Ong Bak 2 !

Ong Bak is possibly the finest example (after a few fight scenes in the Bourne films [ie. the park bench scene with the two Police men]) of realistic applied martial arts put to film. Most of the time Jaa is fighting as if his only goal is to disable the attacker and finish the attack in as short order as possible. This is the ultimate aim of a person in a fight when the outcome has to be in their favour.

A mantra at a gym I used to train at was, ‘don’t turn it into a fight.’ This didn’t just mean the pithy ‘walk away from fights, just back down’ etc. It means simply don’t draw the situation out. Don’t get fancy and fire off 5 moves when 1 will do, don’t let the situation escalate. Always keep the mindset of finishing the attacker with your strikes etc. If this fool is punching me, I’m not thinking about defence, instead I’m thinking of what can be done to stop him from punching again / staying standing / breathing / etc.

“Invincibility lies in the defence;
the possibility of victory in the Attack.”

Sun Tzu

“In every battle there comes a time when both sides consider themselves beaten, then he who continues the attack wins.”

Ulysses S. Grant

A t-Shirt I saw once, in very poor taste I should add, had the slogan, ‘don’t turn this rape into a murder‘ (without debating the t-shirt) The essence is broght to the fore in very graphic terms; don’t make a very bad situation worse by doing extraneous things. If you’re going to crash your car, you slam on the brakes and turn the wheel to avoid the accident. What you don’t do is turn down the stereo, adjust the air-con and wind up the windows! It should be the same in a fight.

I’ve gone off on a tangent here!! Check out the Ong Bak II goodness in the trailer below!

http://www.brightcove.tv/title.jsp?title=1612560688

Why do you bother?!

Looking through the ‘tags’ section of WordPress today I came across this.

How To Manipulate Chi - A Secret To Martial Arts (martialartsecrets.wordpress.com/2008/06/10/how-to-manipulate-chi-a-secret-to-martial-arts)
Learning to manipulate Chi and have it do what you want, when you want, how you want it, is not something that happens overnight. Many people when they learn that Chi is the secret behind most martial arts and the amazing things that can be done by martial arts masters think that they can easily obtain this ability and then they too can do the amazing things done by martial arts masters.

For fuck’s sake, why do you bother. The Internet is full of enough shite already and you feel the need to add some more just to promote something only a 13 year old kid would buy, only to tell the story as a cautionary tale when they matured enough to realise that you’re a scam merchant a a few weeks later.

All the links on the page go to martialarts expert.org. advertising some McDojo propaganda, sponsored by ‘Super Affiliate Marketing Corp. of U.S.A.’ What a shower of cunts.

More from the tool

You don’t need years of the same boring training because the secret and deadly effective methods that the NO instructor wants you to know are finally revealed!

Wow! I wish I had those M4d sK1LLz!

One satisfied customer notes

My anticipation of my opponent has increased ten fold. Thank You”

Tim Stone

ahhh, the sweet anticipation of you Paypal account being a few quid/$ lighter and your body being more than a few mills of essential body fluids lighter on the way to the hospital.

So Mr. ‘Super Affiliate Marketing Corp. of U.S.A.‘ why don’t you just fuck off and leave the real training to people like us and pray that you never need the help of people with the legitimate skills that you have bastardised.

This isn’t new: (yubi - finger, waza - techniques, tricks)

A perspective on things

http://sciencehack.com/videos/view/BBsOeLcUARw

A film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero.

I like this. Makes me remember just how much of nothing there is within us, that we are not a solid as we are in the habit of thinking.

As above so below, or the macrocosm microcosm concept from Taoism.

The essential differences between a man and a woman

Let’s say a guy named Roger is attracted to a woman named Elaine. He
asks her out to a movie; she accepts; they have a pretty good time. A
few nights later he asks her out to dinner, and again they enjoy
themselves. They continue to see each other regularly, and after a
while neither one of them is seeing anybody else.

And then, one
evening when they’re driving home, a thought occurs to Elaine, and,
without really thinking, she says it aloud: “Do you realize that, as of
tonight, we’ve been seeing each other for exactly six months?”

Look Here

On self defence / self defense

munting around on the Interwebs at work today, I felt the need to respond to a post I saw here

This is a portion of the original post:

I think I finally mastered the knife disarm!

Self defense seems so imprecise to me…the attacker will never be in
the same exact position that you’ve practiced, so much of defense, I
feel, is improvised on the spot. Since I dislike improvising anything
(can’t everything come with an instruction manual?) I struggle with all
the “what ifs” (especially, when it comes to things like “what if I
miss in disarming him?”)…….

This is such a common theme. Really most self defence can be summed up in a single word, bullshit, and sometimes; bullshit that will get you killed.

Really, self defence in a nutshell should consist of how to stay the fuck out of dangerous situations, and then, only if you’ve messed that up, how to punch, knee, headbutt, bite, elbow and gouge as hard and as much as required to make the threat go away. Obviously if you’ve got time, a continuum of force idea could be introduced and legal issues addressed. but I digress.

Anyway, here’s my reply:

“Self defence seems so imprecise to me”

If you think about it, what you really mean is that it’s too precise. ie; the attacker has to have their arm in exactly position A, otherwise technique B wont work.

100% foolproof [insert weapon/body part etc here] defence is not a realistic goal, exactly because of all those ‘what ifs’ you’ve mentioned. Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security.

The ‘improvisation’ you’re talking about is the goal of self defence and martial arts in general. You need to respond without thinking to the situation as it evolves, and it will evolve and change far, far too fast for you if you’re trying to remember a technique from amongst a list of hundreds that you’ve memorised.

On the other hand; if you have learned and practice a set of principals and internalised them, then from these you can rely on your self to adapt spontaneously to the fight.
eg: If someone taught you that 2 + 3 is 5 and didn’t explain the function of the ‘+’ sign then you would only ever be able to answer 2+3, you’d be stumped when some one asked you to do 5 + 7!! however, if they taught you the principal that the ‘+’ means to add the values together, you’d be able to do any addition you wanted.

But, you can’t just be told that, you need to put in the practice adding things before it comes naturally.

to bring this back to martial arts; the first 2 + 3 you do is like this ‘knife disarm’ technique you’re learning; you can only do the disarm successfully within very fixed parameters.
After a while and you move on to disarm number 2 and 3 etc. you are still confined to the new parameters of the techniques.
After a number of these techniques you will start to see a common theme, the principals of knife defence. This is where you learn what the ‘+’ does, and how you can make it yours.

These principals that you should be trying to discover are not set in stone. some people may like to trap the knife close to there body, some may like to deflect it and counter attack. each has it’s benefits, but the only measure of correctness is if it works for that person.

It’s from these principals come the answers to the ‘what ifs.’

Remember, the overriding goal is to stop the person from harming you. however you get there is good, as long as you do get there.

Shit, this turned out to be quite long. It’s an important point though. The take home message is really run as fast away as you can if someone comes at you with a knife (Principle number 1!)

Good luck in the training!

A Good list of QiGong related articles

look here

Debating Martial Arts topics on the interwebs

This morning I got pretty aggravated by some tool that made the statement

‘We can safely say that martial arts started when Bodhidharma travelled
from India to China and taught some emaciated Chinese Buddhist monks
some exercises to stay healthy’

This kind of thing really riles me. In my opinion the Shaolin story is full of shit, propagated by the Chinese government and old skool kung fu flicks. Why do I think this, because of things I have read and researched.

Now, does this really matter a toss? Really? the answer is definitely no. It’s my opinion, should it be other people’s opinion too? who gives a toss, it doesn’t matter. Does it help my training if indeed the first person to ever throw a punch and teach his mates was some Indian Yogi? not at all. So why debate it?!

The martial arts are about training to be good at fighting, you cannot put a gloss on that. As a side effect of deep study in any practical field, you will also, after time, develop a scholarly side and start researching the martial arts and related fields. If your inclined that way you might even develop the internal aspects of the arts as well. It’s really no big shit! don’t get all excited about it!

I’m not sure if this post makes much sense, but in summary:

• Don’t be a tool and just spout shit on the internet/real world - At least try to do some research first before showing your ignorance.
• Debating esoterica, vague history etc. is fully pointless and will not make you a better practitioner. The main part of that word is practice, so when you feel the urge to spout off, can it and get to the gym to do something useful (I’m clearly not following my own advice here with this rant!)

NB: For a much more eloquent expression of what I am trying to say look here and here

Learning Japanese - It’s 2008: Use technology to help!

I said a while ago that I moved, well, part of that has involved learning a new language. Following the martial arts maxim,

Do not seek to just blindly copy and emulate your teachers, instead seek what they sought.

I set about trying to find the tools and strategy that worked best for me to accomplish the goal of learning a new language quickly and well.

I found that the king of SRS (spaced repetition systems) and Japanese language learning tools is the humble PDA

So, First go to http://www.japaneselanguagetools.com/ and get an Axim loaded to the gills with Japanese - English dictionaries. Then get bazillions of example sentences from ftp://ftp.cc.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo/jp_examples.fpw.tar.gz and stick that on the PDA’s SD Card (get a big one, the bigger the better)

Once that’s done you have a Japanese-English-Kanji-Stroke order-readings etc Dictionary that easily outperforms any of the commercial J-E ‘Wordtank’ kind of dictionaries,you can add further pimpage too by adding the worlds finest SRS　on it by adding PocketStackz from http://www.stackz.com/Stackz/ppc/ppc.htm
after that’s installed add the vocabulary files from http://www.stackz.com/Stackz/Archive/Archive.php

That’s well on the way to being the King of language learning helpers, but adding Declan’s voice flash cards (Yes: VOICE, they speak the words at you!) and the Kanji software will quite honestly put you over the edge!! get them from here -
http://www.declan-software.com/pocket_pc/japanese/index.htm

The Declans and Stackz site has files for all the JLPT levels and quite frankly, any words you’d ever need!

Free trials are available for all the software listed above (Obviously not the Axim)

Good luck!

NB: I am in no way affiliated with these sites, but I do fully recommend the products.

Latin Quotes from the Oldskool

Nihil aliud scit necessitas quam vincere - Necesssity knows nothing else but victory. (Syrus)

Nemo timendo ad summum pervenit locum - No man by fearing reaches the top. (Syrus)

Mens agitat molem - The mind moves the matter. (Vergil)

Maior risus, acrior ensis: quadragesima octava regula quaesitus - The bigger the smile, the sharper the knife: the 48th rule of acquisition

Facilius per partes in cognitionem totius adducimur - We are more easily led part by part to an understanding of the whole. (Seneca)

Facilius est multa facere quam diu - It is easier to do many things than to do one for a long time. (Quintilianus)

Fas est et ab hoste doceri - It’s proper to learn even from an enemy. (Ovid)

Homines, dum docent, discunt - Men learn while they teach. (Seneca)

Gladiator in arena consilium capit - The gladiator is formulating his plan in the arena (i.e., too late) (Seneca)

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto - I am human, therefore nothing human is strange to me

Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas - Although the power is lacking, the will is commendable. (Ovid)

Veni, vidi, vici - I came, I saw, I conquered. (Julius Caesar)

Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - I see the better way and approve it, but I follow the worse way

Vis consili expers mole ruit sua - Brute force bereft of wisdom falls to ruin by its own weight. (Discretion is the better part of valor) (Horace)

Vitiis nemo sine nascitur - No-one is born without faults. (Horace)

Aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem - Remember when life’s path is steep to keep your mind even. (Horace)

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero - Seize the day, leave as little as possible to tomorrow.(Horace)

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.(Horace)

Tai Chi reduces tension headaches apparently!

As part of the study, the researchers conducted a 15-week Tai Chi
program and found that participating patients improved on a
quality-of-life based measurement called SF-36 and also on a test
called HIT-6TM designed to capture the effect of headaches. A 15 week
intervention of Tai Chi practice was effective in reducing headaches.
The patients also reported improvement in energy levels, emotional well
being, social functioning and mental health.

More Here