It's A Riot!

Just found this, a video from Cebu, Philippines, of 1600 inmates in orange jump suits at the prison there doing a choreographed dance routine to Michael Jackson's "Thriller". Kinda bizarre but definitely has some good moments. According to the article, dance choreography was instituted to replace calisthenics, which many (no surprise) found boring, and to instill discipline in a hard-core crowd.

Speaking of hard core, I just got a look at a sampler DVD entitled "Secrets Of The UK's Best Self-Defense Instructors". Two thoughts - this stuff looks very effective, and these guys have a lot of experience doing these things. Each instructor has his own flavor, so there's material that resembles Kenpo, Systema, FMA, etc. with some nice practical details.

An article you may find interesting by Tai Chi instructor Harve Kurland, Man of the Tao vs Martial Art Hucksters about ethics in teaching. He has some old footage of Gichin Funakoshi there, whom he holds up as an example of someone who taught the art from love and dedication as opposed to ego. Harve also has several video links of old-time Tai Chi masters here. Wu Tu Nan is perhaps 104 in the film (he lived to 107); quite impressive.

Back to Cebu, the site of most of tonight's "Human Weapon" program. The show wasn't bad, but already it seems to be settling into a format that is heavier on travelogue and less on training. Also because there is a competition at the end, coverage seemed heavily skewed towards Doce Pares.

On the other hand, I'm probably being overly critical since that was mostly doing stuff that's pretty familiar to me. I would have liked to see more variety of training, particularly the rural training methods of Leo Gaje such as the caribao wrestling. Might that be a part of Buno training?

All in all, though, a cool program; glad they started with some lesser known arts like FMA.