The Chinese Nutcracker

OUCH!
From The Huffington Post:

Testicle Squeezing In Street Fight Causes Man's Death

"There are worse ways to die, but you probably don't want to think about them, especially if you're a guy.

A Chinese man was reportedly killed last week when a woman squeezed his testicles until he collapsed during a fight over a parking space.

An unidentified 41-year-old woman in China's Haiku City in the Hainan Province rode into town on her scooter to pick her child up from school. The woman tried to park in front of a local store, but the store owner, the 42-year-old victim, refused to allow it, China News 24 reported.

The resulting fight escalated, leading the woman to call her husband and brother, who in turn got into a more violent fist fight with the shopkeeper, according to the website. At some point in the fracas, the woman grabbed the man's testicles and squeezed them until he collapsed. He was taken to a hospital for treatment and later died.

Parking disputes can get ugly just about anywhere. On March 26, Louisiana resident Shawntay Brown, 19, was arrested for biting a 15-year-old's breast during a brawl in Monroe.

An affidavit in the case included a police officer's statement that the 15 year old "showed me the bite mark."

A video is said to show Brown running after the younger girl and biting her on a tender spot, the Smoking Gun reported.

Brown contends that the other girl bit her first."

Huge Earth Changes Coming

I'm having a little trouble with the editing template on Blogger right now, Anybody else? Anyway, here is a fascinating video of dramatic weather and seismic events that occured on April 11th. I say a pole shift is coming...

R.I.P Levon Helm

This last week we lost two icons of the music world; Dick Clark and Levon Helm. Clark was predictably establishment, but will likely be remembered for integrating the racially-charged 1960's music scene in a way your Grandma could watch it. But Levon Helm, lead singer for "The Band" was a greater societal figure in my mind. Originally from Arkansas and raised on rock-a-billy jams, Helm piloted Bob Dylan's back-up group into their own fame. At a time when psychedelic music was the order of the day, "The Band" reverted to folk-rock roots with a string of hits including "The Weight" viewed above. Helm had been battling throat cancer. Here's another fantastic video if you have never seen it; "Festival Express", where The Band, Janice Joplin, The Greatful Dead and many others chartered a train across Canada in a drunken concert spree: Fantastic... R.I.P. Levon Helm

Beat Up Bob

All over the country, nay; all over the world people beat up Bob.
No, not the stupid plastic Bob as pictured above, I mean the real plastic Bob.

Bob is my best imaginary internet friend, and he runs the excellent website "Striking Thoughts".


My friend Bob has arrested development.
He loves school.
In fact, he loves school so much he has decided to become a permanent fixture in random colleges across the country.
He wrote me to say that he has reactivated his website "Striking Thoughts" and has taken a job at a college in "Cowboy Country".
At first I was worried that this was Bob's "Brokeback Mountain" moment, but he has assured me that there were only Bears involved.


So we have our old friend Bob, all alone with Mrs. Bob in Cowboy country.
He has been stressing over his new Brokeback job, barely practicing martial arts, and not drinking enough Vodka.

Do your part to help beat up Bob today.
If you donate one comment to Bob's website "Striking Thoughts" Bob could feel the pain for another day.
And if you help this Bob, other Bob's will find their sponsor and we will all become Bob.


Please, won't you do your part today, and beat up Bob?

Walking Meditation and Tai Chi Chuan

The other day I was listening to a recorded lecture on walking meditation and was struck by the similarities and differences to the practice of Tai Chi.

The talk was being given to some advanced practitioners of Zen meditation. These folks were accustomed to long periods of seated meditation and the idea was to introduce them to movement combined with meditation.
I myself have difficulty being still for so long, and prefer the slow, calculated movements of the internal martial arts.
In Tai Chi Chuan for instance; we learn to move in a very systematic way and if we apply ourselves we eventually gain meditative as well as combat skills.
The Zen group in the lecture had first learned meditation and was struggling to integrate that with simple mindfull walking.
The speaker said they needed to concentrate their intent into their feet, as opposed to the brain and mind. It represented the extreme other end of the body that they were used to working with. As expected, the students were to examine every aspect of foot placement and center of being.
This too, is an important part of internal martial arts practice. But here's a big difference; we don't just think into our feet, the most basic level. We must focus our intent on every body part be it still or moving.
Add to this the intent of how you would apply that movement in a partner form or in self-defense, because moving in Tai Chi Chuan is "empty" without realizing the utility of the movement in application.
Some people can grasp the application, but lack the intent of internal meditation. That also would be considered empty pugilism.

In my many years of Karate in the past, there was always talk of martial arts being 70% mind and 30% body skills.
That was just talk. Karate was 98% body art. Moving through fast forms was about the same as doing 50 push-ups. Invigorating but shallow.

Our local Chinese Tai Chi master, Mr. Pang once told me why we practice slowly. He described picking up a coin quickly. It's just an object or tool to get what you want. But if you pick it up slowly, you can feel it's weight. It's rim. It's smooth or ribbed edge. The face on the coin.
That's a lot of information to process.
Now, transfer that to body arts.

Praise For The .22

This guy may rub some folks the wrong way, but he is exactly right about the under appreciated .22 firearm.

My Dad gave me his .22 single-shot rifle when I was about 12. It was given to him by a rancher in Eastern Oregon when he was about 12.
The .22 is a do-everything firearm. It is great, cheap fun to shoot. It's a perfect survival gun for the bush. In fact, there are compact models that pair the .22 with a .410 shotgun barrel mounted below it. I understand a lot of Alaska pilots keep them in the plane.

Hell, I've even heard that the .22 pistol is one of the preferred handguns for mob hits. Compact, quiet and large magazine capacity.
I don't concern myself with flash-suppressors and such, but the guy makes a good point.

Festus; The Wandering Warrior Cat

Some years back, we got two kittens from a neighbor who was only too glad to be rid of them. We named the grey female "Miss Kitty", and the black male "Festus".
Obviously, we are big fans of the old western "Gunsmoke".

Well, at first we couldn't get them to stay inside our house when we wanted them to. They found a gap they could crawl into and sleep in the insulation of the house. This proved to be a good tactic at times, because unfriendly dogs would try to get them and they would retreat to their hole.
Finally we thought we had got them to come in and be social (as much as a cat can be) and winter was setting in.

That year, right around the Thanksgiving holiday we were hit with a huge snowstorm. We were snowed in for almost a week and Festus was gone. We never thought he would make it with the severe cold weather.
Well, almost six months went by and we had put up a sign on our road - "Lost black cat" with our phone number.
Finally, an elderly woman that lives at the top of our hill called up. Apparently Festus was going in her cat door and eating her cat's food. I imagine there was a little fighting going on. We never thought he could have made it.
So I went up to get him. She offered a cat box for transport, but I said I didn't need it.
I got the shit scratched out of me by the time I got Festus home, he had gone feral.
He had turned into one rabbit-killing son of a bitch. Somehow he had survived the snows of the winter, killed anything that moved, and probably raided other cat's stashes of food. I'm sure he took shelter in barns and garages on our hill.

Well, we got him back into the routine of family life and all seemed well - until the following winter. Again, a huge snowstorm hit around Thanksgiving and Festus was gone. That is gone for another six months.
They say that a cat is the only domestic animal that can survive on it's own without humans, and I believe it.
Sure enough, the elderly woman at the top of the hill called and let us know he was back. Capture, scratch, repeat.
As we started the taming process again, I would go down to the saloon and see him sitting staring at a hole waiting for the rabbits to come out. When he had one, he would fight a polar bear to protect his fresh-killed rabbit. Then he would eat the whole thing and lay down sick for two days until he shit it out.
This is a great way for cats to pick up parasites, by the way. We are really good at giving pills now.

Just in case you think Festus's sister Miss Kitty is an angel, don't be fooled. She is a bitch. Both of them fight, but rely on each other as you would expect.

Lately we have had a late-night problem.
The cats are bringing in mice and rats at like 4 AM.
But recently, they don't always kill them first. I wake up and they are batting some poor rodent up and down the hallway. Real fun to wake up to.
A few nights ago, I grabbed one dead mouse away from the cat and threw it into the wood stove, which had gone out hours ago.
My wife got up in the morning and tried to start a fire, and the damned mouse wasn't dead after all. It jumped out of the wood stove and ran. It took her 20 minutes to get it out of the house, what a great thing for the early morning.

So a couple of nights ago, I had a snootfull of Beer and decided to practice my Wudang Saber form outside at dusk. I spun, stabbed, slashed and ran the form several times. I packed my swords up into a nice Japanese sword bag my Aikido instructor had given me, and went inside.
As I took off my boots, I thought I saw something running across a wall. I checked and couldn't find anything. About 10 minutes later, I was putting my sword bag away and saw the mouse run across the room.
Let's see...
Mouse.
Sword.
That mouse got crushed by the scabbard within the sword bag.
I do not relish those moments, but if I had not killed it, it would have burrowed into places we could not get it.
And there was some irony in the fact that I had a huge amount of Chi going from my sword form, and was faced with making a kill, even if it was a mouse.

Damned cats.

Why Steven Seagal Sucks Worse Than Elvis

I never liked Elvis.
He ripped off black musicians.
He convinced Ed Parker to give him a Black Belt.
And he was an informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency, which is why we see this picture of him and Tricky Dickie Nixon shaking hands.

You see, Elvis the drug-addled tub-o-goo was so incensed by the wave of successful British rockers that he went all authoritarian-cop and ratted on fellow musicians.

Fast forward to Buddha-belly Steven Seagal, "The Lord of Pasta" (thanks Bob).
Seagal has allegedly rubbed coke-noses with CIA-types, Mafia-types and drug running CIA-Mafia-types.

See "The Company He Keeps; The Mafia, CIA and Steven Seagal".




Like Elvis, as Seagal's career failed he turned to Narc status and began working with fascist Sheriff Joe Arpaio on the Arizona border.
Here's an update on Seagal's rogue cop shtick from "The Guardian" via "Raw Story":

" Yes, it’s the return of Officer Steven Seagal, this time making sure the US-Mexico border is safe for law-abiding citizens – no matter what the cost.

Actor, director, philanthropist, aikido sensei, blues guitarist, Buddhist lama, international environmental diplomat, sheriff’s deputy, energy drink creator, Texas border guard, and current defendant in a lawsuit alleging he killed a puppy after driving a tank and a full Swat team into an Arizona farm in the course of busting a cockfighting ring … if there is a celebrity more endlessly rewarding than Steven Seagal then do be so good as to produce them.

In the meantime, we return to developments in the existence of the foremost Lost in Showbiz untouchable, a man of whom an eminent Buddhist leader once observed: “All beings have within them the potential for becoming Buddhas. With Steven Seagal I perceived this potential to be particularly strong.” To this end, the head of the oldest sect of Tibetan Buddhism formally recognised the Under Siege star as a tulku – a revered reincarnation of some 17th-century sacred treasure revealer – declaring that “it is possible to be both a popular movie star and a tulku“.

(snip)

"

But it is a 2011 operation under the same aegis that has landed Seagal in the legal hot water to which we alluded earlier. The facts, such as we know them, are these. Suspecting a man of being involved in cockfighting, Arpaio’s office mounted an assault on his property that featured between 30 and 40 fully armed Swat officers, the entire county bomb unit, a bomb robot, canine units, the use of explosive devices, and a camouflage-geared Steven Seagal driving into his house. Literally – Seagal was in a tank. “All the sheriff’s office had to do was to call my client and ask him to meet with them,” the man’s lawyer said. “But this common sense does not make for good reality television.”

So last year, said client filed a suit accusing Seagal of killing his children’s puppy during the raid, and he has now lodged papers suggesting the force used in the operation was excessive, given that portions of the house were destroyed. I’m afraid there simply isn’t space to get into the Seagal camp’s claims that the roosters found on the farm had been genetically modified – suffice to say that all the birds were killed. And that it’s unclear whether this was effected via a standard euthanasic procedure, or an improvised weapon such as a pool ball in a bar towel (Out for Justice) or a microwave oven (Under Siege)."
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For more on the immense gravitational pull that is Steven Seagal's ego read the full Guradian / Raw Story article HERE,

And "The Company He Keeps; The Mafia, CIA and Steven Seagal".

Remarkable Statistics

These are the stats for Dojo Rat on 4-3-12.
I've never seen them so consistent, of course I've had higher counts on many days.
Today's total hit count is 672313.

For those business people out there, Dojo Rat does indeed have it's price, at some time dojorat.com (I own the dotcom) may go on the market.

You can contact me at dojorat@gmail.com

Bad Night, Worse Morning

Since my buddy Bob over at "Striking Thoughts" is taking time out from his blog, I am the lucky recipient of all his trashy fight stories, so here goes:

Employee At Pirate-Themed Restaurant Uses Sword, Beer Bottle & Screwdriver Against Robber

This isn’t exactly Captain Morgan smooth, but it’s a start. From the Daytona Beach News Journal:

Anthony Brisbane was working at Captain Steamer’s Oyster Bar — where the motto is “Party like a Pirate” — at 5:20 a.m. Sunday, when he heard a thud, police said.

Brisbane grabbed a sword with a broken handle and went to the kitchen where he found a masked man. The man asked not to be killed. When Brisbane saw that the intruder had a tire iron, he “pressed the sword into the suspect’s stomach.”

Still holding the sword against Pufall’s abdomen, Brisbane called 9-1-1, police said. Pufall begged Brisbane to put the phone down and offered him money, police said. The suspect then struck Brisbane three times on the head, police said.

Pufall dropped his tire iron and he and Brisbane fought over the sword.

Brisbane dropped the sword after getting cut. He then shoved Pufall to the floor and slammed a bottle of Bud Lite into the suspect’s head, police said.

Brisbane grabbed a screwdriver, pointed it at Pufall’s neck and walked him outside to the front of the restaurant. By then, police had arrived on scene, the report shows.

You’ve got to give Brisbane credit for using all the tools at his disposal. If you’re interested, Captain Steamers has an obnoxious auto-play website.

[The Daytona Beach News Journal via Consumerist via Rovell]

(Link)
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Bob's comment: Nice use of the available weapons!

April Fools: Cute Hippie Chick of the Month

Well sometimes this monthly column has pictures of girls, sometimes things less human yet still fitting the category:



Happy April Fools Day!