black belt != smart
ok, so on friday it was john and jen's party. since it was at about 7pm or so i still had plenty of time to hook up my new hdmi cables to my dvd player and tv. after being a nerd about that for a while, i drove over to john and jen's and started with the socializing. i usually look forward to john and jen's parties because a bunch of my friends will be there and there will be tons of food and booze and stuff. i think this time i was just too concerned with other stuff. like my humidifier leaking. and the delivery for my new stove being saturday. and... whatever else i was worried about. it's not that i didn't have a good time, i think i was just preoccupied.
anyway, so john and jen have this friend. he studies martial arts (i would give you the actual name of the martial art if he actually studied a real one) at a dojo by me and... well... theencoded can back me up on this... the guy is just full of shit. his dojo has a bad reputation, his sensei seems like something of a fraud and his techniques in the past have seemed... flawed. anyway, it wouldn't be such a big deal to me if this guy wasn't also a HUGE bragger. i can only speak for myself on this, but with my shodan came a sense that it is very easy to harm others, and as a result, very easy to be harmed. therefore, i really don't want to get in a fight. ever. that realization doesn't seem to have penetrated this guy's thick noggin. instead, he has to tell other people how many people he could fight at once. *sigh* it's people like him that give martial arts a bad name.
so one of the guys i was talking to (and who happens to be a nidan in shorinji kempo) mentioned that his brother and some of their friends got mugged in detroit. cue jackass, stage left. dumbass then starts talking about how those muggers are lucky he wasn't there because he would have killed every single one of them with his bare hands and that the guys who got dragged out of the car were pussies and whatever. well, while i would think your first instinct would be to fight back if someone was dragging you out of the car, i don't really know the situation and i wasn't in it. since i wasn't, i can't really call anyone a coward or whatever. besides that, it doesn't fucking matter: getting mugged is scary. you never know how you are going to react to something like that. dumbass, on the other hand, started cataloging all the things he would do to these apparently motionless, unarmed figures. annoyed, i mentioned "maybe they had some kind of weapon." this is when things got started getting really annoying.
instead of thinking "maybe not everyone know all 117 ways to disarm an opponent with a knife" he once again started talking about how knives don't scare him and that at his dojo, they practice WITH REAL FUCKING KNIVES. this is where whatever shred of respect i allotted to his dojo flew out the window. how fucking dumb are you that you practice with real knives? even in feudal japan they had the common sense to use bokken (wooden swords, or as his dojo spells it... swards) when practicing. when i attended a gochinjitsu seminar earlier this year, one of the techniques you learn is disarming an opponent with a knife. of course, we used harmless wooden knives for this. most of the people in the seminar were shodan and above. most had decades of experience in martial arts and were very well versed in disarming. the instructor of the class, noboru saito, is a very highly respected jodoka and karateka, holding shichidan (7th degree black belts) in both. he is an ass kicking machine. he made it VERY clear when demonstrating these techniques they are only if you are attacked. they are not if someone pulls a knife and asks for your wallet. if they want your money... give it to them. money can be replaced; organs cannot. one interesting thing to see when we were going over some of these techniques was how easily you could be cut when struggling with an armed opponent. if you didn't do things just right and focus on that blade, you could be fatally injured. dumbass, however, has probably never even heard this stuff. instead, he bragged about his 32 stitch scar on his hand that he got at the dojo.
after phil and i tried to talk a little sense in him, he continued to talk about how great he is. he talked about how dojos in japan had invited him to teach there. i can recall the trip he was referring to and how he had a) claimed he could easily beat a female judo world champion because he was bigger and had wrestling in high school and b) that the kodokan had invited him to teach there. let me tell you a little something about the kodokan: they don't invite anyone, japanese or not, to teach about martial arts there unless that person is a fucking world champion or has been in martial arts for more than a few years. the kodokan is the world headquarters for judo. why on earth would someone with no pedigree be invited to teach something other than judo there? it just doesn't make sense.
so after bragging about his scars and how he swings a three foot razor blade at his friends head every week and how japan invites him to teach them about martial arts because he's fucking tom cruise in the last samurai and shit, i asked him very simply "ok... what if they had a gun?" that's when things went from ridiculous to completely retarded: he said "they better be more than five feet away from me or i'll break their fuckin neck!" how utterly brain dead do you have to be to think that you can win against someone with a gun pointed at you? the time it takes my tendons to flex and contract is a helluva lot less time than it takes a human being to cover the distance of five feet. and bullets can't be swatted away or caught in your teeth and spit back at the other guy. bullets have one purpose: to kill you. then he started talking about (and i'm not kidding) how he would rip the guy's throat out, ala road house. what. the. fuck. i had to stop from laughing at that one. then his wife came in to the kitchen and reminded him (for the like... tenth time) that they were supposed to go.
for the life of me, i cannot figure out where this guy's head is. i know his dojo doesn't have a good reputation. i know he seems to be insecure to the point of hilariously over-the-top exaggerations. i know that he probably honestly thinks he can do these things. but seriously... what if he actually does get a gun or knife pulled on him. i hope for him, his wife and any kids they may have some day that he has the common sense to just give them the fucking money and not try to be chuck norris or something. and i hope he's not dumb enough to actually pick fights with people. he might not be a very good martial artist... but to me, he is a very dangerous man.
anyway, so john and jen have this friend. he studies martial arts (i would give you the actual name of the martial art if he actually studied a real one) at a dojo by me and... well... theencoded can back me up on this... the guy is just full of shit. his dojo has a bad reputation, his sensei seems like something of a fraud and his techniques in the past have seemed... flawed. anyway, it wouldn't be such a big deal to me if this guy wasn't also a HUGE bragger. i can only speak for myself on this, but with my shodan came a sense that it is very easy to harm others, and as a result, very easy to be harmed. therefore, i really don't want to get in a fight. ever. that realization doesn't seem to have penetrated this guy's thick noggin. instead, he has to tell other people how many people he could fight at once. *sigh* it's people like him that give martial arts a bad name.
so one of the guys i was talking to (and who happens to be a nidan in shorinji kempo) mentioned that his brother and some of their friends got mugged in detroit. cue jackass, stage left. dumbass then starts talking about how those muggers are lucky he wasn't there because he would have killed every single one of them with his bare hands and that the guys who got dragged out of the car were pussies and whatever. well, while i would think your first instinct would be to fight back if someone was dragging you out of the car, i don't really know the situation and i wasn't in it. since i wasn't, i can't really call anyone a coward or whatever. besides that, it doesn't fucking matter: getting mugged is scary. you never know how you are going to react to something like that. dumbass, on the other hand, started cataloging all the things he would do to these apparently motionless, unarmed figures. annoyed, i mentioned "maybe they had some kind of weapon." this is when things got started getting really annoying.
instead of thinking "maybe not everyone know all 117 ways to disarm an opponent with a knife" he once again started talking about how knives don't scare him and that at his dojo, they practice WITH REAL FUCKING KNIVES. this is where whatever shred of respect i allotted to his dojo flew out the window. how fucking dumb are you that you practice with real knives? even in feudal japan they had the common sense to use bokken (wooden swords, or as his dojo spells it... swards) when practicing. when i attended a gochinjitsu seminar earlier this year, one of the techniques you learn is disarming an opponent with a knife. of course, we used harmless wooden knives for this. most of the people in the seminar were shodan and above. most had decades of experience in martial arts and were very well versed in disarming. the instructor of the class, noboru saito, is a very highly respected jodoka and karateka, holding shichidan (7th degree black belts) in both. he is an ass kicking machine. he made it VERY clear when demonstrating these techniques they are only if you are attacked. they are not if someone pulls a knife and asks for your wallet. if they want your money... give it to them. money can be replaced; organs cannot. one interesting thing to see when we were going over some of these techniques was how easily you could be cut when struggling with an armed opponent. if you didn't do things just right and focus on that blade, you could be fatally injured. dumbass, however, has probably never even heard this stuff. instead, he bragged about his 32 stitch scar on his hand that he got at the dojo.
after phil and i tried to talk a little sense in him, he continued to talk about how great he is. he talked about how dojos in japan had invited him to teach there. i can recall the trip he was referring to and how he had a) claimed he could easily beat a female judo world champion because he was bigger and had wrestling in high school and b) that the kodokan had invited him to teach there. let me tell you a little something about the kodokan: they don't invite anyone, japanese or not, to teach about martial arts there unless that person is a fucking world champion or has been in martial arts for more than a few years. the kodokan is the world headquarters for judo. why on earth would someone with no pedigree be invited to teach something other than judo there? it just doesn't make sense.
so after bragging about his scars and how he swings a three foot razor blade at his friends head every week and how japan invites him to teach them about martial arts because he's fucking tom cruise in the last samurai and shit, i asked him very simply "ok... what if they had a gun?" that's when things went from ridiculous to completely retarded: he said "they better be more than five feet away from me or i'll break their fuckin neck!" how utterly brain dead do you have to be to think that you can win against someone with a gun pointed at you? the time it takes my tendons to flex and contract is a helluva lot less time than it takes a human being to cover the distance of five feet. and bullets can't be swatted away or caught in your teeth and spit back at the other guy. bullets have one purpose: to kill you. then he started talking about (and i'm not kidding) how he would rip the guy's throat out, ala road house. what. the. fuck. i had to stop from laughing at that one. then his wife came in to the kitchen and reminded him (for the like... tenth time) that they were supposed to go.
for the life of me, i cannot figure out where this guy's head is. i know his dojo doesn't have a good reputation. i know he seems to be insecure to the point of hilariously over-the-top exaggerations. i know that he probably honestly thinks he can do these things. but seriously... what if he actually does get a gun or knife pulled on him. i hope for him, his wife and any kids they may have some day that he has the common sense to just give them the fucking money and not try to be chuck norris or something. and i hope he's not dumb enough to actually pick fights with people. he might not be a very good martial artist... but to me, he is a very dangerous man.