I’m back, so now we can all rest easy. Let me ease back in by pointing out a few places where you can pan some gold:

(1) Stickgrappler’s site. It must have been ten years ago that I first met this cat. A family man and (at the time) finance guy, he was at a naban (Burmese grappling) seminar in New Jersey, of all places. Phil Dunlap asks him “what do you want to learn?” and without missing a beat he responds “stickgrappling.” I had seen a couple chokes with the stick, but at the time I don’t know that I had even heard of stickgrappling being its own thing. Worked for me, though, because I picked up some nice chokes. He was also one of the first to start talking about 52 blocks/Jailhouse Rock (his Stickgrappler martial arts archives were famous) and it looks like he’s still following it today (btw, I began drafting something on 52/JHR and never finished it- I’ll get to it one day; I owe it to Daniel Marks)

Stickgrappler and I share a lot of the same interests and as I explored his blog, I saw some other friends with sites I follow as well, such as (2) James Marwood’s safeism (I can’t figure out what it is he actually does for a living- I mean seriously, what the hell is a management consultant?, but James is who I’d want to show me round England for a day if I visited) and (3) Jimmy Fatwing’s site (one of my stops on said visit would be training combatives for a day with Jimmy).

Anyway, go check ‘em out- there’s good stuff in all three and I’ll let you dig around and find it on your own.