An editorial I just read made an interesting point - while one could go to top athletes, musicians, or executives and request training, any opportunity (basketball camp, business seminar, etc) will be exorbitantly expensive. Martial arts seminars given by everyone from the top cagefighters to military to really old traditional teachers range from $50 to $600; a somewhat comparable (in the sense that it's a physical skill) mountaineering seminar, for example, is upwards of $9000. Even in my local Arizona region I could list recent and upcoming seminars fearturing people from Japan, the Philippines, Brazil, a big cagefighter coming from Las Vegas (I mean literally huge) An interview in the same magazine made me think back to that editorial in a different sense, however - the interviewee was of the opinion that martial arts are sustained because the people that teach them enjoy teaching. That's not to say that other kinds of seminars arent's conducting by people that enjoy the same, I guess I'm just thinking off the cuff that it's nice that as the martial arts are generally built around constant learning, it's conducive to relatively easily accessible seminars.

      And I just finally realized that if a spearhand (a strike with the fingertips, with all the fingers aligned and together, and the hand flat) is conditioned properly and is used to hit a soft target, it acts like a thrust from a staff, because of the minimal striking surface (I had previously thought that striking with the fingertips couldn't be anything but uselessly fragile). Wa-hey....dorky epitomes, 101.

The Physical Body - minus the (quite interesting looking) giant implements, the bodywork stuff in the video is where a good deal of the conditioning we use for jujitsu at the east Ko Sho comes from (but seriously, I hope that guy doing the squats is wearing pants)

Samurai 7 - Akira Kurosawa versus the classic of similar name....hello, hello, hello....

Kill Harry - Harry Potter versus Kill Bill (down at the bottom)...strange.