Line of Eld

Metcon / 'So sorry! Jiu Jitsu please, not judo'

2009-05-16T12:53:00.002+01:00

Still debating whether to kill off this blog or not.

10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 reps for time

60kg power cleans
pull ups

13:15

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http://ejmas.com

Some excellent articles here on the early days of asian martial arts in the west, among other things.

Particularly http://ejmas.com/jcs/jcsart_angier_0501.htm

Don Angier appears to be one of those rarest of things- a westerner who calls himself headmaster of a koryu japanese martial art ... And he really is.

Thruster Hitler / Power Bias WOD

2009-05-05T20:01:00.002+01:00

This isn't going to make much sense unless you know what a thruster is, and that some critics of CrossFit don't rate them very highly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyL_jIZodiM

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Power Cleans

3-3-3

All at 80kg (bodyweight)

Then as many rounds as possible in ten minutes of

5 front squats 70kg
10 pull ups
15 push ups

4 rounds flat.

Kettlebell workouts

2009-04-23T14:45:00.003+01:00

Been slack on the old blog, but I'm not sure what to do with it, to be honest. I may knock it on the head.

Yesterday-

3 minutes mashup of kettlebell snatches, swings (both 16kg) and air squats for max reps, 1 minute rest ... repeat 3 times

Today-

21-15-9
21-15-9
21-15-9
kettlebell swings 16kg
pushups

16:45

:)

Moderate suckage

2009-04-08T21:08:00.001+01:00

AMRAP 20 Mins

250m row
10 burpees
10 ring dips

4 rounds plus four burpees

Happy enough considering ring dips are one of my weak areas. Good chance to work on them and squeeze in a bit of metcon work too.

2009-04-06T19:58:00.002+01:00

Heavy Thrusters
1-1-1-1-1

65, 70, 72.5, 75, 77.5(f)

Dropped into the bottom of the 77.5 and stalled coming up on the press as a result.

21-15-9 for time

burpee box jumps

24kg kettlebell swings

6.12

Whew ... The box jumps sucked about as much as I expected, and I slowed to a crawl on the last nine without quite coming to a stop. The 24kg swings helped my time in that I was able to complete these mostly unbroken. Did this with Jeff and he came in at around the 6.40 mark. I more or less zoned out and wasn't conscious of competing with him because I was too focused on things like getting my breath and not hitting the box as I dropped down on the burpees, but nevertheless it was nice to have someone alongside me in the trenches.

---

Jean Claude on challenging Steven Seagal to go outside for a fight at a party at Sylvester Stallone's house in 1997

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-U5L0QPkrE

In case you haven't seen Jean Claude's movie 'JCVD' you should... Some say it's his best work in 15 years.

2009-03-20T20:17:00.000Z

3 rounds for time

30 32kg kettlbell swings
15 strict pull-ups

17:36

The pull-ups were the thing that slowed me down, although there is a lot of work in moving a 32kg kettlebell.

2009-03-13T19:34:00.002Z

13 Calorie Row
13 Box Jumps (24")
13 Sit Ups
13 Weighted Walking Lunges (10kg Dumbbell each arm)
13 Medicine Ball Cleans (must break parallel each clean)
13 Pull Ups
13 Kettlebell Swings (24Kg)
13 Knees to Elbows
13 Dumbbell Push Presses, 20Kg
13 Burpees
13 Thrusters (45Kg Bar)
13 Double Unders
13 Ring Dips

12:16

No sleep + hang squat cleans + pull-up bleep test

2009-03-11T19:20:00.000Z

Only got about three hours sleep last night thanks to jackhammers, drills and a couple of open windows.

Couldn't face a metcon, so I headed down to the gym at lunchtime and tried hanging squat cleans, intending to do 3-3-3-3-3Warmed up at 60 and then did 70 and 75 ... Felt heavy but when I loaded up the bar at 80 I began failing straight off. Offhand I think my max full squat clean is 87.5 and I know I've cleaned 85 for 3 before, so I'm going to put this down to sheer knackeredness and lack of concentration.

Went home and slept for about an hour and a half, intending to do a few rounds of Brazillian Jiu Jitsu, but in the end I cleaned my room and did a strict pull-up bleep test. 8 rounds, and I did a half-dozen further sets to failure, resting between efforts.

BJJ / quotable heinlein

2009-03-10T06:27:00.001Z

1 hour no-gi brazillian jiu jitsu. Four minute rounds, 30 seconds rest between them. Got pretty brutal.

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http://www.quotableheinlein.com

Rest day Heinlein

2009-03-08T20:26:00.004Z

A little Robert Heinlein on a rest day.

---

What are the marks of a sick culture?

It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn't the whole population.

A very bad sign. Particularism. It was once considered a Spanish vice but any country can fall sick with it. Dominance of males over females seems to be one of the symptoms.

Before a revolution can take place, the population must loose faith in both the police and the courts.

High taxation is important and so is inflation of the currency and the ratio of the productive to those on the public payroll. But that's old hat; everybody knows that a country is on the skids when its income and outgo get out of balance and stay that way - even though there are always endless attempts to wish it way by legislation.

But I started looking for little signs and what some call silly-season symptoms.

I want to mention one of the obvious symptoms: Violence. Muggings. Sniping. Arson. Bombing. Terrorism of any sort. Riots of course - but I suspect that little incidents of violence, pecking way at people day after day, damage a culture even more than riots that flare up and then die down.

Oh, conscription and slavery and arbitrary compulsion of all sorts and imprisonment without bail and without speedy trial - but those things are obvious; all the histories list them. I think you have missed the most alarming symptom of all.

This one I shall tell you. But go back and search for it. Examine it. Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms as you have named... But a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than a riot.

-R.H

Metcon / box jump chaos

2009-03-07T14:57:00.000Z

5 rounds for time

15 clean and jerk 30kg
15 pull ups
400m run

21:40something?

Then Max height box jump.

Think I got up to 43" ... There's a video of me falling off 44" so I expect that will be popping up eventually.

Overhead squats / Highline strikes

2009-03-06T22:12:00.003Z

Overhead squats
1-1-1-1-1

70kg, 75, 80, 85(shallow), 85, 87.5

Max rep 45kg overhead squats: 29 reps

Max rep 14lb sledgehammer swings in 2 minutes: 77 reps

---

Mick Coup highline strike breakdown 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoenPa8Stro&feature=channel

Mick Coup highline strikes breadown 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM7egia-wLg&feature=channel_page

Helen / Power cleans

2009-03-04T20:37:00.002Z

'Helen'

3 rounds for time

400m run
21 kettlebell swings (24kg)
12 pull-ups

10:55

---

Then some generalised messing around with power cleans.

Think I did 60kg for ten twice, then up to 70kg and a sets of five and three, then a back-off set at 60kg again.

Back squats / Muay Thai

2009-03-03T22:12:00.002Z

Back squats

5-5-5

100kg across. Conservative but I'm creeping back towards my PR in each slow lift.

- - -

Tonight was also the first night of new Muay Thai classes in the gym, run by Declan Broderick.

Following a lengthly warm-up-

5 three minute rounds of seven of the eight limbs of this art (we didn't throw any elbows). Finished off with a circle of bodyweight exercises.

Bigger numbers than were expected. I guess Tallaght and Muay Thai just go hand in hand. Great for flattening people outside The Plaza.

Today's WOD / C2 seminar review

2009-03-02T22:48:00.002Z

Shoulder press
5-5-5

45kg across. Bah, should have gone heavier... But I still suck at shoulder presses.

Then 10 rounds for time

5 burpees
5 pull-ups

6.35.

Shooting pains in my arms afterwards... it sucked! But in a good way.

---

CORE COMBATIVES SEMINAR, BELFAST 22ND MARCH 2009

Before I get into a rundown of what went on at the recent Belfast-based C2 seminar, I want to outline my previous experience of Mick's system.

Earlier on this year I made it over to do two days training with him in Cardiff, during which he gave me a bit of a crash course in his approach and the rationale behind it. My background in martial arts and combat sports is mainly in grappling, muay thai and mma ... heavily biased towards the grappling, really (I don't like getting punched!). Beyond that in terms of the self protection community in general I'd kind of stayed away from it because to be honest I thought that there was quite a lot of sillyness: Instructors recreating the "classical mess'' that they said they were trying to get away from, and in many cases what I saw as a lack of robust training in comparison with the combat sports gyms I'd frequented.

Mick's written articles first led me to think he could be the exception to the rule, and the more C2 material I am exposed to the more I believe it makes an excellent adjunct to the rest of my training ... I would encourage anyone involved in policing or doing the work of a first-responder to look into it.

What drew me up north from Dublin to attend this seminar was the fact that one of the seminar subjects was to be Mick's stress drills and ''live fighting''. He'd outlined some of what these entailed to me when I trained with him in Cardiff, and I was eager to see if they would turn out to be what I expected: A way of safely training against a resisting opponent while at the same time not compromising on the principles underpinning C2 as a designer approach to real fighting, not something adapted from sport or classical martial arts.

Having packed my gumshield and colossal groin guard (got to protect the legacy) I duly showed up on the day and found about twelve participants all set to go. A mixture of forumite EricF's karate club, some Kapap or Krav Maga guys and Monty Sneddon, the organiser.

In my mind the rest of the seminar broke down into three stages. First of all Mick reintroduced some of the primary and secondary impact tools. Principally the highline strike (I think most people were using the open hand but there were a few punchers, with Mick commenting that this was fine with him, it was an individual choice), elbow, palm hook and knee. I'm open to correction but I think that was pretty much the technical range ... And if you think that's not enough material to work on for weeks to months, let alone hours, well...

I paired off with Monty and the next hour or so involved pyramiding up, in schemes like 2 to 20, and back down again. Initially it was kept simple, just highline shots, and then we began working in transitioning to throw elbow shots and introducing knees. Aside from the conditioning element involved as the number of shots thrown began to mount up everyone was grappling with trying to take on board points from Mick about their biomechanics and keeping in mind making quick transitions between shots when called for.

The next stage of the seminar retained the padwork element of the first but we now formed a loose circle and began working some of Mick's 'stress' or 'mayhem'' drills. We did two variations of these, if I recall correctly, both involving one participant and up to four other people faciliating him: Initially two pad men actively working and a third hanging back for the end of the drill, and later on three pad men and a 'spoiler' (pretty much doing what their name suggests). My take on the basis for these drills is that they involve taking some of the tools honed in the comparatively straightforward padwork we did previously and seeing what it's like to begin to apply them in a chaotic situation with more unpredictable movement, beginning from a sudden starting point (where you get hit, did I mention that?) and sometimes with someone hanging off your back or walking in front of you.

Beginning from a pinned position, the two participants fighting must escape to their feet and run at each other. Techniquewise anything goes, according to Mick. We principally saw openhanded and close fist striking to the head, a few elbows and I think only one kick (me, just to see what would happen). The participants clash together, attempt to make their mark and are then pulled apart by the same two 'safety men' who pinned them at the beginning of the drill.

Mick keeps the engagements short, but they are repeated three times.Wearing Daido Juku supersafe helmets, neck protectors and groin guards ensures that no-one is going to head in to work the following day looking like they've had their face mashed up, but you do still feel the impacts through the gear. Monty caught me nicely during our fight and between rounds doing push-ups (forgot to mention those, they come before the pin) I had the beginnings of a headache.Without belabouring it, I've sparred a lot and I've also been involved in quite a few real fights in the context of my work. I must say that the 'live fights' were innovative, enjoyable and in my opinion some of the most useful preparation I think I have ever done for the quick, impactive and violent nature of real fights.

Mick is back in Ireland in a couple of months for a seminar down south, in Cork. I'll be pencilling it in for sure.

Sorry if this review is a bit disjointed, but I'm all over the place at the moment working mad shifts and also trying to retain as much of Sunday's material as possible.

Snatch balance / Metcon

2009-02-26T21:20:00.001Z

Snatch balances

3-3-3-3-3

Got up to 55kg on these ... Quite surprising given that I think last time around I struggled with these. Not too far off my max rep single for a snatch.

Then

7 rounds

10 push presses 40kg
10 knees to elbows

10:39

Nice workout ... the knees to elbows are what consumed my time.

Core Combatives seminar review, Belfast 23/2/09

2009-02-24T22:52:00.003Z

Last Sunday I made it up to Belfast for a seminar with security consultant and former British armed forces instructor Mick Coup. Mick fronts his own 'designer' self protection system, which he calls C2: Core Combatives. He's taught quite a bit in Ireland, funnily enough, but until this year I hadn't made it to one of his events.

His site http://www.corecombatives.com

Earlier on this year I made it over to do two days training with him in Cardiff, during which he gave me a bit of a crash course in his approach and the rationale behind it. My background in martial arts and combat sports is mainly in grappling, muay thai and mma ... heavily biased towards the grappling, really (I don't like getting punched!). In terms of the self protection community in general I'd kind of stayed away from it because to be honest I thought that there was quite a lot of sillyness: Instructors recreating the "classical mess'' that they said they were trying to get away from, and in many cases what I saw as a lack of robust training in comparison with the combat sports gyms I'd frequented.

Don't get me wrong- I haven't turned overnight into one of those guys who believes that combat sports are ''only'' sports and therefore unsuited for use in real fights. I still believe they make a tremendous base and type of general physical preparation. But based on my experience of what real violence is like I also more and more acknowledge that there are avenues of training and approaches to be taken which are not addressed purely in a sports context. There is a sort of 'situational' aspect to real violence that only someone who has been there and done that can coach in relation to.

Mick kicked things off with a brief introduction to using a correct push-up position or plank as a way of conditioning the body and gaining a core stability useful for fighting. This segued into a bit of a warm-up, moving around in that position. A little bit like bear-crawls except without your ass in the air.In my mind the rest of the seminar broke down into three stages. First of all Mick reintroduced some of the primary and secondary impact tools. Principally the highline strike (I think most people were using the open hand but there were a few punchers, with Mick commenting that this was fine with him, it was an individual choice), elbow, palm hook and knee. I'm open to correction but I think that was pretty much the technical range ... And if you think that's not enough material to work on for weeks to months, let alone hours, well...

The next stage of the seminar retained the padwork element of the first but we now formed a loose circle and began working some of Mick's 'stress' or 'mayhem'' drills. We did two variations of these, if I recall correctly, both involving one participant and up to four other people faciliating him: Initially two pad men actively working and a third hanging back for the end of the drill, and later on three pad men and a 'spoiler' (pretty much doing what their name suggests). I don't want to outline the entire basis of these drills, but my take on the basis for these drills is that they involve taking some of the tools honed in the comparatively straightforward padwork we did previously and seeing what it's like to begin to apply them in a chaotic situation with more unpredictable movement, beginning from a sudden starting point (where you get hit, did I mention that?) and sometimes with someone hanging off your back or walking in front of you.

Finally, the much-anticipated live fighting drills came around.Again, I don't want to spoil the element of surprise for anyone, but I will outline them a little. Mick has obviously been heavily influenced by the para's use of 'milling' as a tool for building toughness in coming up with his live fighting model, but equally I think you could say that it also exemplifies the 'go like fuck' tactic that underpins C2. Beginning from a pinned position, the two participants fighting must escape to their feet and run at each other. Techniquewise anything goes, according to Mick. We principally saw openhanded and close fist striking to the head, a few elbows and I think only one kick (me, just to see what would happen). The participants clash together, attempt to make their mark and are then pulled apart by the same two 'safety men' who pinned them at the beginning of the drill. Mick keeps the engagements short, but they are repeated three times.Wearing Daido Juku supersafe helmets, neck protectors and groin guards ensures that no-one is going to head in to work the following day looking like they've had their face mashed up, but you do still feel the impacts through the gear. Monty caught me nicely during our fight and between rounds doing push-ups (forgot to mention those, they come before the pin) I had the beginnings of a headache.

Without belabouring it, I've sparred a lot and I've also been involved in quite a few real fights in the context of my work. I must say that the 'live fights' were innovative, enjoyable and in my opinion some of the most useful preparation I think I have ever done for the quick, impactive and violent nature of real fights.

Mick is back in Ireland in a couple of months for a seminar down south, in Cork. I'll be pencilling it in for sure.Sorry if this review is a bit disjointed, but I'm all over the place at the moment working mad shifts and also trying to retain as much of Sunday's material as possible.

Metcon / Power cleans / Gran Torino in 10 minutes

2009-02-23T21:41:00.003Z

Today's WOD

3 rounds for time

800m run

21 box jumps

14:17

I think if I had a running partner I could have shaved a bit off this, but good workout all the same. My upper body is kind of fried after yesterday and I'm up at joke o'çlock doing crazy stuff at work today and tomorrow.

Then seeing as the gym's Crazy Old Man (Bill) was doing power cleans I got in on the act.
5-5-5-5-5
70kg across, working on form.

I'm shorting my hips a bit at the top according to Colm so that's something to work on. I was jumping the bar up too much as well, it was hurting my clavicles landing in the rack position. This isn't the worst thing in the world because it means the 70kg is light enough that I can jump too much in the first place. At heavier weight the jump would become more muted and the problem would dissapear. If I were doing 70s again and wanted to avoid it I would work on jumping no more than I need to in order to get under the bar.

Clint Eastwood's masterpiece 'Gran Torino' in 10 minutes ... careful, some spoilers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtk7U-9bUJQ&feature=related

Power cleans and a strange metcon / Afro Celt Sound System

2009-02-20T19:48:00.002Z

Power Cleans
5-5-5-5-5

75kg, 75kg, 75kg, 80kg, 80kg(f)

Hmm.. I've power cleaned heavier before, but this time I'm putting it down to having tweaked by left wrist a few weeks ago. It's getting better all the time, but I can still feel it and I think getting it jerked around a lot when I'm rolling in BJJ has slowed down the recovery. What I was finding with the cleans is that I was getting wary of it somewhere between the first and second pull ... I think it was that bit where Rip advocates your elbows and straight and you jump explosively.

Then a metcon

AMRAP 1o minutes

10 knees to elbows
25 squat jumps (air squat, feet must leave the floor at the top of the squat)

6 rounds + 5 knees to elbows

Fun metcon, if a little odd.

---

This video from Afro Celt Sound System (vocals guest Peter Gabriel) was unofficially banned around the time it came out- 9/11. It was thought to remind too many viewers of the tragic folks that jumped out of the Twin Towers before they fell.

'When you're falling' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=em7bk_McVHU

Push press / running / doubling over

2009-02-19T12:48:00.002Z

It was a somewhat complicated week, this was my first proper training since Monday.

Push press

5-5-5-5-5

60kg across probably would have been enough but bearing in mind my one rep max for a push press is 75 or 77.5kg I wanted to go heavier. I had the ludicrous notion of going 67.5 or 70 across but some warm-up sets put paid to that notion. Ah, nothing like iron to bring you back to reality. (Although it I think the coloured rubber coating of our plates somewhat reduces the manliness factor ... for that you need black iron with a faint patina of rust caused by tears and blood)

Anyway:60-60-60-65-65(f)

Then 400m run x 3

Strict 3 minute rest periods between efforts

1:19, 1:14, 1:21

Benching / The Medievil Gaelic Warrior

2009-02-17T18:11:00.001Z

Bench press 5-5-5-5-5

55kg across. Went a little light, but this is only my second time benching and I wanted to experiment with different grip widths and generally not drop the bar on myself.

Then an hour's BJJ (in the gi).

---

The Medievil Gaelic Warrior. Excellent article over on swordforum.

http://www.swordforum.com/articles/history/the_medieval_gaelic_soldier.php

2009-02-14T14:52:00.001Z

Shoulder press

5-5-5-5-5

45kg across, failing on the last set.

Wanted to do overhead squats and pull-ups in a metcon for time, but my legs were just fried after yesterday's shenanigans.

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Muay Thai is coming to Spartan MMA...

(OK, not Ramon Dekker himself, but this is pretty inspirational stuff)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pir_kDB4cGw&feature=related

Take your medicine / Rocky in Russia

2009-02-13T20:45:00.003Z

7 rounds for time:

5 Thrusters 50kg
10 Medicine Ball Cleans

9:48

Oddly it was the med ball cleans that started to kill me, not the thrusters.

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As a friend of mine once pointed out, Rocky vs Drago was all about renegade/old-school training methods versus machines and computer silliness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDko7Utfqdg&feature=channel_page

Concise Wednesday

2009-02-11T21:20:00.002Z

Deadlifts5-5-5

130kg across

Then

AMRAP 15 minutes

5 knees to elbows
10 box jumps
15 walking lunges

9 rounds + change

Now I sleep... Oh no. Wait...

I've got eight hours of work first.

Great.

---

Bas Rutten is still the funniest man in MMA. Why hasn't anyone brought him to Ireland for a seminar yet?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKwdwv7T2yQ

Stand-up Tuesday / Don Familton on the roll-away defence in boxing

2009-02-10T20:37:00.003Z

Ah... stand-up Tuesday. Where I gleefully revel in my terrible stand-up game.

2 min round jab only
2 min round jab + hook only

3 minutes all hands (boxing)

2 minutes kick-for-kick with an emphasis on correct range in Muay Thai style kicking

3 minutes kickboxing / Muay Thai
3 minutes kickboxing / Muay Thai

3 minutes kickboxing / Muay Thai + kneeing in the clinch with light contact

3 minutes MMA with no headshots on the ground
3 minutes MMA with no headshots on the ground

3 minutes submission wrestling
3 minutes submission wrestling

---

Don Familton, an early SBG-promoted boxing coach teaches the type of defensive measure for boxing that I really should learn:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0nz9BBFvLk

Zhoo Zhitsu / ISR Matrix

2009-02-10T06:51:00.004Z

An hour of rolling down at Next Generation tonight. We did three minute rounds, and there was an almost tabata-like warping of time ... Felt like we had practically no time to recover between rounds. I admit I was a little tardy stepping back on at times. Still finding new blue belts to roll with down there.

Driving to work afterwards was interesting, the whole neighbourhood was pitch black. First of all I thought I was driving with my lights off, Border Fox style, but then I twigged that there was obviously a poweroutage and it wasn't me.

Quite eerie ... I guess if TEOTWAWKI came about then things would get this dark and quiet pretty quick. Naturally there were a bunch of geniuses in dark clothes walking back and forth over the roads asking to be mown down. I didn't duly oblige but I was tempted.

My eighteen volumes of Mario Sperry instructionals had also arrived at work when I came in. Excellent. I can feel myself becoming better by video osmosis.

---

On the subject of mowing people down: As this is not considered a justifiable use of force tactic for law enforcement officers except in the most extreme circumstances, such when communists are rioting or whatever, systems such as ISR Matrix come in very handy.

In a few words, this is the best control and restraint / defensive tactics programme I have ever seen for law enforcement. Bar none. It is a system of high-percentile wrestling and jiu jitsu techniques that fit together seamlessly and are ridiculously functional. It helps if you're already training MMA, admittedly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7UDd3Zgg8I&feature=related

Problems with cycle times in metcons / Rodney King's Crazy Monkey

2009-02-07T13:56:00.002Z

A short but sweet metcon from CrossFit Ireland:

3 rounds for time

21 kettlebell swings (16kg)

30 sit-ups

50 walking lunges

Took me 9:47. This was a frustrating workout because all of the sets remained unbroken and I took no rest... But I couldn't seem to cycle each exercise fast enough to get my time significantly lower.

Swinging a kettlebell overhead American-style is a long cycling movement. You can 'speed it up' somewhat by actively pulling the kettlebell back down. Greg Everett ( http://www.cathletics.com/ ) also suggests that this is desirable because it increases your ability to handle the ballistic loading element of the movement. He mentions kettlebell swings in the assistance exercises chapter of his book 'Olympic Weightlifting'.

Likewise I couldn't seem to get through the sit-ups or walking lunges significantly faster, the range of motions being what they are.

OK, OK, I guess the lunges are where I could have made up the time at least a little bit. Next time...

---

I was exposed to Rodney King's 'Crazy Monkey' method of high guard defense for stand-up sparring in Straight Blast Gym Ireland introductory classes.

Most people involved in MMA will be familliar with it: Looks a little like frenetic combing of the hair or washing the top of the head with the hands. This active movement combined with a hunchbacked stance are elements in the way CM lets athletes get used to safely being hit. It's easy to learn and not dependent on the size of gloves you're wearing... Or if you aren't wearing any at all. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ8NbkaQbWY&feature=channel

In recent times Rodney and SBG have parted ways. Since then Crazy Monkey has been given a few facelifts and the Crazy Monkey organisations seems to have gone off in a few different directions.

Some of it looks like good stuff, in the sense that the foundations of what Crazy Monkey was always about (allowing people with no stand-up game to gain ability because they have confidence in their new defensive abilities) are intact and a lot of new instructional material in that vein has been made available. For example: Dirty boxing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXc7txj5yCk&feature=channel_page

Some of it I'm not so sure about : http://embodiedwarrior.typepad.com/

'Rediscovering the Male spirit'

http://www.crazymonkeydefense.com/cmdp/content/view/678/331/

Overhead squats (bad), tabata mash-up / Dog Brothers

2009-02-05T21:34:00.001Z

A bit of an abortive overhead squat session. Wasn't happening, for whatever reason.

1-1-1-1-1

Got up to 75kg and failed. A technical correction and I got 75kg, but then failed at 80kg (which I've gotten previously).

Ouch.

Then a tabata mash-up of box jumps and 30kg pushpresses.

---

Let's look at some Dog Brothers videos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0Zuj5jdY-k

Lift, roll, repeat / ARMA sparring

2009-02-04T22:46:00.004Z

Deadlifts 3-3-3-3-3

130kg for the first set and then 135kg across. Last one was a little ugly, rushed it because the BJJ class I wanted to join in with had started rolling.

Then I did six 5 minute rounds of no-gi jiu jitsu. Went fine, rolled with a couple of interesting people- a female BJJ blue belt and two guys with a superheavy top game.

Finished off with a five minute round of pummelling with one of these eastern european wrestlers that every MMA gym in Ireland seems to have.

---

When we talk about western martial arts as opposed to martial arts from South East Asia, China, Japan and whatnot, stuff like boxing, wrestling and MMA springs to mind.

But there's also an ongoing effort on the part of groups like John Clements' Association for Renaissance Martial Arts (ARMA) to study and practice historical European martial arts as described in 'fightbooks' from the medievil and renaissance periods. These guys use a combination of archaeological study, test-cutting with period-accurate weapons and lots of free-sparring their interpetation of the written material.

http://www.thearma.org/

Done properly, their efforts look at little like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QPXYXPrXlU&feature=PlayList&p=ADBF71E837605323&index=11

Careful of the groin shots, though...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaYZI3oCfuA

The sleep of the just: Rest day / Weird energy shit not cheating

2009-02-03T10:43:00.003Z

Giving the body a chance to reccuperate today, but in the spirit of CrossFit's rest day discussions- here's a link to an article on the vaseline controversy surrounding the recent GSP V. BJ Penn domination/fight.

http://www.sherdog.com/news/news/nsac-comments-on-vaseline-controversy-16028

Greg Jackson, GSP's cornerman, comments on accusations that someone from his camp smeared vaseline on GSP's back and shoulders. Turns out it wasn't that they were greasing him up, it was just that some dude was doing some weird energy-work shit! And don't ask Jackson to explain, he doesn't understand (no-one does).

Joking aside, I think its a shame that this has tainted to some extent the outcome of the fight, but its not like it was close enough that this seriously necessitates that these guys do it again. If GSP fought Penn again, as Jackson indicated he was willing to do, then the result would undoubtedly be the same.

Penn's record at this weight is now quite dubious- 1-3? He's not cut out for meeting a 170lb GSP.

Monday night rolling

2009-02-02T23:17:00.004Z

My second week doing the Monday night rolling session at Next Generation Ireland. Dave Jones, a brown belt under Chris Brennan, runs an hour of as many 5 minute no-gi Brazillian Jiu Jitsu rounds as can be squeezed in.

Tonight I went straight from work and missed the warm-up but then rolled with pretty much every blue belt (and possibly a purple belt or two) there. And Dave. The result- pretty humbling, but that's the point of making it down there. Its a different feeling to get on the mats in a gym that you're not a member of, and roll. Not that anyone behaves like a dick (just the opposite in fact, they're a bunch of cool guys), but everyone is an unknown quantity with different games and approaches that are new to you, and vice versa.

Kind of like 'red teaming' your grappling game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Team

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A pretty good thread on the etiquette of rolling in Brazillian Jiu Jitsu / grappling:- http://www.subfighter.com/forum/viewtopic.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=36743&highlight=proper

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And last but certainly not least, let's spare a thought for the biggest patriarch of the last century's Brazillian Jiu Jitsu community.

Helio Gracie RIP.

http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/28913997/

Tabata Mash-up / Mario Sperry on the guillotine

2009-01-30T23:50:00.002Z

After doing a lot of rolling earlier in the week and MMA on Tuesday night my joints were beginning to complain, so I decided to do something comparatively low-impact and easy on the upper-body.

Tabata mash-up of sit-ups and squats

32 intervals of 20 seconds work, 10 seconds rest.

Averageed 14-15 squats per interval and 9-11 sit-ups.

In hindsight I kind of screwed up the programming because I alternated the exercises and that worked as rest. Better doing sixteen intervals of squats and sixteen intervals of sit-ups afterwards, I reckon.

---

I've been checking out Mario Sperry's instructional material yesterday. His Vale Tudo / no-holds-barred fighting series is considered the gold standard of instructionals in the US, but curiously I don't think its terribly well known over here. Anyway, this clip is from his Submission Wrestling tapes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmuiX3H7DTo

I really want to try and get this when I roll, because prior to this I've been going for a guillotine without an arm in, and maybe I haven't been getting anywhere with it because, as he suggests, it's too easy to defend against.

Tried out the little shrimping out movement at the end of the clip, supposed to finish off the choke, in the gym the other night but with mixed success. Upon a second viewing I see my mistake. Shrimped to the wrong side... D'oh!

Change of direction ...

2009-01-28T20:26:00.002Z

Lately I just haven't seemed to be able to motivate myself to sit down and update this blog. Guess I'm either lazy or its just that a lot of what I have to say seems redundant as there are plenty of other bloggers I could link to who say the same thing I'd like to, but in a more erudite way.

So for the forseeable future I'm going to try something a little different with this blog. It's going to become a CrossFit / MMA and BJJ training log... Along with links or thoughts on whatever else training-related I come across (whether that's to do with the Dog Brothers or the best of Mario Sperry's Vale Tudo instructional YouTube clips!).

Viking prayer, viking parable

2008-12-25T19:19:00.005Z

Over Christmas I watched a movie I didn't really appreciate the first time around. "The 13th Warrior" (1999), based on the Michael Crichton novel 'Eaters of the dead'. I think it was ahead of its time, quite possibly...

One of the better scens is the final prayer before battle is joined-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN-no1Ka7yU&feature=related

Afterwards, browsingthe web I came across a pretty cool site belonging to a group called Hurstwic. They're living history enthusiasts who focus specifically on the Vikings.

http://www.valhs.org/index.html

In their articles section they've got a couple of interesting pieces on Viking culture, and one essay on raiding talks a bit about how their Norse paganism encouraged them in their endeavours.

Basically, for the Vikings there was no afterlife... Except for a minority of people. The warriors and 'good' men went to Valhalla, and the cowards and thieves were dragged off to be tormented in the equivalent of Hell. Because most Norsemen couldn't count on getting into the Afterlife, as such, they placed great stock on what would surivive their death: Their earthly reputation. Behaving in the proper honorable fashion for a Norseman kept their reputation spotless, and raiding was part of this for a young man, proving that he could beat other men and take and hold their possessions.

A second facet was that they believed in predestination where death was concerned. The notion was that the moment of a person's death was already mapped out at the moment of their birth. This formed the basis for the sentiment expressed by the following Viking parable:-

Thus spoke a farmer when he accompanied his son to the warships and gave him
advice, asking him to be valiant and hardy in perils: "How would you act if you
were engaged in battle and knew before hand that you were destined to be
killed?" The son answered, "Why should I then shrink from striking right and
left?" The farmer said, "Now suppose someone could tell you for certain that you
would not be killed?" The son answered, "Why should I then refrain from pressing
forward to the utmost?" The farmer said, "In every battle where you are present,
one of two things will happen: you will either fall or come away alive. Be bold,
therefore, for everything is preordained. Nothing can bring a man to his death
if his time has not come, and nothing can save one doomed to die. To die in
flight is the worst death of all."

Definitley a battle religion.

Articles: http://www.valhs.org/history/text/history.htm

When the academic types dig out the duelling stuff

2008-12-04T22:20:00.003Z

Today I headed into the National Museum. I'd been meaning to take a look for some time at two exhibitions they are currently running: 'Blaze Away', which is based on a book called 'That damn'd thing called honour: Duelling in Ireland 1570-1860', and another long-term exhibition called 'Soldiers and Chiefs' which traced Irish fighting men at home and abroad from 1550 to the present day.

The duelling exhibition was split between two rooms, one on pistols and one on swords. This reflected the differing preferences of different parts of the country. According to the exhibition guns were favoured in some counties, whereas in others like Galway the sword was preferred. Then there were counties like Roscommon where both were used with equal facility.

The sword room mainly contained commissioned pieces from the cutlers which sprung up, and this was actually a little dissapointing in that most of what was on display looked to me to be more decorative than functional. They were mainly heavily gilded cavalry swords intended for commissioned officers or as regimental gear. I guess I was hoping more for the sort of late rapiers, sideswords and smallswords which might have actually been used in duels. I doubt any of these were, frankly.

The firearms room, in comparison, contained pieces that were very clearly intended for 'social' use: As well as matchlocks up to black powder pistols and Webleys there were even chopped-down blunderbusses and in one instance a seven-barrelled carbine of some sort. There were also tiny hideout pistols with folding triggers.

There was also some interesting information on the duelling tradition, including the '26 commandments' which many duels were fought by. This detailed such matters as who should apologise first following the firing of shots (for example, someone who made the first insult had to apologise first even if the other party's retort was an even greater insult), and also such matters as the degree to which an insult offered to a woman in a man's care was greater than an insult offered to a man.

It also covered all the possible contingencies that could arise. For example, If seconds disagreed on some matter and decided that they also wished to duel, then they were to do so five paces paralell to the original duellists. Also, the person challenged to the duel was ordinarily entitled to choose the weapons.... But if the other party declared (on their honour) that they 'were no swordsman' then they had to choose something else, which had to be accepted.

Some of the breakdown of how duels occurred was also interesting. Apparently the most common causes of duels in Ireland were, in order, 1. Insults, 2. Politics and 3. Women. Interesting!

There was also a statistic that in the early years of duelling the odds of a person being killed in one was something like 14 to 1... And 7 to 1 to be injured. However, as firearms became more accurate these odds shrank, and it was this in conjunction with the development of constabularies which resulted in duels being outlawed.

The 'Soldiers and Chiefs' exhibition seemed mainly concerned with uniforms, medals and whatnot, but there was one cabinet which showed 19th century knives from a cutler in Dublin, which were sold to young officers commissioned into the British army. I couldn't resist taking a picture of these, because it struck me that knifemaking is one artform that hasn't really changed that much in some respects, these pieces wouldn't be too out of place at any contemporary show.

The cutler's name was 'Thompson' (the bowie is stamped with his name). According to the museum the top two are stag-handled. The bottom one, a great bowie-patterned knife, looks to have ivory or bone chequered grips.

Sam Sheridan's 'A Fighter's Heart'

2008-10-24T03:10:00.003+01:00

There's a curious sub-genre of martial arts books that I've always enjoyed. They're not historical, or instructional in any sense. They're closer to being pure biographies or training journals... Often just a rambling diatribe of someone coming up through a particular style of training. Sometimes they're god-awful, but equally there are a few great ones.

A good example I have just finished is Sam Sheridan's 'A Fighter's Heart'. Once you get past the rather cheesey title this is a very interesting mixture of journal and travelogue from a Harvard grad and firefighter who spend a few years travelling to places like Fairtex Muay Thai in Thailand and Miletich Fighting Systems in Iowa in order to explore the ins-and-outs of amateur and professional fight training.

Beginning in the Fairtex camp before it became commercialised, the author provides a pretty good insight into what it's like to try to get to grips with combat sports like Muay Thai and later on what it's like to hang out with an MMA academy full of champions (at Miletich Fighting Systems). I don't agree with all of his perspectives on training, but Sheridan is a cut above the standard of the usual martial arts writer, and a later chapter in the book where he trains with the coach of US boxing gold medallist Andre Ward is especially strong. If I were going to critique him I'd say that at times he gets way caught up in intellectuallising and even romanticising fight training, when the book is probably principally more interesting just as a window into what it's like to be part of the various camps and training set-ups he visits for a few months at a time.

This sub-genre of these kinds of books have always appealled to me. There are a couple of ones from the UK which are especially good, and deal with traditional martial arts.

Robert Twigger's 'Angry White Pyjamas' is especially good. The author is a complete martial arts novice living in Tokyo who decides to enlist in an extremely tough year-long aikido programme which takes the student from white belt to shodan. The course is manditory for new members of the Tokyo riot police, and they make up half the class. Twigger's book is extremely funny, and one of the best and most accurate studies of how ridiculous and almost farcical trad martial arts can be at times. He's also got a keen eye for the undercurrents of Japanese society, and the book is interesting in the sense of what it's like to be an expatriot living in Japan. One of Twigger's room-mates, who is mentioned, later went on to write his own book about Yukio Mishima and Japanese sword-arts. Bit more serious, though.

Angry White Pyjamas by Robert Twigger.

Others worth reading include Davis Miller's 'The Tao of Bruce Lee' (More about him than Bruce Lee, obviously), 'The Tao of Muhammad Ali' by the same author (again, more him, although he did actually meet Ali a few times).

This one also looks good: The Pyjama Game by Mark Law. Judo's modern history makes for fascinating reading by virtue of the fact that it's been an Olympic sport for a fair while now... That injected a certain amount of feverish intensity into the development of the sport over the past few decades, along with alot of politics.

(My) CrossFit Year One

2008-10-24T00:34:00.004+01:00

When I write a blog entry on, say, a particular MMA fight, the entry feels 'dated' very quickly. Within a matter of days it’s pretty irrelevant to anyone interested in MMA that comes across it. Whereas certain subjects feel like more solid ground: If I write something on Matheson’s awesome ‘I Am Legend’ (http://lineofeld.blogspot.com/2007/12/best-vampire-novel-youve-probably-never.html) then I know that while much of what needs to be said has already been said, I also know that this is a timeless classic worth banging on about a little more. And maybe that entry earns one more Matheson convert.

Writing about CrossFit (http://www.crossfit.com/) is similar to writing about something as fluid and quick-changing as current events in MMA. I've been hesistant to do it because it's not somethin that can easily be pinned down, and writing about it on the net is pretty far removed from what should be the most physical and grounded of pasttimes.

CrossFit has the feel of a daring project or experiment which is underway, rather than just another system which can be put in a particular box. It’s a grassroots fitness revolution in actual fact, the real deal, not in infomercial TV-speak with a price-tag attached. Considering that the main site is right there, an open-source hub with all the information that someone might need about the system, its founder, its coaches and the people who practice it day to day, it seems a bit redundant for me to pen some half-assed introductory piece when what people should really be reading is ‘What is Crossfit?’ (http://www.crossfit.com/cf-info/what-crossfit.html ).

(Besides, I did the half-assed introductory piece last time http://lineofeld.blogspot.com/2007/10/if-jack-bauer-worked-out-then-hed-do.html).

However, I did decide that I should at least mention the fact that I’ve been CrossFitting for over a year now, and have seen some pretty convincing evidence for its adoption by anyone willing to actually knuckle down to some sweating and exertion when they train. It’s an uncomfortable, demanding programme which most people will have to scale down at first, in order to even practice it. Dropping the weights on the exercises down, the number of repetitions, the number of rounds and typically the amount of days a week recommended (few people jump straight into the recommended five days a week). At some point, a few months in, you might have chalk practically tattooed into your hands, under the skin. You could have scarring on your shins from dragging a bar with more than your own bodyweight up over your shins. Chances are you’ll almost certainly have these weird calluses which are prone to tearing during protracted stints of pull-ups.

By then, though, the benefits will have begun to accrue, and these things are more like badges of honour than genuine downsides. In fact, they’re probably evidence of progress. A few months in, I’d hazard a guess that most people will be literally half again as strong as they were at the outset. There are a plethora of benchmarks (your first full pull-up…. Then your first ten…. First time doing a hellish workout like ‘Fran’ at the recommended weights…. And then struggling to do the same workout in something approaching a decent time for your age and experience).

For me, a year on, there are still big benchmarks out there to be hunted down and mastered. My first muscle-up still eludes me (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o65VzdSBogA).

But the cool thing about CrossFit is that there comes a point where, even though you’re tired and a little beaten up from your workouts, you’re also beginning to realise that those same workouts are putting a little steel into you. So you begin to size up monster workouts and think about them in terms of how long it’ll take you to do them, rather than whether they can be achieved at all. I guess you could say that this is another kind of gameness, a term more commonly bandied around in MMA circles.

And you begin to make some curious accommodations. I swore I’d never make the effort to convert to Barry Sears’ popular-but-initially-somewhat-complicated-to-follow Zone diet (http://journal.crossfit.com/2004/05/zone-meal-plans-crossfit-journ.tpl). A year on, though, and I’m on it. I won’t belabour the point except to say that without it I don’t think I could foresee myself continuing to crunch through five workouts a week for the rest of my life. Yes it’s Spartan, yes it involves walking around with bags of nuts and little bottles of olive oil stashed away so you can balance every meal you eat, but every indicator so far is that it’s worth it.

Now, back to trying to get that muscle-up…

Subtitled cop films worth the effort

2008-07-10T08:44:00.004+01:00

A couple of days ago I picked up the Tartan Films edition of '36' / 'Quai des Orfevres'. Dubbed "The French 'Heat' ", it stars Daniel Auteuil and Gerard Depardieu as two cops engaged in a dangerous feud over who will ascend to replace their current boss. Against the backdrop of a bloody year-long conflict with a gang carrying out daring military-style heists their rivalry gradually takes on lethal proportions. Eventually, in time-honored French fasion ('The Count of Montecristo') it climaxes in betrayal and a very satisfying revenge scene.

Watching '36' again got me to thinking. There's a bizillion worthwhile subtitled movies out there, away from the mainstream hollywood humdrum. It's a matter of sifting through the arthouse crap involving menopausal women going on holidays in Florence in order to find the type of movies that deliver a Hollywood-type feeling of satisfaction but at the same time have a different sensibility. '36', for example, is ostensibly a cop film in the vein of anything by Pacino or Deniro, but at the same time it's clearly Europe not the US: Right down to the cars that are driven and the hardware that is toted.

'36' trailer on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSbYST9M9gg

Offhand I can think of plenty of similarly worthwhile movies stretching back to early Kurosawa up to contemporary stuff like the bizarrely-good plethora of Korean war-movies around but I'll limit myself to the subgenre of foreign cop movies.

Next up, from Italy we have 'The Escort' / 'La Scorta'. Set in Sicily, it revolves around two bodyguards for a newly-appointed judge. Angelo and Corsale find themsleves having to decide whether they will continue as they have in the past, with their charges intimidated or assassinated, or whether they are going to make a possibly-futile run at protecting the Judge in order that he actually starts making an impact on the Underworld.

From 1993, this was the Italian equivalent of Tarantino. It's a slow-burner and not nearly as slickly satisfying as '36', but it has the same distinctive feel in terms of the setting and sense of place. It's not exactly Hollywood production values and props, but it feels authentic. The protagonists go spinning around in crappy little 1.4 litre hatchbacks ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emZK40NMZho&feature=related ), and their bosses are fat, moustachioed guys in sweat-stained blue uniform shirts who don't bother to wear their tie.

One thing I like about 'La Scorta' is that it is realistic in the sense that it captures what I understand to be one of the realities of close protection: That it is mainly to do with planning, waiting and a tiny, tiny fraction of actually responding to a threat.

Last up I'm going to mention the Hong Kong trilogy 'Internal Affairs' which spawned the Hollywood adaptation 'The Departed' starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson. The original movie tells the same bare-bones story: A policeman infiltrates a criminal gang, while the same gang has a mole in his police department.

Apparently the Chinese title translates as something along the lines of "The no-stop path", which is the lowest level of Buddhist hell. Someone supposedly tried to make the english title 'Internal Affairs' a play on words with 'Infernal' in order to evoke Dante's 'Inferno', but... Well... It didn't quite work, did it?

Plot-wise there is considerable divergence with the Hollywood original. It's a lot more concise and focused in terms of the storytelling. I guess without Jack Nicholson to monologue and smoke a lot they had to actually get down to the business of telling a story, and they did this with some success.

There are a couple of alternate endings, one as originally intended and another in order to please mainland Chinese sensors which rather ham-fistedly illustrates that 'Crime does not pay'.

Trailer here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jO4RLrNVbd4&feature=related

Kettlebells: Cool but no 'Silver Bullet' for those looking for quick and easy gains

2008-06-27T22:54:00.004+01:00

Kettlebells have finally taken off in Ireland. As elsewhere, they've managed to bridge the gap between fitness and martial arts enthusiasts and somehow be all things to all people. An All-irish kettlebell lifting federation has sprung up (run by a very nice guy) and seminars have proliferating charging considerable amounts of money to teach people how to swing, press and clean these bad boys.

For whatever reason, alot of people who seem to have no real interest in other forms of resistance training are queuing up to buy kettlebells and get some of that 'functional fitness' that we hear so much about for themselves.

I hesistate to say they are a fad, given that they are of ancient pedigree , but let me say that here in Ireland right now I think that's what is going on.

I have a 16kg kettlebell and like incorporating it into metcon workouts... In fact, I'm going to buy a 25kg one just so I can do 'Helen' (a CrossFit workout) properly. But sometimes I can't help but feel that people who first come across short-duration high-intensity type training in the context of kettlebells think it is primarily about the kettlebells... whereas really it's about the training methodology.

You can do kick-ass metcons with dumbells, barbells, sledgehammers, boxes, pull-up bars, rowers... Kettlebells are just one more bit of kit.

Yes, they have some unique characteristics but then again so do the alternatives.

I don't think they can compete with an olympic bar and a set of plates for sheer flexibility, for example. Load the bar with an additional 20kg and you've got something to use in a metcon. Load some more weight and it'll probably be right for olympic lifts. Add a lot more plates and you've got enough weight for a proper strength day. No matter how many kettlebells you own I don't think you can get the same range.

I don't mean to be down on kettlebells- I really do like them. But I question whether they really are really as uniquely useful as some people think they are.

SF Dystopia: The silly politics of Richard Morgan's 'Black Man'

2008-06-16T15:25:00.009+01:00

A few years ago I spent two weeks in Tokyo doing a lot of eating, sleeping and traditional martial arts. That and reading. Starved of english-language media, at one point I read seven books in about ten days and trade novels with other people. Easily the most memorable for me was Richard Morgan's 'Altered Carbon', then a debut novel from a much-feted but largely unknown new writer.

If you haven't had the pleasure, 'Altered Carbon' is a modern classic, following the fortunes of Takeshi Kovacs, who arrives on Earth trying to track down a murderer in typical gumshoe fashion. It's genuinely one of the fastest-paced, mostly tightly-written SF noir detective stories ever committed to paper. Perhaps I really should just be blogging about it, and all things I like about it and the two strong novels which Morgan followed it with, 'Broken Angels' and 'Market Forces'... However, I've already culled some posts I wrote for an online SF discussion forum and chopped them into a blog on what was to be one of Morgan's most controversial books: 'Black Man', or 'Thirteen', as it was known in the US.

It was and is controversial in the sense that some critics and bloggers thought it was the best thing since sliced bread while at the same time some of Morgans' biggest fans were the first to pan it as a turkey.

Plot-wise, most people overlooked the obvious lifting of the storyline from 'Bladerunner'. In Morgan's dystopian near-future, genetically engineered supermales called "Thirteens" have been decomissioned and sent to a colony on Mars because they are too dangerous to integrate into normal society. When one Thirteen makes a rather bloody return to Earth and begins a rampage, another Thirteen, named Marsalis (sigh), is rather cautiously commissioned to track him down and terminate him.

From the outset with 'Black Man' you struggle to see the same author that wrote 'Altered Carbon', so effortlessly stylish, at work here. To a degree he's still shooting for cool, gritty noirish violence, but he seems to have forgotten how to do it.

In theory, a 'variant thirteen genetically re-engineered male' like Carl Marsalis (the good guy) is an ideal vehicle for this. However, Marsalis doesn't seem identifiably much more alpha-male than a lot of the other male characters, in fact, we get a lot of monologuing from Marsalis about how tired of violence he is. Far from coming across as a stone-cold killer, he mopes about occassionally complaining about what it's like to be a genetically-altered 'twist', and wincing about how even hardened prison inmates are automatically prejudiced against him.

Then there's the politics.

Reading 'Black Man' is a bit like sitting down and having Morgan lecture you straight from the pages of books by Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and other anti-american current affairs authors. Morgan works himself up into a frenzy with his vision of a future Republican-created 'Jesusland': A state of bigots, lynchings, religious fundamentalism, squallor and racism. On the one hand, yes, this is a work of fiction, but equally it's one of the nastier manifestations of anti-americanism masquerading as dystopianism that I've seen from a contemporary UK SF author. Some of the ropey logic at work would shame columnists for 'The Guardian'.

Dystopianism is an honorable tradition in SF, but this reads more as anti-american wish-fulfillment. It's left liberal SF porn, with a rabid america having torn itself apart and given up it's place on the world stage to international bodies and the Chinese. This has been described as being a book about prejudice- And indeed it is, although I think there's an excellent argument that principally what is apparent is Morgan's old european distate for all things middle american.

Morgan did comment on what he perceived as 'bitching' about 'Black Man' on the news section of his website, http://www.richardkmorgan.com/news.htm (October 07 'Nuclear Reactions') and he took the stance that a majority of people who said they didn't like it must have been dissapointed that it wasn't another 'Altered Carbon'.

I'm sure that was true of some people, but as he says himself, it's not like his direction didn't change with the later Kovacs novels and the publication of 'Market Forces'. This is partially why I think it was a bit of a cop-out on his part to write off a lot of the criticism levelled at 'Black Man' as being a result of a chunk of his fan-base having failed to mature with him or be somehow stuck in the past.

He did allude to some unhappy readers expressing a disatisfaction with some of the political commentary in the book. I think he's certainly on to something there, to some degree- at least in my case. Maybe it was inevitable that when he let his personal politics gain a fuller expression in 'Black Man', with the usual Chomsky and Klein inspired criticisms of Western (particularly American) foreign policy, class divisions and consumerism, he was going to automatically alienate a lot of people. The point I've always made is that I can put up with silly politics if there's something else to keep you hooked. Morgan carried this off with his back catalogue, but not with 'Black Man', which also fell flat for me in terms of the way it was plotted and characterised.

Still, I'm cautiously optimistic that 'The Steel Remains', Morgan's forthcoming attempt at breaking the Fantasy market, won't afford as much scope for Morgan to be tempted into soapboxing, given that the subgenre doesn't lend itself to political commentary quite so easily.

Morgan is promising a dark reimagining of the Fantasy genre, and what I've heard thusfar sounds promising, albeit from some of the same blogger/reviewers with advance copies that clapped so enthusiastically for 'Black Man' and left it to fans to raise the question of whether or not the Emperor had no clothes....

SF Dystopia: SM Stirling's 'Draka' novels

2008-06-16T14:57:00.004+01:00

Recently I've been looking over a mildly infamous Alternate History / SF series written by S.M Stirling.

The Draka mythos comprises a trilogy usually referred to as 'The Domination', one cross-over novel set in our own world and a collection of short stories set in the Draka universe written by other Baen authors like David Drake and Eric Flint.

Stirling's alternate history begins begins to diverge from our own around the time of the American War of Independece. His "what if?" begins with the premise that premise that colonials who supported the Crown during the War of Independence were rewarded with South African plantations and land. Their numbers were later bolstered by fleeing Confederates and later on by the likes of Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde (bizarre). Gradually, their society solidifies and expands into a slave-owning expansionist empire called 'The Domination'. Swallowing up Africa, Persia and parts of Central Asia, it is comprised of 20 million white serf-owning 'citizens' and 120 million serfs / slaves.

The first book in Stirling's series, 'Marching through Georgia', is a more or less straight-forward war story following Draka paratroopers as they attempt to slow down Nazis on their way to Stalingrad during WW2, the idea being that the Draka have entered the war on the side of the allies in order to remove remove what they see as their main opposition- the Nazis and Stalinist Russia. In Stirling's alternate history the US is on the backfoot, with the Japanese having successfully taken Pearl Harbour, and grudgingly takes advantage of Draka involvement in the war.It's unremittingly dark in the sense that the only meaningful players in the book are either Draka or the SS they are fighting. Both sides are as morally bankrupt as the other, and at least some readers have commented that they actually found themselves as regarding the Nazis as being the less morally repugnant of the two sides. There are a host of powerless outsider characters also present: Georgian peasants, Russian Prisoners and a lone American war correspondent. All are either killed, manipulated or barely tolerated by the SS and Draka.

'Under the Yoke', the second novel, explores the life of serfs under the Draka boothell. A Polish nun, a French marxist and an American deep-cover OSS agent are thrown together on a plantation. This is where the series really starts to become grimly fascinating. There's an underlying tension that you take on as a reader, when Stirling stops pulling his punches here. There's torture, forced pregnancy and a truly ambivalent ending. At times you do wonder exactly how Stirling came up with the premise for this series. It's like 'Casablanca' mixed with some Italian cannbial horror movie.

'The Stone Dogs' is the strongest book in the trilogy. It's a more panoramic view of a cold war between the Draka and an alliance of surviving democratic countries headed by the USA. Without going into greater detail, it revolves around the rapidly-approaching showdown between the Draka fascist super-empire and a very bedraggled and desperate rest of the world. The democratic coalition has the edge in physics and chemistry thanks partially to the aid of fleeing German scientists, whereas the Draka are evolving some truly nasty biological technologies thanks to their complete disregard for human life. Some of the more interesting elements of the book deal with how developing biotechnology (this book is set almost contemporarily, as opposed to the WWII setting of 'Marching through Georgia') allows the Draka to make physically manifest their supposed superiority over their property.

Given the grimness of it all, you've got to ask yourself why this was a popular enough series that Baen reissued it and its sequels in a new omnibus edition. I think it's because the Draka novels have the same effect on people as car crashes and slasher movies: They bring out the rubber-necker in all of us. It's awful stuff, but it's hard to look away. This is dystopian science fiction in the purest sense, envisaging the kind of future society which makes your skin crawl just contemplating it.

Can a country boy survive? Matt Hughes after UFC 85

2008-06-10T14:12:00.008+01:00

There was a time when Matt Hughes seemed like an unbeatable automaton in the Octagon. He approached each fight with the gravitas of someone about to wage a war rather than compete in an athletic contest. With his grappler's strength and dominant wrestling abilities he handled the rest of his weight class with seeming ease, highlighting the changing nature of the MMA athlete with his total schooling of the legendary Royce Gracie at UFC 60. It took an absolute phenom in the form of George St. Pierre to bring his era as champion to an end.

Even as he entered the Octagon at UFC 85 to meet young blade Thiago Alves people were still talking about Hughes as having been probably the most dominant champion in his class the UFC ever had. Accepted wisdom was that had it not been for GSP he would still be atop the throne.

The first sign that the fight with Alves might not resolve in favour of Hughes was probably when Alves appeared looking absolutely huge, bigger than we've ever seen him. Although he had failed to make weight, Hughes' camp and the UFC managment signed off on the fight anyway. Although Alves says his failure to make weight has due to a minor injury which kept him off his feet for a few days, he certainly didn't appear puffy... If anything it looked like he spent the time on his back pushing black iron.

Although Hughes contends on his blog ( at http://www.matt-hughes.com/ ) that Alves' size and apparent greater strength was not the deciding factor in the fight I think it was must have factored into his inability to take Alves down at will. Hughes looked a lot leaner than normal.

His physical attributes coupled with his wrestling abilities were what defined Hughes as a fighter in many people's eyes, and as Alves stuffed Hughes first attempt at a shoot and began to manhandle him around the Octagon it became clear that Hughes was in trouble. Hughes put it this way:

"I think Thiago came up with a good game plan. He didn’t throw too many
punches or any kicks to where I could take him down. He was stronger than I
thought and he was quite defensive on the ground."

It's not like Hughes underperformed as such, or has been 'shown up'. He remains a phenomenal athlete and prodigiously experienced fighter (this was his fiftieth bout). But while Alves is no GSP he must be given credit for also being part of a new generation of MMA fighters who seem to be able to do it all. While Hughes has black-belt level jiu-jitsu and solid boxing, Alves had the competence at every range to negate him. He's known for his frenetic striking but this is also a guy that trains with 18 jiu-jitsu black belts at American Top Team and is clearly possessed of the same kind of titanic physical strength that once upon a time made Hughes a stand-out.

At UFC 85 Alves looked almost playful, eluding Hughes' shoots and picking his moments to attack. When he did throw, he connected and hurt Hughes badly almost every time. Bloodying him up early with knees and ground and pound, and stopping Hughes in highlight-reel fashion with a spectacular flying knee that he said had been in the back of his mind since before the fight. Also factoring into the stoppage may have been the nasty way Hughes buckled on his left knee as he went down.

As Alves looks up the ladder at the belt, where does Hughes go from here?

Some are already calling for him to hang up his gloves and accept that the sport has changed. This seems premature given that it's been 8 years since Hughes lost two fights in a row, and from an age perspective he is hardly over the hill. In fact, he says he has upped his training from two-a-days to three-a-days at his new HIT Squad gym. Gameplan wise, he doesn't look ready to shift his focus away from a wrestling-based approach:

"I think I need to work on my wrestling, especially my shot. I need to be able
to take people down. When people are close enough to punch me, I need to be able
to shoot effectively and take them down."

Although, I think it is worth noting that after Alves stuffed his early takedowns Hughes did actually pull guard, which must have had Royce Gracie laughing his ass off somewhere. Alves slithered out of a submission attempt, but Hughes looked pretty comfortable working from bottom and then in half-guard.

It seems likely that we'll see a Hughes versus Serra grudge match sometime early next year, possibly the last fight on Hughes' UFC contract.

Personally, I'm rooting for Hughes to come through this in some way. I've always felt that he got a raw deal from some fans of the sport who seemed to dislike him more for his beliefs outside of the Cage than his performance inside it.

Hughes is well-known as a born-again Christian, and thanking God and promoting the Bible factors in to a lot of what he is about. Personally I am interested in Hughes the fighter, not Hughes the evangelical, but it doesn't particularly bug me that he has biblical quotes on his website or thanks God after each fight (we let actors picking up Oscars get away with it, so why not guys who have just narrowly avoided getting knocked out or choked unconscious?). The amount of flak he catches for it has never made sense to me, especially given that he's not the only fighter who is outspokenly religious. Randy Couture, after beating Tim Sylvia, said something to the effect of America surviving thanks to 'blood shed by Jesus Christ and by the American G.I'. And yet, because it's Randy Couture saying this there were few grumbles in my circle of friends. Had Hughes said it he would have been a bible-basher and a militarist.

Whaddya gonna do?

Wrestling, Wrist-weaves and Russians

2008-06-06T06:57:00.007+01:00

Earlier on this evening I was watching the first ISR Matrix ( http://www.isrmatrix.org) video, part of a set of instructionals which were released a number of years ago. The guys behind it were Mixed Martial Arts coaches with Straight Blast Gym and also had experience as bouncers and in Law Enforcement.

ISR stands for 'Intercept, Stabilise, Resolve'.

It came about as a result of their wanting to offer people involved in policing a safer, more effective alternative to the kind of junk traditionally offered to recruits in training ("OK grab my wrist... No, you grabbed it wrong. OK, now I... No, stop resisting so much, we're just training here. Lemme untangle my hands... Where does my thumb go again?" Etc).

What they produced has become a kind of industry gold standard now. I don't know of any knowledgeable people who believe that there are systems out there which are better than the ISR Matrix in terms of workable tactics which gel really well with whatever alive, athletic training people are also doing on their own time. The stuff just works, it's high-percentile and well-thought out.

One of the tools taught involves going from what in wrestling is called the two-on-one position into a 'wrist weave'. Trying to describe it in text stumps me, but I'll link to a clip which will give you an idea of what it entails a bit later.

Something about the two-on-one and wrist-weave really fascinates me. Superficially it reminds me of some of the more japanese-style bent armlock control methods taught as traditional control tactics, although in practice it seems to be far more secure and yield greater leverage when it is 'on', and in the context of the two-on-one there is a really good structure for how you can actually get it on in the first place. I guess that leverage primarily comes from the way you can sag your full body weight onto one side of the subject's body, same principle as getting a body lock at the quarter position.

Part of why its fascinating to me is because we don't have the high-school wrestling tradition that exists in other countries like the US (and, indeed, in Eastern Europe), and the reality is that our clinch in this country is not at the same standard as it is elsewhere. That's changing, though...

Anyway: Trawling YouTube I came across this clip of a seminar from a Russian olympian of the 70s- a heavyweight called Ivan Yarygin.

I like this clip for a couple of reasons. One- this is a guy who obviously is still a monster on the mat a couple of decades after his career ended.

Two- Come on... Look at those takedowns, slick or what? This is what Aikido and Judo aspire to be: The physics of the way this guy moves the human body around is a thing of beauty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLB_0jRj5tk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agNqR...eature=related

Sometimes all you need is a little harmony

2008-04-27T20:41:00.003+01:00

I've always liked 'The Alamo' (2004) with Dennis Quaid, Billy Bob Thornton and Jason Patric as a really bad-ass, deathly ill Jim Bowie.

In the movie, each day at dusk, the Mexicans bombard the Alamo with their cannons. Preceding each attack their band plays a tune called- I think- El Deguello (meaning 'slit throat' or something along those lines). The defenders come to associate this particular song with, basically, having cannon balls lobbed at them so needless to say they don't particularly like it.

Which gives rise to this great scene-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NONil_hvUKc

It's not included in this clip, but Crockett buys the Texans a night of peace and quiet, without cannon fire, for once...

Not exactly "knifey-spooney"

2008-04-25T15:39:00.007+01:00

During the week I took a drive down the country to do some old-fashioned home training with the only certified instructor of Floro Fighting Systems ( http://www.florofighting.com/ ) in the country.

Invented by Australian Ray Floro, this is a system of using and defending against edged weapons which has found a lot of favour with law enforcement and military types. It's popular because Floro distilled his experience of a traditional type of kali, western fencing and thousands of hours of sparring and came up with a really-well thought out short syllabus. The main reason I was curious about it is because in contrast with a lot of other systems dealing with this kind of material, there appeared to be a heavy emphasis on sparring with safety gear and actually trying everything out. In that respect, Floro Fighting Systems seemed to be the edged weapons equivalent of guys like the Dog Brothers ( http://www.dogbrothers.com/ ) who take a roughly similar approach with the stick. In short, they train 'alive'.

Picture taken from the FFS website

These days I mainly train for relaxation and fitness, so becoming some kind of ultimate warrior is pretty low down my list of things to do right now. Recently, in fact, I've done less combat athletics type training over the past few months and more time just doing CrossFit workouts and really enjoying those. But at the same time, I'm always looking around for other new approaches to try out and incoporate into what I'm doing. Unlike quite a lot of martial artists I've never really had any hang-ups about studying weapons-based training as long as it was done sensibly and it was placed in the appropriate context.

And like it or not, in the line of work I am in I fall into that small category of people who actually might need to know a thing or two about what to do in a situation where I am faced with someone with a knife, and where running is not an option (frowned upon that when you're the guy paid to run towards trouble, not away from it).

Anyway: I met up with Miso, a former Slovakian police officer of some years experience, and he explained to me at the outset that we would be spending approximately 50% of the time sparring the material he was introducing me to. Without much further fanfare he fitted me for a hockey helmet with face grill and hockey gloves. After clearing away the furniture from his living room he handed me a padded training knife and we were all set to spar.

"WHAM!"

I realised almost immediately that Miso was able to bounce his training knife off my helmet grill at unfeasibly high speeds, and also seemed to be able to time it so that he could hit me whereas I'd fall short attempting the same thing with him. This came down to a few factors, all characteristic of the approach taken in Floro Fighting Sytems:-

1. Thrusts straight down the middle are quickest and most direct way to go so they are overwhelmingly the highest percentile technique used.

2. Non-telegraphic striking enables more of these to land, so this is a big deal. No bobbing up and down, jumping in on entry or using too much shoulder movement.

3. A deceptive type of footwork was used to sneak into striking range which seemed to me to be somewhere between fencing and normal walking. Either way, for whatever reason my shuffling muay thai type movements didn't seem to translate well, especially since I was standing in a kind of southpaw stance, with the knifehand leading.

After a thorough schooling Miso had me working according to the Floro method with isolation drills for a bit, practicing thrusts and whatnot, and then we went back to sparring periodically. At times I felt like I was on the verge of getting it, but then frustration would set in a bit and I would start telegraphing really badly again and not land one shot in ten. Although we were working with quite basic material, it was much harder than I expected to grasp the finer points of not giving away what I was planning to do, and measure the distance correctly.

We rounded off the training session with a method of using a belt against someone armed with a knife. I've seen this type of material previously but it never seemed up to much, if the person armed with the knife wasn't playing along. This time I was quite surprised at what seemed to be quite a functional approach. You'd still have to be lucky and a little nuts to pull it off, but as was explained to me if it improved your chances better than being totally unnarmed then it was worth knowing about. As with the knife sparring material, what came through was that the FFS guys had obviously come up with a lot of fine detail and technical points as a result of all the sparring and pressure-testing they'd done.

In conclusion: A very interesting system. I like the idea of bringing edged weapons training into the realm of 'alive' training, of being able to throw on a helmet and gloves and 'have at it'. It might shock the purists out there, but at least whatever these guys are teaching is based upon their best efforts at empirical testing rather than just passing on tradition for its own sake.

It's not about the suits

2008-04-22T22:01:00.007+01:00

Something I've noticed surfing the web and in general conversation is that the average person, if they are aware that Robert Heinlein wrote 'Starship Troopers' at all, seems to associate Heinlein with 'action' and the coolness factor that goes with guys in mechanised combat suits jumping around letting off atomic bombs....

Obviously a large element of this must come from an association with the well-known Paul Verhoeven movie as opposed to the original novel that inspired it . Maybe the Roughnecks animated series (which was much better received by Heinlein devotees), videogame, graphic novel and RPG as well, all of them extremely action-orientated.

It's a curious thing, the way a particular work or body of ideas can enter into common culture in a form that is often far distorted from what they actually originally were. An example might be the concept of Dracula- we tend to think more of Bella Lugosi and some guy in an evening suit and red cape, rather than Bram Stoker's original masterwork of horror, laden with subtext and pathos.

If you've read it lately, you might recall that the strength of Heinlein's 'Starship Troopers' is not some hi-octane action element. Frankly, Heinlein does not write battle / fight scenes especially well, although paradoxically he is second to none for capturing some of the intangibles of military life and the backdrop to conflicts. His actions scenes are typically quite workmanlike and almost perfunctory. Far more significant are the subtexts and ideas teased out during long bootcamp passages, conversations among NCOs in bars during periods of R&R and the various bumps in the roads of Rico's career path towards officerdom (if that's a word).

John Steakley commented that had Heinlein had an interest in and included some truly fluid action scenes, then there would have been no need for him to write his cult classic Armour as a tribute. For those who aren't familliar with it, it's one of the most outrageous examples of splatterpunk SF ever written, with pages upon pages of armor-suited anti-hero battle scenes. A seemingly unkillable protagonist develops a split-personality disorder in order to survive being thrown repeatedly back into combat. Judged unreadable by some of my friends, Steakley's prose is characterised by run-on sentences and a casual approach to some of the 'rules' of novel writing.

While I'm inclined to agree with Steakley that Heinlein was not overtly gifted in terms of writing action scenes, especially by contemporary standards, where authors like Richard Morgan seem able to commit almost balletic action scenes to paper, 'Starship Troopers' remains one of my favourite books because it is principally about more serious themes than just cartoonish SF soldiering.

The guys in mechanised suits stomping around breaking things are fun but mainly window-dressing, far more imporant, contemporarily, is Heinlein's warning that a society which endlessly prioritises ever more expansive notions of individual rights and entitlements faces mass juvenile deliquency and social disorder.

Their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified the mythology of
rights... and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can
survive.
-Jean Dubois, Robert Heinlein's 'Starship Troopers'

Guess I'm showing my conservative streak.

But then- what did you expect?

Timothy Zahn's 'Cobra' novels

2008-04-22T21:41:00.003+01:00

Continuing where my last post left off, here is a look at another homage to Heinlein's 'Starship Troopers'. This time from Timothy Zahn, arguably best known at the moment for writing novels for the 'Star Wars' franchise. Zahn is up-front about where he is coming from at the outset- his hero is even called Jonny.

The Cobra trilogy has a few interesting quirks and underlying premises that make it worth a special mention. The protagonists of the title are a small group of surgically altered soldiers who are dropped onto alien-occupied planets to co-ordinate and assist local resistance efforts (in some ways this is also similar to Eric Frank Russell's excellent Wasp).

These guys are a bit like Heinlein's mechanised infantry ... except their suits are on the inside: They have implanted laser weaponry, onboard guidance systems, ubnbreakable laminated skeletons and tactical computers as well as servo-motors to magnify their strength and speed. Looking like anyone else, the civillian population provides them with cover until they emerge to carry out operations hamstringing the occupying forces. Think Lee Majors bionic man...

But the radical alterations and implanted gear that have made them a devestatingly effective guerilla force have side effects, not just physical but mental. What one observer calls a titan complex. Going from human to superhuman and being put into a warzone far from direct command, or indeed anyone physically capable of reining them in, fully 30% of the Cobras start to perceive themselves in an unhealthy light: As being intrinsically more valuable than the resistance fighters and civillians surrounding them.

As the saying goes: "Power corrupts, and absolute power, corrupts absolutely".

Tensions rise between the resistance and their Cobra allies as civillian incompetence and limitations costs Cobra lives, and vice versa Cobra contempt for the fragility and timidy of 'ordinary' humans alienates them from the community they are supposed to be protecting.

The resistance are left wondering something along the lines of 'with allies like these guys, who needs enemies?', while the Cobras question the point of the whole endeavour given what they perceive to be unworthiness or cowardice on the part of the civillian population they are risking their own lives for.

Likewise it is easy to identify with the resistance's deep-seating concerns about the motivations and ultimate goals of the Cobras : They've opened the door to them, but have no way of sending them back out through it. The question "What dooes a society do with returning combat veterans?" is also posed by David Drake's excellent stand-alone novel Redliners, and it's interesting to me that he and Zahn come to almost the same conclusion. In their SF future, veterans are encouraged and funnelled into travelling to the outer boundaries of human space, settling on colonial worlds where ordinary humans need their protection and experience.

----

There are, in actual fact, three Cobra novels and they've recently been republished as an omnibus. I encourage fans of military SF to go and take a look.

Heinlein, 'Starship Troopers', and some pretenders to the throne

2008-03-26T15:25:00.006Z

At what point does a tribute risk making itself redundant, if it remains forever in the shadow of the thing it pays tribute to?

Robert Buettner's 'Orphanage' shares so many superficial similarities with Robert Heinlein's 'Starship Troopers' that if you are familliar with the basic plot of either then you know the outline of both. They are effectively interchangable: In a future society bugs throw rock(s) at earth and the human military responds with a faultering campaign to prevent mankind being snuffed out. Both are first person coming-of-age stories fused with military SF, and in the case of 'Starship Troopers' a case can be made for reading the novel as a meditation on the vanishing appreciation society places on those persons willing to place the survival of the body politic and society as a whole before their own survival. It is difficult to make the same case for a deeper purose in 'Orphanage'. It can't really be read as an intelligent commentary on Heinlein, as Haldeman's 'Forever War' can be. Nor is it a conscious attempt at focusing on the action element of the story, as John Steakley's cult classic 'Armor' was.

OK, let me backtrack and establish what 'Orphanage' is like in its own right, before I continue throwing rocks of my own at it. I'm being a bit unfair to it.

Buetter is a former military intelligence bloke. This is always a good start for any prospective writer of authentic military SF. Heinlein was a naval man. Haldeman and Drake cut their teeth in vietnam. More recently, John Ringo and Tom Kratman are both veterans of the big green machine. Kratman, in fact, was also a US marine I believe.As a result of his own life-experiences, Buettner can inject that little bit of authenticity that is sometimes missing otherwise: The bureaucracy and petty mundanity of everyday military life, and contrastingly the visceral physical reaction of the body to combat situations, with all its perceptual distortion and shock.

In respect of his battle scenes, Buettner is particularly able to reflect the 'murphy's law' quality of real conflicts. Whether a fist-fight or a campaign, a maxim which always seems to prove itself true is that "if it can go wrong, it will go wrong". 'Orphanage' is strewn with the bodies of supporting characters who are offed at a staggering rate and often with a meaninglessness that mirrors the reality of conflict. Veterans sitting in drop-ships are skewered by bits of loose gear dislodged during a rough landing. Ships full of soldiers vanish into lakes of ash. Others are smothered in their sleep by the invertebrate alien enemy.

Buettner's protagonist, Jason Wander, is similar enough to Heinlein's eager-to-please Fillipino Johnny Rico that initially I expected him to have a comparatively soft ride through his coming-of-age. Rico, blandly competent, gets over his 'hump' deceptively easily in that his personal trials and tribulations are swallowed into Heinlein's broader descriptions of the training process at Camp Currie. Barring his one final brush with administrative punishment, Rico heads out into the bug war having been successfully conditioned and indoctrinated. From there, its all 'up' for him, into a spot as an NCO and then into OCS. Kudos to Buetter, as such, for making Wander the kind of screw-up that Rico never was. For the bulk of 'Orphanage', Wander is the lowest common denominator is his crop of recruits. He may shoot exceptionally, he may be more physically capabale than some of the others, but he consistently fails to fit into military life and the notion of a square peg going into a round hole springs to mind. The final cherry on the cake is his scraping through boot camp thanks to some political string-pulling necessitated by his involvment in a drugs incident which resulted in the death of a fellow trainee.

We are told at a later date that Wander was 'born' for the leadership role that he finds thrust upon him, and indeed that others 'saw' the necessary qualities in him which he himself was oblivious to. I would have preferred to be shown rather than told, in the sense that we see precious little evidence of the maturation process that Wander is supposed to have undergone. While we have incidences of compassion, these are almost always related to self-interest. We have incidences of Wander displaying physical courage, but from the first incident we meet him (in front of a judge for assaulting a teacher), we know that he does not fear conflict. While I can accept that Wander has the "it" which makes not just a good soldier, but a good officer, Buettner does little to tease it out.

Buettner's focus remains closely on Wander, and little of the overall war is painted. This is also the case in 'Starship Troopers', to an extent, but there is a crucial difference: Heinlein's society's response to the alien threat is simple: "Fight!". And as a result of vicariously sitting in Mr. Dubois' classes with Johnny, we can understand why they are so prepared and able to do so. The philosophy of Rico's society is expounded step by step, from education through discipline through to its highest aspirational goals for its citizens. Buettner's future society also fights, but through Wander we learn little about the whys and hows.

Is 'Orphanage', as promised, a "hell of a good read"?Well, This is competent military SF, and very much blood kin to 'Starship Troopers'. Perhaps not in the same mould in the stylistic sense, related like a younger brother clinging on the coat-tails of an older sibling. The prose is modern and conversational, peppered with references to sex and general hedonism (Heinlein saved this for his other books). Wander is an interesting protagonist as a result of, rather than despite his flaws, making Rico look like 'Mr. Clean'. There is something endearing about anyone who drugs himself before his final exam, which involves throwing live grenades. All around him, more able and professional people are blown to hamburger meat. But its Wander who is left standing. Perhaps Buetter is teaching us another great maxim of military life: "Its better to be lucky than good".

'Orphanage' was promoted by a publisher's blurb somewhere as being a "post-9/11" book at one stage (I don't think I imagined this). I've tried to find the reference again but no luck so far. At the time, it struck me as intriguing. 'Orphanage' was almost certainly written at a time when support for armed American action was at an all-time high. It was before the numbing lows of a protracted and unpopular action in Iraq. Reading 'Orphanage', I tried to see this in it... Though I can't say I could draw any clear conclusions. I think this is a book that any former serviceman could have written, at any stage in history (albeit one with a bit of a soft streak).

'Orphan's Destiny' is the second book in the series (the third has been released, but I haven't got around to reading it yet). I kind of stalled on the last hundred pages, and I'm not sure whether to blame Buettner or myself for the loss of momentum.

Like 'Orphanage', this is competent but not mind-blowing stuff. I admire Buettner for consciously attempting to go more his own way with 'Orphan's Destiny', although arguably it owes a significant debt to Joe Haldeman, in that 'The Forever War' deals to some extent with the alienation of soldiers who return home from war. In contrast, 'Starship Troopers' ends with Rico effectively discovering that he is already at home with his unit, even to the extent that his father is his senior NCO. Buettner isn't working from Heinlein's blueprint this time around.

I've got to give kudos to Buettner for a pretty compelling plotline based on the tension between a military establishment's desire to properly allocate resources for defence, and the civillian establishment's need to put the same resources into ensuring that we have a society left to defend.... I think this kind of topical issue, at a time when defence spending is controversial all across the first world, is one that the miltary SF genre could get even more mileage out of. I'd like to see a longer, more sombre treatment of this kind of storyline.

Without giving too much away, midway through the book the familliar slug enemy raises its head again, catching earth with its pants down, and perhaps rather bizarrely the task of saving the planet once again falls to a twenty-five year old general who was a specialist fourth-class a couple of years beforehand. Personally, I prefer a little more plausibility in my military SF, but the positive trade-off for the improbable plot events that Buettner allows is that he squeezes in some nice black humour and the occassional nice plot twist.

If you liked 'Orphanage' then this is a logical follow-up and good middle book in what will presumably be a three or four book series. A handy read for a couple of days, nothing much to tax the brain barring a bizarre two-page infodump of science towards the end of the book which deals with Slug anti-gravity technology.Buettner includes a little three or four page essay at the end of the book explaining his intent with both novels. He asserts that 'Starship Troopers' was "fascist", which is a disturbing misreading of Heinlein, but gives a reasonable enough account of Haldeman as having written a war novel inspired by the spirit of the 60s and the unpopular war in Vietnam. He argues that his own pair of novels are "not political" in a broader sense, but are only intended to highlight that infantry fight for the comrades along side them as opposed to abstract ideas of state or politics. He says his books should only be read as pro-infantry as opposed to anti anything. Fair enough, although it might be pointed out that romanticising the motivations of combat troops is a political statement in and of itself. I'll take his message over someone like Haldeman's, but neither do I agree with him when he presents his work as having captured some post-9/11 zeitgeist. That's reaching a bit, I reckon. I'm betting that at core his politics are not so different than Heinlein's, just a little less coherent.

In conclusion: Readable. Good military SF is always a worthy exercise. I question whether Buettner didn't do himself an injustice in setting out to mirror Heinlein quite so closely. I am tempted to suggest that anyone contemplating reading it should first be steered towards Heinlein's original at all costs.

While we're on the subject of Heinlein's legacy, I may as well mention a book I first read in 2001, about a week before 9/11. John Steakley's 'Armor' is a very odd duck, but it enjoys tremendous cult status, and rightly so in my mind. Like 'Vampire$', Steakley's first novel breaks many of the rules of good writing, with lots of run-on lines and sentence fragments. Steakley seems to consciously use these to reflect the chaos of combat, and depending on your perspective it either makes the book a masterpiece or totally unreadable.

Steakley, like Buettner, was unashamedly paying tribute to Heinlein and as with 'Orphanage' there are huge plot similarities. However, Steakley's focus is almost exclusively on putting his protagonist through an absolute ringer in terms of combat, and using these experiences as a crucible to look at how his mind copes and adapts to being dropped again and again into a hellish battle for survival. Think hordes of aliens, nuclear explosions and intense psychological pressure. There are some wonderful passages where the hero, Felix, explains that at a certain point he himself cannot continue to function: And at that point what he describes as 'an engine' in him takes over and fights like an automaton to stay alive. This main narrative is interspersed with another plot involving a space pirate and an academic, who have excavated the battle-suit that Felix wore, and through it are discovering what his ultimate fate was.

Seems I've barely scraped the surface of the legacy of 'Starship Troopers'. No mention of David Drake or John Ringo, even.

Maybe another time...

Ken Grimwood's 'Replay'

2008-02-29T17:17:00.004Z

I just got back from a short holiday at a small village near the Spanish city of La Coruna. I stayed at an old farmhouse near a little hill town, situated on the atlantic coast, with winding streets and a bizillion little bars serving the best calamari and tortillas I've ever had alongside crisp Estrella Gallicia beers by the bucketload.

Still, no short break is complete without the obligatory paperback that you dip into.

I picked up 'Replay' before I left Dublin, more or less on a whim. Ken Grimwood won a 1988 world fantasy award for it, but I only became aware of it because it has been republished as part of an excellent publishing imprint called the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series. The series collects the best of the fantasy genre, and includes obvious sword and sorcery classics like Robert E. Howard's 'Conan' as well as less commonly heard of stand-alone works like 'Replay', which otherwise I'd probably not have come across. This is from the end of the genre which pretty much anyone could read and enjoy.'

Replay's narrator is Jeff, who dies in his early forties from a heart-attack only to wake up in the body of his eighteen year-old self, years earlier. As the book unfolds Jeff takes advantage of his miraculous second chance, using his memories to tinker and change the path his life takes. However, when he reaches his forties again he dies once more and realises that he is caught in a pattern of 'replaying' his life over and over.

Initially 'Replay' is a meditation on the situation that Jeff finds himself in, and broader questions of how one should spend the time one is allotted in life. Initially, although traumatised by his death and resurrection, he is full of optimism and excited about the possibility of correcting the mistakes he made in his first life. Knowledge of who wins key sporting events like the World Series allow him to become independently wealthy via gambling, and the book is full of wish-fulfillment in a sense.

His 'replaying', however, is a double-edged sword. Jeff quickly realises that even though he has boundless limitations in terms of the way he can live each of his lives, he must still face death at the end of his allotted time, and when he wakes up again each time everything he has created, whether it's an international conglomerate or a new family and children, is obliterated.

Matters become more intriguing when, halfway through the book, Jeff becomes aware that there may be others living their life over and over again...

Erasmus' Rules

2008-02-07T21:08:00.000Z

One of the appendices in Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman's excellent book 'On Combat' reproduces an interesting bit of scholarship done by a Sergeant Chris Pascoe from the Michigan State Police.

Pascoe 'extracted' the twenty-two rules reproduced below from a book written by Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), a heavyweight Christian philosopher and humanist. Before anyone switches off at the mention of 'Christian', let me point out that back in the day these guys were some heavy-duty philosophers. Arguably they demonstrated a lot more philosophical and logical rigour in addressing the issues of their day than we do contemporarily.

Erasmus was a contemporary of Reformation figures like Martin Luther, when some big questions about Christianity and morality were being hammered out. My take on Erasmus is that he was ahead of his time: He shared many of the reformist ideals of early Protestants, but not their belief in predestination: Erasmus still believed in man's ultimate capacity for free-will.

One of the books that Erasmus wrote in his life came about as a result of his meeting a well-meaning but ultimately pretty barbaric soldier. This soldier's wife prevailed on Erasmus to write something that would help the soldier mend his ways. What he wrote became the Enchiridion militis Christiani, which is translated variously as 'A Guide for the Righteous Protector' or 'The Handbook of a Christian Knight'.

My intial impression was that this was some kind of western Hagakure, a prescriptive text for samurai written at a time when their way of life was increasingly becoming harder to understand as Japan changed. Although they stem from a different religious world-view, they share a similar purpose. Lately I've also come across essays on Islamic chivalry, Futawa, which is still knocking around today, promoted by some Sufi martial arts organisations. Some of its tenets appear to ring similar to Erasmus'.

I'm willing to bet that any culture which has ever had a warrior caste of some kind has had a corresponding moral code specifically geared towards them.

The ultimate purpose of these various codes is the same: To put it bluntly, they're an attempt to safeguard civil society from what can happen when cops, soldiers or people in similar roles go bad.

Nowadays, thanks to the research of psychologists like Lt Col Dave Grossman we know that people going in harm's way in the course of their work risk becoming psychiatric casualities as well as suffering physical injuries. We also know that the 'toxic' environment of human conflict situations can result in some people losing the run of themselves and becoming dangerous to those around them, even innocent bystanders. This was true in Erasmus' day, and it's true contemporarily.

Some jobs put normal people in environments and situations so bizarre or screwed up that the Rule of Law appears to have broken down or apply ambiguously at best. An extreme example of this would be troops operating in a war-zone... say, Irish peace-enforcers going into Chad. A more mundane example would be a group of police officers entering a house to execute a warrant and getting caught up in a conflict in someone's family home.

Professionals operating in this kind of unusual workplace are in potentially dangerous situations for everyone concerned: They may be dealing with volatile mixes of alcohol and drug-fuelled agression, mental illness, innocent bystanders and the frankly bizarre.

Increasingly they are also being held to increasingly complex and legalistic standards of behaviour: Making a confusing and disorientating environment even more treacherous.

Maybe that's why the 'rules' distilled below appear almost self-evident or overly simple: In some environments, simple is better! Trainers and coaches today know that under pressure we are more likely to retain and pull out simple physical movements as opposed to the complex stuff. Most soldiers and cops these days try and follow the KISS principle: 'Keep it simple, stupid'. Maybe the idea behind Erasmus' rules is that they are spartan enough to be retained in the same way. A curious mix of mundane soldierly lore and moral instruction...

I put these up here partially because I like the language (maybe a lot of it due to the way Pascoe wrote up these rules), but also because cheesy or not, this is pretty relevant stuff in a time when society is more and more concerned with establishing oversights, ombusman commissions and rooting out corruption. There's a role for these types of top-down externally imposed measures, but I'm also old-school. Maybe there's something to be said for Erasmus' approach: Trying to get the problem-people concerned to change 'from the inside out'.

________________________________________________

ERASMUS' TWENTY-TWO PRINCIPLES ON HOW TO BE STRONG WHILE REMAINING VIRTUOUS IN A DANGEROUS WORLD

First Rule

INCREASE YOUR FAITH.
Even if the entire world appears mad.

Second Rule
ACT UPON YOUR FAITH.
Even if you must undergo the loss of everything.

Third Rule

ANALYZE YOUR FEARS.
You will find that things are not as bad as they appear.

Fourth Rule

MAKE VIRTUE THE ONLY GOAL OF YOUR LIFE.
Dedicate all of your enthusiasm, all your effort, your leisure as well as your business.

Fifth Rule

TURN AWAY FROM MATERIAL THINGS.
If you are greatly concerned with money you will be weak of spirit.

Sixth Rule

TRAIN YOUR MIND TO DISTINGUISH GOOD AND EVIL.
Let your rule of government be determined by the common good.

Seventh Rule

NEVER LET ANY SETBACK STOP YOU IN YOUR QUEST.
We are not perfect - This only means we should try harder.

Eighth Rule

IF YOU HAVE FREQUENT TEMPTATIONS, DO NOT WORRY.
Begin to worry when you do not have temptation, because that is a sure sign that you cannot distinguish good from evil.

Ninth Rule

ALWAYS BE PREPARED FOR AN ATTACK.
Careful generals set guards even in times of peace.

Tenth Rule

SPIT, AS IT WERE, IN THE FACE OF DANGER.
Keep a stirring quotation with you for encouragement.

Twelfth Rule

TURN YOUR WEAKNESS INTO VIRTUE.
If you are inclined to be selfish, make a deliberate effort to be giving.

Thirteenth Rule

TREAT EACH BATTLE AS THOUGH IT WERE YOUR LAST.
And you will finish, in the end, victorious!

Fourteenth Rule

DON'T ASSUME THAT DOING GOOD ALLOWS YOU TO KEEP A FEW VICES.
The enemy you ignore the most is the one who conquers you.

Fifteenth Rule

WEIGH YOUR ALTERNATIVES CAREFULLY.
The wrong way will often seem easier than the right way.

Sixteenth Rule
NEVER ADMIT DEFEAT EVEN IF YOU HAVE BEEN WOUNDED.
The good soldier's painful wounds spur him to gather his strength.

Seventeenth Rule

ALWAYS HAVE A PLAN OF ACTION.
So when the time comes for battle, you will know what to do.

Eighteenth Rule

CALM YOUR PASSIONS BY SEEING HOW LITTLE THERE IS TO GAIN.
We often worry and scheme about trifling matters of no importance.

Nineteenth Rule

SPEAK WITH YOURSELF THIS WAY:
If I do what I am considering, would I want my family to know about it?

Twentieth Rule

VIRTUE HAS ITS OWN REWARD.
Once a person has it, they would not exchange it for anything.

Twenty-first Rule

LIFE CAN BE SAD, DIFFICULT AND QUICK: MAKE IT COUNT FOR SOMETHING!
Since we do not know when death will come, act honorably everyday.

Twenty-second Rule

REPENT YOUR WRONGS.
Those who do not admit their faults have the most to fear.

________________________________________________
(Courtesy Appendix A from 'On Combat' by Dave Grossman, with Loren Chistensen, published by PPCT Research Publications)

David Gemmell in The Wall Street Journal

2008-01-24T23:30:00.000Z

David Gemmell died last year.

He was widely regarded as Britain's greatest living writer of heroic fantasy. Ultimately he may be remembered as a British equivalent to Robert E. Howard. Gemmell was a self-made man from the East End of London who had worked as a bouncer and a journalist prior to finding his calling as author of kick-ass fantasy novels.

His novels are undoubtedly an acquired taste, but frankly I think if you read his first and best-known novel 'Legend' and don't feel some emotion stirring then you're probably a robot.

I think he would really have got a kick out of this article published a couple of days ago in the Wall Street Journal : http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1201...iews_days_only

A snippet-

When Gemmell was a boy, a teacher read "The Hobbit" to his class, turning
Gemmell into a lifelong fan of J.R.R. Tolkien, whose characters became his role
models. On a train platform one evening, Gemmell -- a big-and-tall fellow who
once worked as a bouncer -- saw three men beating up a fourth. As he told the
Independent, "A voice inside my head said, 'What would Boromir do?'" He jumped
into the fray and fought off the assailants. Years later, Gemmell told a New Zealand newspaper about receiving a letter from a fan who had gone out for a
walk with his dog when he saw two men attacking a woman. He charged in and they
ran off. "He said he did not think he would have done it if he hadn't been
reading one of my books about heroes," said Gemmell. "That's the kind of thing
that I shall carry with me, not making millions or whatever."

You know you've got too much time on your hands when you blog about indigneous Irish stick-fighting...

2007-12-25T22:52:00.000Z

Naturally, Christmas time is a period of reflection and... well... for eating a lot of mince pies. You eat things which you can't even identify. There's a really fine line between what constitutes bakewell tart and some form of apple and pear crumble with a layer of raspberry, if you consider it. After your second desert you may run down to the beach in a fit of guilt and bust out some circuit training involving sprints and kettlebells (or not). Then your family calls you a mentalist.

Ah, famillial strife- That's when you know it really is Christmas.

Anyway. Lately I've been trawling the depths of the Internet and came across some stuff I noticed years ago, still going strong: 'Authentic' Irish stick-fighting.

Rince an Bhata Uisce Bheatha (pronounced rinkan watta ishka vaaha) is
Gaelic for Whiskey Stick Dancing. However, Rince an Bhata Uisce Bheatha isn't a
form of Irish dance, it's a Doyle Clan's style of Irish stick fighting -- the
martial art most Irishmen used to settle their disputes in the 18th and 19th
centuries -- so the only dancing you will be doing will be at the party after
the brawl.

( http://www.geocities.com/glendoyle/bata/ )

That's right: Just like the Japanese, Filipinos, Chinese and everyone else we've apparently got ourselves an indigenous martial tradition going back hundreds of years. That's if you believe that such a tradition could have been preserved by Canadians and Americans of Irish descent with us in the Motherland blissfully oblivious.

Another page:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/4933/shillelagh.html

A little more genuine-seeming, this guy looks to be saying outright that what he is doing is reconstructing what he thinks went on in faction-fighting:

http://johnwhurley.com/

http://www.thewildgeese.com/pages/facfight.html

I'm very skeptical about the styles that claim to be some secret unbroken family tradition passed down from ancient times, however.

It's a historical fact that we had a tradition of some sort of stickfighting in this country, and that 'faction fights' or group fights occurred throughout the country in times past (this tradition continuing to some extent among our Traveller community).

Much of the stickfighting that was taught was thought to be based upon the experiences of irishmen who served in the military abroad and returned home, sharing what they had learned. I think its more likely that their methods fell closely in line with whatever was going on in Britain and on the continent at the time, than being based on some kind of indigineous gaelic methods. For that kind of thing you've got to look to mythological cycles.

All of the claims for an authentic irish stickfighting traditions seem to be coming from abroad, essentially. There are certainly no schools hidden away in Connemara offering 'whiskey style stickfighting' or whatever else (believe me, the country is not that big, we would know).

If such traditions were passed down on a more informal basis, I still think it likely that there would be an awareness of them contmporarily, especially in the martial arts community.

A few years ago I raised this issue with historians from Trinity College Dublin, and their position was that many people confused old woodcut block prints of hurling (a ball and stick game) with some sort of martial arts activity. The stick that is used in hurling is called a 'bata', the ball is a 'sliotar'.

I find it difficult to believe that emigrants would preserve a stickfighting tradition for hundreds of years, passing it down through the generations as suggested on-line, and yet we within the country would lose all of it. Considering that as a culture we have a very strong track record for preserving folk traditions of storytelling, music and art, I find this questionable at best.

For all I know these guys really know how to scrap with a stick- maybe their material is well-thought out and functional. But it is likely to be historically accurate or otherwise authentic? I think the odds are against that.

The best vampire novel you've probably never read

2007-12-20T15:26:00.000Z

On a whim, I re-read Richard Matheson's 'I am legend' cover-to-cover a couple of days ago, before I passed my rather battered copy over to a friend who wants to read it before the movie hits the cinemas.

Matheson is one of those writers so good that he 'makes the Michael Crichtons of the world cry into their pillows at night' (Someone once said that of Jim Dodge, I think the same sentiment applies to Matheson). Admittedly, Crichton is probably too busy counting his money and signing off on his next book-to-movie adaption to give much of a damn about being a hack... But you get my point: 'I am Legend' is the kind of landmark genre-changing novel anyone should aspire to write.

Written way back in '54, it has been adapted for the big screen no less than three times, and also inspired George Romero's zombie movies (Matheson allegedly disliked Romero's work, describing it as "kind of cornball"). There's also a BBC radio adaption nine parts floating around, which is supposed to be quite good.

A lot of SF dates because realworld science slowly encroaches on the author's fictional universe, but the prose can also be an issue. I love Heinlein, but his english is not my english, for example. In contrast, I think Matheson holds up a little better, perhaps because his writing was so spartan- 'I am Legend' is a minimalist work of genius, perfectly assembled and a lean couple of hundred pages.

Remarkably, I've heard that the Will Smith movie adaption, released on St Stephen's Day, isn't actually that bad. He's stepping into big shoes- Vincent Price and Charlton Heston have previously appeared in the role of Robert Neville. The real test whether the movie can preserve the sombre, grey mood of the book. Will it even attempt, I wonder, to capture the mental precipice which Neville dangles over in the early part of the novel, as he risks descending into insanity?

Fingers crossed.

Little Art / Big Art

2007-11-11T12:03:00.000Z

Graphic novels, or 'comics' as they are more colloqially known, have been on the cusp of achieving a bit of mainstream credibility for some time now. It was actually first predicted years ago, but things went the other way and the business took a huge nosedive, according to industry insider Scott McCloud.

Indicators of a new boom-time have included the sheer number that have been mined as source for big-screen adaptions. Most notably of late- '300', 'V for Vendetta' and the very new 'Stardust'. Sales in general are up, and now most mainstream bookstores have a reasonably well-stocked graphic novels section which contains carefully selected titles which appeal to a broad range of readers (and crucially, of both genders).

For anyone who is genuinely interested in understanding the potential of the medium of comics, the 'how' and 'why' they work, Scott McCloud's 'Understanding Comics' and 'Reimagining Comics' are essential reading.

They are also perfect examples in their own right of the distinction between form and content when it comes to comics- or as McCloud prefers to call them: Sequential art.

His two volumes use the same devices and tricks as any other comic, but the material is best described as a mixture of humour, philosophy and meditation on his subject.

If Jack Bauer worked out then he'd do Crossfit

2007-10-08T23:02:00.000+01:00

‘I love bodyweight exercises,’ says Colm. ‘They’re so humbling’.

At this point I’m still hunched over and shaking badly, more than a little wrecked after finishing a sixteen minute long workout rather whimsically named “Tabata something else”, set by Colm O’Reilly, coach down at the newly-opened Crossfit Ireland.

The titular ‘Tabata’ refers to an exercise principle codified by Japanese sports science researcher of the same name. Essentially, the idea is that you have an intense period of activity (say 20 seconds duration) followed by a short rest period (maybe 10 seconds) and then the cycle repeats itself on and on over a series of rounds: Typical Japanese sadism, some might say. This is, after all, the nation that brought us the dreaded bunny-hop.

In the case of this particular workout, the total sixteen minutes was split between pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups and squats. Colm jotted the number of each exercise that I managed in each burst of activity per round, and the figures tapered off rather significantly as fatigue set in and the rest periods seemed to be over before they started.

Humbling? Yep, when you consider I was ‘only’ moving my own bodyweight around for sixteen minutes, some of which was rest time. Like many WODs which look rather innocuous on paper, they turn out to be incredibly physically taxing when you try and do them and discover that they have fiendishly tiring features which are not immediately apparent until it’s too late.

Ah, the beauty of Crossfit.

Crossfit is an international open-source organisation dedicated to ‘forging elite fitness’. That might sound a bit daunting, but while its methods have increasingly been adopted by fire-fighters, police officers and collegiate and professional athletes, it is also a way of working out which its founder Greg Glassman says can and does work for everyone. He argues that the needs of a young elite athlete and a middle-aged housewife do not differ in kind, but only by degree. Both can employ the same training methods to get maximum results, if the workouts are scaled up or down to fit the individual.

For a concise and definitive explanation of what Crossfit is about the best place to look is on the main site, but here’s my personal take so far:-

“Routine is the enemy” in Crossfit and every day brings a WOD different than the one before. I think they may recycle every few months or so, but essentially on a day-to-day basis you are getting up to face a workout which presents different challenges and requires different skill-sets to the previous one. The line-up of activities crosses almost the entire athletic spectrum: Rowing, Olympic weight lifting, gymnastics, running and so on. Inevitably some technical instruction from a Crossfit-certified coach is required, but most of what goes on does not require much specialised equipment beyond that found in a ‘garage gym’.

Most Crossfit WODs tend to be high-intensity workouts of short duration, so it’s not unusual for a workout to be done and dusted, one way or another, inside of twenty minutes. Factor in a warm-up, some technical instruction pertaining to the workout, and a cool-down, and it’s not unusual to have the whole thing done in under an hour.

It can seem a little counter-intuitive to workout in such a way that you feel like you’ve reached your limit (and hopefully gone a bit beyond it) in a comparatively short period of time, but from what I can gather modern sports science is pretty much in Glassman’s corner on this one. Short high-intensity workouts deliver a “big whollop to the endocrine system”, says Glassman, that builds lean muscle mass, burns fat and delivers the kind of strength and conditioning that athletes specifically want but which everyone, regardless of their profession, needs to have a high standard of living into old age.

Colm O’Reilly, mainly known to me before this as a Mixed Martial Arts coach has had his Tallaght-based Crossfit-affiliated gym open since early September. It’s ‘so far so good’, he maintains, busy fielding e-mails from the curious and running daily classes for neophytes like me.

It’s a spartan but well-equipped gym to train in. The décor runs to concrete and plywood, no showers, one toilet and a motley assortment of bare-bones stuff to lift and swing in pursuit of fitness. Pull-up bars, barbells, Olympic bars and weights, Concept 2 rowing machines and a ‘cage’ to facilitate the safe performance of dynamic Olympic lifts which involve fairly hefty bits of metal being heaved around the place.

‘The one thing that everyone does coming in here is pick up one of the sledgehammers,’ comments Colm.

A half-dozen of them stand against the wall, alongside the heavy-duty tire that soaks up their impact if swinging them is part of a WOD. Swinging them is fun, but simultaneously it’s also bloody tiring.

Ultimately, this for me is the interesting thing about Crossfit’s approach to fitness. You might walk out of the gym and have difficulty operating the buttons on your car radio because your muscles are so fried that your fine motor-skills are a bit wonky. But undeniably, you’ll have had fun doing the workout that did that to you.

Maybe it was the skill involved, like getting the rhythm to swinging a sledge properly. Or maybe it was something more primal, like the sense of caveman achievement that you get from knowing that you have come out the far side of a tough workout and lifted heavy metal over your head.

Still, it’s early days for me and Crossfit, and ultimately the test will be whether I can juggle it with shift work and the other stuff I have going on. I’ve been squeezing in squeezing in as many WODs as I can, barring on rest days, and trying not to let it cut into my time spent training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Muay Thai down at Straight Blast Gym Ireland.

Today’s WOD kicked my ass, and I know I’ll be feeling it tomorrow morning when I get up for work.

Even so, it feels pretty good.

Michael Collins and the birth of asymmetrical warfare

2007-10-03T12:49:00.000+01:00

Last night RTE screened ‘Hidden History: Get Collins’.

Running a crisp hour and ten minutes, this documentary presented a timely reappraisal of the War of Independence and Michael Collins’ role in it. Essentially, the argument made was that the principal battleground of this conflict was not the hills of Cork and Kerry, where Flying Columns most effectively operated, but rather in the streets and offices of Dublin, and that this was principally a struggle between two Intelligence services.

The documentary focused on Collins’ key role as pioneer of urban warfare, intelligence gathering and, conversely, counter intelligence methods including assassination. It’s hard to underestimate the significance of some of the strategies and tactics that Collins implemented early on in the conflict. These same approaches to urban warfare were read by a young Mao, and related books remain on the reading lists of officer candidates in the United States Marine Corps.

Interestingly, the documentary also focused on a ‘protégé of Lloyd George’, Andrew Cope, a British operative sent comparatively late to Dublin and tasked with opening lines of communications with Michael Collins and the Irish Republican Army. As one of the commentators on the show said, if he was successful in doing so to the point that he was pivotal in facilitating the signing of the treaty with the British which effectively ended the War of Independence, then Cope is a hugely significant figure in Irish history who has thus far escaped close scrutiny.

There is a pattern to the events which led to Cope apparently being tasked with opening a dialog with Collins, even while parallel to his doing so the Black and Tans and British Military as a whole were effectively looking to locate Collins purely for the purposes of shooting him on sight.

Prior to Cope’s arrival the IRA had effectively hamstrung the parish-based intelligence gathering methods of the British, principally as a result of Collins’ and his full-time ‘Squad’ placing pretty much unprecedented violent pressure on the Dublin Municipal Police, G-branch and even civil servants. Following a neutral reaction to Collins’ first assassinations of key figures on the part of the Irish public and rest of the Republican movement, Collins’ Squad effectively intimidated the DMP into sitting out the rest of the conflict comparatively early on. The more elite G-branch held out comparatively longer, but was hamstrung from the inside as a result of extensive infiltration by the IRA.

It’s remarkable in the sense that with practically no resources Collins successfully built a highly effective intelligence service, with himself at the centre, beginning with his time spent interned in the UK and in the couple of years following his release. In a very short time he took a small cadre of volunteers and systematically neutralised not just the existing British intelligence operations in Dublin castle, but successive waves of agents brought in as the situation spiralled out of British control around 1920.

Perhaps now more than ever it’s important to look back on what occurred with a dispassionate eye, because we are effectively seeing a related type of asymmetrical intelligence-led urban warfare becoming this century’s new paradigm. From Baghdad to Kabul, conventional forces and intelligence services are struggling with small, dedicated insurgencies. I’m not suggesting these conflicts do not have their own specific characteristics and history. But there are only so many ways to fight an asymmetrical war, and lessons can be carried over from one theatre to another.

One of the more interesting observations made on last night’s documentary that by the middle of 1920 Collins had effectively forced not just British intelligence but also a host of comparatively innocent civil servants into living high-security, restricted lifestyles where their survival was pretty much dependent on their remaining inside Dublin castle.

The suggestion is that once they were shoehorned into the Castle the men of British intelligence were operationally limited and increasingly psychologically set upon. There were at least five suicides in the offices of G-branch. Riddled by informants, what operational capacity they had left must have been almost nil in functional terms, resulting in the rest of the British forces effectively operating ‘blind’.

A comparison was made between this and the contemporary ‘green zone’ in Baghdad, with western contractors and key workers living their day-to-day lives behind a heavy security cordon separating them from hostile territory.

I’m not sure the comparison is entirely valid. There are cultural and material differences to be considered: What happened in Dublin around 1920 may have been the genesis of what is recognisable as asymmetrical warfare in an urban setting, but time has not stood still.

Collins operated on the principal that individual enemy agents could be replaced in physical terms, but that their assassination or intimidation into ineffectiveness was worthwhile on the basis that while a replacement could ‘step into the shoes’ of the man he replaced, he did not necessarily inherit that man’s knowledge- the contacts he had made, the informants he had cultivated and the intelligence he personally retained.

Perhaps partially in order to minimise the effects of Collins’ brand of tactics, and also in order to afford closer accountability, nowadays best practice in relation to the handling of intelligence is that it be gathered and disseminated widely within a trusted network of analysts. And this accomplished via modern information systems technology that can reach halfway across the planet and back infinitely quicker than it could have taken Collins’ staff to circulate a dispatch around the city. Aslo, while informants may still be cultivated by individuals on the ground, these ‘covert human intelligence resources’ are then taken over by handlers with specialised training in order to ensure greater oversight.

In more general terms, the pooling and sharing of intelligence, logging of what occurs during shiftwork and constant cycle of briefings, operations and subsequent debriefings means that no single individual is indispensable. If anything, high-value people contemporarily are more likely to be carefully-cultivated informers and touts.

Collins played a part in forcing this kind of evolution. Now more than ever western governments are faced with the task of learning how to contain and defeat highly motivated insurgencies which are highly effective even when limited to comparatively low-tech means.

It’s for this reason that I have mixed feelings about Collins’ legacy.

In recent times the moral authority of the ‘physical force tradition’ in Republicanism has been robustly challenged by revisionist historians who question whether self-government could not have been achieved through non-violent civil means alone.

If we are to assess Collins as some form of national hero then we must take a measured look at what he contributed in local and international political terms. It is no longer enough to present a simplistic picture of him as a fighting folk figure, a bogeyman to the British, who was pivotal in bringing about a situation whereby the 1921 treaty was signed and the Free State brought about. I think that even if we give him the benefit of the doubt in terms of having a mandate for direct action against the British, the methods which he pioneered effectively paved the way for future terror groups operating with far less widespread support and moral authority.

There is an argument, of course, that a crucial different between Collins and those who came after him is that he did not target civilians, but he certainly sailed close to the wind- The assassination of the civil servant Alan Bell in Donnybrook, for example. Bell was a retired magistrate, 70 years of age, who came precariously close to uncovering secret banks accounts belonging to the IRA.

Collins was killed during the Civil War the signing of the treaty perhaps made inevitable. Debatably he had yet to demonstrate whether or not he could change from autocratic intelligence boss to being a founding father of a modern democratic state. Even so, it seems certain that Collins would have been horrified by the ideologies of the various groups who have been the inheritors of the strategies and tactics that he pioneered. What would Collins have made of Islamist execution of hostages on the world-wide web- Is this the logical conclusion of the tactics of asymmetrical warfare he set out, or an aberration?

Retro urban fantasy for the young 'uns : Michael De Larrabeiti

2007-09-24T19:51:00.000+01:00

Of late we've seen something of a blurring of lines in the bookselling marketplace. JK Rowling and Phillip Pullman are the latest authors whose work has successfully transcended nominally being 'young adult fiction' and managed to capture a much broader chunk of the market.

Pullman, in particular, has brought some serious literary licks to the table and his His Dark Materials trilogy is the kind of thing that makes you cry yourself to sleep into your pillow because the prose is so good. Having already had at least two great runs on stage as a theatrical production, it is now heading for cinema screens near you very soon.

This ambivalence about what is strictly intended for teenagers and what is purely 'adult' isn't a totally new, thing. There have always been absolute treasures which are nominally aimed squarely at a YA demographic. Susan Coopers' dark pagan contemporary fantasies The Dark is Rising (also due to be trotted out as a horribly re-interpeted American blockbuster soon), for example, JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit and Robert Heinlein's 'juvenile' novels like Have spacesuit, will travel.

This weekend, sorting out piles of books at home in Donegal, I came across an omnibus edition of Michael De Larrabeiti's Borribles novels. Horribly named, these are probably some of the finest YA urban fantasy most people will absolutely never read.

Currently hot urban fantasy writers like Neil Gaiman (he of The Sandman graphic novel fame, American Gods and Neverwhere) and China Mielville (trendy leftist, not my cup of tea but a lot of people thing he's the best thing since sliced bread) have both cited De Larrabeiti as a favourite author. Mieville in particular has waxed lyrical in interviews, and was due to write the introduction to the Macmillan collected edition of De Larrabeiti's novels. He said that they both wrote novels that were "epic love poems to london".

I don't know about that, but De Larrabeiti's Borribles novels are certainly rather remarkable books, especially if you're a young teenager coming across them for the first time. They're incredibly anarchic and violent, far more so than contemporary books which have raised a lot of heckles in the press (Pullman, Rowling).

De Larrabeiti is or was a travel-writer for the Sunday papers by trade, and his other works are non-fantasy for the most part. His three 'Borrible' novels may possibly be work he'd prefer to forget, although I'd hope not. We should all be lucky to have such spiffing stuff to be embarrassed about....

The trilogy comprises 'The Borribles', 'The Borribles go for Broke' and 'Across a Dark Metropolis'. Recently re-published in one volume at a knockdown price. All short novels, perhaps two-sixty pages apiece.

The Borribles of the title are an immortal race of street urchins. Living in the sewers and derelict buildings of London, they are an invisible community of thieves, pickpockets and adventurers. De Larrabeiti explores themes of loyalty, greed, friendship through the quests of his protagonists to earn more names: the things Borribles regard most highly, as each name tells of an adventure determining their street credibility and status.

That's probably where it ends, for child readers. Rousing adventure stories washed in a fair amount of blood. Thrills, spills and all that. But an adult reader will find a lot more.

De Larrabeiti wrote these books in the 80s, and they are a deliciously sharp critique of Thattcherite poltics, yuppie greed and the rat race. Our heros are vagabonds, drop-outs, drunks, criminals and effectively a peter-pan community of children who refuse to grow up and join the mundane adult workforce. In the latter two books the principle bad guys are simply a special anti-Borrible police branch. This is one book where the coppers are not the good guys.

Styllistically, that the protagonists' fellowship is an homage to Tolkien is apparent, or more specifically - to 'The Hobbit'. The ten-strong Borrible force has more than a little in common with Bilbo and company (more with a 'Dirty Dozen' edge, though...), and are just as likely to sink some beers and burst into song. Songs, in fact, pepper the novels throughout.

They're like Pullman or Rowling, in the sense that that they defy the label of 'children's fiction' or 'YA fiction' which has been applied to them in the past. I'm genuinely unsure of how to recommend these books- to a child they're gory disturbing dark fantasy, to an adult they're deliciously sharp urban fairy tales.

When I say gory, I mean it. Murders permeate the pages, and de Larrabeiti takes a Dahl-esque pleasure in spelling out in great detail the damage his angel-faced protagonists inflict on their enemies. We're talking boiling alive, cracked skulls, spilled brains, duels with razor-sharp spades, drownings in mud and so on.

If criticise them I must, then I'd principally point to the fact that the nature of his Borrible characters, their essence, means that they are essentially foetal or childlike, despite the great age of some of them. They refuse to enter adulthood, they cling to their simple counter-cultural lifestyle, and like most twelve-year old kids frozen in time... they don't really have an awful lot to say for themselves.

The appearance around book two of Ben the alcoholic tramp is a nice break from the Borribles slitting throats and earnestly waging urban warfare in defense of their territories. Ben represents some kind of enlightened master, as De Larrabeiti writes him, a figure that lives in a ramshackle junkyard mansion build of old wood and corrugated iron, and sleeps in a five-mattress bed composed of the junk other people throw away. A kind of uber-slacker that most will probably identify with more now than readers in the 80s would have....

Yes, these are weird, weird novels. But weird in the good sense, not in the 'back away slowly and don't make eye contact' sense. Keep an eye out for them, if you fancy a trip down a rather warped and chaotic childhood memory lane.

The Severest School

2007-09-18T21:08:00.000+01:00

"We should remember that one man is much the same as another, and
that he is best who is trained in the severest school."

Thucydides again.

The above, already a snippet from a longer commentary, is often shortened even further to 'He is best who is trained in the severest school'. In this form it reads simply as an admonition to work hard if you want to suceed. There are a bizillion different maxims which amount to the same thing-

Another commentator from Classical military history, Vegetius (circa the 4th century, I think) wrote of Roman training methods having been 'bloodless battles' ensuring that their actual battles amounted to 'bloody drills'.

More contemporarily, every Mixed Martial Arts competitor and combat athlete attempts to make true a simple equation: 'Train hard, fight easy'.

Getting back to Thucydides, though, I think it's worth re-reading the full quote. Thucydides' message in context is more than just an admonition to train hard. The lines referring to the 'severest school' are preceded, in the Jowett translation of a History of the Peloponnesian War by-

"We think that the wits of our enemies are as good as our own, and that the element of fortune cannot be forecast in words. Let us assume that they have common prudence, and let our preparations be, not words, but deeds. Our hopes ought not to rest on the probability of their making mistakes, but on our own caution and foresight. "

There's not a whole lot to add to Thucydides' analysis of what it takes to garner a victory over an opponent. You credit him with the same common sense as yourself. You acknowledge that luck will play a part. And then you make sure that your plans for victory are actualised by real work, not just theory or talk. And because your opponent is doing the same, and because you can't assume you're an inherently better man than he ... The difference between victory and defeat might come down to who has trained "in the severest school".

There's no school like the old school

2007-09-15T17:34:00.000+01:00

Thucydides (460BC - 395 BC) probably isn't a Greek historian of interest to very many people. His History of the Peloponnesian War, an account of a war between Sparta and Athens, wouldn't normally appear to the be the sort of thing that would fly off the shelves in Waterstones. And that's his best known work.

Not everyone feels that the classics aren't worth cracking open every now and again, however. Sometimes, indeed, it's the people you least expect who will find relevance in the writings of someone who died about four centuries before Christ was born. The most recent one I've come across was the SF author Dan Simmons, who believes that Thucydide's commentaries on the risks of attempting to appease an implcabale enemy has contemporary lessons for our political masters. Also drawing drawing on the Peloponnesian War for inspiration we've had Steven Pressfield's new(ish) historical novel, 'Tides of War'.

That's not really the point of this post, however. I'm interested in something about his work which I hope people will agree on a little more readily.

A typical analysis of Thucydide's contribution to history runs something to the effect that he was one of the fathers of a more rational, naturalistic way of reporting history. Giving equal credence to each historical event and seeing them as part of an overall pattern of the times was part of it. The really important contribution he made, though, seems to have been that he was a little more likely to ascribe the outcome of events to human agency or even random chance ... As opposed to someone like Herodotus, who saw the wrath of the Gods in every calamity, and their favour in every stroke of fortune.

Admirable stuff, but for someone who is credited with casting a protoscientific eye on the passage of historical events, what really strikes me about Thucydides is....

....Man, this guy could really write....

"The whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; they are
honoured not only by columns and inscriptions in their own land, but in foreign nations on memorials graven not on stone but in the hearts and minds of men."

More to follow.

Ultimate Fighting Championship 75

2007-09-12T22:20:00.000+01:00

Zuffa promotions, bringing us the Ultimate Fighting Championship 75 billed this one as a 'battle of the champions'. While it wasn't an actual unification bout, it did pit a current UFC champion, 'Rampage' Jackson, against his opposite number in popular Japanese promotion Pride Fighting Championship, Dan Henderson. This only became possible due to the seemingly unstoppable march of Zuffa in accquiring other Mixed Martial Arts promotions.

Either way, this fight was set to be a doozy, and it didn't dissapoint. Jackson was the quintessential hungry man when he outfoxed Chuck 'The Iceman' Liddell and took the belt from him in his last fight. 'Rampage' is a top tier wrestler with heavy hands, and is known for manhandling his opponents into position for a takedown, and then 'grounding and pounding' them until the referee stops the fight.

And his opponent, Dan Henderson, used pretty much the exact same strategy in his successful Pride career. Maybe the only marginal difference is that Jackson is the bigger man whereas Henderson is probably the better wrestler of the two.

Anyway- I was lucky enough to score cheapish seats in the Royal Bank of Scotland's corporate box, thanks to my buddy Cilian. Despite his losing them on the way to the venue, we still managed to talk our way inside for the first fight of the undercard. Here, though, I'm only going to discuss the main card, and the three biggest fights of the night- starting with Mikro Cro Cop versus Cheic (spelling?) Kongo.

This was as close to a 'gimmee' as the UFC were every going to give Cro Cop after his embarassing knockout via roundkick in his last fight. Talk about those living by the sword dying by the sword.... Here is a man, after all, who is a cult hero because he can practically decapitate people with his left shin. They should have nicknamed him 'the Highlander'. On Saturday night, however, Cro Cop wasn't any less lacklustre than last time he stepped into the Octagon.

My take on the Cro Cop fight is that this is simply not the same athlete who dominated with his patented left high roundhouse in Pride. It's like he's been sedated. Exactly what is going on in his private life I don't know, but realistically he has blown his chance of a title shot any time in the near future. Will White try to redeem him or will Cro Cop vanish off into another promotion? Hard to say. They paid a lot of money for this guy...

The Michael Bisping / Matt Hamill fight for me was the biggest controversy of the night. Bisping is the biggest international MMA fighter hailing from Britain, and this something of a local hero. Since they both appeared on the 'Ultimate Fighter' reality TV show, he has been engaged in a pretty mean-spirited feud with deaf Olympian and MMA fighter Matt 'The Hammer' Hamill'. It was a good fight, but there has been tremendous debate about the decision to give the victory to Bisping.

While many have argued that Bisping's counterstriking was accurate enough, and takedown defence good enough later in the match, I feel that overall Hamill won this match by a reasonable margin. He had far the better octagon control and aggression, and he actually had the better of Bisping in striking terms in the sense that I think Bisping was the one who was actually on the back foot and in danger of being stopped. It's remarkable that by training with local Utica boxers since leaving Team Punishment (and ergo no proper MMA coach for hs standup game) Hamill has come so far. He is no longer the one-dimensional pure wrestler that Bisping still mocks him for being.

It's also worth mentioning that Hamill was gracious in defeat whereas Bisping was decidely less so. I think it's notable that the english crowd were not partisan and booed both his victory and his comments to Hamill post-fight- "back to wrestling".

The Hendo / Rampge fight was something of an anti-climax for me, to be honest. My mind was still very much on the Bisping / Hamill match.

I expected this bout to be close, and wasn't surprised. Henderson certainly had the better of the greco and takedowns in the first round, and I felt he also had the edge in the striking. However, Rampage is the marginally bigger man, and perhaps this combined with better conditioning resulting in a more even second round. I think beyond that Rampage did enough to retain his belt and I believe he has proved that he is not, as has been claimed, shakier now than during his Pride days. Furthermore, he's good for the sport: A good showman when it is appropriate, but also a thoughtful tactician (as evidenced by his pre-fight quiet analysis of the match).

Conclusion: The sport's ascent continues!

Couture vs Gonzaga

2007-08-27T21:16:00.000+01:00

On Sunday night, at UFC 74: Respect, the 44 year old heavyweight champion Randy Couture retained his heavy weight title by defeating Gabriel Gonzaga early in the third round.

Every now and again a fight like this reminds you that conventional wisdom is sometimes ... Well ... wrong.

Going into this fight everyone agreed that Couture was the underdog. Even 'The Natural' himself. At his age, he acknowledged, he was going to be the underdog for every fight left in his career. Minutes out before ref Herb Dean brought the two fighters together, even the commentators were pointedly remarking on exactly how big the younger, taller fighter Gonzaga was in comparion with Couture.

When Couture last held the heavyweight belt, earlier in his career, it was bigger guys like Gonzaga who gave him trouble, and led to him slipping down a weight class and trying his luck there. On paper, years on, Gonzaga was exactly the guy to go through Couture early in the first few rounds, making good on the promise he displayed when he knocked out the previous #1 contender, Cro Cop, in his last fight.

Instead, of course, we saw a rather different fight.

Couture came out and proceeded to use his olympic level greco-roman wrestling to tie up Gonzaga against the cage and throw a heavy beating to the younger fighter. It was exactly Randy's type of match: His newly-acquired head movement allowing him to slip the worst of Gonzaga's man-killing big shots, and then tying up the younger man and throwing knees, elbows and punches as Gonzaga tried to avoid the worst of them while also avoiding the ever-present threat of a big takedown or slam from Couture. Which, of course, is exactly what happened.

Couture executed a big greco-roman slam and either his shoulder or head ended up breaking Gonzaga's nose badly. From then on, things got worse for the Brazillian. With his nose broken, his mouth had to gape open to allow him to breathe and to spit out the blood that was trickling down into his mouth and throat. Randy, literally and figuratively, sensed blood and kept up the pressure.

The end came early in the third round. Another takedown, and Couture finished in half-guard, on top of Gonzaga and throwing short, vicious punches. With the Brazillian unable or unwilling to intelligently defend himself beyond covering his head in his hands, referee Herb Dean stepped in and stopped the fight.

Remind me again- Why was everyone saying Couture was the underdog?

Yes, he's old... Yes, the UFC is full of people generally regarded as the new-breed of MMA athlete.... What Couture has, though, is the kind of mental strength and will to dominate that sends younger competitors like Gonzaga home to their mothers looking like callow youths.

Pressed up against the cage and getting beaten up by a guy over a dozen years his senior, I'm guessing Gonzaga probably reached the conclusion that, really, he could wait a few more years for Couture's belt.

Media in intelligent coverage of martial arts and combat sports shocker

2007-08-08T21:08:00.000+01:00

Recently I came across Robert Carry's series of articles in Metro Eireann, Ireland's first and only multicultural newspaper. The series is titled 'Martial Arts... For the uninitiated'.

I gather that the idea is that every week he visits a martial art from a different country (in keeping with the paper's multicultural ethos) and then reports on it.Carry goes in with his sceptical faculties turned on and manages to capture some of the more ludicrous aspects of some martial arts classes.

Wayfarers and Tank Lords

2007-03-24T22:07:00.000Z

So, I read 'Liane the Wayfarer', a classic short story by Jack Vance.

I've never been a huge fan of Vance.

Intellectually, I recognise that he is a titan and what he wrote has stood the test of time as being unique and compelling. 'Liane' was included with other stories in 'The Dying Earth' which Gollancz reprinted as part of its respected Fantasy Masterworks Series. On a gut level, though, Vance has always left me cold- All the cleverness is fine, but he never emotionally hooked me with his writing.

I'm planning on tracking down the 'Demon Princes' novels in omnibus format in the near future, though, to see if I can change my own mind. In a lot of ways maybe I'm being a bit unfair with Vance, because not only have I not read these novels, I haven't actually read 'Big Planet' or 'The Dragon Princes' either...

The most interesting part of 'Liane the Wayfarer', for me, is Vance's protagonists' sociopathic nature- Something which is actually largely secondary to the actual plot and events of the story. He nonchalantly squeezes in these little moments that make you realise that Liane isn't playing with anything close to a full deck.

Liane is the type who doubles back and drops rocks from a height on people he has gotten directions from a few minutes before... Just on the mere offchance that they in fact are planning on getting ahead of him and ambushing him. Even doddering old men get this treatment.

Vance writes from a non-judgemental standpoint where he never tells his reader one way or the other how he is supposed to feel about either his characters or what is occurring (Something discussed in the afterword added to 'Liane the Wayfarer' as it is published in Baen's "The World Turned Upside Down").

This is a characteristic shared by David Drake at times, perhaps most notably in his 'Fleet' and 'Hammer's Slammers' short fiction, which were both among the earliest SF he wrote after returning home from the Vietnam war. Both are credited as being the closest thing to war memoirs Drake ever wrote, in a strange way, and also as being his own personal form of therapy. As Military Science Ficiton goes, they're the good stuff- diamond hard prose and redolent of the reality of warfare as experienced by a veteran of a very dirty ground war.

Incidentally, not only have they become his best-known material, but they've also jumped mediums at times. For whatever reason, Drake's visions of future 'Tank Lords' hovering across battlefields under distant suns has inspired all kinds of tributes in the form of 'Hammer's Slammers' boardgames, model miniatures and fine art prints. Check out this picture of Drake himself holding some little grey hovertank models.

The 'Slammers' stories have been published in a variety of formats, and in recent years Drake has grouped them together in various omnibus formats for Baen. This was not long ago at all, so I was surprised when I heard that he'd given the stamp of approval to a three-volume series to be published by Night Shade Books which collects all of the Hammer's Slammers stuff in hardback.

The first two volumes are available and on my desk now: Really nice things to have from a vanity perspective, beautifully put together and with lavish covers, introductions from Gene Wolfe and David Hartwell, afterwords from Drake himself ... and of course, new 'Slammers' material.

The third and concluding volume is due in the next year. If you're a newbie to the 'Slammers' mythos this will be the definitive way to get started. Mine say this is a 'limited edition' run, perhaps why the books are retailing for up to $60 apiece in some places. Amazon has them way cheaper.

Anyway, I'm three-quarters of the way through re-reading the first 'Slammers' story, 'Under the Hammer', and I'm reminded yet again of why Drake is regarded by many as the greatest living writer of military SF alive today.

It hasn't aged at all.

What did the British ever do for us? Apart from ale, our laws etc.

2007-03-13T23:31:00.000Z

A package arrived from Amazon.co.uk yesterday, containing something I'd ordered on a whim and more or less forgotten about.

For those not familliar with it, 'Ultraviolet' was an unusually good five-episode UK show starring Jack Davenport. Running for around 200 minutes, practically a mini-series by today's 12 to 22 episodes per season standards.

The premise is that vampires are real and have co-existed with humanity down through the ages. Now, with humanity having harnessed many means of destroying itself (chemical, biological, nuclear), they have decided it's time to step in and assume control. Davenport finds himself entangled in an intelligence war being fought in the shadows, with government spooks led by a former priest on one side, and vampires in Mercdes Benz on the other.

It's hard to explain exactly why this is such an excellent show, to the point that it really makes more contemporary british efforts like Torchwood and Primevil look like amateurish rubbish. I think it has something to do with the utter seriousness with which the cast and writer (same guy who did 'This Life', incidentally) approached things. There are no Kate Beckinsdales running around in leather pants firing two pistols at once. Everything is low key and chillingly plausible: For example, the carbon-tipped bullets the government uses to kill their targets in place of the traditional wooden stake.

The old horror device of keeping the monster offstage is played upon, and moments of clear-cut supernatural activity are few enough to be genuinely menacing when they do occur. I think 'Ultraviolet' also plays upon two elements of the original vampire myth that sometimes take a back seat to special effects and whatnot:-

Firstly, vampires look and act human. For all intents and purposes that's the scariest bit in a way ... You could be sitting next to one when you're riding the tube, or giving one a lift to on the way home. What about that friend you haven't seen in ages, when he calls you up and wants to come around some night?

Secondly, the emotional turmoil faced by someone who has had a loved one turned is explored in greater than usual detail. It's one thing when your loved one has a ridged monster face, as in 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' ... But in 'Ultraviolet' the vampires are almost always affable and manipulative figures, paralysing their prey with the possibility that they are not, in fact, actually all that bad...

Excellent show.

'Old Man's War' - Hugo Award Nominee by John Scalzi

2006-10-13T17:32:00.000+01:00

Finally got around to polishing off John Scalzi's 'Old Man's War'.

I enjoyed it, but at the same time I have reservations about the way in which this has been presented as owing so much to Heinlein's 'Starship Troopers'. 'Old Man's War' is an excellent adventure story with some clever elements extrapolated from current physics and technology. To what extent he has really written something informed by 'Starship Troopers' is a more open question, I think.

Scalzi has retained a 'lite' version of the military SF, but little of Heinlein's provocative and intelligent debate about the relationship between citizenship and personal responsibility is present. I think 'Starship Troopers' worked on an number of levels by challenging the reader on social and political points while at the same time telling a compelling coming-of-age military SF story. Scalzi does the big guns and nasty aliens, but by omitting almost entirely the political philosophy element he does less justice to Heinlein's memory than the likes of John Ringo and David Drake, in my opinion.

If Scalzi has an advantage over them, however, it is that a lot of casual readers find hard Military SF almost stuffy or slightly baffling (Maybe part of it is that in the current social climate some people are uncomfortable with even ficitonal portrayals of the military in a positive light). 'Old Man's War' is markedly more accessible than something along the lines of David Drake's 'Hammer's Slammers' series, which, in its day was also considered a direct tribute to 'Starship Troopers'.

An Aliveness manifesto through on-line clips

2006-09-20T23:54:00.000+01:00

A couple of years ago clips like these had a pretty big impact on me- especially the original rip of Matt Thornton's 'What is aliveness?' tape. They cemented in my mind the need for me to change my training paradigm and move towards training exclusively 'alive'. I hope maybe one or two people out there find these as inspirational as I did.

This is quite a long list of clips. The Matt Thornton interviews are more talky / methodology-orientated. If you're looking for more action, check out the STAB clips, Rodney King's clips and the final ISR PM clip.

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The original 'What is aliveness?' clip http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2068450760833041053&q=aliveness

Matt Thornton Interivew mainly talking about the evolution of his gym from JKD concepts towards a syllabus based on MMA and comabt athletics http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=698639012050980635&q=Matt+Thornton

SBGi tour of UK and Denmark clip http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=439707796897158934&q=SBGi

Matt Thornton Interview with Mjolnir gym : Talking about, among othe things boxing, the clinch, crazy monkey http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2164264104275931970

Hour-long clip of Matt Thornton talking to a dojo full of traditional karateka about aliveness (poor sound quality) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7892384548000318708&q=Karl+Tanswell

Karl Tanswell teaching his Strategy and Tactics Against Blades (STAB) system http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-306340144244288583&q=SBG

Highlights of STAB seminar, Denmark http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7410961341925544918&q=SBG

Karl Tanswell talking about the evolution of his training, origin of STAB material and other stuff ( "The SENI incident" )http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6925928447274462159&q=SBG

Luis Guitterez (SBG coach) Interview http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2143697601523513527&q=SBG

Preview Clip for Rodney King's Street Boxing : Sparring 101 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8893632552837416353&q=Straight+Blast+Gym

Rodney King demo-ing low thai round kick - Nice pointers here http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3404547572879309209&q=Rodney+King

Crazy Monkey - Defending the jab clip. I love watching Rodney working CM, it really highlights how badly so many people who think they are doing CM actually are at it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njPgVLPTWZk&mode=related&search=

Rodney King teaching a power combination based on jab, cross to shovel hook. Great fine points about making it work. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F256qCZtzAc&mode=related&search=

Rodney doing open hand slap to side of head. "One of the best tools you can use on the street". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC-lIMuBkko&mode=related&search=

A little bit on clinching and throwing a hook from Rodney. More of a snap-down than a clinch, maybe? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7w2IUJ7jR8&mode=related&search=

'Elevation drive'. Interesting take on crashing with a tight cage to strike rather than grapple http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrewiYRi48o&mode=related&search=

And last but not least ... Putting it all together:-

Pretty well-known ISR Matrix (Physical Managment) clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xmy7ETFlhA

Supernatural (Season One, contains spoilers...)

2006-09-11T23:52:00.000+01:00

Recently I got through watching season one of 'Supernatural' back to back on DVD. For those not in the know, this is something in the vein of previously successful shows like 'The X-Files', 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer' and 'Angel'.

The two protagonists, brothers, travel the backroads of America waging a personal war against various malevolent occult forces, ranging from restless spirits to full-blown demonic possession. Throughout the suspense and horror element is emphasised, with varying degrees of success from episode to episode. Some fall flat on their face ('Route 666') while others genuinely illicit the odd jump ('Providence').

It borrows heavily from Chris Carter's groundbreaking 'X-files' in terms of lighting and mood (I think parts of the show may even have been shot on the same Canadian locations) and also in adopting, for the most part, a sort of 'monster of the week' approach to storytelling which is very reminiscent of the early seasons. Standout episodes, for me, were the early 'Wendigo' and the later 'Scarecrow', which was a sort of homage to 'Children of the Corn' mixed in with pop-culture references to 'Jeepers Creepers' and others.

There are few plot twists or deviation from the basic premise of the show, with the result that at times ever episode call feel a little samey. The first half-dozen episodes in particular reminded me of watching 'The A-Team' at times. I could pretty much predict the plot of a show after the first five minutes. Sam and Dean roll into town and discover there is a mysterious evil force in residence. They meet someone whose family has a dark past or is tied up in events (usually they are a cute girl). Sam and Dean fight evil force and discover its weakness in the nick of time, usually involving some minor plot twist involving the true nature of the bad guy. Sprinkled throughout is a bit of angst from Sam and some mingled recklessness and level-headedness from Dean, establishing clearly which one is which.

Reading over that, it sounds a little harsh. But this was one of my major beefs with the first part of the season. Unlike 'Buffy' there was little attempt at developing the very compelling backstory until almost the last third of the season: Where was the Winchester brothers' father, and what was the nature of the "greater" threat that he was trying to preserve them from?

When the show did move beyond the 'monster of the week' mould into an ongoing story arc, things immediately took off. In 'Scarecrow', mentioned earlier, for example, we are introduced to hot chick hitcher Meg Masters. At first she seems no more than a love interest for Sam. The closing moments of the episode, however, reveal that Meg appears to be part of the Winchesters' opposite numbers ... She's a member of some sort of demonic group deeply steeped in evil. At last there is a sense that Sam and Dean may seriously be at risk, stumbling around in the dark with enemies arrayed against them who make them look extremely unprepared indeed.

The excellent two-part finale of the show introduces and kills off pretty much more interesting characters relevant to the backstory than we met in all the earlier episodes put together. The Winchester family, reuinted, irons out much of the stuff that led to Sam spouting a lot of 'Dawsons Creek' style monologues previously. And the closing twist is an absolute cracker, reminscent of horror films with unremittingly grim endings, like 'The Omen'. The Winchesters, apparently in the clear and in the middle of yet another family chat, get plowed off the road by a a huge eighteen-wheeler truck. After the crash, the truckdriver is visible through the windscreen, his all-black eyes perfectly unblinking. The camera pans over the Winchesters one by one, and if you didn't know that Season Two had already been signed up, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it was one of the biggest 'bad guys win' ending ever filmed for a mainstream TV show.

Closing remarks: 'Supernatural' is far from perfect. In the main the Winchester brothers have a believable chemistry, and together they carry the buddy-buddy plot elements off. At times, though, it's hard not to think of Dean as vaguely like Joey Triviani (except as a demon-hunter), or some bloke from 'Melrose Place'. He has one of those soap-opera heads.

Despite all this, though, this has the potential to take off as an excellent series if they grab hold of it and run with season two in the form of linked episodes following an ongoing story arc. In this respect shows like 'Buffy' and 'Angel' showed the way for SF/Fantasy shows, and 'Battlestar Galactica' continues to push the boundaries even further. 'Supernatural' has the budget and potentially meaty source material to be very, very good, if they are willing to take some risks.

The art of the eight limbs

2006-08-19T18:02:00.000+01:00

Muay Thai.

Geoff Thompson described it as a "ferocious martial art". Often it is described as the single most functional stand-up striking art in the world, albeit usually with the caveat that the Muay Thai in question be from a gym which has good technique with the hands, not just the kicks, knees, elbows and clinches and tie-ups which are part and parcel of Muay Thai.

I've been training at Chupasart Muay Thai, which is coached by Paddy Clint. Training is three times a week, and is in the new Straight Blast Gym facility which has opened up just on the outskirts of Dublin (it's anything from a forty minute drive to a bit over an hour, depending on traffic).

It's hard to juggle committment to training with committment with work at the best of times, but generally I'm able to manage two or three good sessions a week in addition to whatever solo work I do on my own in between. If you're doing MMA, though, how do you spend those three sessions?

BJJ class?

General MMA work?

Muay Thai?

Judo?

Sometimes more choices can complicate things, and a problem I have with Thai is that I can't necessarily train two or three times every week like I probably should, if I really want to progress at the same rate as the guys there who are doing it exclusively. If nothing else, they're quickly developing awesome fitness levels.

See, I also love Jiu-jitsu, and I also really benefit form the all-round MMA classes run in the gym which work clinch, standup and ground...

My solution, at the moment, is to alternate. One week, I'm aiming to do two classes of Thai and one good grappling session (two if I can). Then the following week, two grappling classes and one Thai.

It'll be interesting to see how it works out.

[Afterword: Reading over this on the blog, something which has occurred to me is how many different ranges I'm juggling at the moment. If I looked at it from a stylistic point of view I could say that I'm doing Muay Thai, Brazillian Jiu Jitsu and hefty chunks of freestyle and greco-roman wrestling, as well as starting into a bit of kali and continuing to do my own research into soft-skills and whatnot. Is it too much? I think the answer is an emphatic no. The common denominator in all of this, barring the kali (which I'm still uncertain about, realyl) is that irrespective of what I'm working on in a given class, it's an 'alive' training methodology that we're using.

Sayoc Kali: "All blade, all the time"

2006-08-14T14:59:00.000+01:00

Last sunday I headed down the country to a Fillipino martial arts training group run by a couple of guys who are the official representatives of the Sayoc organisation in Ireland.

Sayoc Kali is just one component of their traditional family art, although it is probably what they are best known for. Describing it in one sentence? It's an offensive-based system of working with one or more blades that has become increasingly popular in recent years. It's even made it onto TV and movie screens, most notably in Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro's 'The Hunted'.

The training offered covers the whole spectrum of anything related to blades, whether used offensively or defensively. From the basics of how to carry and how to draw, and then into the realm of looking at what the Sayocs call 'vital point templates' which provide the anatomical and structural basis for how they look at fighting with blades. How it was explained to me was that the Sayoc syllabus had pretty much evolved to the point where they had isolated everything from the minutiae of how to catch an hand containing a bade ('receiver grips) to how to integrate esoteric weapons like the tomohawk and kerambit, beyond a whole range of comparatively conventional types of knives whether folding or fixed-blade.

Sayoc trainees characteristically wear a (very expensive) training rig which simulates various carry positons and enables them to access all these various blades when appropriate in training. It reminded me somewhat of a butcher's apron. Or maybe if you've ever seen 'The Gangs of New York', then think of Bill the Butcher.

Checking out the Sayoc.com website, and based on the training group meet I attended, it does appear that this is a heavily drill-based system, which initially made me a little skeptical of how well this would gel with the aliveness methodology espoused by Matt Thornton and the SBGi organisation that I train with.

I was concerned, first of all, about the prospect of going back to a system of training which looked, on the oustide, like it was based on quite a bit of rote movement and repeat pattern. After having spent two years away from this kind of training, I dreaded going back.

After learning a couple of templates and practicing a way of 'tapping' or defending against them, however, I'm not really sure what I think one way or the other. I'm going to reserve my final opinion for a while yet.

While there is, undeniably, an element of pattern and repitition inherent in the idea of templates, as far as I can see so far, there is also a certain logic to them if you accept the idea that anatomy is more relevant in the context of blades than it is in, for example, an unnarmed striking-based martial art. A blade isn't just a blunt object to be applied to the general head area, or which will break bone in any part of the body- it needs specific entry points, and different locations will given different results in different times. As such, the idea of templates makes a certain kind of sense in that they definitley did get me thinking of specific vulnerable points as opposed to just thinking in terms of swinging at all the angles of the clock-face (which is a more traditional model found in other Fillipino arts, and in military combatives systems).

The nature of the material itself is, of course, very visceral and gritty. You definitley know you aren't in Kansas anymore the first time you hear someone calling out a vital template, which might go something like "Carotid...carotid...."blue worm"....abdominal aorta..." and so on. There is a sense that someone has put a lot of research and consideration into this. How much is modern reorganisation and how much was genuinely arrived at through trial-and-error over the course of the Sayoc family history I don't know, but either way its more cerebral than I expected.

It also seems to be the case that the Sayocs in instructor positions or at a reasonable level do pressure-test their stuff and integrate it with real timing and resistance. I've seen full-contact fighting clips of them squaring off at Dogbrothers events, and also of them practicing full-speed knife defence which looked plausible enough. At this weekend's training I didn't get far beyond the basic templates we were introducing, but I could see the more experienced portion of the class beginning to mix it up a bit with some contact and resistance. It looked messy, but alive training always does.

I guess the other inevitable question which hangs over arts like Sayoc Kali is simply- 'why?'. Why devote this time to an art that micromanages every facet of bladed combat? Not many of us are statistically likely to find themselves in a blade conflict. Or at least, the average person isn't. Someone in the police and military, you could argue, have a greater chance of exposure. But comparatively speaking, I think most of us would accept that in Ireland this is a niche area of preparation which is a few rungs down the ladder from more basic things to worry about: Like the kind of crap we're eating, and our general fitness and outlook on life.

So, I'm inclined to think that anyone who invests time in this kind of martial art does so because, whatever their protestations, they simply enjoy it. Some people think that this is evidence of some deep-seated psychological hang-up, and I have a certain amount of belief that this is true of some people who will be attracted to this kind of material.

On the other hand, I also think that some objectors are hoplophobes who have a hang-up of their own- an instinctive objection to the fact that Kali places weapons at the centre of things.

Anyway- for the moment I'm going to continue looking in Sayoc Kali and see where it takes me.

The legend of Easy company

2006-08-14T14:55:00.000+01:00

I watched the first part of 'Band of Brothers' on DVD last night (It only took me these few years!).

Last week I bought the commemorative boxed set for the bargain price of twenty-five euros in Xtravision. Not bad for a nine DVD set....

This is another impressive HBO production, and all the more impressive given the scholarly work that went into its genesis. The source material deals with real people, real sacrifices.

All the more stirring stuff, given how much the world around us at the moment bears more than a little resemblance to that of 1938.

...Those bastards get Porsches and powerboats?

2006-08-07T03:39:00.000+01:00

I saw 'Miami Vice' the day before yesterday and really really liked it.

It has, of course, almost nothing to do with the original TV show- let's emphasise that for starters. Michael Mann could have made this movie and called it practically anything. The only real crossover is that his protagonists are two Miami PD cops that happen to be called Crockett and Tubbs.

Mann has crafted a wonderfully grainy and moody film that is visually extremely beautiful. As with 'Collateral' he favours a flat, digital finish and carefully matches sound and score to visuals. Audioslave, as in 'Collateral' feature heavily. The whole movie, in a way, is more about the ambience and sense of atmosphere that Mann evokes, laid over what is really quite spartan and limited dialogue, and a bare-bones plot based around little more than the premise that Crockett and Tubbs are going deep undercover to gather intelligence.

I've read reviews criticising this as a 'Buddy buddy' movie without much 'buddy' elements in it, and lacking in the expected comedy. This, to me, misses the point, and is a projection of the viewers' expectations more than an even-handed analysis of the movie which has been delivered. Just as every review seems to kick off with an obligatory "those were the days" paragraph of nostalgia for the original series and its sockless protagonists. Sure the nail in the coffin of these expectations should have come months ago, when Mann was announced as director. Mann doesn't do jocular and feel-good. His movies are, almost without exception, about individuals who step outside of society as a whole, or their individual millieu, in order to pursue their goals. If anyone was expecting "hilarious" Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller style japes then they were always going to be let down by what Mann was going to deliver. His Crockett and Tubbs are demonstrably close-knit and interdependent in this movie, but the focus is not on teasing out their relationship but on their seperate pursuit of each's objectives: To avenge one lover, and protect another. All the while trying to avoid getting groundup in the cogs of two warring machines, US law enforcement and the superrich and superruthless Drug Cartel they have infiltrated.

'Heat', of course, is a Mann movie much loved in tactical and law-enforcement circles, and 'Miami Vice' will be judged against it closely, perhaps more so than 'Collateral', which was instantly viewed with suspicion because of its casting of Tom Cruise (who, as it turned out, can play a remarkably convincing badass, even if he is practically a dwarf). Its gunhandling and tactical savvy demonstrates an admirable level of detail and care, from Pacino's press-check of his compact 1911 in an elevator to the smooth competency of De Niro's Neil character in the final heist shootout of the movie. 'Miami Vice' places a little less emphasis on detail in terms of such matters, and although there are some wonderful visuals in the concluding firefight of the movie, there is a sense that this is closer to Hollywood reality than the brutal street reality of 'Heat'. If nothing else, in terms of the resources Tubbs and Crockett seem to have access too. Cops in designer clothes, driving sportscars and riding in powerboats to Cuba? Show me where I sign up...

If I were to criticise, I would possibly suggest that Colin Farrell looks just a little too lounge-lizard like with his ridiculous Mexican moustache and penchant for rum cocktails. I never really got the sense that someone like Gong Li's character would jump several steps down the social ladder to actually jump into bed with someone like him.

Overall, a welcome contemporary thriller from Mann, and a vindication of his maverick decision to cut free of the original material. We've had too many 'Starsky and Hutch' and 'Dukes of Hazard' disasters as it is.

Still Mann's opus, however: Heat

Titan of British fantasy dead at 57

2006-07-28T19:09:00.000+01:00

Sad news today.

David Gemmell, arguably the greatest living writer of heroic fantasy in the world, has passed on at the age of 57. He is survived by a wife and kids.

Gemmell was a tremendously popular cult novelist in the UK who had only recently, from the late 90s onwards, begun to be better known in the US. Prior to becoming a prolific author of heroic fantasy, he survived a rough childhood in London and expulsion from school for organising a gambling syndicate prior to working as a bouncer and eventually a journalist.

He wrote his first and best known work, 'Legend', during a period in which he was battling with a cancer diagnosis. It tells the story of a fortress holding at bay a horde of half a million savages, and Gemmell freely admitted the metaphorical basis for the story in terms of his own illness. It was the first of upwards of two-dozen published works, which saw him comfortably settle into the position of one of the UK's most popular professional fantasy writers.

Throughout his career, Gemmell was known for his clipped prose and spartan style. More specifically, however, he was variously criticised and lauded for using the same achetypical characters in many of his books in order to convey his central message: That evil must be directly confronted and fought by good men.

See you in Valhalla, Dave.

2006-07-20T18:24:00.000+01:00

I saw 'Superman Returns' last night, and thought it was an extremely successful movie. Especially considering it spent a huge amount of time in development hell and ultimately was in the unenviable position of having to be all things to all people.

One of traps that this movie could have fallen into was in becoming simply another summertime blockbuster aimed at the same teenage demographic as the original comic-books. Inevitably there are going to be a few people who are disgruntled at the fact that Singer has done for Superman what he did for the X-men: An intelligent re-reading of the original source material which will appeal across the board to the sorts of people who would normally have no interest in a man flying around wearing his underpants outside his trousers.

This is less of an SFX feast of action, and more of a paced, character-driven tale interspersed periodically with carefully-measured action sequences that are never superfluous.

The love-triangle between Superman, Lois and Perry White's nephew is intriguing in the sense that it presents Lois with a devil's choice: The love of an incomparably-powerful superbeing who already left her once ... or the earthbound, honorable love of James' Marsden's character. What effect on her choice the knowledge that her son is actually Superman's son will have upon her should make for interesting viewing in any sequels.

Ultimately Routh's Superman is blessedly free of adornment. He is played as a straight, uncomplicated hero- a kind of all-american hercules (the moment where he bears the Daily Planet globe gently to the earth is particularly iconic in this respect) with Jesus overtones. This latter element certainly emphasised by the excellent score, and moments of careful cinematography such as when he falls christ-like back to earth, arms splayed out as though crucified.

I'm less impressed by Kate Bosworth's Lois Lane. As the [I]Sunday Times[/I] review pointed out, it is difficult to see what Superman actually sees in her. She is not sexy, nor particularly intelligent nor resourceful. In fact, she is played as "just another self-absorbed media person", this particularly exemplified in the way she treats Clark Kent, upon his re-appearance after five years. Although there is a good argument that the Kent character is deliberately sidelined to allow for more focus on the love triangle.

Spacey's Luther? Workmanlike. He's more sadistic than the way Gene Hackman played him, but ultimately I'm not convinced that Spacey really did anything particularly clever with the character. Just another megalomaniac.

Certainly the movie has it's downsides, perhaps most notably the length. At times I felt like I was watching a mini-series shown back-to-back as opposed to a move. The Olsen character felt redundant.

Overally, however, Singer has crafted an intelligent, tremendously well-shot take on the Superman story. There are some particularly fine touches, such as the retro-opening sequence which harks back to the original movies, and throughout Singer's cinematography is top-notch.

The original movies were big hits with me and my friends when we were kids. Watching 'Superman Returns', we had just the right balance of nostalgia for the old Christopher Reeve series (which time has not really been kind to, if you re-watch them), and an appreciation for the updated Bryan Singer version.

There were plenty of references to older Superman material, some obvious, some not so much. As I mentioned previously, the opening credits and score were a deliberate evocation of the original film opening credits, to the point of being strangely retro. There were also elements of the original sets, particularly in the Lex Luthor scenes. Lex's ship's decor, and the train-set room could have been lifted straight out of the original movies (Spacey's Luthor and Hackman's Luthor obviously have the same kitsch tastes).

Less obvious, but as effective if you knew what you were looking at: Parker Posey's role, even down to the bad perm she sports early on. Routh himself, of course, served as an important bridge, in the manner in which he played the Kent role. Very different from the less clumsy, more socially adept Dean Cain and 'Smallville' Clark Kents.

I'm also led to believe that the scene in which Superman rescues Park Posey's character from a runaway car, holding it above his head, was a tribute to Superman's first ink-and-paper appearance in 'Action Comics #1'.

Something I didn't mention in my original post, which is worth pointing out, is the adept way in which they re-used old dialogue from Marlon Brando which was cut out of the original movies.

"They can be a great people, Kal-El. They wish to be... They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you, my only son..."

I gather that they can considered simply slotting Anthony Hopkins into the role of Jor-el. I'm glad they toughed it out and made Brando work.

An intelligent, thoughtful take on the Man of Steel.

More Golden Age SF

2006-07-08T23:56:00.000+01:00

Finally got around to finishing reading L. Sprague De Camp's 'A Gun for Dinosaur'. Personally, I'm not so enamoured of this as many others have been. I think there are stronger examples of "man versus dinosaur" SF. Basically, guys travel back in time to hunt king lizards. Dinosaurs eat some guys. Guys go home chastened.

A minor quibble with some of the colour Sprague tries to inject when it comes to the longarms his time-travelling hunters use: The narrator mentions that he and his clients use hunting rifles on their safaris which are capable of 'knocking dinosaurs head over heels'. Simple physics dictates that a firearm which could pick up and throw around something the size of a cow, let alone a dinosaur, is not something which a person could fire without themselves being rendered into a bloody mist by the recoil and general pressures involved.

Yes, I'm a nit-picker. This is on a par with people activating safety catches on revolvers.

I liked James H. Schmitz's 'Goblin Night' a hell of a lot more. Schmitz was one of those guys who has wrote some tremendously good golden age SF a few decades ago but never really got his moment in the sun, perhaps due to the fact that he was writing in an era where men like Heinlein were at their most prolific and powerful. His only previous work which I've read is 'The Witches of Kares', and that perhaps only because Gollancz picked it up and republished it as part of their yellowjacket series.

'Goblin Night' is very, very slick indeed.It's a sort of SF take on campfire-tale slasher horror. A teenager relaxing in a far-future national park at night detects a kind of stray psychic emanation, the last desperate thoughts of someone being pursued through the park and murdered by an unknown assailent. Shortly after she is contacted by the lone, crippled, denizen of the park. He suggests she pay him a visit, also aware that something predatory is abroad. But is he as harmless as he seems? Schmitz was unusual, given the era he was writing in, for using strong female lead characters, and 'Goblin Night's' heroine is no exception. Think Ellen Page's character in the contemporary movie Hard Candy.

---

R.I.P Jim Baen

He will be missed.

'Don't believe the hype'

2006-06-29T13:26:00.000+01:00

Finished 'Cell', by Stephen King, a few weeks back. I was fairly dissapointed in it, to be honest. While it was heralded as a return to King's horror roots, I can see little common ground between this and early classics like 'Salem's Lot' or 'Needful Things'. It's competent enough, but stirring moments are few and far between, the plot limping along to a subdued conclusion.

Something I did note about 'Cell' is that the plot is remarkably similar in many ways to an old horror novel by Simon Clark called 'Blood Crazy' ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...068823-0546036 ).

In both novels, a band of survivors face an apocalypse which comes about when the majority population become murderous flesh-eating automatons. In both books they are later established to be a sort of evolutionary hive mind. Both books cite Jung and others for the theory.

I'm not seriously suggesting 'Cell' is a rip-off of 'Blood Crazy'. After all, Clark drew his ideas from somewhere as well. However, Clark's novel is probably the more compelling of the two, for all its faults prose-wise. It has a youthful energy and spikiness that 'Cell' does not.

This is a dissapointingly retogressive step for King, considering his successful completion of 'The Dark Tower' series.

Not much like 'Mad Max'...

2006-06-09T14:11:00.000+01:00

'Earth Abides' is one of those SF novels that you hand to someone who claims to never want to read a genre novel. Then, talk to them a week later and they'll only have good things to say about it.

It's a tremendously powerful novel, and easily one of the finest studies of a collapsing, regressing, human community ever written. Full of genuine pathos and tragedy.

What makes it fairly unique in the post-apocalyptic subgenre is that it pretty much avoids all the usual "mutant biker gangs plague the earth" nonsense (which, albeit fun, has been done to death). Instead, Stewart's characters in 'Earth Abides' lead lives of quiet desperation, eking out a meagre living on their seedy farm. The main struggle the protagonist faces is that of keeping the memory of technology and science alive in the face of his offspring's total apathy towards a world they never knew.

There are some clever subtexts and byplays going on as well. Even the name of the protagonist, 'Ish', can be read as a wordplay in Hebrew and also a native american language.

Famously this is the only SF work Stewart ever wrote. As a professor of english at Berkley, I can't help but wonder how he felt about winning the first International Fantasy Award for it in 1951.

Aeon Flux

2006-06-08T13:20:00.000+01:00

Last night I rented the much-maligned Aeon Flux, starring springbok Charlize Theron.

Aside from it being a chance to spend an hour and a half watching Ms. Theron leaping around snapping necks and doing handsprings in a black catsuit, I wanted to see for myself whether or not this was the critical failure that Aeon Flux fans believed it to be.

The Korean-American creater of the avante-garde original cartoon, Peter Chung, had said in an on-line interview that seeing the movie made him feel powerless, humiliated and sad. And yet, while the movie makes significant plot adjustments and changes, it did go to great efforts to incoporate many elements and characters from the original source material (for example, a scene where Aeon captures a fly by trapping it between her closing eyelashes).

I don't think anyone seriously believed that Hollywood was going to really run with the more challenging elements of the cartoon. The conscious lack of dialog, for example, and deliberate lack of consistent plotting.

Maybe the necessity to introduce more structure necessarily entailed the film team 'making it up' where Chung left gaps. However, they do seem to have streamlined and simplified liberally. In Chung's cartoon, Aeon is an agent of Bregna, a fluid and constantly evolving anarchist society. Her lover and enemy is Goodchild, the leader of a neighbouring country which is, in contrast, organised from the top-down in a meticulous way: It resembles a hybrid between a totalitarian regime and some futurist utopia imagined by an architect like Niemeyer or Le Corbusier.

One of the differences between the film and the cartoon emerges here. For the purposes of the movie, Aeon is not the self-directed morally-ambiguous operative of the cartoon- she is reduced to being a freedom fighter operating within Goodchild's society, motivated by the classic Hollywood action-hero tragedy ("Those bastards killed my mother / sister / brother / husband / wife / dog").

Where the movie falls flat is that it simply crawls along as a story. There's no pace, no characterisation deeper than a few flashback sequences accompanied by grimaces and grunts, and frankly the revelations and twists can be seen coming from the next continent over.

It does, however, look fantastic.

Chung's cartoon is visually inspired by european artists like Moebius and hard-edged anime. The movie moves slightly away from this but retains the sleek, ultramodern aesthetic. Originally the plan was for the movie to be shot in the utopian city Brasilia, which Oscar Niemeyer created in the middle of a Brazillian jungle. When the budgeting and logistics of it proved unworkable, the production was moved to Berlin, and students of the arts will recognise constant usage of some of the city's high points. Everything from the Mexican embassy to various Bauhaus buildings.

Coupled with the stunning sets is a conscious attempt to introduce an organic theme to the technology, foods and costumes. Everything from Aeon's biotechnological array of tools and weapons to Goodchild's razor-edged grass garden defense system.

Taking in the sumptuous visuals, good cast (on paper) and compelling source material, it occassionally strikes you how good this movie could potentially have been. Once you get past the visual, however, there's a deficit ... nothing to anchor your attention or interest. A bit like meeting a tremendously good-looking girl in a bar, who turns out to have the personality and intelligence of a piece of shiny rock.

Still- we'll always have Charlize in the catsuit, right?

End of an era: Royce versus Hughes

2006-05-29T11:58:00.000+01:00

Last night Matt Hughes, fighting out of the Miletich camp, defeated the legengendary Royce Gracie in under five minutes at Ultimate Fighting Championship 60.

After some perfunctory standup where both fighters exchanged cautious kicks to the legs and some light hand strikes, Hughes closed the distance and tied Royce up, taking him to the ground and passing guard into side control at around the 3:30 mark.

Royce was largely infective on the ground, his perferred range, which is a tribute to how far along the game of non-Gracies has come in this range. As a Miletich fighter, Hughes has some of the best coaches and trainers in the world, like Pat Miletich, and Jeremy Horn. While Royce did regain half guard, Hughes was dominant through a straight armbar to the ground and pound finish that so many of us expected.

What this fight represented was an unwilling changing of the guard. This marked the end of the Gracie story in the UFC, and the MMA mindset of some old-school fight fans that being outstanding in one art (Brazillian Jiu Jitsu in this case) was enough for the modern game.

Hughes definitively proved it isn't.

His superlative clinch and takedown skills never effected the painful slam as a prelude to ground and pound that a lot of people expected, but they were part of the reason he was able to seemingly pass Royce's guard at will, and even on the ground he showed another layer: Getting a straight-arm submission on a submissions expert before finally opting back into his preferred mode as someone who utilises ground and pound to end the fight.

The short of it: Styles are not longer a useful benchmark in talking about the readiness or ability of a competitor. Today, they are either a complete fighter and athlete, or they are unprepared.

"We have learned that the sport has definintley evolved. And the only way people are going to get it is if people see a legend like Royce Gracie get in the ring. He risked the Gracie mystique."

Randy Couture

[Check out Youtube.com for a five-minute video of the fight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MTdthB6YIk&search=Gracie%20Hughes]

Mashed potato on a hot dog? Welcome to Goteborg...

2006-05-07T22:19:00.000+01:00

So, I'm fresh off the plane from a weekend in Goteborg visiting an old friend.

(Anna is a very cool, laid-back saintly hippie chick who likes to travel and generally be at one with the world ... although she may want to throw me through a plate-glass window when she reads that)

Anna modelling some 5.2% Falcon beer in the graveyard near her appartment

As I was saying to the sucker .... er... pal .... who gave me a lift from the airport, it will take some time to unpack my experience and get a handle on it. I went over right in the middle of a busy period at work, and I was kind of juggling stuff here right up until the point I got on the plane. The result was that I more or less stepped out of uniform and into civvie clothes on the streets of Sweden.

Anna rather immediately picked out the fact that I was a little ill-at-ease because I'm not good at being dependant on someone else for even the most basic communications. Not speaking swedish sucks when you're in sweden! Happily they all speak english, and don't really seem to mind dusting it off and putting it to use. Even the drunk Goteborg derby supporters in the toilets of the King's Head (Which does a pretty good selection of English ales at around 44 krona in addition to cheap 'Stora Stark' (spelling?) at a little over half that).

Anyway, I basically had a fantastic time. Nice people, good food, interesting sights ... and the weather was pretty kick-ass as well. I didn't really expect the heat, which necessitated a quick trip to H & M on day two to buy some shorts and flip-flops (I was sick of cooking inside my jeans).

Those crazy swedes have their bright moments. Aside from manafacturing some of the best pop music in the world (not to mention giving us probably the best-looking women ever), they also come up with fiendishly good stff like the halvspecial : Surely one of the greatest drinking-session snacks ever invented by mortal man. Take one hot dog, and add mashed potato on top. Ingenious. Trust me when I say it soaks up a lot of beer and hits the spot. The fact that its a bizarro combination of foods is tempered by the fact that if you're eating it then you're probably already drunk, in which case you're really not going to care one way or the other.

There's stuff I'm leaving out. The archipelago of islands we trekked out to off the coast of Goteborg. Eating some of best falafel anywhere in the world and then dangling our legs over a medievil mote / canal. Pondering the finer points of pop-kids versus rockers. Listening to Damien Dempsey and unheard-of Swedish bands....

In another post, maybe.

Ring of Truth

2006-04-30T14:37:00.000+01:00

Awesome fight card in the National stadium last night. Pictured above is Owen Roddy in the clinch versus his opponent Tim Murphy. I know how hard Owen prepared for this fight, and he did himself serious justice, looking dominant in all three ranges. Tim had a good second round and managed to cut Owen high on the heard, which raised the disturbing possibility of the doctor stepping in. However, the fight continuied and Owen won by K.O in the third round, with a punishing knee.

Also last night another fighter from the gym, Arni Issakson, was victorious by decision. He was cool as a cucumber throughout his fight, implaccable as a rock.

I'm a bit biased as they fight out of where I train, but it was good to see the work these two warriors put in pay off.

Four-kilometre long alien beings, rough men with heavy weapons ... and a psychotic android playing with a small rubber dog

2006-04-18T23:45:00.000+01:00

Recently we've seen a growing awareness that British SF is undergoing something of a renaissance. Guys like Iain M. Banks and Peter F. Hamilton are obvious players in this, who are shifting huge amounts of their work. But there are others, like Neal Asher, who are successfully putting their work out there as well.

When Asher began posting at the excellent forum on http://www.sffworld.com , it worked as a very effective reminder that I needed to finally get hold of the first book in his Ian Cormac sequence, Gridlinked. While I understand that earlier material of his has been published, this seemed like the best place to start.

Gridlinked, it must be acknowledged, owes a heavy debt to a variety of SF authors, and indeed Asher has mentioned "standing on the shoulders of giants" in interviews. However, while it arguably treads very familliar ground, evoking Iain M. Banks, Asimov, Dan Simmons, Ridley Scott's Bladerunner and similar, Asher certainly demonstrates that he is more than a journeyman author, and by the end of Gridlinked I think it would be fair to say I was a convert. The approach Asher takes, heavy on splatterpunk ultra-violence and adventure, actually works well as a corollary to some of his more thoughtful contemporaries. Perhaps in the way that John Steakley's Armor can be read, several decades on, as a good adjunct to Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

Gridlinked is set in a far-future human society where travel is near-instantaneous, even across huge spans of space, thanks to 'runcible' technology. A benevolent central government administers to humanity, though with minority dissent and resistance from seperatist groups. In order to combat these and other internal threats (and handle whatever external threats present themselves, presumably) there exist 007-esque agents such as Ian Cormac.

Cormac has been 'gridlinked' for upwards of a couple of decades, giving him almost god-like powers of information access and instantaneous contact with the administering Artificial Intelligences of the Polity, and has served as an investigator and all-round troubleshooter and special envoy for longer than that. The result being that somewhere along the way, he's forgotten a lot of what it means to be human. At the opening of the novel, his handlers put him on the trail of whoever or whatever was behind the case of a sabotaged runcible which resulted in the death of 10,000 polity citizens. Cormac is simultaneously stripped of his gridlinked facility, in an attempt to salvage his personality and humanity. He doesn't just have the toughest case of his career on his hands, but he's also going cold-turkey, grappling with his dependency on gridlinking and atrophied interpersonal skills.

A foreign-edition cover of 'Gridlinked'. What's notable is that the UK versions use a very unsual single-piece cover which only becomes apparent when the book is held open and turned on its side. Like a little mini-poster, or a folded-out CD sleeve.

Asher arrays against Cormac a rogue's gallery from his past- an ominous four-kilometre long behemoth alien called Dragon which blurs the line between flesh and machine, an insane vengence-crazed seperatist leader ... and perhaps most memorably, the android enforcer, Mr. Crane. Crane has, we learn, been broken to insanity by means of being directly linked to the mind of a psychotic murderer. The result is a serial-killing android two and a half-metres tall whose party trick is to hand people upside down with one brass hand while the other guts them. His unpredictability also extends to the seemingly whimsical- his fondness for 'collecting' little knick-nacks like ... er... small rubber dogs, and binoculars.

Another cover variant. Something vaguley Metal Gear Solid about this one, no ?

Not much else to say, beyond that I've now got to squeeze in the time to read the rest of Asher's catalogue. Shouldn't take a tremendous amount of time: His clipped, spartan prose goes down extremely easily. I don't want to say this is light reading (it isn't, necessarily...). But all the elements that Asher appears to value in his SF, I agree with. And when you're on the same wavelength as an author, you're not grappling for understanding- you're just sitting back enjoying the ride.

This is good stuff. Hook youself up to the grid...

SF short fiction from the Golden Age

2006-04-07T22:49:00.000+01:00

Just recently I realised that I don't read enough short fiction, particularly SF short fiction.

Depending on who you ask, the SF golden age runs from the late 1930s or so onto some indeterminate date. During that time a tremendous amount of the authors that we now know as prolific novelists cut their teeth by publishing shorts. And aside from them, a hell of a lot of guys published absolute gems and then slowly vanished away quietly. Jim Baen makes the point that if you look back over the catalogue of great short SF, a lot of it is written by people who you've probably never heard of.

To kick off I'll mention one of them: Rick Raphael, whose story 'Code 3' is included in that Baen anthology I keep mentioning, 'Worlds turned upside down' (all of the stories included in it are hand-picked by Eric Flint, Jim Baen and David Drake, which makes for a dynamite list).

'Code 3' chilled me, because I hate heavy traffic with a passion. This is the story of a future where north america's giant motorways are so out-of-control that they need a special corps of elite paramilitaries to police it. They drive sixty foot long tanks that come equipped with 25mm canons, cranes and full medical suites for the inevitable victims of sideswipes, crashes and road rage.

The story follows the three-person team of Car 56 as it sets out on its southbound eleven month tour of duty. Its crew will spend ten days at a time between debriefings and repairs at waystations along the way. We are introduced to the car's sergeant, his junior partner and its pretty half-cherokee, half-irish medic. There's something slightly voyeuristic about the fact that we see them when they're working, when they're fighting, when they're eating and maybe this is what lets Raphael build up a sense of intimacy with the characters so quickly.

Raphael fuses graphic crash sequences with chases and shootouts in a remarkably short space of a couple dozen pages. There's emergency medicine here long before an episode of ER, and desperate jury-rigged rescues reminscent of 'Third watch'. Like both those shows, however, the real genius of the story is how the action is juxtaposed with the private lives of the crew, and 'Code 3' has a very subtly handled "will they, won't they?" romantic subplot which is left deliciously unresolved.

Also today:'Black Destroyer' by A.E Van Vogt, which reminds me of the Carpenter version of "The Thing" in a way. A future exploratory team lands on a desolated planet where a once-thriving civillisation appears to have vanished slowly and for no obvious reason. Lurking in the ruins is the 'black destroyer' of the title, a seeminly immortal predator who lives to feed on 'id beings'. Did the old civilisation vanish ... or were they slowly devoured one by one?

Vogt wrote this as a potboiler horror SF, and it works very well. The titular beast is a curious mix of savage animal and cunning megalomaniac. Over the countless years of its existance it has regressed and slowly forgot its knowledge of science, but with the presence of the humans stimulating it, the creature begins to gradually remember what it has forgotten, and a terrible ambition to travel in space and find more id beings to feed upon is born....

Not as compelling to me as 'Code 3', but this is still a very nice monster-of-the-week effort.

---

Reading these old stories, it really strikes me that there's a solid argument that these guys 'did it all' in their day. More to come.

Max and Jim

2006-04-04T00:11:00.000+01:00

Tonight I watched Cinderella Man, Ron Howard's not-terribly-successful boxing biopic starring Russell Crowe (something of an impromptu pugilist in real life, his favourite opponents being kiwi millionaires in toilets) and Renee Zellwegger.

(Admittedly, its hard to see Crowe put his hands up anymore without instantly thinking of him "fightin' round the world" a la Southpark....)

I'd put this in the 'serious' movie category, however.

My buddy Cormac recommended it, and one scene stuck out in his mind: A bit where the former contender, James J. Braddock, must 'hold out his hand' and beg money off his former coterie of managers and promoters in order to pay to have the electricity and heat restored to his cramped slum appartment. See, Braddock has three kids, and if there's no heat, then they've got to be packed off to stay with relations. It's a painful scene to watch, no doubt. There is real pathos and emotion there.

Braddock was the human equivalent of 'Seabiscuit', if you like. He was the depression-era comeback story who went from the breadline to champion boxer against the odds. Like 'Seabiscuit', this was a boxer who on paper was finished in the same way that Seabiscuit should have been a non-starter as a racehorse after being badly injured. Too old, carrying too many injuries, and facing opposition not just younger but also superior technically and physically.

Always a journeyman fighter, Braddock was no more than a contender when he the depression hit and he simultaneously badly injured his hand. Breaking it a number of times, he was to suffer arthritis from that point onwards. Not a good thing, considering that the stockmarket crash hit Braddock pretty badly. While not exactly sinking to depths depicted in 'Cinderella Man', Braddock was reduced to working as a longshoreman on the docks, and he did have to take government money to keep his head above water.

Is it moving when we watch Braddock fight through fifteen rounds against the then-champion, Max Baer, to win the title?

Sure, course it is. But as usual, Hollywood hasn't quite told us the whole story.

Braddock is a hero worth lauding. Not just an old-skool boxer with a heart of iron, he went on to serve honorably in WWII and generally seems to have been a stand-up guy. While beaten by Joe Lois, losing the title, he went on to fulfill his wish to end his career with a win by stepping into the ring a number of years later with the Welsh boxer Tommy Farr, who he defeated. Many boxing hacks who watched the fight regarded the last two rounds in that fight as the finest of Braddock's career. And, as usual, he came from behind to win.

But you know, Braddock is only half the story in the last half of Howard's movie.

His opponent, Max Baer, is depicted as a hulking psychopath. Howard goes to pains to illustrate him as a brute. We see him beating his opponent in the ring with a rictus of a snarl on his face. Then we see him telling women to shut up. Oh yeah, he insults Braddock's wife for good measure, and I think at one point he implies Braddock takes pipe (surely not!).

Hollywood likes its bad guys to be bad. And the Braddock story works all the better on the screen because it has a goblin for Jim to fight off.

Thing is, the real Max Baer wasn't such a bad guy. In fact, he was arguably as interesting as Braddock himself, and a good bit more misunderstood. Though he did kill an early opponent by hitting him so hard that he detached his brain from its connective tissue, this haunted him and he would weep for decades afterward according to his son, Max jnr. Baer spiralled into a black depression following the death, even though he was cleared of manslaughter (a terrifying thing in an of itself to face, even with the defense of it being a legitimate boxing bout).

Another legend and very interesting guy, Jack Dempsey, took Baer under his wing and Baer came back and eventually took the championship. Throughout he fed purses to the widow of the man he had killed, and put his children through college. Hardly the actions of the ogre that Howard made him out to be.

In 1933, Max Baer fought his namesake, Max Scmeling. Schmeling wasn't a nazi (that's a story for another day), but nevertheless it was significant that Baer, who was half-jewish, took him out. Baer did it with a star of david embroidered on his shorts, and that star was there in every fight after that.

I gather that Baer wasn't actually raised jewish, but rather catholic, in his mother's faith. But his sticking it to Schmeling was a tremendously important event, and is a story worth telling in and of itself. Frankly, Howard does his good name a disservice. Though in 'Cinderella Man' Baer fights with that golden star on his trunks, that aspect of Baer's life is never discussed or hinted at.

Frankly, that's a hell of a shame.

Nice threads but your conditioning has taken a hit

2006-03-27T23:02:00.000+01:00

That's what I was saying to myself tonight about midway through my second BJJ class tonight. It was my first night back to the gym after giving myself a week off to let my tattoo finish healing. The week before that, work meant I didn't make it down either ... and the week before that I think I worked too.

Its surprising how much conditioning you can lose in that space of time. Normally when I don't train at the gym I'm running and doing my bodyweight exercise routines. But the past fortnight I think I slacked off more than I have at any time in the past six months. A few half-hearted runs and I was pretty nice to myself cranking out sets of pushups, squats, bootstrappers and crunches. Maybe some of it is also a mental thing- a loss of momentum, the body groaning a bit about the prospect of being made to work hard again.

All the same, it was a good class, and conditioning aside I benefited alot from having the chance to roll with a few blue and purple belts. I managed to hang for a good while with a (new, I think) blue, gaining north-south position, losing it, regaining it and generally doing alright until inevitably I went for the submission and instead got picked off with a nice trick involving faking going for an armbar and instead snapping on a scissors choke. I gather that scissors chokes used to be a regular favourite technique of really really old skool wrestlers, but it isn't really a big part of anyone's game these days. Anyway- it worked well enough on me this time. A little while after that I rolled with a purple, and didn't really get passed trying to pass his guard. It was like hitting a metaphorical brick wall, he just methodically walked me into an armbar. I don't mind tapping, as long as I'm learning, though (and I was).

The 'nice threads' I mentioned was gear from Sprawl which I ordered a few weeks ago. A really warm black hoody covered in their yellow logo (for lovely Irish springs), and more importantly: A pair of their V-flex fight shorts, which are the latest incarnation of their long-running line of probably the best fight shorts in the business (Barring perhaps Nogi, who are snapping at their heels). The V-flex shorts have a plethora of special design elements:-

Most obviously, they are made of about 20% stretch material, and this is used for a 'v' of pannelling which runs along the inside leg of the shorts, and the crotch. Basically, this is going to stop you tearing the ass out of your shorts if someone has you stacked up, or you are squatting or whatever. The rest of the shorts are nylon and have a bit of stretch in them as well, just in case. The stitching is triple-stiching to boot.
There's a little pocket on the inside of the hip which is supposed to hold your iPod or a mouthguard. Excellent thinking.
I ordered the V-flex with the optional split-seam leg. This means that you can kick really explosively above the waist, and this feature combined with the stretch material means that there is little chance of you ever tearing the shorts. I don't think you could manage it if you tried, as long as the shorts were sized properly.

Pretty nice stuff.

Sure, you won't roll any better just because you're wearing some nice fight shorts ... But the point of the Sprawls if you ask me is that you have about the most comfortable and durable training gear that you can get, making it all the easier to concentrate on learning and having fun.

For Sprawl products: http://www.sprawl.tv

Winning versus surviving

2006-03-27T01:27:00.000+01:00

I'm about two chapters into 'Train to Win' by Wes Doss, which I came across just browsing.'Train to win' is a compact book on the dynamics of force-on-force training, sort of an overview not unlike Ken R. Murray's 'Training at the speed of life'. I'm only a few chapters in so can't comment on the book as a whole, but there's definitley food for thought in it.

A really interesting concept he mentions at the outset, for example, is of promoting the desirability of mentally fixating on winning as opposed to merely surviving. Doss advocates the cultivation of what he refers to as 'the winning mind' and suggests that investing in the term 'survival' and 'survivor' is not necessarily a good thing. Its counterintuitive, but he has an interesting argument.

...we [instructors] must stop emphasizing survival and start preaching winning.
Throughout our lives from childhood to our adult years, we all have experience
with winning and losing, and all but a very few individuals hate to lose. On the
other hand, the greatest experience most individuals have with survival comes
from history lessons involving shipwrecks, natural disasters, and other such
involuntary situations. These history lessons are the earliest and most profound
mental images of survival for most people, this is a highly significant factor
when dealing with high stress situations, considering the proven power of the
mind and its ability to accept suggestion.

When something as important as our lives or the lives of others are at stake,
should we prepare to accept our occupations as on-going efforts to merely
survive? Reallistically, if survival was the hinge pin to the equation then
wouldn't finding a different line of work be a better solution?

I think he's on to something. It is more than just a matter of semantics, as Doss correctly points out the impact that positive or negative mental self-talk can have on our performance. While I'm not sure we can comfortably generalise about what the word 'survival' triggers in everyone's mind, I think it is difficult to dispute that the notion of 'winning' is synonymous with traits we'd almost always regard as desirable.

Better living through 154CM steel ...

2006-03-17T17:02:00.000Z

A few months ago I became aware of a company called Grayman knives.

They offer no-frills affordable knives for military and law enforcement. It's more or less a one-man show, with the owner Mike making the knives in his spare time. If some of the designs look vaguely familliar, it's probably because variations on them have been offered in the past through companies like Strider and Mercworx.I corresponded with Mike and found him a really good guy to deal with.

Around this time he had just started offering a pair of concealable back-up fixed blades called the Dinka and mini-Dinka, both single-bevel spearpoints. After discussing how the Dinka would make an excellent knife for drawpoint and general utility stuff (drawpoint is in fact one of things Mike had in mind), I ordered both.

They arrived a couple of weeks ago, after a minor delay which resulted from the order not being shipped while Mike was overseas. Mike offered to let me have one of the knives for free, which I thought was damn nice of him. I didn't take him up on his generous offer.

They were shipped with simple kydex sheaths and belt loops. The fit is pretty good, more so on the mini-dinka, perhaps with a view towards neck-carry with this knife.The knives themselves are extremely tough little brutes, 3/16" of an inch thick and in 154CM. Mine are around an inch and a half wide, very sturdy spearpoints. The handles are micarta in both cases, and are grinded for comfort around the choils. Beyond that, though, there's precious little unecessary embellishment on these knives, they are very much geared towards hard use.

I would imagine someone into art knives or who wants very high production standards in an aesthetic sense would probably be horrified by them in some ways. The only caveat I would have is that the micarta is a little sharp in places, and I might file it down in places to facilitate a bit of a more comfortable grip.

I would re-emphasise is that for their size these are extremely durable, weighty little knives. Both work well in conventional forward and reverse grips, and came with good working edges as opposed to coming shave-the-hair-of-your-arm sharp. I quite like the bare-bones design of them, they are set up to do everything you probably need a piece of sharpened steel to do, and economical in the sense that work on them finished at that point.

Graymanknives were pleasant to deal with and I wouldn't hesistate to recommend them to someone looking for affordable hard-use knives.

The right stuff

2006-03-06T00:54:00.000Z

I'm breaking my 'no politics' rule again, in order to post this link to footage of Arab-American psychologist debating an Islamic cleric on Al Jazeera. Actually, the 'Islamic cleric' is probably more accurately described as an Algerian Jihadist, according to web sources.

Its a somewhat one-sided debate, after side-lining the Al Jazeera presenter, she goes through the other interviewee like a buzz-saw, and he's reduced to calling her a heretic and a blasphemer. Something tells me she won't be going home to cry into her pillow.

Click here to see the footage

Fairbairn's legacy

2006-03-04T16:59:00.000Z

[I wrote the following as a series of posts in a discussion for a bulletin board, but thought it might be worth compiling and sticking up here. Writing it sort of clarified in my own mind where I think the Fairbairn tradition contrasts with the direction training for mil / police people has gone, lately.]

W.E Fairbairn, Bill Sykes and Pat O'Neill (from Cork incidentally) were mainly influential in police and military circles, as opposed to the civilian martial arts community. Lately, however, WW2 combatives have really become something of a phenomenon on the internet. It seems like every second RBSD advocate regards Fairbairn as a personal influence, several decades after his death.

There were various big names who taught unnarmed combat material to the military prior to or at the same time as Fairbairn. Going back to WWI, for example, there was Drexel Biddle who taught a system based on a lot of physical conditioning, jiu-jitsu, boxing and savate. Ironically, Biddle's training methods would probably thought of far more highly than Fairbairn's by a lot of people on this board, as he was a huge proponent of athleticism and sporting methods to increase self-confidence and fighting spirit. During WWII, there were a number of other instructors, even Jack Dempsey got in on the act and taught the US Coast Guard a programme based on dirty boxing.

Why do we remember Fairbairn, and why do countless people reference him instead of ... say ...Biddle?

When Fairbairn was in Shanghai, he distilled the traditional martial arts he was doing (mostly kodokan judo, some chinese stuff) and created a system called Defendu that contained lots of small joint locks and throws as well as striking techniques. This police self defence system formed the bedrock of what was taught in pretty much every system taught to police in the west for the past seventy years. Even today, Gardai learn thumblocks, goose-neck locks and hammerlocks which owe a lot to Fairbairn's study of traditional japanese jujutsu. Then, as WWII began, he produced the Get Tough! syllabus which is devoid of all the locking and control techniques. Just a handful of striking techniques using the heel of the hand, edge of the boot and similar. Right up until he died, postwar in Cyprus, he continued to teach his various programmes, and they became progressively more and more stripped down (which is the opposite to what happens with most systems). He was able to codify his syllabus for each situation, and then get it adopted. I think there must have been a snowball effect, in some ways. He was hired for Shanghai because of military experience ... then hired for WWII teaching positions because of Shanghai ... Then postwar, had his pick of positions because of WWII ... It never really ended.

In police circles Fairbairn is not just remembered for his H2H stuff, however. He is widely credited with being the guy who invented the idea of the SWAT or emergency response team, as he set up the 'Shanghai Municipal Police Reserve team' when he was in Shanghai. Likewise, he pioneered extensive close quarter shooting methods and found ways to pressure test them on the range which were considered highly innovative and daring for the time. Rather gruesomely, he is also infamous for using cadavers to test the effects of various types of ammunition on the human body.

That's the rosey side of it. But does it mean we should all step back in time and train like our grandfather's generation did?

One of the main arguments from his adovcates is that we should look seriously at this stuff because it is 'battle-tested'. Well, a lot of martial arts claim that. So where's the documented proof? Erm... There isn't much, really. While Fairbairn codified his syllabus during a time of war (some of it, anyway ... leaving out the Shanghai-era stuff for the moment), no one actually went around afterwards documenting how well it worked out. Beyond Fairbairn, maybe. We do not have empirical proof that his instruction helped allied agents who were dropped into France to survive. We don't even really have any proof that it was a better training methodology than whatever other powers at the time were using (we just know it stood the test of time better).

I think that fixating on what Fairbairn and others achieved during WWII and in the run-up to it is to ignore some of the major directions that training has taken in the decades afterward. Leaving aside the civillian martial arts industry for the moment, I would point out that in military and police circles, pretty much any serious programme at the moment revolves around 'force on force' training, which is pretty much the antithesis of the combatives idea of training dirty blows unsafe to use full-power on a human partner, or training to 'beat on the opponent like a sack of potatoes'. The current US army H2H programme, for example, is based around a programme of Brazillian Jiu-jitsu. In policing, some of the most cutting edge programmes like ISR Matrix and Arrestling are based on greco roman / freestyle wrestling and grappling.

I think we should admire Fairbairn for what he achieved in his day ... but the world has moved on since then.

It might be interesting to do a visual comparison of some of the stuff we're talking about.First, some clips of WWII combatives:-

Footage of edge of hand blows, chin jabs and targets demonstrated in slow motion

Fairbairn in a Lone Ranger mask demonstrating combatives

Both of the above were filmed for propoganda purposes more than anything else, but they are indicative of some of the techniques favoured. For the sake of completeness, here are a pair of Carl Cestari clips, who teaches currently:-

Cestari teaching strike to groin followed by elbow

Cestari teaching edge of hand blows drill on BOB

Bayonet training

This above is a clip of Biddle's bayonet system, which I think is actually far more impressive. It was the US marine programme, and had nothing to do with Fairbairn's group. About halfway through this clip, there is an explanation of how their approach to bayonetry is based on boxing. The instructor does a little shadow boxing and then has a bayonet and rifle put in his hands to show that (as we might understand it) the delivery system is the same.

Now, let's look at some contemporary approaches not in the Fairbairn tradition. Unfortunately I couldn't find any clips of the US army BJJ-style combatives programme, but the following are geared towards police agencies.

ISR Matrix sample clip 1

ISR Matrix sample clip 2

Tony Blauer clips

The ISR matrix clips kind of speak for themselves and have cropped up before. I included the Tony Blauer clips even though they are more orientated towards selling his 'High Gear' protective outfits because they also demonstrate some of his training methods, which are athetlically-based and heavily MMA influenced. His programmes for the police and military are very similar to what you see in the clip, except his guys train wearing their duty belts or in full webbing with all their gear.

I agree that goals of programmes like these probably remain pretty similar since Fairbairn's time (train a lot of people safely, in a limited time, and taking into account that what they learn needs to integrate with firearms, contact weapons and whatever control and restraint devices they are using). However, the training methods used to accomplish those goals seem vastly different to me. These days 'force on force' pressure testing is in, whereas the nature of Fairbairn's syllabus was such that it involved hitting dummies or practicing slowly with a partner (this remains the case today, hence the popularity of those BOB plastic dummies with combatives people).

In summary, Fairbairn is a pivotal figure in the history of the last century from a close quarter battle and combatives perspective. With that said, his work is best understood in the context and parameters within which he taught, and we must be wary of lionising his approach as universally relevant today.

Two of the best

2006-03-03T22:33:00.000Z

Sipping some 17 year old Bowmore as I type this. Its not as astringent or peaty as a lot of Islay malts. An Ardbeg is positively iodine-flavoured in comparison with this much more gently smoky after dinner whiskey. I say after dinner, but really its a good all-rounder that would be fit for bringing out on any occassion.

I've matched that with one of the crispest, most high quality lagers on the market these days: Tyskie, the gold medal winning Polish lager. Proof that our Polish brethren provide us not just with some of the most beautiful women in Dublin these days, but also some of our best beers.

Black day

2006-02-26T00:38:00.000Z

This blog was never intended to inlcude posts on my work. Or on politics.

But I cannot overlook the disgusting events of today. Maybe I'm naive, but I've having trouble getting my head around the fact that we have people in this state willing to riot and tear the heart out of our capital city, and score a political own-goal in the process. Maybe its because today was more about thuggery and opportunism than anything remotely connected with legitimate political protest or civil action.

These pictures are from independent photographers, or from Dublin's CCTV cameras. I culled them from the web. As you might imagine, I was otherwise occupied today, and taking pictures was a luxury I could not afford.

I'm too angry to write more.

The public order squad advancing, but hampered by a lack of numbers during the initial phase of the rioting

The ambulance service brave missiles from rioters to treat an injured Garda

Safe parts of the city centre were littered with empty Garda vehicles which came in from outside stations, their occupants dispersed to flash points

Smoke bombs, petrol bombs and a building site full of ammunition for the thugs

The material aftermath. But what will the political fallout be?

Cinema folly

2006-02-24T23:41:00.000Z

This movie has been universally slammed in all the reviews I glanced at. Frankly, when there is almost universal consensus that a movie is worth two stars at best, that warns most people off.

Not me.

I have this in-built ability to dumb-down at will. Possibly not unlike the ability of certain farm animals to sleep standing up, I'm capable of watching a movie with the part of my brain that governs 'taste' almost completely switched off.

Note that I say 'almost'. Even I have limits, and a true stinker remains a true stinker. But maybe its just the fact that a big big screen is involved, but I can usually glean some pleasure from even a crap film when I see it in a cinema.

(mild spoilers ahead...)

This re-make of a John Carpenter classic is kind of borderline. It did get me a little enthused once or twice, but broadly speaking I would need to be very drunk if I was going to sit through it again. Look- I can't honestly think of a reason why anyone needed to dig up Carpenter's original and decide that what we really really needed was to do it all over again with a few B-list TV bimbos (Tom Welling is a bimbo).

Oh, and Selma Blair. Who we can only assume must have gotten lost and wandered onto the set by accident. Pick up the phone and fire your agent, Selma. Then hire a friendly golden retriever to do the job, it couldn't do any worse.

Maggie Grace beat out her 'Lost' co-star Emilie De Ravin for the role of 'blond chick who looks really good in wet clothes or walking around in panties'. Can't fault the casting there, though, the girl has the goods. Reminds me of a more wooden version of Emma Caulfield, though.

Occassionally there are some marginally interesting shots of the titular fog moving in towards the island, or pressing malevolently against windows. This gradually gives way to some sort of ghostly fade effect when the spectres the fog holds are finally revealed. Not too shabby, but as usual, there were moments instead of thinking 'wow, ghosts', you're thinking 'wow, CG ghosts'.

Dialog? Rubbish. Acting? Mediocre to extremely poor. Ridiculous horror cliches? Yes. Predictable ending? Hell yes! Are there worse ways to spend eight or nine euro (or whatever the equivalent in sterling is...)? Dunno, guess everyone will have to decide that for themselves.

I reckon they could have done with playing up the leprosy more. Maybe someone could come up with a good drinking game for next time I have to watch this. Barring that, the best thing about it was that it reminded me to go check out the original movie again.

Back to the grindstone...

2006-02-24T13:59:00.000Z

This week was pretty disruptive, from a training perspective. There's an inevitable clash between your training, diet and the expectation people have of you when you socialise. On Saturday night I had my brother's surprise going-away party, on Monday night I had a night out with my unit from work and on Wednesday I went to the Jack Johnson concert in the Point Depot.

Result: Taken individually, they were really pleasant nights out. Taken together: A lot of drink taken, sleep lost, comparatively bad food eaten and training sessions missed.

I'm not bitching, per say. I wouldn't have missed my bro's going away party for anything. Likewise Monday and Wednesday were good chances to catch up with people outside of work.

But I could feel myself suffering on the two short runs I squeezed in this week. Dehydrated ... a little tired ...

Time to get back to the gym and back out doing roadwork.

There's no other route to healthiness, mental or physical.

Early one morning while making the rounds / I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down ...

2006-02-15T18:59:00.000Z

I'm a colossal Johnny Cash fan, let me say that from the outset.

When I was a kid our house was always full of country music, and Cash's 'Live at Folsom prison' was the first country album where I let myself admit that my old dad had some taste in music after all. He actually met the great man twice, once backstage at a show in Belfast, and again when he knocked on Cash's front door in Nashville (Cash gave him a keyring that said 'House of Cash' that time, but it was later knicked at yet another country gig).

Probably got most of the Cash back-catalogue at this stage, and I even enjoy some of his work that others write off as the weaker stuff ... Material he recorded in the 80s when he was deeply unfashionable, and before his career renaissance beginning from the Viper Room in L.A.If anyone has read Johnny's autobiography, they will know what a tough job Joaquin Phoenix had in front of him. Cash was a snaggle of paradoxes: Old time preacher man, deeply flawed recovering alcholic and junkie, soulful singer and probably one of the finest singer songwriters even to come out of the 20th century. He was also so deepy idiosyncratic that if Phoenix got it wrong, if his 'Cash' persona didn't ring true ... then it was always going to be painfully obvious.

Overall, I think he made more than a good attempt at it. Phoenix always had that slightly sweaty, flushed and decadent look, and that was perfect for the role, as the movie deals with the early years of Cash's addictions and pursuit of June Carter. Singing for real, he sounds plausible enough (albeit only as a shadow of the real thing).Reese Witherspoon was sweet, and captures something of June Carter's notorious strength of will. The fact that Witherspoon is a real-life mother of a young family probably also helped with the role.

Its not a perfect movie. Broadly speaking it has received the seal of approval from his family and from friends like Kris Kristofersson. But at the same time this is only one take on it, and I'd encourage people to read more widely to see other pieces of the puzzle. Maybe in the future we'll have another movie from someone else dealing with the rest of his career and his phenomenonal achievments in his last years.

At the moment his loss is too fresh, but if anyone deserves to have his whole story told, its Johnny Cash.

Vintage!

2006-02-12T21:43:00.000Z

I'm drinking medal-winning Strong Suffolk vintage ale as I write this.

At the best of times, ale is much maligned in popular culture. Its made fun of as a flat, old fashioned drink for even older men. The reality is, of course, that ales have long been produced with some of the finest ingredients in the world, and from a [i]taste[/i] perspective, their being served at a lower temperture is a boon. In fact, this was the basis for a series of adverts for Hobgoblin ale (fine stuff) a while back which asked the question "Whatsamater, lager boy ... afraid you'll taste something?".

The idea of a'vintage' ale probably baffles the casual drinker. When it comes to whiskey or wine we're mostly educated to the fact that the ageing process is natural and desirable. This isn't usually the case with beer, and there's a perception that the fresher a batch it is, the better.

If that means there's all the more Suffolk vintage left on the shelves for me, then I'm a happy man. Its a rich ruby-red colour, almost like claret, with a fruity, spicey nose. The nose is, in fact, slightly comparable to Abbot Ale, and indeed both are regarded as excellent accompaniments to food. The Suffolk, in fact, is also recommended as an accompaniment to mature cheese. I didn't go so far as this, but I did have a bowl of stilton and broccoli soup for tea, not long before opening my ale.

In general, beer or ale is a better acompaniment to a meal than wine is, if it is well-chosen. A far better companion, indeed, than is wine, as has recently been in the papers after a study. Try telling that to your average so-called foodie, however ...

Anyway. The Suffolk is a hefty 6.0% (thats three units), but is incredibly easy to drink. There's a certain toffee sweetness to it that is quite deceptive, in fact.

Thoroughly recommended. And another nail in the coffin of the idea that british food and drink is rubbish.

Seminar 101

2006-02-07T00:57:00.000Z

The Matt Thornton seminar has come and gone, and it was a hell of a learning experience. Experience enough, in fact, that it even motivated me to come back to my blog and pick it up again. Maybe this blog, being partially a training diary, can be part of the introspective process that Matt advocates as a part of boosting your game.

In a purely technical sense nine hours or so of training over two days equates to a lot of mat-time squeezed in together. That's the amount of time I might spend in the gym over the course of two and a half weeks, and there's something different about coming in and doing two hours and then fucking off in comparison with coming in to a seminar where you really feel like you're going to focus and take whatever you can (because you're paying through the nose for it, and the coach has travelled a couple of thousand miles to be there).

Honestly, Matt Thornton himself was pretty much what I expected based on the clips I've seen of him talking about his coach philosophy and philosophy on 'aliveness'. Likewise a lot of us follow his two blogs, and the guerilla blog in personal is really quite personal reading and I can't think offhand of many coaches who write so prolifically on so many issues as Matt does. When I say he was what I expected, thats a good thing. He was just as articulate and thoughtful in person as he comes across through his work. Laid back, but definitley a deep thinker, not just about the sport he coaches, but about life in general.

Over the course of the two days of the seminar he covered a lot of material, but pretty much just fundamentals (a relief to me). He commented that functional martial arts really only had fundamentals to teach, that a beginner performed them badly, an intermediate person performed them competently, and an expert performed them with a high degree of competency. The question then becomes how do you train those fundamentals in the most efficient way possible?

Matt introduced his guard surfing drill on day one. It took about an hour to run through ten different ways to pass the guard, each based on a different kind of pressure. I guess someone with a couple of years of training would be familliar with at least eight or nine of them, but it was great for me. I'd only really seen two or three of them. The guard surfing drill itself is based around call-outs and involves combining multiple types of guard passes over the course of a round (which can be up to twelve minutes long). The drill delivered what Matt promised in the sense that afterwards I think everyone there could palpably feel that they had learned something new about passing the guard, and obviously the drill itself is appealing in that it is a really complete way to drill every part of your guard passing game.

Day two, Matt covered the clinch surfing drill, which is not unlike the guard surfing drill, but with obvious differences. It's also a call-out drill, and I guess its main purpose is to teach things like posture, head position, hand control, body control and all the other stuff thats bread and butter to the clinch game.

There's more I could write, but right now I'm pretty fried and I think I'm getting a sore throat. Trained hard saturday and sunday and I went for a run this morning when I probably should have given my body a bit of a break.

Paperwork is piling up at work, but I'm rallying myself to sort out almost all of my files by the end of the week. Once that's done, I'll have an amazing straight run for a while.

I'll pick this up later.

p.s Lifted the picture from the SBGi site (I linked to it, actually). I don't think anyone took pictures of the Dublin seminar, which is a bit of a shame. But it wasn't unlike this.

Full circle to the big man

2006-01-08T22:14:00.000Z

Something that I occassionally stray away from is that this blog was inspired by SBG head coach Matt Thornton's blog, Aliveness 101, which I've linked to in my side bar.

Guys, sometimes I throw stuff about about beer, or good eating. Of late, I've posted a lot of stuff on SF books ... and maybe of late the reason most of the blog has been this kind of thing is that the christmas period pumps us full of this stuff. Its not universally known as a holiday where you get into the gym and crank out some sick workouts.

We've hit new years running, and a lot of people are taking stock. This is the time of year that the average person tries to halt the creeping obesity that will claim so many of us in the first world. Or quit smoking. Or just do something to moderately improve their health.

I kind of got a little self-satisfied over christmas. I ate well, but I didn't gain any weight. Checking myself for a possible entry to an amateur mixed martial arts league at the end of next month, I found I am teetering between 76 and 77 kilos. Which puts me in the light heavyweight category.

Mentally, I'm thinking: Hey- shouldn't I be heavier?

I don't mean I'm going to hit the pies, but I'm wondering if maybe I'm robbing myself of the kind of strength I should have for my frame. I've never really taken on a serious strength training programme. Even with the various bodyweight routines I've played with I've never gotten into some of the more strength-building exercises like pullups and their variations.

So if I was going to set myself a little new years S & C goal? I'd like to improve my functional strength and go back up to around the 80 kilo mark, maybe.

---

I'm pleased to report that SBGi sessions in Harold's Cross are still an absolute pleasure.

Coming full circle to how this blog began, I'm going to link here to a talk given by Matt Thornton.

Enjoy.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4838722756738846126&q=sbg

Still burning bright ...

2006-01-07T22:16:00.000Z

One of the things we in the UK and Ireland have to thank the Gollancz / Millenium SF Masterworks series for is that it has introduced some of the classics of the past to a whole new generation of readers. I include myself among them, as before books like 'The stars my destination' (or 'Tiger! Tiger!' as it was first published as in 1956) became widely available in this reprint, it was a matter of either hunting them down on-line or playing a waiting game and keeping an eye on second hand bookshops (along with everyone else...).

The Millenium series and the yellow-jacket Gollancz series offer a fantastic way to build up a select library of SF in a very short time. In the early days, I bought each new edition almost purely on the basis of the last one having been very satisfactory.

This is, of course, how I put Bester on my shelf after having seen him referenced and mentioned in a number of places (as diverse sources as Babylon 5 and The Simpsons, in fact). Previously I have to confess that I'd never actually owned anything by him. I absorbed 'The Stars my Destination', henceforce to be called TSMD and 'The Demolished Man' in quick succession.

Leaving discussion of the latter for another time, I will open by saying that I think TSMD was a near perfect book at the time it was released, and several decades on it remains outstanding.It was a pivotal work which influenced not just the 1960s new wave but also the cyberpunk authors of the 80s. Even by todays standards this is an absolutely incendiary novel: Extremely fast moving, and all the more impressive considering it is only Bester's second novel.

TSMD has been much drawn upon in styllistic and thematic terms. One of Bester's underpinning tendencies is to warn against the agendas of big business and centralised power structures, and in this respect he was an early prophet of a whole SF movement (mirrored in popular culture). If elements of TSMD have lost their punch slightly since they were written, it is not entirely Bester's fault as a result: TSMD has been much-imitated.

Enough with the praise, though. Even if the history of the SF genre is immaterial to you, then TSMD remains a fine soap opera of betrayal and revenge. Bester deserves to be rediscovered by new generations, and not just TMSD, but also 'The Demolished Man': Which, if I'm not mistaken, won the first ever Hugo award.

While I'm on the subject of trivia, I might add that wikipedia informs me that BB4 did a 60 to 90 minute adaption of TSMD in 1991. Anyone who can point me towards a copy of it shall get a shiny new dollar!

2006-01-04T20:48:00.000Z

This is the result of finally getting a credit card... I'm in constant debt to amazon. SF / Fantasy books currently queued for reading:-

- 'Dies the fire' and 'The Protectors War' in hardback, both by S.M Stirling. These are basically post-apocalypse adventures set in a world where some mysterious environmental change has put an end to electronic devices- they just don't work. The clock has turned back, and society has fallen apart. If we accept the somewhat ropey premise, then this is familliar ground and explores the usual device of 'good survivors' versus 'bad survivors' and the kinds of societies they build. I'm looking forward to them. S.M Stirling is a solid enough writer, although I must confess that I stopped reading his 'Island in the sea of time' series because I got tired of some of his characterisation.

- 'Dead to the world' by Charlaine Harris. This is the first of the Southern Vampire mystery novels I've bought in hardback. A quirky series, good for a change of pace. Evidentally I'm not the only one who thinks so, as a HBO adaption from the makers of 'six feet under' is in the pipeline.

- 'Into the looking glass', 'Ghost', 'Cally's War' (written with Julie Cochrane) and 'Against the tide' all by John Ringo. I'm a bit tired of pimping this guy's military SF and fantasy, so I won't talk much about these beyond saying they are variously stand-alones or parts of ongoing series. Ringo writes with a very visceral, heady style.

- 'Weapons of Choice' and 'Designated Targets' by John Birmingham. I don't think I've heard this new military SF / Alternate history series mentioned thusfar on the board. I think Birmingham is actually an aussie author. The premise of the series is that a UN naval battlegroup from 2020, involved in an exercise involving new technology, has been transported back in time to WWII. Part of what I'm curious about is how the 'culture shock' aspect of it will be explored - even the nominal "good guys" of WWII-era america and britain will have a kneejerk problem with a battlegroup from the future which contains different races, genders, sexual orientations and .... germans and japanese....

At the moment, I've just finished EE Knight's 'Valentine's Rising', which is pulp military sf / post-apocalypse / adventure / spy story. Generally satisfying, with a protracted siege taking up the last half of the book. There are one or two nice narrative twists, one involving the main character faced with a lose/lose choice between sacrificing a human baby to vampires, or blowing his cover and having his whole command slaughtered.

I was planning on changing gears to fantasy by reading 'Deadhouse Gates' next, but in actual fact I ended up going to Robert Buettner's 'Orphanage' (the sequal, 'Orphan's desinty' is on my shelf). I want to post extensively about this when I've read a little more. Provisionally, this is a tribute to Robert Heinlein which also has the approval of Joe Haldeman. That bodes well.

CHRIST!!!mas

2005-12-26T19:26:00.000Z

People complain about what its like to do christmas shopping in Dublin these days.

Swimming against a tide of people willing to trample over children and old folks on Grafton street ... Laying about you with a lead pipe in order to stop unscrupulous bespectacled chancers jumping you in the queue for a till in HMV ... Grappling with the elderly in Tescoes for the last few packets of deep-filled mince pies.

Look, the fact is- this stuff is just the [i]warm up[/i] for god's sakes.

The real test of you nerve begins when you go home and have to spend more than three hours in contact with your family. If, like mine, its a family of grown up children and semi-retired parents, then you're effectively talking about a bunch of people who have gradually forgotten exactly what it takes to live together under one roof and not strangle each other.

Anyway, so far there has been shouting, demands for receipts for presents and generally a lot of 'bah humbug'.

I have been party to the above, but in my defense I've been working nights all week and over the past three nights got a grand total of nine hours sleep (that's not enough). I'm vacillating between wanting to be nice, and wanting to go postal.

The 17

2005-12-18T17:23:00.000Z

Cilian and I made a deal a while back when we we drinking port-wood finished Glenamorangie (at some savage expense). Seeing as no-one else was going to, we should buy fine single malt for one another as capitalistmas ... er... christmas presents.

I dodged into a small but able little off-licence I know a couple of days ago and picked him out a bottle of The Glenlivet 12 year old. Glenlivet was a name used by every tom, dick and harry (aengus?) in the old days before finally one distiller earned the sole right to the name, having long had to call his superior product 'THE' Glenlivet so as to distinguish it from impostors. I think that was about 1824.

Anyway, having tried it with him subsequently (excellently complimented by some superb T-nation Chili and a bottle of Deuchars IPA), I can say it is a smooth, quality bev.

Cilian laid a bottle of 17 year old Bowmore on me, which was really above and beyond the call of duty. He knows I favour this subtle and slightly lesser-known Islay distillery. In particular, I dig their wood finishes in port, claret and sherry. The 17 year old, we both agreed, was a pretty epic drink which you wouldn't dole out to someone who wasn't going to appreciate it.

Given its Islay background, you might expect more of a burn, but with a whisky of this age and calibre you're not paying for the same thing you'd get with a 10 year old Laphroaig (if that's what you're after, you're missing the point). There's less of an iodine, peaty character to this and more of a salty, smooth and aromatic character.

Should be awesome for christmas day in front of the box. Then a snooze and off to work.

---

Next on my bev list, this time purchased on own bat, are a Bowmore darkest, a cask-strength Caol Ila and possibly a foray into the world of bourbon and sippin' whiskies. Stay tuned.

I might add that this is coming after a suitable break for my liver, since the pre-christmas party season has been a trifle ungentle with her. I'm thinking about a month of bed rest.