I came across a video recently posted on youtube of my former jujutsu teacher, John Bear Shihan demonstrating futari kata in 1989. Was surprised to see that I was the main receiver, joined partway through the video by Neil Phillips.
At that time, I was a shodan (1st Dan black belt) and Neil was probably 3rd kyu brown belt. This kata was a training exercise for 5th kyu purple belt level.
My Dad is a person I have admired from before the time I first knew him. My Dad had a wonderful sense of humour. His childhood and university days were full of harmless pranks and the nicest sound I can remember is my Dad reading or listening to the radio when something would tickle his sense of humour making him laugh out loud, infecting anyone within hearing.
A comprehensive list of publications relating to my professional work is available at www.colinmathers.com
Colin Mathers. Shall I try Australia? A history of the Mathers family in Ireland, Scotland and Australia from the 17th to the 21st century. Lulu.com, Australia, 2010 (148 pages).
My great-grandfather, James Mathers, was born in Armagh, Ireland, in 1852 and moved to Scotland in the 1860s where he married Margaret Melrose. They migrated to Australia with their six surviving children in 1897. This book documents the history of the family in Australia, and traces the Mathers and Melrose ancestors in Ireland and Scotland back to the 1700s and earlier. The previous generation, born around the 1820s, were almost all illiterate labourers and coalminers. The subsequent history of the Mathers family encapsulates the dramatic changes in the educational, cultural and economic opportunities brought by the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
This edition of the book was available only to Mathers family members, and a second edition is planned. The second edition will include substantial additions and new information, not least because it has recently been discovered that James Mathers had an older sister, who migrated to Australia earlier, and whose existence was unknown to his descendents. Continue reading
Relaxing in the volcanic springs at Saturnia in Tuscany, summer 2013
Australian medalists at the Sixth World Jujutsu Championships held in Auckland, New Zealand in October 1995. I am in the back row at the left.
I was using the Twenty Ten theme and decided I wanted my category pages to show the full post, not just the first few lines (and without any images). So I changed to Twenty Eleven today. Not sure I like it as much, the pages seem narrower, though I did a comparison and the amount of text on a line was the same. A small bonus is that the header image is a bit deeper, so the cropping is not as extreme as in Twenty Ten. Gives more flexibility in using photos for headers.
This post has been superceded by a new post my-maternal-ancestors-from-eve-via-ice-age-europe-to-victorian-england which contains latest information from a recent more detailed analysis of my mtDNA together with revised and updated dates and locations of haplogroup founders.
In my previous post on my deep maternal ancestors (https://mountainsrivers.com/2014/02/16/deep-maternal-ancestors-out-of-africa-into-ice-age-europe/) I summarized the “grandmothers” who contributed specific mutations to my mtDNA that allow me to trace them (and approximately when and where they lived) all the way back to Mitochondrial Eve, the most recent common maternal ancestor of all living humans. These women were real and specific individuals, and Sykes and others have given the older ones specific names (usually starting with the letter of the haplogroup they founded). I have followed this by giving names to the founders of the subgroups to which I belong. In this post, I give a brief biography of each of these ancestral grandmothers, starting with Mitochondrial Eve, placing them in evolutionary, geographic, and climatic context. Continue reading
A few photos of us all together:
Sitting on a bouncy castle, hired for a birthday party 2011
"For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern" -- William Blake
Reflecting on what it all means
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it always knows
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