Drunken Monkey

sod the disposable scalpel, the plastic handle is too light and just feels wrong. if you're going to have one in your first aid box, you might as well have a good old swann no.3 (or 4). they feel right in the hand and i can throw and accurately hit a target up to 12 feet away. or maybe i should've kept that bit quiet....

anyway. y'know, my sister bought a £1500 sofa for her flat. it was italian hnd made, but white leather. i couldn't uderstand why.... but then she can't understand why i pay more for the 97 octane petrol at the pump.

a couple of months ago there was an influx of karate guys (of which style they couldn't quite say), all at 7th kyu/green belt or about to test for it or something, all from thailand and all living in uk (but he couldn't decide what area...) and they all shared the same spelling errors and grammatical errors.

quite an arrogant attitude? kinda understandable... when the whole world says you are the best, sometimes and the way the people around him would've treated him, it's very easy to start believing them. but then, makes you wonder what heppend to all of that philosphy he was so proud of (which i should add, he used to get other people to write his papers for him when he wasn't regurtating confuscious' books)?

i guess what bugs me is that just because tens of millions of kids buy them doesn't mean it is a good thing. after all, ladies and gentlemen, i give you pokemon, bayblade, digimon....

hehe, the thing is if you make a taller clone a lot of other factors automatically come into play. taller means, heavier, which means he needs to do more work to get the same effect (in terms of real energy expenditure i.e heavier limbs). also, increased height=longer arms which means slightly longer distance for the brain to send and receive signals to/from. sorry. couldn't help picking....

i thought they got rid of you here....

oh god... i have an unnatural hatred towards the harry potter books. i'm not saying that they're bad things, just that i think they're a bit undeserving of the praise heaped upon them.

size matters BUT it is not the all deciding factor which is what we are debating. some people say the bigger guy will always win. some people say the bigger guy doesn't always win. what a lot of people seem to have failed to realise is that usually, or perhaps ideally, the better person wins, be s/he big or small.

now i'm sure i have mentioned this before but bruce lee was most definitely not the best example of a hero.... look into his family life. it's not mentioned very often but he wasn't the best husband or father. i'm not surprised at the drugs thing. after all, think of the period that it all happened; it was part of the culture.

don't confuse the guy who's been training since the age of ten and happens to get awarded his first black belt at sixteen with the guy who joined a place that said he would get his black belt in two years time or the guy who wants to get his black belt by the time he's sixteen.

the problem i see, isn't that 'traditional' martial arts are bad, it's the schools that teach them that are the problem, after all, let's not forget that for all intent purposes, the gracies learnt 'traditional' martial arts. we've been through this before. the question of effectiveness is in the training. bjj schools are successful because they train a lot harder and a lot more than the majority of martial schools out there. muay thai is successful because they fight everytime they go into training (and muay thai is a very 'traditional' martial art...). what's missing from the majority of martial arts schools out there is this level of hard training. i have always said, if you train to fight, it doesn't matter what style you practice. the most basic move in ALL martial arts involves one person hitting another. it might look different but if you practice to hit the other person (i.e actually do it), you will get good at it. conversely, if you don't practice to hit the other guy, you will not.

but who ever said that they will do a jumping spinning hook kick in a fight? you're little example of a 'useless' move is completely unfair in that it takes a move that is not intended for the ground and then placing it in the situation of being mounted. i can just as easily say that you will never get me in a mount cos i'd knock you out before you can even try. or your mount is kinda useless when you have my foot planted on your face from your shooting in. see? it isn't hard to make up situations in which someone's style is useless. and don't say that if the ground-fighter wants you on the ground he'd get you there. from what i remember, sakuraba prevented royce from getting him on the ground quite a few times. anyway. just like to point out, one thing i keep seeing here is that some people talk about street/self defence and then use things that have happened in a ring fight as defence for their argument (see above). drag one hundred people off from the street and see how many of them fight like the guys you see in the ufc/nhb/pride/K1/etc.

no offence but how could you spend some time leanring at a kung fu school and not know the name of the style... strikes me as being a bit odd. do you mean that they never mentioned its name?

let me get this right. you really are saying that 'traditional' martial arts does not teach you how to fight? from what you have said here and from other threads, it is quite clear to me that your knowledge of other martial arts is based purely on what you have read and as a result you have offered not much more than generalities that cannot be applied to ALL traditional martial arts, if any at all. but let's forget about that for a moment. i wanna hear everyone's definition and examples of what is a traditional martial art and what is a modern martial art. (cos for a start, i could've sworn that muay thai has thousands of years under it's belt, whilst karate is only a few hundred years old...)

this has been bugging me for a bit now but the way the thread/post was made. he turns up, no intro and then decides that he has 'the final say' and proceeds to give us over-simplified statements and some generalities that proved to un-realsitic, as well as the obligatory bruce lee quote....

what you see in an event fight, be it ufc/nhb/K1 or whatever are techniques (forget about the style they're from, after all bjj isn't the only style with an armbar...) working in isolation against one person. while it is a good judge of the technique, it isn't that good a judge of the styles that do or do not participate. for a start, the guys who participate in those fights train for those fights. they train in the moves that work for those sorts of fights. hell, just watch any of the fights that i'm pretty sure you have on video somewhere and see how many moves from their entire repertoire that they actually use. i will say that if you want to win one of those events, then you don't even really need to learn all of bjj, just the moves that are sucessful and, more importantly, what to do against the moves that you see a lot of. and just think of what you are implying (just cos you don't type the words doesn't mean you aren't implying it...) are you really saying that judo doesn't work? that wing chun doesn't work? that aikido doesn't work? that karate doesn't work? that kempo (of any sort) doesn't work? just because you don't see them win in one of those fights? the obvious counterpoint to that would be to ask you to look through all of the news reports where martial arts have been involved. how many of them have been about karateka defending themseves. and how many have been about bjj, muay thai, what-ever defending themselves? the karate person can easily take that stand-point and argue that karate works better on real streets because there are more reports of it doing so. hell, let's go back to what has been said in this thread. where did delta say that kempo was a kick-* style? i was under the impression that he was just trying to explain the kempo learning process.... somehow you needed to well, for lack of a better term, disrespect his style because he shares his training/learning method? there's been too much of that lately. the media already misrepresents us. the layman misunderstands us. and yet there are still people who are actually part of the martial arts world that seek to belittle all others in the name of their style. that's all i've been hearing/reading/seeing lately. my style is better than yours. your style doesn't work. your teacher is rubbish. you aren't learning realistcally. it all boils down to one thing. wanting to be better than someone else. does it matter if your stye beat mine in a fight between two professionals? does it mean you can beat me? does it matter if you can beat me? do you think that if we were to fight, you'd get away without incurring injuries to yourself? for some reason, there is a belief that if you train in a particular style you are going to be invincible. i've said this before. a punch in the face is the same no matter what style you train. an arm break is an arm break. a kick is a kick. it doesn't matter that they look different to each other, that's just because their underlying method is different, the resulting effect is the same. if you think that stand up styles don't deal with grappling then you are mistaken. just like if you think a grappler has no stand up abilities. it's almost as stupid as thinking that the tkd guy who has decided to try his luck in a kick-boxing fight hasn't been working his punches...

when you spar, how many moves do you really use? if all you do is live sparring you will use the same moves over and over again. granted you will become very proficient with those few moves and you will be a very capable fighter but then what's happened to the rest of the art? when you do a kata/form/whatever you want to call it, you are going through many moves each with many permutations. in the long term, if you and i were going to set ourselves a target to learn and use effectively let's just say 100 techniques. one will learn the techniques one at a time and learn how to use etc etc. the other will learn how to do all of the techniques then get them to work. net result is the same. it isn't inefficient, it's just for a different purpose.

and not all grappling occurs when you are 'on the ground'.

is it circular if you take a straight step to one side, turn and do a straight punch? after all, the hand has taken a circular approach to deliver the punch the thing is, the movements described are only so clear because they are written and analysed in words. in execution, all of the movements are done at the same time. the hand does indeed move in an arc, and in two planes as well. the strike is indeed linear in relation to your body but in relation to an opponent, it is circular. see the reason for the choice of my example? also, in relation to the internal/external view of linear/circular. if you know the chinese differentiations then you'll see that we are actually in agreement regarding liner/circular/internal/external/hard/soft y'know, i know that this is a valid topic of debate but i don't like it when some people use this as a way of saying my way is better than yours....

what i find funny is how someone can use this 'use of title' thing as a basis to the argument that my martial art training is better than your martial art training....

you'll find the general remarks usually come from those with, let's just say, knowledge limited to what they've read.... for a start, where do you fit some of the techniques/applications that, in terms of hand/point to point is strictly linear whilst the body movement, be it stepping or turning or combinations thereof, results in the sum of the movements being circular? (to clarify) is it circular if you take a straight step to one side, turn and do a straight punch? after all, the hand has taken a circular approach to deliver the punch. in my mind, there is no real linear/cirular differentiation to hand movements unless you see things at a very basic level. in the example of the wing chun punch, would you call it linear because the hand (usually) moves in a straight line or is it circular because it's source of power is circular? what's more important, the punch or the power? i have always regarded the linear/straight (and in terms of chinese styles that also includes the hard/soft debate...) as something to do with how your body moves in your style. arghhhh.... can't one of the moderators merge the threads?

um, should also point out that there are circular elements to the wing chun punch/arm movements. watch the elbow (wing chun's 'source' of power) when you punch. anyway. as i said earlier, there is already a thread on this. http://www.karateforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=9715 we're going over very old ground...

should point out that adopting a myth from another country (and you should remember that england has been invaded many, many timesso legends being adopted is not surprising) is in no way, anything like the way american film makers treat real historical events. as mart pointed out, Enigma was a joke and does nothing except feed the popular idea that america won the war, totolly ignoring British and believe it or not, the French roles in the events. anyway. back to the thread.... the thing is, i have always seen martial arts as existing in their own little bubble that is very resistant to change. it was almost like a little culture that has no real effect on the world and the world has no real effect on (until the development of firearms). you could be a banker AND a martial arts student. you could be a market stall holder AND a martial arts student. you can be a computer programmer AND a martial arts student. the learning of the arts hasn't changed (whereas the training has but that's a different thread...) you can say that western culture hasn't changed the art BUT it has changed what people want from the art. some wing chun schools teach you everything as they did in the past. some wing chun schools teach you how to fight more efficiently, focussing on the more direct and leaving out the 'higher' levels of the art. some wing chun schools have incorperated basic grappling into their teaching to offer more of a nhb feel to their training. these different schools of teaching are all teaching wing chun and i'm pretty sure that the wing chun elements are all going to be the same. the long and short of it is that nothing has changed. the arts are still what they have always been. in the film, what you seem to have failed to see is that the bad japanese guy, i forget the name, was only using the new culture as a way to gain power. he saw it as a way to gain power without the need to do anything except wave money about. he was afraid of the old ways because, according to the old ways, he had no real respect. according to the old ways, he had no power. the samurai had respect and had real power but they did not care for it. that is the difference. it isn't really a matter of culture's clashing, it is about the effects of short-sighted greed/lust for power. there was no need to wipe out the samurai. the two can co-exist but the greedy man didn't want anyone to be able to stand in his way. i know i've wandered off a bit. i'll have a think and write a little more when i've had time to focu my thoughts a bit. i'm still hurting from last night...

hmm, but isn't it true that the ninjas were the samurai? so really, there is no one is better than the other because they are for different aspects of the samurai's job? y'know, a good chef knows how to cut things properly, cook things properly, chose the best ingredients etc etc. if a samurai was ordered to go on a 'covert' (to use the popular term) mission then the skills he would use are from the art of ninjutsu. so unlike the hollywood version, you don't have a group of ninjas sitting around doing nothing. when ninjas aren't doing their ninja stuff, they are samurai. well, that's what i've always believed.... feel free to correct me.