inside the certificate was a snapshot of a woman posing nude in a motel room, and one, in black-and-white, of what appeared to be the same woman as a child. There were some traveler’s-check receipts, and the stub of a train ticket, issued shortly after the date on the rider, for a trip to the town where the birth certificate was issued.

Maybe I should take a job at a used-book store:

Used books often gain value from forgotten paper — paper money, for example; the Strand’s staff rakes in lots of that. They haven’t yet found a “hell scene with fish monster,” as Cristiana Romelli did two years ago at Sotheby’s in London. The original Hieronymus Bosch sketch fell out of a client’s old picture album and sold for $276,000. A few years earlier, her colleague Julien Stock found a Michelangelo stuck in a 19th-century scrap book. In 2001, that one brought its owner $12 million.

The Strand did buy a $15 doodled-over book of drawings by the Renaissance artist Ucello. The doodler was Salvador Dali. Fred Bass, the Strand’s owner, once opened a book titled “The Bill of Rights” to find it was hollowed out. The bottom of the inside was signed, “Boo! Abbie Hoffman.” Mr. Bass says he learned later from Mr. Hoffman that he had hidden a tape recorder in there during the Chicago Seven trial.

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Unfalsifiable political theories

Monday, June 21st, 2004

In Unfalsifiable political theories, Steven Den Beste compares the Cold War and War on Terror and notes how the “party line” always recommends negotiation over military build-up, whether the opponent is strong or weak:

Before the fall of the Soviet Union, the “party line” in the west was that it was useless to try to compete with the USSR because the Soviet economy was strong and the Soviet military was formidable, and there was no way it was going to collapse, so we should negotiate and try to come to some sort of accommodation, instead of relying on competition and military build-up. After the USSR collapsed, the party line changed to this: The USSR had always been a basket case and its collapse was inevitable anyway. (We always said that, and it turned out we were right.) So there wasn’t any need to rely on competition and military build-up; we should have negotiated and tried to come to some sort of accommodation while we waited for the inevitable collapse.

We have seen exactly the same thing happen in the “War on Terror”. Prior to the Madrid bombing, the “party line” was that the threat of terrorism had been massively overblown and the American response was preposterously excessive and totally unjustified. Rather than try to rely on military might and confrontation, we should instead negotiate and try to come to a peaceful accommodation. (In a spectacular example of bad timing, the International Herald Tribune notoriously published an opinion piece which said exactly that on the day that Madrid was bombed.)

After Madrid, the party line turned on a dime, and became: It’s apparent that the use of military power and confrontation to deal with the threat of terrorism is a failure. We should instead try to negotiate and come to some sort of accommodation.

You may have noticed a common theme in the party line.

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German ‘Samurai’ on the Loose in Woods Near Berlin

Sunday, June 20th, 2004

From German ‘Samurai’ on the Loose in Woods Near Berlin:

A camouflage-clad German man wielding a samurai sword attacked at least seven hikers in forests west of Berlin, performing sword tricks before ordering them to leave the woods, police said Friday.

They suspect a 46-year-old local man who trained in martial arts and survival skills in camps in Papua New Guinea and Vietnam to be the attacker.

‘He’s dangerous and has been hard to find because he wears camouflage,’ said Catrin Feistauer, spokeswoman for the Nauen police department. Police have used infrared cameras mounted on helicopters to try and track him down.

The man pushed two elderly people off their bikes and, flashing his sword, shouted at them to leave the forest. He later tried to drive a young couple out of the woods. No one was seriously hurt.

‘It’s frightening because the violence level has increased each time,’ Feistauer said.

Where is Michael Dudikoff these days, anyway?

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