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Juggling involves any kind of object manipulation that defies the law of gravity. What most people think of when they heard the word juggling is called toss juggling, which consists of alternatively throwing and catching objects in different patterns and adding manipulation tricks. But there some other less known forms of juggling, which involve manipulation of objects with gyroscopic properties (diabolo, devil sticks), bouncing balls, routines more akin to dancing (poi) and the aesthetically elegant contact juggling.

Juggling may be taken up by almost everyone, young or adult. Besides being an entertaining passtime and often an impressive display in the eyes of non-jugglers, it can be an outlet to relieve stress and a great way to improve your hand-eye coordination. Also, the mathematically-oriented will find the geometry and the tempo of juggling patterns an interesting thing in its own right.

I remember myself thinking "wow, THAT must be incredibly difficult" when I first tried to learn to juggle 3 balls for the first time a couple years ago. But if I, being the clumsy bonebag that I am, was able to get the hold of it after a couple weeks, I am sure that anybody can do it putting the right amount of steady practice into it :-) Truth be told, things really do start getting difficult if you want to juggle the more eyecatching patterns (which involve weird sequences of hands crossing and uncrossing, throwing objects behind your back, under your leg, above your head, and just about any imaginable thing), or add more objects into the equation. Juggling 4 objects is only slightly more difficult than 3, 5 requires very quick reflexes and evident throwing accuracy which only comes with muuch practice, and 7 or above is something for masters only, I would say. However, the 3-object cascade, which is the basic toss juggling pattern on which many other build, is quite easy to pick up, and I would say it can be done fluidly by almost anyone in at most a month.

Below are the juggling props (that's how the juggling toys are called in the juggling jargon) in my possession so far:

• Bean bags (or balls): The easiest to juggle, and the ones most people begin with. The difference between bean bags and proper balls is that bean bags don't roll or bounce away when you drop them. I can do the 3-ball cascade, 2 in one hand, some low-to-medium difficulty patterns (involving throws over the top, under the arm, hand crossings, columns, shower, ...), and only not long ago I started trying to control 4 balls.



• Rings: Slightly more difficult than balls, since there are two additional degrees of freedom to keep under control. You have to give the rings a vertical spin, and moreover take care of the throws so that the ring's plane of rotation doesn't start turning sideways. Also, the catching the rings involves more precise timing than with balls. I started with rings not long ago, and can only juggle the 3-ring cascade and 2 in one hand so far.



• Clubs: The ultimate frontier in toss juggling. More difficult than balls or rings, because clubs have to be given the right amount of rotation in each throw so that they can be caught by the "handle" part in the next catch. Rotations need not be single, clubs can be thrown higher with a double or triple rotation in order to allow more time to perform some trick before the catch. Clubs are the starting point to being able to juggle other more "impressive" objects with an elongated shape: knives, fire torches, chainsaws (and YES, some people do THAT)... Also, it hasn't been long since I started trying to juggle clubs, and at the time I'm working on getting a solid 3-club cascade.



• Devil sticks: Two small "control" sticks and the bigger one, the devil stick. Grab one of the control sticks in each hand, place the devil stick atop them, lift one side of the devil stick with that hand's control stick while letting it go in the opposite side... and off you go: you are devil-sticking. The objective is to keep the devil stick in the air while making it oscillate in different figures using the control sticks. Also, I took this up almost at the same time I started with clubs, and can only do the pendulum (the most basic figure) and some flips.



• Diabolo: Two conic shapes joining at an axle, and two control sticks connected by a string. The objective is to speed up the diabolo by making it twirl faster on the string by successively lifting one of the control sticks, and then throw the diabolo into the air and catch it again on the string in different figures. I don't really have much experience with this one yet, since even though I had one, I never really payed it too much attention.

Bean bags	Juggling clubs	Juggling rings

Devil stick	Diabolo

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I used to be the typical guy whose musical tastes are just about anything in the pop/rock scene (including rock-derived and sibling styles such as heavy, some of punk, or reggae) and who thinks the core of electronic music is just a full bag of headnumbing boom-boom noise.

That was before I decided, driven by curiosity, to give a go at electronic music, and to try to dig in the vast amount of electronica styles with a more attentive ear to "see" (more precisely, to hear) what it had to offer. What I discovered: electronic music is a landscape full of nuances and different styles; and it is by no means just a bunch of boom-boom, but it can be as arty, creative and emotion-evoking as rock music (name it jazz, soul or your favorite non-electronica genre), and sometimes even more so.

Electronic dance music genres are classified primarily by their bpm (beats per minute, that is, the speed of the main drum pattern in a song). Then again, there are a plethora of subgenres and people may argue at length about whether this particular track belongs to this or that other genre. My favorite styles, in very general terms, are trance (130-150 bpm) and house (120-135 bpm) music. It would be really complicated trying to describe the qualities of each genre into words, but, as a rough approximation: trance music is supposed to be more "hypnotic", with more "ethereal" sounds, and anthemic melodies with long buildups and sudden releases of tension; house music is more relaxed, more patterned, more disco-ish, sometimes with jazzy and Latin influences... In my opinion, trance is more danceable (I like something I read about trance that said it's a music that "fucks with your feelings"), while house is more the kind of music that just feels right to listen to in the background while you do other things.

Trying to describe (not only electronic) music with words is almost like trying to explain colours to a blind person. A very good resource to get to know the different styles is Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music, where genres and subgenres are arranged in a graph and commented (with a touch of sarcasm), and you can get a feel for how each style sounds through short music samples that are included with them. As for DJs and electronic music artists, some of my favorite are: Tiësto (trance), Sasha (house/trance), Paul Van Dyk (trance), Armin Van Buuren (trance), Paul Oakenfold (trance), Gigi d'Agostino (dance/trance), The Chemical Brothers (break beat/trip hop), Daft Punk (house) and Kevin Yost (house with jazzy influences). Since there are DJs and electronic music artists in the thousands, The DJ List may prove a useful resource to dig in lists of DJs by genre or get some profile information about them. A good quality to look for in a track producer is that you like his style and his sounds. Besides, a good quality to look for in a DJ (apart from good technical re-mixing and beatmatching skills), when you listen to a compilation album or a live session, is that the DJ is capable of taking you on a kind of musical "journey": the album or session should have a start, some turns and a destination, all with a sense of continuity and direction.

The bottomline of all this ranting and raving about electronic music is that, if I have convinced some people who think initially as I did ("electronic music is just a bunch of nonsensical boom-boom") to give it a go and explore the depths of this big genre, all the better. The electronic sounds of synthetizers and drum machines can achieve aural qualities not found in traditional musical instruments, some genres (like trance) incorporate emotional vocal lines in some of their tracks, and besides, electronic music can experiment with rhythm in a much "purer" state than non-electronic genres. Trance and house are my favorite styles, but they are by no means the complete picture. I just tried to provide some pointers from which someone may start looking around. My best advice is: go, look around for some samples of different styles, and if you find something you like, try to find some similar artists, and above all, keep an open mind. It is my experience that some music one may actually like, may take more than one listening to get one's ear and brain comfortable with it (i.e. it may sound too weird, unusual or distant from one's musical "comfort zone" to be appreciated at first).

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I was never particularly fond of pets. They give unnecessary work, need special care, feeding, disposing of their bodily waste, and generate mess all in all. Besides, you can interact with them on some basic levels, but they don't exactly make your dream conversation partner. I used to think "Hey, animals had built their own societies and social groups in nature long before homo sapiens arrived. Why is there any need of pets living in domestic arrangements with man?"

Now my current home resembles a kind of mini zoo. I live with countless cats (eight adult, if I didn't lose count, plus the occasional kittens), three ferrets (plus the occasional litter) and a macaw. The reason for this apparent craziness is that my significant other was always a pet lover, and has made a small hobbyist business of breeding animals and selling them, for the most part cats. You can see her cattery website here (site in Spanish). Other creatures I have seen cohabiting with me in the past include: exotic sea fishes (a sea water aquarium), a rabbit, two chinchillas, a chameleon (for a short amount of time), and even some animals I didn't even know existed (ever heard of bearded dragons?).

Persian Chinchilla adult male	Red persian kitten	Devon Rex adult male

Young ferret	Blue-and-yellow macaw

Now, after having been living for a couple years surrounded by pets, I must admit retrospectively that they are not so annoying after all, and I'd even go as far as saying that they are lovely sometimes, and certainly liven up the household. I think it would feel weird for me if all the pets were gone all of a sudden... maybe it's just another example of human being's remarkable ability for adaptation. There are only a couple of details I still find "unfunny": one is when the macaw decides to go too vocal (this bird's "singing", so to speak, can be quite loud and high-pitched at times); another one is our male cats having chosen our entire home as the land for their own particular "wars for territory". Unneutered male cats have a strong territorial instinct, and they mark the limits of their territory by spraying their own "scent" (something like urine but with a more characteristic odour) around corners and particular places. Now imagine several male cats so claiming their territory time and again on top the previous occupier's olfactory signals, and you'll get an idea of what I mean.

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"Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus" (But it flees in the meanwhile, the irreplaceable time flees) — Virgil

"Memento mori!" (Remember you will die!)

"A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it." — Rabindranath Tagore

"By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower." — Rabindranath Tagore

"Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come." — Rabindranath Tagore

"Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." — Master Yoda

"That until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes...Me say war." — Haile Selassie I

"An eye for an eye, and soon the whole world is blind." — Mahatma Gandhi

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