Welcome to South Austin Aikido

This is a test article to see how the Amazon.com content tagging system works on our site.

I'm really looking forward to the release of Book 7 in the Harry Potter series: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. My family has already preordered the book and we plan on being in line to pick it up at midnight on July 21. Obsessive? Perhaps, but it's fun for the kids.

Now we move on to something aikido related. This is a famous book by Mitsugi Saotome Sensei: Aikido and the Harmony of Nature. It's not clear to me whether Amazon links these guys by looking at the author, or title, or both, so this will be an interesting experiment.

On to movies. We just saw Stranger than Fiction with Emma Thompson and Will Ferrell. We were both pleasantly surprised at Will Ferrell's performance: understated and affecting; far removed from his normal manic turns. It reminded me of Jim Carrey's work in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind only without Carrey's almost palpable sense of restraining an inner goofball.

Chrystie and I have both been playing a lot of Viva Piñata recently, although the novelty of raising endless paper maiche animals has pretty much worn off. The outstanding Gears of War caught my attention for a while, but as bad as I am at action games, I was only able to play through it once before moving on. Right now, I'm re-playing Psychonauts while waiting for Bioware's Mass Effect. When that releases in late Spring or early Summer, I fully expect to never be seen again, sucked beyond the event horizon of an irresistible RPG force of nature.

Let's see what links to Amazon.com.