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There's a great article on USA Today about the current revival of European martial arts from the middle ages and renaissance. A few snippets below. Click the title for the whole article.

Martial arts take a Western turn
Elizabeth Weise, USA Today
"Cool. Knights!" exclaims a little boy, part of a YMCA preschool class next door, as children pressed ( Read more... )

Our Hippy Slacker Moving Sale on eBay has been doing really well so far. We're already over halfway to our short term goal, which is to take a week long trip to Oregon to scout it out in preparation of our long term goal, which is to get a house up there.

Saw a good episode of Human Weapon last night. I've written about that show before. Last ( Read more... )

Last night I watched the premiere of a new History Channel show called Human Weapon (finday nights at 10). Two martial artists (one of them is actually a football player who happened to also wrestle some), travel around the world, learning about a different martial art each episode, learning both its techniques and its history. Then at the end of ( Read more... )

Anyone who thinks asian martial arts are inherently more sophisticated than western... think again.

I watched Ultra Violet last night, because although I'd heard it was pretty bad, I'd also read that it had Gun Kata in it. It was every bit as bad as I'd heard and then some. Bad dialogue, cheezy shallow story, crappy special effects, and even the action scenes (what I was watching it for) weren't very good.

Had a good karate class last night, followed by a good episode of Lost. (Is there ever a bad episode?) My mom ordered the mini-series Shogun, and it arived yesterday, so we're going to start watching it soon. I saw it years ago, when I was pretty young, but I was too little to understand it very well, so I'm looking forward to seeing it again, ( Read more... )

Karate class was good last night. We spent the entire hour (and then some) working with the bo, and Sensei Marti said he's going to start incorporating weapons (bo, jo, tonfa, sai and nunchaku) into our normal training, which is awsome.

I think I'm finaly over my infection, though I'm still coughing a little and haven't been back to karate class yet.

Samurai armor is my arch nemesis. It's beautiful and I love it, but it's damn near impossible to draw right.