People are stupid…

OK, just watched the news earlier on and I just have to get this out of me. What is it with people and glorifying people as if they’re heroes purely because they didn’t die? (…. and sometimes only because they died?)

A few days ago it was about a few mountain climbers, and on the news it was as if they were the one’s that saved someone… I mean… I can’t see how a climber needing to be rescued being a glorious victory. And one maybe more memorable (if you’re Australian) being the Beaconsfield mining accident. After the whole ordeal, reporters and journalists were paying these guys tons of money for exclusive stories and they were kept on the news for god knows how many weeks, and for what? they just sat in a hole for 2 weeks and not die! they didn’t dig their way out, they didn’t even have to find their own food! Heck, I’ve been doing that for more than 2 decades already.

And this even goes for ex-cancer patients and people with some sort of amputation…. “wow, you had cancer and you didn’t die? you’re amazing!”…. no, our current medical technologies are amazing… Then you get those people that go “after that I have a new found meaning to life! I’m going to love my family more and make the most of my life and do the things I want!” on breast cancer fund water bottles having ‘Amanda 49, breast cancer survivor’ as if it’s some kind of profession… so good for you, but when the media makes these people sound like saints and philosophers, that’s when I get annoyed. People don’t need to have been near death to appreciate life. If you have any sort of value on your life, you will love your family and friends just as much and walk the same paths; people that need to see their lives flash before their eyes first are just slow and simply don’t think about their own lives enough.

[and the whole "live everyday as if it's your last" thing... doesn't work: if you do live everyday as if it's your last, it probably will be; and if everyone did it the world would be in chaos]

And another thing that bugs me is people like mountain climbers, surfers that go to the beaches during a hurricane, and all those other extreme sports players are simply people that are just asking for it! It’s a wasted of resources to save them in the first place! What we should be doing is forget about the people risking their lives, and more importantly the lives of others, with absolutely no purpose; and commemorate those that risked their lives saving the asses of these dickheads.

Then there are the people that become heroes because they died… not because they died trying to save a baby from a rampaging blue fin tuna or taking out a nuclear bomb…. just because…. they died… it’s like “he was fighting in a war…. then he died… WHAT A TWIST!” Think about the dead soldiers from Iraq. Don’t get me wrong, I respect the soldiers (not so much the war, I can’t believe Australia joined and our oil prices are still high as ever….), but I think having reports that go on for days that are like “he died because he shot himself while cleaning a gun” then have his whole family history laid out to be more of an insult then not talking about him at all…

————————————————–

wow… a form that actually makes you more sensible…

How stuff works… in a nutshell!: Sarcomeres

Sarcomeres are the basic functional units of muscle (be it skeletal (ones you show off) or cardiac (heart), but  NOT smooth muscle!… however the principles below still apply), and they stick end on end to form myofibrils (if you ever see “myo-” it means “muscle”), which gather to form the muscle fibers and blah blah blah.. gather to form your everyday muscles . And if you want to know how they contract you really only need to worry about 2 things: actin (thin) and myosin (thick) filaments.

I like to think of the myosin filaments as caterpillars…. that have 2 heads: so as you can see from the picture above, the myosin filaments have little ‘legs‘  sticking out at the 2 ends (but they like to call them heads….) and what those 2 pictures at the bottom are trying to say (and doing a crappy job at it..) is that these heads reach out to an actin filament and then attaches itself, then physically pulls the actin towards the middle over and over again (much like how animals walk), which makes the muscle shorten.

If you keep in mind the same image, then you can begin to understand the logic behind the length-force relationship of muscles:

all this says is that when the muscle is stretched or shortened to a point it will start to reduce its ability to produce force (so why it’s harder to do a squat or a push-up if you go lower, despite the fact you are moving the same weight). So back to the caterpillar metaphor: if the branch (actin) is too far but close enough for a leg or 2 to reach, it still really can’t pull itself up the other side and if anything it’ll have to keep scuttling just to stay attached (that vibration you get when you strain?…). And when your muscles are too short, the actin filaments will end up sliding past each other, which means that the ‘legs’ at each ends will actually be working against the contraction as they run along the actin going the opposite way, also when the actin overlaps it stops the myosin from connecting with the filaments it was suppose to; and also the myosin filaments will end up butting up against the ends of the sarcomere.

Anyways that’s my first in-a-nutshell post and I hope it was useful and didn’t confuse/bore you to death. I try to steer away from the molecular stuff for now since it can be extremely boring and extremely long and I want to try to keep these as simple and short as possible (hopefully I did alright this round), and I guess I’ll keep these post to things people can relate to (rather than your school stuff where you spend 2 months learning about how you make pee…. but if you really want to know….).

[Doing this is also beneficial to my study ]

—————————————————–

Hugh Hefner finally grew up:

[another fashion store in HK somewhere...]

You people search the weirdest things… perverts…

everyone that owns an internet site or blog gets some of their best entertainment by looking at what search terms people put into their browsers to reach their site, and lately this is getting more and more bizarre and some I don’t even know how it possibly related to this site. So I thought I’d share some today:

• pedo porn, baby child pedo, pedophilia virtual, blowjob underage… and the list goes on… (I’m sure these people will get into a lot of trouble if I can track their IP…)
• cheating they’re cheating on you, right behind your back (…………….)
• snap crackle pop (do I make people think I talk about rice bubbles here?)
• chinaman sexual picture (sorry, I don’t pose, sorry)
• cunt kickers (their are some really sick people out there…)
• somebody getting raped (at least they’re not picky…)
• viktor & hermione art (just found this odd since that pic doesn’t have a tagline along with it)
• Kendo sex (can’t really understand how that works… someone please explain how this fetish works)

… and a whole ton along the lines of “taekwondo sucks” (comes second in my top search engine terms…)

anyways, if you are one of those losers that somehow make it to this page when searching for porn, please do a favour for the human race and go kill yourself, not because you’re looking for porn (I mean what else is the internet for?) but for being stupid enough to click into a WORDPRESS page (not to say there aren’t any) with the title of “Kevin Lee’s Virtual Dojo” while you’re at it…. and those looking up pedo porn: this is how you guys get chased down…. I’d stick to sitting at playgrounds all day if I were you guys….

————————————————————-

why we all love shopping overseas:

Scientific Facts

we hear the term all the time, from snack and supplement commercials to schooling and the news; but seriously, there is no such thing as fact in this world, simply claims yet to be disproved.

What is considered a fact changes almost everyday: back in the day it was fact that the world was flat, mental illness was cured by drilling a hole in your skull, earth was the center of the universe, and standing in the cold will get you a cold. In the scientific world things are accepted as facts or laws simply because there is yet to be a better explanation: the effectiveness of a drug depends on the fraction of people that it has an effect on; remember those commercials saying “it has been scientifically test to significantly help sooth the symptoms of influenza” what this means is that we gave this drug to 1000 sick people, about 10 said they felt a bit better, so we made a little graph and threw some stats in there. And has anyone besides me found the claim of “it is scientifically proven that smoking causes cancer” and “we don’t know exactly how lung cancer is formed” a bit contradictory?

People usually think scientists can look down a microscope and see the little balls of atoms and molecule in the nice colours, then move them around to make other stuff; but no, until recently noone has actually seen an atom, chemists and physicists analyse atomical structure and manipulate it by chemical reactions based on theories by some old dude hundreds of years ago, and go by it because the reactions they see conform to it. But let’s say this theory is incorrect, but just that something else happens along with the process tehy were testing, or simply that every time this experiment has been done something has gone wrong, or that this process happens by percentage and it’s just been luck that it’s worked so far…. and now we are basing all our future developments on this principle, we would have then fundamentally biased all our scientific knowledge. I mean think of the alchemists and making medicine out of sulfur and mercury… which I’m sure worked very well in bringing the patient straight to heaven…

I’m not saying that what specialists and textbooks say aren’t trustworthy, I’m just saying don’t live by what others have told you and be open to all possibilities, after all, we are where we are because we question… whether that is a good thing or not you be the judge (and I’m also sick of people telling me they got their sources from ads and their grandmas).

[lies, damn lies, and statistics..]

——————————————————————

would you like to try for size?

Boxing: a martial art?

Finally, I have been freed from the imprisonment of end of semester exams at Uni, so it’s time to give this place a new update.

I’ve lately been watching a classic anime series (in between, after, and a bit during study…) called ‘Hajime no Ippo’. It’s about a young boy that’s quite obviously on steroids going from a shy little Japanese ‘kid’ (.. like for most anime I use that term loosely, the age never seems right…) to a shy little Japanese boy beating the crap out of everyone all over the world, all thanks to Boxing! (anyways, it’s a great show and I would be watching it right now if I didn’t use up the download quota…)

so anyways, this show has inspired me to do an entry on boxing.

To be honest I have never considered boxing a martial art. Boxing is a sport: it has rules, it has boundaries, and therefore it has limits. Martial arts to me is something that you can use anytime, anywhere, against anyone (given you had some essential gear e.g. weapons). This conflicts with boxing firstly because these guys don’t use their legs to fight. The biggest problem here is the lack of defense: boxers have a very high center of gravity, this keeps them light on their feet and easier to shift their weight around; the trade off is it’s much easier to impair their movement and damage the lower limbs (as well as groin shots), which is a fatal flaw on the streets. The second problem is they only have 2 weapons: their left fist and their right fist. So you’ve lost flexibility in your fighting, as oppose to those who train with kicks, knees, elbows, headbutts, grapples, palm strikes, throws, shoulder strikes……. and so on.

The cognitive state from doing boxing is also very different: due to the fact there are really only 2 hazards you have to worry about (left and right fist) this is where your concentration goes when you defend, and with the rules in the ring you don’t have to worry about the other guy doing anything tricky either. One example I always think of is weaving. Even though it’s used in other martial arts as well, there is no sense of danger in the boxing ring of someone kneeing you in the face, so the movements are more dramatic and lower. And I’m not sure how often this is used or is McKoy the only one to use it, but the “corkscrew” punch is another technique I find to be protected by the rules of no grappling and limb breaking. The corkscrew is THE example of an over extended and self-exposing move, to the point I personally think out weights the power of the punch.

[And no, I did not base all of this simply on a cartoon show... well maybe a bit on the corkscrew, but wiki'ed it and it was there so it's fine by me]

————————————————————————–

when you think you’re all alone in this world…..

*taken at “yuen’s market”, sunnybank, QLD*

Virtual Dojo Announcement

Ok, listen up people, for those that aren’t attending university or highschool in Australia, this is a note to tell you guys I’m in the last 3 weeks or so of my semester so I’m really busy and I still haven’t studied. So coming here every week isn’t in my best interest considering how much procrastination I go through already. So I probably won’t even think about updating till after the 20th of June.

Kevin Lee out.

P.S. I’ll be going to Hong Kong on the 22nd for 2 weeks, so friends in the city give me a ring or email because I’ll be tight on time. And for everyone else, rest assure I’ll take many Engrish photos!

You are not a RPG character

Often (if not always) any discussion I have concerning martial arts involves people categorizing themselves or others as either long/mid/close/in strikers (then further split into boxers and kickers…), weapons, grapplers, ground fighters etc. I think it’s good to know your strong points and it gives you a focus in discussion, but when you categorize yourself all the time you psychologically limit yourself. This also goes for any other matter like types of knowledge, preferred music and movies etc.

I’ve had friends tell me that they’re boxers (not the ones you wear…) or wrestlers, and pretty much that’s all they focus on; so the wrestlers don’t practice their punches and the boxers don’t bother grabbing, and I think this is just giving yourself a handicap. If I must categorize myself, I would say I’m a mid-range striker (over a swordsman simply because I’ve fought more in unarmed), but I still like grapples and ground fighting (though not good at it…), and I brawl quite a bit. We are not fucking RPG characters: we don’t have to pick a certain trait and focus on maxing it! And we don’t have a crappy leveling system, you can train up your abilities as you go… I suppose this leads back to my previous statement that just because you do taekwondo you don’t need to do fairy kicks all the time and Judo people can punch too…

[the next time I see someone write that Jeet Kune Do deals more "crits", I will spam them with viruses]

—————————————————–

random picture of the day: too late…

solution to pedophilia: lower the legal age (no porn here, piss off you sick bastards!)

“Love is patient; love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
Corinthians 13:4–7 (NIV)

Well I give up, I have looked absolutely everywhere and I could not find anything that tells us that we are not allowed to love people below 18! Don’t get me wrong, I think sleeping with 5 year olds is disgusting… so let’s up the level a little so this doesn’t go disgusting… let’s say a 15 year old: if you’re not doing it against her will nor are you deceiving her, then why can’t 2 people that have feelings for each other be together? I see around me anything remotely hinting sexuality of people under 18 being crucified. I remember a report on TV about I think a swimming coach or something was having a relationship with his underage student, and naturally was prosecuted and jailed. However after he was released and she was of age, they got back together; is this not the enduring love we speak of all the time? yet he is branded a pedophile and everyone emphasized that he was deceiving her, exploiting her… but seeing that they got together again (or at least attempted, didn’t really follow up too far) he wasn’t just looking for an easy meal, because putting up with all the accusations and aggression is definitely not easy.

Just think about it, think back maybe a few centuries: we had prearranged marriages, 8 year old couples, 5 year old mothers, and grandpa was 40… obviously wasn’t an issue then, so why now? In an age where fathers are marrying daughters, people having passions for Sonic and Robotnic, we choose to worry about a 16 year old girl giving out blowjobs?

I would imagine the greatest argument would be: “well they are still young and innocent, and they can’t distinguish between good and bad people, therefore won’t make the right decisions”. Well firstly, kids today aren’t innocent: you’ll see 4 year olds swearing and 9 year olds with a hardcore porn stash (and I mean how many people were still virgins after high school?… honestly); secondly, does having been alive for 18 years mean you make all the right decisions and can tell good from bad? NO! less likely… maybe (people still get lured by strangers, but probably not by candy or puppies), but ultimately it means nothing. The only thing that’ll help you tell good people from bad is experience and logic, so 18 years of thinking that you know everything, yet have been bubble-wrapped and sheltered from reality?… quite the opposite thing.

I think child molesters and rapists should be executed over 2 hours with 4 blenders filled with super-glue (so they don’t bleed to death first) to each of their limbs and an apple peeler corer for males (be creative); but if your kid can tell the difference between a handjob and giving the priest a massage, and can take responsibility of their actions, then who are we to say that they are wrong?

[how to wipe out pedophiles: stop having kids]

———————————————————-

random picture of the day: sounds like a happy place

Haidong Gumdo: the beginning

My journey into the martial arts world was nothing spectacular or any point of enlightenment, mine started as a 13 year old overweight boy wanting to do a bit of exercise and do something cool; and what better way than to wave a sword around in a skirt?

I (left if you haven’t seen me before) also dragged my cousin (right) into it: who (for the record) also quit

Haidong Gumdo is a Korean martial art focused with sword fighting (“gumdo/Kumdo” and “Kendo” both mean “the way of the sword” except one’s the korean pronunciation and one’s Japanese). The basic breakdown of it is it’s very similar to its traditional Japanese counterpart (and I don’t mean the “I keep slapping your head” type), though what I gathered has a greater focus in wide arch slices for multiple opponents and some differences in the stances; but they still use the Japanese style swords and the forms have the same type of movements. I’ll just leave out the history of the art simply because there’s just a lack of legitimate evidence of its origins and development.

Haidong Gumdo is a very simplistic martial art (not saying this in a bad way), the techniques are very direct and allows for a lot of freedom in terms of attacking angle and defending area. With that said there also isn’t that much to really learn, and it’s mainly just developing the skills to use them and training. I often have people tell me that the stances (especially the short stance: basically your usual long stance but you tuck your back leg in so that the knee is directly below you and your front knee is in front of your hip..) will screw up your legs, but I reckon that does the art injustice: the stances can seem awkward, but if you have the calibration of your hip and trunk the movements are ergonomically fine. One point that I think should be emphasized is that these movements are designed to support the SWORD, so you wont have the same balance or dynamics of the body as your average combat type martial arts.

I never really had many problems with the art itself, I left mainly due to the whole McDojo phenomenon happening, i.e. the head instructor (who was actually very good) pretty much stopped teaching and the classes just became systematically the same everyday mainly comprising of workouts; the fees were at a ridiculous level (fuck I paid like $450 [something like that, it's a sum that people will slap me for anyway] for my blackbelt, and this didn’t include my sword..); and pretty much anyone who grades gains a level, and this happened every 1.5 months till you get to the grade just below 1st dan (I know some people that make it to BB in a year…), so we had have an overflow of posers and kiddy black belts, and a bunch of people that were teaching me that I would probably easily take down in a fight. Finally the most disappointing part of the training is that there’s no sparring (if you want to refer to the pictures in this post, they we pre-rehearsed fighting sequences), so I don’t even get the chance to prove my point… so all these factors simply just forced me to leave.

However I am definitely happy that I joined the club: it got me fitter (the training there is still the toughest I’ve experienced), gave me a better understanding of myself, and some of the skills and techniques I still use in my own training (and I actually still practice, just not as often as I should). Well, that’s my summary of my Haidong Gumdo experience that lasted for over 5 years (more on my old blog if you want to flick through some entries), some of it was frustrating but most of it was fun. For those that do Haidong Gumdo out there, I will once again state here that I am not meaning to insult or degrade the art, I have just simply moved on… to things that are more practical (trust me, you won’t get that many chances to swing a samurai sword around when you go out). I also further reemphasize it was some of the PEOPLE and clubs I had issues with (and taken into account how many people leave after black belt, I know I’m not alone…).

[Those people that I've complained about above, if you know who you are: go kill yourself, you're an insult to humanity and degrade all those that deserve the title of a martial artist. If you are as incompetent enough as to be incapable of suicide: leave me a message and I'll lend a hand. If you're not sure if I'm talking about you: leave me a message and I'll lend a hand...]

—————————————————–

Random picture of the day: homosexual prostitution market at depression

[taken in the University of Queensland refectory]

Women’s self-defense: why women are getting raped and assaulted more often

“women’s” martial arts has always been that itch I just can’t scratch without being called sexist, even though I never think that I’m in any way being unreasonable or biased against women. I know a few women out there that I’m sure would be able to kick my ass pretty easily… but then again, there’s only one way to find out…

My biggest problem would have to be: “why women’s martial arts?”, what is the difference compared to our normal martial arts?. Unless you’re telling me you plan to throw hooks at people with your breasts or insert a dagger in your vagina; the last time I checked women still have 2 arms, 2 legs, 20 phalanges, and a head. How I see it, women’s martial arts is just another money making scheme for girls to keep fit, look cool, feed their ego, and at the same time not break a sweat. The only real excuse I can find to support the term is scenario based focusing such as sexual assault, someone stealing your purse… yea, that’s about it, I tried…

When I evaluate a martial art/skill (basically everything), I just think about what works realistically [i.e. are my reflexes really that good? will that guy just stand there while I jump around him? can I really tap a guy in a pressure point with my pinky while he's elbowing my face?]. And when I think about the division of the sexes in something like martial arts (and anything competitive really..): “I’m pretty good for a girl” just doesn’t cut it. People always say that girls do push ups on their knees because of mechanical disadvantages with a less broad shoulder width, and that this way is ‘equivalent’ to the normal on-your-toes ones. keyword here is “equivalence” (here go the double standards again…); I just don’t get the logic behind this: since you’re already at a biological disadvantage with body portions and muscle development, shouldn’t it be that you work twice as hard rather than half of what the guys do?

now back to women’s ’self defense’, which is the more bullshit stuff marketed all over the world. These classes usually educate you in the art of somebody grabbing you by the wrist then you twirl around like a fairy till he lets go, while totally ignoring he also has 3 other limbs; the classes also educate you 175 techniques of how to kick someone in the balls. And what qualifications do you need to teach such a class? here’s one I got off an apparently highly regarded women’s martial arts organization:

http://www.nwmaf.org/mc/page.do?sitePageId=61891

to break it down:

• I need to have joined a martial art/ self defense group for 3 years, but only needing to train for 20 days
• know how to do an upper, middle, and lower block; be able to break-fall
• babysit your students and shower them with love and care
• been ‘violently victimized’
• make class as friendly as possible, reassuring your students that your would be attackers will be just as polite
• be happy to lower your standards if your students find it too hard
• paid the organization for a year
• conform to a load of feminist bullshit (i.e. it is never a women’s fault)

[here's some other shit to look at while you're at it: Oh My Fucking Goddess Martial Arts...]

A lot of these ’self defense’ ideas are not just unrealistic and ineffective, but it can also be dangerous. For example this guy wants your wallet, edging a knife at your throat: normally you would just give him the wallet (at least I would…), but no, you’ve mastered the way of knocking his hand away and giving a punch to the solar plexus… then you realize arms don’t just go limp once you touch them and you don’t successfully defeat an attacker by landing 1 punch that has shit all power to it. So now you’ve successfully pissed the guy off and you get stabbed, have your arms and legs broken, and your nose is pointing in the wrong direction, and your wallet’s still taken. congratulations.

All you women out there wanting to learn how to protect yourselves: learn a real martial art, not the 2 month program shit. Understand that males have a biological advantage in physical activities, accept it, but don’t be discouraged by it: aim to be a good fighter, not just a good female fighter (but try not to use drugs). If you aren’t prepared to put some effort into it: get either a tazer, pepper spray, baseball bat, with a pair of scissors; and if you want to learn how to REALLY defend yourself, learn to sprint, and try to use common sense more like ‘don’t walk through dark alley ways alone at night in a miniskirt’ and calling people “girl bashers” will not always stop someone from bashing you.

[Feminists are the ones responsible for making men look down on women: genocide all feminists to restore world order!]

———————————————————-

random crap of the day: How many 5 year olds could you take in a fight?

hm…. I’m pretty sure I can do better than that… well……..only one way to find out!