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Admin: forthcoming server upheaval

Exploding Pen is about to migrate to a different webserver. This may result in an interruption to our otherwise reliable, unflappable service. If you feel a tremor in the Force during your training, that's what it was. Sometime in the next week, we should clunk and bump onto the new machine.

Etin, CFO of the Exploding Pen publishing empire, with brass plaque

It's not just technical administration that interrupts the "business-as-usual" intensive training and under-waterfall meditation that normally goes on here, oh no. Sometimes the earthly matters of Her Majesty's Government and its Company Law rudely interfere with life in our secret mountain-top monastery bunker HQ. For example, this photo, taken last Saturday in London, shows Etin, Chief Financial Officer, in front of the Companies House brass plaque, having just delivered some frightfully important documents.

Companies House, if you didn't know, is where all the businesses in the UK are registered. I've never been inside — we just send our CFO to attend meetings there, and he tells us that what goes on is on a "need to know" basis, and so far, he says, we've needed to know nothing. Etin came to be with us because one of the Exploding Pen directors adopted him in Borneo. If you ever adopt an Orang-utan, learn from our experience and don't entrust him or her with any executive responsibility. The power goes to their orange-furred heads, and they get difficult.

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Nice moves, baby

Baby and dummy

Baby and dummy

The "Fight for Kisses" game trailer * features some nicely observed martial art details — no, not skipping with a bra, I mean the brightly coloured wooden beads on the mook yan yong — oh never mind. Just enjoy the animation.

 

* Warning — trailer contains gratuitous advertising.

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Fudebakudo at the BAFTA

Last weekend I went to the BAFTA (that's the British Academy of Film and Television Arts) on Piccadilly to see the UK premier of Hula Girls, a Japanese Full Monty (except it's girls instead of boys, and it's hula-dancing rather than stripping). Beyond the intriguing premise of building a Hawaian Centre in a bleak mining town (which happens to be the true part of the story), the film is fairly straightforward and at times labours the clichés a bit — it but it was an enjoyable evening, with an entertaining question-and-answer session with the director at the end.

Afterwards, I was standing by the entrance to the bar, waiting for my friends (girls, as ever, going to the toilet en masse), when the director and his party came through from the theatre. To set the scene, I should mention that I am over six foot even when I'm not wearing my black ex-British Army Boots. With shaved head, black combat adventure trousers, and black hoodie, standing by the entrance on my own (alert, no slouching), I unwittingly looked like the security hired for the evening. The party stopped at the door, and one of them leaned towards me (actually, my chest) and peered intently at the logo on my black hoodie — it's an embroidered Fudebakudo logo, in scarlet thread. She then asked me if the bar was open. Well, it clearly was open, but she asked me as if I knew.

BAFTA logo vs. FBD logo

BAFTA logo vs. FBD logo

Only after I had said that it was did I realise that she had thought I was "working the door." And then I understood what had happened — the Fudebakudo logo, with its samurai helmet face-mask, looks a bit like, well, a mask, which is also the logo of the BAFTA.

Perhaps I will be able to blag entry to the next BAFTA awards ceremony based on this useful deception.

Of course I now regret not having stopped the director from getting to the bar — if your name's not on the list, mate, you're not coming in. But I didn't realise I could pass off the Fudebakudo logo as a BAFTA badge until it was too late.

Incidentally, if you watch the eyeball-strainingly tiny trailer on that Hula Girls website, see if you don't read the line "The Girls Dance for the Sake" the way I did. It's, um, sake not sake. Whoops . . . changes the tone of the whole film a bit, heh.

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Samurai crabs

On page 43 of the book, there's the curious tale of a ninja who escaped from the battle of Dannoura in 1185 by strapping his feet to a pair of crabs with kelp twine, and scuttling away. Consequently, the crabs of Shimonseki to this day bear an invisible ninja footprint on their shells.

Um . . . 

Well it's a quirky story and the footprint bit is hard to disprove. But, as ever with Fudebakudo and the martial arts, there's another version of the story. This one is slightly better known than the ninja one, but it, too, is not quite as straightforward as it seems.

The fact is that there was a sea-battle at Dannoura in 1185. It was a bloody affair resulting in the defeat of the Taira clan. The grandmother of the six-year old boy Emperor Antoku jumped to her death, taking the boy with her to her watery grave, when it was clear that the battle was lost. To this day, the crabs of the area have on their shells the faces of samurai warriors, the drowned souls that were lost beneath the waves reincarnated as crustaceans.

heike crab

Ooh! Spooky! And yet . . . almost true — because the thing about this story is that the crabs do indeed display a ghostly samurai face (note that "ghostly" here affords some artistic license, and you have to scrunch your eyes up a bit, but hey). They are called Heike crabs (Heike is another reading of the Taira kanji) and there's an intriguing explanation for how this has come to be. The samurai crabs are, the theory goes, an exquisite example of artificial natural selection.

The key fact is that the crabs have patterned shells, some of which look a bit like a samurai face and some of which do not. Fishermen catching the crabs in the sea where the legendary battle took place would be inclined to throw back the ones that seemed to be reincarnated warriors (it's never wise to antagonise departed souls, especially those of warriors), whilst keeping the ones that had no such pattern. In this way, over the centuries, the stock of crabs with a samurai pattern on their backs is reinforced by breeding, while those that fail to carry the mark are removed from the gene pool.

Neat, eh? 

It's a wonderful idea, and it was popularised by the late, great Carl Sagan. But, sadly, it doesn't quite cut the mustard (or Thousand Island Dressing). The explanation of artificial selection works best if you imagine crabs the size of dinner plates, or, at least, big enough for half a crab sandwich. Unfortunately the Heike crabs are on the small end of the crabby scale (an inch across, or thereabouts) and it's not such a convincing theory if you consider that nobody bothers eating crabs that small; they probably all get thrown back. Unless, of course, the seagulls of Shimonoseki are more selective than people realise.

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Way-of-Life drinks: now it’s a dog’s life

No sooner had I reported on the Way of Life drinks that have been created to cynically target thirsty martial artists, than TokyoTimes is describing Pet Sweat.

Pet Sweat in a conbi 

The claim is that it's an isotonic drink for dogs — ideal for budo-dogs during intensive training in the doggie dojo.

Anyone who has trained in — or, indeed, just been to — Japan will be familiar with Pocari Sweat. Pocaris are large, sloth-like creatures that up until modern times used to live quiet, undisturbed lives in the forested mountains of the northern parts of Japan. Now, few remain in the wild. Mostly they are cultivated in huge industrial cage-farms kept artificially hot, with suction pumps attached to their sweat-glands. This sorry state of affairs is a direct result of the unrelenting demand for isotonic drinks. Obviously, this raises the troubling question of how exactly these bottles of Pet Sweat are being filled. Dogs, even the sturdy Japanese Akita, are considerably smaller than the shambling Pocari. The lines of cages must run for miles.

 

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Pizza hurled as weapon

Fudebakudo fans who saw us at Seni05 will remember our gingerbread shuriken (with chocolate flavour tips). Because we are serious about the martial arts, and responsible about the risk of lethal Oriental secrets falling into the unskilled hands of hooligans lacking the sensitivites to use them only against Bad People in order to make the world a better place, we placed big warnings on them: NOT TO BE USED AS A WEAPON.

Sadly, some manufacturers do not take the same trouble on the packaging of their pizza:

Man arrested for throwing hot pizza.

"'It is what it is,' he said, according to the report." Hmm. 

As this story shows, it's almost impossible to tell the difference between an angry man lacking self-control in domestic circumstances and a pizza-hurling Zen master.

 

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New “Way of Life” drinks to target martial artists

Lucozade
"Sport" drink

The rise in popularity of the so-called sports drink since the late 1980s is a masterpiece of marketing. When I was young, the only way you saw a bottle of Lucozade — then it was the startlingly sweet and reddish-orange fizzy drink in a big glass bottle (with little  bobbles around the neck) — was by surviving the 'flu, or something like it. It was a drink reserved for recovery, the only good thing about being sick (apart from missing school, of course). These days, people are presumably too healthy for that to be a viable market, so Lucozade has become a "sports" drink. It's a drink built on "science," because it provides energy (glucose), and replenishes lost fluids by being isotonic, which means, roughly, that it is made to be as close to sweat as is possible without, you know, actually having been sweated into the bottle.

Lucozade "Way of Life" drink for martial artists

So, today, it's almost unthinkable to go training without the aid of a "sports" drink. I get through a bottle every session — and there's the rub. These are sports drinks, whereas, as any serious martial artist will tell you, a martial art is not a sport, it's a way of life.*

Presumably it was with this in mind that the brains behind Lucozade are now doing trials of a "Way of Life" drink — identical (as far as we were able to tell) to their popular "Sports" drinks, but simply with different labeling. They were handing out free bottles at the recent British Open T'ai Chi  Long-Form tournament in Manchester, which ran for the entire two months of May and June (the winner, incidentally, performed an unbeatable form which lasted for over three days). Instead of the usual girls in skimpy promotional T-shirts, at least the sponsors had the restraint to use Chinese pensioners to hand out the free samples; but, still, it seems a bit cynical that the trade should be re-labelling drinks just to tap into a thirsty but currently untargeted market. The Fudebakudo informer who was present  at the event kindly sent a bottle (unopened) down to us, which we have photographed with our usual studio-quality care and which is shown to the right.

It remains to be seen if Lucozade Way of Life drinks become available in the shops, and if so whether or not they will be priced higher than the sports version. It may be that green tea or lotus petal will replace the usual citrus flavours, and it's highly likely that "Boost" versions will be available with added gingseng.

If you see Lucozade Way of Life drinks in the shops, please let us know. Meanwhile, the science behind the drinks is described on the official Lucozade website.

This is especially remarkable because Lucozade is a mainstream brand. Such an approach — or something like it — has been tried before by the makers of this less popular, but no less disturbing, martial arts drink.

 

* Actually, judo and taekwondo are sports, because they are in the Olympics. Since the IOC doesn't give out Olympic medals for the way you live your life, that pretty much means that if you do judo or TKD you can stick to regular Lucozade.

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There’d be blood everywhere!

Last weekend I was at an aikido seminar where Mr. Kenneth Cottier was teaching. He's remarkable in the world of aikido because he is one of the few Englishmen (and, indeed, non-Japanese) to have trained at the hombu, or headquarters, dojo in Tokyo while the founder of aikido was still alive and teaching — in fact Mr. Cottier was there from the early 1960s. He currently holds the rank of 7th dan shihan from the Aikikai headquarters.

During the class, he addressed a common question. I'm quoting this as closely as I can recall to his actual words, although I didn't take written notes at the time.

I'm sometimes asked what would happen if a good karate-man attacked me with a decent roundhouse kick . . . What would happen? I'd be on the floor and there'd be blood everywhere! I'm 74! Why is he attacking me? Why?!"

Kenneth Cottier