Hucksters used to work either on pure pseudo-science or on religion, snake oil or faith healing, but in the last 100 years they have added in all kinds of eastern mysticism to the mix. One of the big growth areas has been in nonsense martial arts. Guys claiming to work miracles via martial methods passed down by ancient masters until one day they ended up at a martial arts dojo in a strip mall in Iowa.

The stories grow and grow in the popular imagination. Japanese soldiers slicing 50 caliber machines guns in half with swords was big when I was a kid. I think I would still rather have a machine gun if given the choice. Then came Bruce Lee and the Numchuck craze in which we were told that a rice flail was the ultimate weapon. No one pointed out that the reason the Okinawans used them was the Japanese had conquered them and taken all the real weapons away. The other day I saw a web site where a guy was claiming he could generate chi blasts like the characters in Dragon Ball Z and knock people out with them. Righhhhtt, sure you can buddy.

Anyway, this isn’t to belittle martial arts, they are real fighting techniques and some people have really done some remarkable things by studying them, but there is a long line between remarkable and miraculous. Aaron and John Knapp have set up a site to separate the real from the hype called Bad Martial Arts. It applies reason and common sense to the claims and helps sort the wheat from the chaff. They are a little hard on Kung Fu movies in general, I just give movies a pass on accuracy myself, but I really like their writing style an recommend anyone interested in the martial arts give it a look.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 9:21 am and is filed under Internet, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.