Kung Fu Tricks & Other Fakery

Breaking stones with heads or hands, tearing phone books, performing amazing feats of strength and the like go waaaaaay back. The earliest accounts of martial art tricks/stunts I recall go back to the days of the Roman gladiators.
Today it’s shaolin monks, less recently “no-touch” knockouts, a couple decades ago it was the “unbendable arm” and […]

Carnival of Martial Arts #3

Welcome to the October 1, 2007 edition of carnival of martial arts.
Patrick Parker presents Mokuren Dojo: Fences, hard challenges, and strategy confusion posted at Mokuren Dojo.
Renli presents Review of Chen Xin’s Book (Part 2) posted at 仁力的網頁, saying, “A review of the most sought after Tai Chi book, ever, recently translated […]

First Reprint Available: Fall Guys

Big news! The first martial reprint is available although it’s not the one I had expected to be ready first. C’est la vie.
Anyway, I offer “Fall Guys: The Barnums of Bounce.” It was first published in 1937 by sports reporter Marcus Griffin who did his research and exposed the wrestling game, showing it to […]

Carnival of Martial Arts #2

Welcome to the September 1, 2007 edition of the Carnival of Martial Arts. I’ve been pressed this month and haven’t been able to beg, borrow, or steal as much content for this edition as last month, but hopefully that will turn around next month. I give you our contributors:

Patrick Parker presents Mokuren Dojo: The […]

Skipping Belt Ranks

There are two threads regarding skipping ranks over on the Convocation of Combat Forum. Rather than wax on over there, I’ll wax off alone over here and then link to it. (Yikes, a Karate Kid and masturbation pun in the second sentence, this is going downhill fast). Anyway, the genesis of the debate arose when […]

Jujutsu Humor

Another brief installment of jiu-jitsu humor from the Washington Post, 1-24-1905.
 An Experiment in Jiu Jitsu.
From the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.
When a footpad approaches you, seze him by the center of the arm and press your thumb violently against a nerve in the inner elbow joint. The footpad will then probably shoot five bulletholes in you while […]

Early Civilian Western Martial Arts

The following roundup represents a group that goes together in my head as Civilian/Self-Defense Martial Arts in the late Renaissance to early-Victorian eras. I chose to keep boxing manuals separate, because they are generally later than these manuals.
Johann Georg Passchen’s Vollstandiges Ring-buch (1659). These other versions are probably based on Eli Steenput’s translation:

HACA

AEMMA

Nicolaes Petter’s Clear […]

Jiu-do Book Update

As you may know from reading this blog, Jiu-jutsu or Jiu-do: Selection from Kodokwan Method is the book I am currently working on reprinting. I made a big push this weekend and got my files out, so I’m just waiting on a proof copy now. I thought the cover turned out pretty well and wanted […]

First Edition! Carnival of Martial Arts #1

I am pleased to welcome you to the first edition of the Carnival of Martial Arts. To avoid playing favorites, the submissions below are presented in the order of receipt.

Jujutsu Humor

The early 1900s newspapers often poked fun at the “jiu-jitsu” invasion. Satirical pieces were written on the convolutions of jiu-jitsu holds, as metaphor for happenings in the Russo-Japanese war, and, of course, comparing jiu-jitsu to good old-fashioned wrestling.
The couple lines below will be appreciated by the grapplers who have seen the endless debates over the […]

Paper Bludgeon: the Millwall Brick

The other day I read a post on Boing Boing about constructing the Millwall Brick, which is the first I had heard of it. The Millwall (or Chelsea) Brick is an improvised weapon constructed out of rolled and folded newspaper.
The history behind the Milwall Brick is that football (soccer) hooligans, frisked at the gates, were […]

Knife Fighting Instruction

MacHeath had a jackknife, which he kept out of sight, and used almost poetically if Bobby Darin’s description is any indication. Jim Croce gave Bad Bad Leroy Brown a .32 gun in his pocket for fun and a razor in his shoe, and he didn’t specify what Big Jim Walker carried, but a knife sounds […]

Test Pic from Jiudo

The image manipulation has been a difficult process with the Jiudo reprint, but I’ve finally made some headway. The difficulty was in preserving the excellent original line drawings without carrying along a big white box of empty space around them. I’ve learned this is called “transparency” in the image editing field. The other benefit was […]

Butting in the Revolutionary War

For Independence Day, I thought the following account would be an appropriate choice. It is an excerpt from a butting article I am working on (I have collected dozens of these types of accounts) that took place during the Revolutionary War. Butting, in its broadest sense, was headbutting. It was predominantly practiced by African-Americans, and […]

William Ewart Fairbairn: The Legendary Instructor

Combatives researcher Phil Mathews has put together another excellent biographical article on yet another combatives pioneer. This time the subject is none other than William Ewart Fairbairn, possibly the biggest name in the field.
Fairbairn spent time in the Royal Marines in the 1900s, the Shanghai Municipal Police in the 1920s, then taught combatives at Camp […]