We will be closing MediaMaster down. It might pop back up in some other form in the future, but for now, it will be going away. It is not possible to keep a service like this up for free without some sort of scale to get ads to pay for it. Even then, the overhead might be quite high.So long, MediaMaster.com, you were simply great while you lasted. I would have been willing to pay money to keep you going, but you never asked me to. Sorry it fell apart on you.
However, like I mentioned, it could pop up in another form sometime in the future (hint). If so, it would be a pay only service at that time.
There are many other complexities to the business as well and you can point the finger at our friends the record labels. Their lawyers have created such a swamp of legal complexity that just does not fit in the new world. Funders of businesses are afraid of funding them and that causes big companies to not take a risk that they might succeed and give the labels a new model for revenue.
The blog will stay up with comments about ongoing work.
Thanks for your use of our service over time, we appreciate it, but it was not enough in the current terrible business economy.
Exterior, Kanvera Church
The Church at Kanvera is lovely
Bondage Maids, Coffee and Theology
Being very well armed is a sensible precaution on Mondserrat
In classic Pulp Adventure fashion, the bridges are not what they seem.Patrick McGoohan passed away in Los Angeles today. He was 80.
McGoohan is (arguably) best knows as Number Six in THE PRISONER, for which he was a producer, writer, and director. Some theorize THE PRISONER may have been a loose continuation of DANGER MAN, an early 60s TV series featuring McGoohan as an operative named John Drake (more on the series' connections HERE).
But his accomplishments spanned a far greater range of projects - including ICE STATION ZEBRA, ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ, David Cronenberg's SCANNERS, Mel Gibson's BRAVEHEART, and THE PHANTOM (father to Billy Zane's character). In 1976 he co-starred with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor in Arthur Hiller's SILVER STREAK.
McGoohan appeared on stage in Orson Welles' MOBY DICK REHEARSED, and directed a rock opera adaptation of OTHELLO called CATCH MY SOUL. He reprised his Number Six role for an episode of THE SIMPSONS, and won Emmys for his work with Peter Falk on COLUMBO (which he also wrote, produced, or directed upon occasion).
Perhaps most interestingly, McGoohan is said to have turned down the roles of both James Bond (successor to Connery) and THE SAINT's Simon Templar.
A KICKING MATCH
Revolting Exhibition Among Pennsylvania Miners
of an Imported British Article of Brutal "Sport."The use of the word "revolting" was ironic since the Police Gazette, then a newspaper recently taken over by Richard K. Fox, made a fortune by reporting on spectacle, sport, misfortune, and of course by displaying illustrations of hourglass-shaped entertainers. Later, when photography came into vogue around 1900, the public and the paper both suffered as the sympathetic illustrations of those shapely entertainers slowly became photographs revealing the harsh truth of their pear shaped forms. At any rate, the Police Gazette could not have been too morally outraged at the purring contest, since it saw fit to print a woodcut of their artist's conception of what the purring match would have looked like.
Obviously Davis's challenge was taken up or the contest would not have made the newspaper. Thomas Proudfit, another English miner, put up a $10 forfeit and each man eventually fought for $50 a side, a respectable enough sum for the day. The fancy rented out a bar-room where they wedged themselves into corners and on top of the bar so all could see. The two men stripped to their breeches, Proudfit slipping the new brogans over his woolen stockings, Davis the same over his cotton stockings. The men shook hands (an old Cornish wrestling tradition) and indicated they were ready to begin under the straightforward rules:
- nothing to cover the legs but breeches;
- no kicking a downed man;
- no kicks above the knee (an automatic forfeiture):
- no grappling; and
- the first to surrender loses.Davis was the larger and more experienced of the two, but also less agile. Initially, the match was all feinting and dodging until the first kicks began to score in a furious flurry lasting about one minute. When time for the first round was called, both men had whiskey while their bruised and bleeding shins were examined by their seconds. As the fight wore on for eleven more rounds, the men limped on cut and bleeding legs trying to dodge the kicks, their corduroy breeches torn to ribbons below the knees. Finally, Davis refused to toe the mark for the thirteenth round. He was ready to give it up in the tenth, but the spectators jeered him and he kept on for the last two rounds, where Proudfit scored at will with Davis unable to return the favor.
After the match, Davis slumped in a chair while Proudfit danced a jig with a glass of water on his head, then both fighters had their shins attended. Their seconds first washed the fighters' legs, then applied poultices of rotten apples to reduce the inflammation and pain. Davis had to be carried home and Proudfit was said to be not much better off.
The Davis-Proudfit match is interesting on a number of levels. In some respects, the miners had taken a traditional English sport and adapted it to the current American boxing scene, as the same elements were present. The same spectators, the saloon location, the challenge, the forfeit money, the betting, rules including certain fouls, stripping to the waist, timed rounds, and the whiskey between the rounds are all elements adapted from the local boxing culture. The rules were not necessarily standardized, though, as other matches changed some rules, such as allowing grappling.
In 1883, a match occurred in Port Richmond, Pennsylvania, between a certain Grabby and a McTevish. This time they wore Lancashire shoes, toed with copper, and shoulder straps for their opponent to grasp. This fight was reported in a technical manner, with gory blow-by-blow accounts of the strikes given:
McTevish?made a straight toe kick for his opponent's right knee. Grabby deftly avoided the blow by spraddling his legs far apart and?brought his left foot around and caught McTevish on the outside of the right calf. The flesh was laid open to the bone, and the blood spurted out in streams?At the same instant?he gave Grabby what is known as the sole scrape. Beginning at the instep and ending just below the knee pan, Grabby's left shin was scraped almost clear of skin.Grabby then lost hold of McTevish's shoulder strap and while looking up, received a double-footed kick for his inattention. He quickly returned with a kick on McTevish's knee, which caused him to drop, but he pulled Grabby with him to the ground. They were separated, and the round ended, being about sixteen minutes long.
Both men were a sad sight when they toed the mark for the second round, their legs had been bound in plaster, but blood still oozed out and the exposed spots looked like raw steak. Mercifully, Grabby immediately scored a straight kick to McTevish's injured knee that put him down and ended the fight for both men.
Some new elements were added in this fight. While there were rounds, they ended in the traditional bare-knuckle boxing manner, i.e., the round ended when one man fell to the ground. Without the added aspect of the grappling, such rounds could have lasted a long time before someone dropped of a kick. In fact, this match sounds somewhat similar to the classic Devonshire wrestling match, with their special kicking shoes and upright grappling.
Probably the best reported purring match ever held took place that same year and was picked up by newspapers across the nation. The contestants were again two Pennsylvanians: David McWilliams (142 lbs.), a Luzerne County miner who had kicked his way to victory in eleven previous matches, and Robert Tavish (130 lbs.), an ex-miner who ran a saloon in Manayunk, but was known as a boxer and wrestler. His main claim to fame was his offer the previous fall to wrestle the Englishman, Sam Acton, for $1000 a side.
They searched for a sporting house in Philadelphia to host the event, but due to prospective police interference, they ended up crossing the Delaware River and holding it in a rented room in Camden, NJ. The stakes were for $250 a side, which shows that there must have been considerable interest in the match. The rules used were similar to the Davis-Proudfit match four years earlier.
First, the men stripped to their knee breeches, which left their legs bare from the knee down. Then they donned new pairs of heavy brogans: McWilliams wanted the regulation horn-tipped shoes, but Tavish objected on the (sensible) grounds that he did not want to be crippled. A referee was appointed and the five minute rounds were timed. The fight went off a little after midnight with odds two to one in favor of the more experienced McWilliams.
The first round was dancing and dodging, with no effective strikes landed. In the second, kick's were exchanged which drew blood, and both fighters went down in a tangle. McWilliam's seconds claimed foul because of the grappling, but the referee refused to call a foul. Over the next four rounds Tavish abused McWilliams legs so much that they had to be washed in vinegar to stop the bleeding,. Despite the bleeding, McWilliams was still fresh and Tavish was beginning to tire. After seven more rounds, the floor was sprinkled in Tavishs' blood.
Tavish had a short rally in the fifteenth, but by the end of the twenty-second round, Tavish's second couldn't stop the flow of blood and requested the legs be bandaged. The referee refused, and after Tavish was kicked for the fifth time in the twenty-third, he dropped like a log and refused to go on. Similar to the Davis match, Tavish would have given up at the end of the fourteenth if it hadn't been for the jeers of his backers. The fight ended around two a.m. and both had their legs washed in applejack. Tavish had to be carried away to the ferry, and before he and McWilliams reached Philadelphia, their legs, "covered in cuts and raw as beefsteak" as the quote at the beginning of this essay put it, had swollen out of all proportions.
From the cries of "foul" by McWilliams supporters when he was grabbed by Tavish, it appears that grappling was not allowed in this match. That would make sense, considering that the rounds were timed. Untimed rounds and no grappling would make for a long, brutal match. Notice also that some form of rotten apple or apple liquor was applied in more than one of these matches as a remedy for the pain and inflammation. Interestingly, this same advice appeared in Parkyns' Cornish wrestling treatise over 150 years earlier as a remedy for black eyes.
ReferencesDavis-Proudfit Match
National Police Gazette, November 1, 1879
the flanking sentinels of the Horse Guards, as illustrated in our frontispiece. Tall beyond the ordinary run of men, mounted on high-mettled, glossy black chargers, dressed to perfection, in their white leather breeches, their superlatively high top boots, their spotless gauntlets, their burnished steel cuirasses and their metal helmets, reflecting the nodding plume, they are the never-ending admiration of all small boys, the cynosure of all the nursemaids' eyes from Norwood to Kew, and of more than passing interest to all strangers. To those who see them thus they seem, at first blush, immovable and passive; they show no sign of life and, except for the champing bits of their steeds, they give rather the impression of trophies than of living equestrians; indeed, it is only when you turn from the mounted sentinels outside to those in the court yard and note the giants there on foot, similarly accoutred, with carbine on arm, striding the flagstones with mathematical precision, that you are quite sure they are alive. Every inch soldiers, with the carriage of conscious power, these aristocrats of the British army have not escaped the shrewish tongue of envy and it has been, at recurring periods, a fashionable form of raillery to call them "Knights of the Carpet; " but when these men have been put to the test of active service they have dispelled this illusion, and those who read of them at Waterloo or Inkerman, or who saw them on the sands of Egypt, so recently as Tel-el-Kebir, read or saw feats of arms such as none but the most perfectly disciplined and expert horsemen in the world could have executed. But there is no need to see them on the tented field; a second's inspection will satisfy you that beneath the grave exterior and the glitter and pomp of the full dress in which they discharge their home duties there lie a power and a skill such as are given to only the most perfect development of inherent abilities and of the human frame.
Nor is this at all surprising when one comes to give a more than momentary consideration to the British army and its functions. How otherwise could it, comparatively small as it is, be relied on to discharge its manifold duties in all parts of the world? If every unit in it were not brought to the highest state of physical perfection and military expertness, how could it possibly withstand the strain which climate and service over a dominion on which the sun never sets imposes upon it? It has to form the nucleus, and by its own efficiency inspire the respect of the swarthy thousands, far outnumbering itself, of the native army of India, and to awe into submission the millions of civilians there ready, as the mutiny proved, to rend the hand that keeps them from rending each other and from returning to that chaos of infuriated bigotry and bloodshed from which nothing but the might of England saved them. It has to keep in check the predatory instincts and lawless impulses of antagonistic populations in South Africa, which, if let loose, would there trample out the rights of the black man with a ruthless disregard of all that the more civilized and equity-loving people of Europe regard as justice. It has to protect the fellaheen of Egypt on the one hand against the slave-catching Arab of the far Soudan, and on the other hand against the foreign harpies and unprincipled tyrants who are ready to fatten on their miseries at home. It has to follow the fierce sons of the hills in Upper 
India into their fastnesses, and to drag the piratical dacoit of Burmah from his lurking places, that the peacefully disposed may follow their callings and enrich the world with their industry. It has to garrison the great chain of fortresses, set like a girdle on the great highway to the East, from Gibraltar to Aden; and it has to meet the continued drain, yearly more and more increasing, of time-expired men whose places must be filled in every garrison over the wide world. Nor is this all; mere numbers might do that, but when war comes, as in the discharge of these police duties come it will, it has to fight in necessarily small numbers, and against great odds, the most skilled, fanatical and infuriated savages in the world; swordsmen whose skill is the unbroken tradition of a thousand years; men who, like the hill tribesmen of India, will not hesitate, naked and armed only with a knife, to face the tiger in the fenced arena, and will vanquish this mighty lord of the forest; Arabs, fleet children of the desert, whose scimitars carried terror through the greater part of Europe and established a kingdom, reaching from the Bay of Biscay to the Euxine, which three hundred years of battering has failed wholly to demolish; Maoris in New Zealand, who could never be dislodged from their stockaded forts, except at close quarters. All these duties and many like these have fallen year by year on the rank and file of the British army. Now, such duties are not fulfilled by merely providing, as the great armies of France, Germany and other Continental countries mainly do, an immense mass of food for modern artillery to shatter into fragments at distances which must be reckoned by miles; they require a physical ability and trained use in the primitive weapons of the world, the sword and the lance, such as is not called into requirement by the great manæuvring millions who play the game of war in the so-called civilized countries of Europe, where, given the data, the moves, like those at chess, can be forecast and cannot be deviated from. The British soldier has mainly to meet his enemy at the gate single handed, face to face, and to grapple with him there in personal conflict, as fierce and dependent as much on personal skill and endurance, as did the knights of old who met the ancestors of his to-day’s enemies in the Crusades. Hence it follows that the training of the British soldier, to be successful, must be physical, painstaking and skillful.
Nor is this view of him and his duties lost sight of by those having him in charge. He is not prepared in the "armory," like the volunteers in Great Britain, or the national guardsmen in the States, to march, to countermarch, to move in companies with precision, and after a few days' battalion drill in camp ticketed "efficient." He has to be treated as an individual unit and every ounce of strength and atom of skill he has in him has to be developed to the highest point which care, system, long knowledge of the art and experienced teachers can bring out of him. It follows, therefore, that at the base of the British soldier's career lies not so much the "drill sergeant" as the "gymnast;" not so much he who perfects him in the goose step as the riding master and the fencing instructor. And so it is that, when the recruiting officer has once got hold of the raw recruit, the mere frame of bone and muscle fresh from the plough tail, often overgrown and oftener underfed for his years and strength, the first routine is, out of that material, to knit together the man; to loose the stiffened joints, to make supple the brawny shoulders which nature has provided, to strengthen the long legs, to set up the back bones, to turn his muscles into iron and his sinews into whip cord.
For this purpose the recruit is handed over to the precincts of the gymnasium, where, for the first three months, he almost lives. When all this is over, and it is done in that time or sufficiently forwarded for further progress to be assured, his own father would scarcely know him. No longer the ungainly slouch which his occupation had tended to produce and habit had confirmed, but straight as an arrow, quick eyed as a hawk, limber as a serpent and strong as a son of Anak, he is ready for the riding school and the swordsman two ordeals as painful and painstaking, in their several departments, as the gymnast's, and crowned in the majority of cases with a success as signal, as we shall presently see.
For many years such had been the method of building up the British soldier; but as all things in the modern world exact dispatch it became necessary to expedite and facilitate the making of the perfected soldier; and there arose with the adoption of the short-service system another question: "How is the soldier at home to be inspired with an incentive strong enough to develop very early in his military career, and to keep alive beyond the stage when he was delivered over by his teachers as efficient, that continuous practice which is absolutely necessary to maintain efficiency how to make work, in fact, not only a duty but a pleasure?"
Serious as the problem was it has been solved for good and aye. The military tournaments which culminate in the metropolis every year, to delight ever increasing thousands upon thousands of civilians and soldiers, who flock to them from every corner of the United Kingdom, are the factors solving it. And yet, curiously enough, while many were anxiously groping for this answer it came, as it were, of itself in one of those far-off, mysterious ways which it is as impossible to fathom as to explain. This great motive force was entirely the result of all accident indeed was the outcome of a disaster.
All the world remembers the calamity which fell on an isolated portion of the British army in 1878, at Isandlana and Rorke's Drift, when, exposed to the deadly ambush of the Boers, its ranks were swept by the murderous fire of the most skillful shooters of an eminently shooting country.
Out of the graves of the heroes who fell there arose the quickening phoenix of the competitions which all judges admit have had, are having and will continue to have a far-reaching and important effect upon the morale and, what is of more consequence, upon the esprit de corps of the British army. For it entered into the head of I know not whom (except it were poor Major General Burnaby, who sacrificed his life so foolish gallantly at Tel-el- Kebir) that it would be a patriotic thing to utilize the staff of the Aldershot Gymnasium to give an entertainment, in the Albert Hall, London, on behalf of a fund for the relief of the widows and orphans of the soldiers who fell in those two sanguinary and never-to-be-forgotten engagements. The patriotism of the country, and the gratitude due to the fallen heroes, provided an ample monetary reward, and in that manner was started on its way the great wave which, in its subsequent movement, has extended so widely and markedly raised the standard of excellence in every individual of which the army consists.
Necessarily, indeed from the very place in which the display was held, it had, compared with later developments, a very limited function, was in fact but a somewhat extended exhibition of the already more or less familiar in provincial towns "assaults of arms," whereat feats of skill and strength with the sword had been shown by the fencing masters of the army for many years; but the movement once concentrated in the metropolis, limited to masters in their respective lines, and extended so as to include other and more varied forms of skill and daring, was no sooner seen than it was keenly appreciated by the public, and when to it was added horsemanship, as was soon after done at West Drayton by Windsor, the public set the seal of its approval and its permanent and ultimate success was assured.
In the next year this seed sown by the way took root at the Agricultural Hall, Islington, in the form of a fully-organized display and competition of military training and exercise between all the branches. Cavalry and infantry, artillery and musketry, engineers and ambulance corps, 
sword and lance, sabre and bayonet, horsemanship and agility on foot, feats of skill and feats of strength, all for the first time came together in a competition which has not only provided a rallying point and incentive to the soldier, and a social function the most popular of the whole year, but has added over a million dollars to the funds of the various military charities providing for the widows and orphans of the British soldier.
Graced from the first by the presence of all that is notable in society and brilliant in itself beyond expectation, these sports broke like a revelation upon the public, with whom such prowess and evidence of equestrian skill had always been popular, even when they took the form only of the strolling circus, and they became much more so when displayed with all the pomp and circumstance of warlike troops, in numbers and variety never before gathered together, and executed by each man under the spurring influence of publicity and competition. Agricultural Hall became the Old Tilting Yard, and its contests were instinctively christened "The Tournaments." All ranks of the service, officers and men; all branches of its forces, regulars, and yeomanry, volunteers and militia, alike vied with each other in a desire to join in these contests and in preparations to acquit themselves in one or other of the departments to which their particular service lent itself.
To such an extent, indeed, did this desire extend that it soon became necessary to impose the restriction of the passage through, and the obtainment of the first place in merit from, a district tournament at Aldershot, Woolwich, Portsmouth or Dublin as a condition precedent to competition in London; and, to add to the inducement to achieve the ability necessary for success, it became possible in many of the events to pit, in this mimic warfare, one service against another cavalry of the line against yeomanry, cavalry and regular infantry against the militia and the volunteers.
That all branches of the service have been signally benefited by these annual tournaments and by the long and patient preparations for them, is amply evidenced by the ever-increasing standard of excellence which year by year has seen develop. It is not possible within the limited scope of even so large a floor space as the Agricultural Hall to display all, or nearly all, the evolutions which the cavalry and artillery respectively are trained to perform in the field, and thereby much of the highest expertness and skill attained in those arms can still only be witnessed by a visit to Woolwich Common or Aldershot Camp. The exercises which are given may be roughly divided into two classes: Those which come within the ordinary routine of the soldier's duty such, for instance, as the bayonet and sword practice-and those which are imported from his amusements, such as the "tent pegging;" and they may furthermore be more or less again divided into two classes those which appeal to the eye as spectacles and those which exhibit the expertness, strength or skill of the individual.
As a spectacle, undoubtedly the most pleasing is that produced by the "musical ride," which mainly falls to the Household Cavalry. Indeed, as an exhibition of docility and intelligence on the part of the horse and patience on the part of the men, who train them for the effect as a labor of love and not of duty, it would be difficult to design a more pleasing, or instructive or picturesquely striking feature. The faultless seat and get up of the men; the spirit which is manifest in every step of the horse and every flash of his eye; the evident degree to which they are under the influence of time and symphony in the music; the quality and perfection of the music itself; the mingling maze of flashing steel and glinting color which the uniforms give as they wind in and out the dance or swerve rigid and faultless as the spokes of a wheel round its hub; the schapokas of the lancers, with their flying horsehair plumes, their bright scarlet in the world to be remarkable, and plastrons, their fluttering pennons of red and white; the golden helmets and the silvered cuirasses of the Guards; the precision of movement and magnificent physique, could not fail in any assembly in one as sympathetic as is gathered in London it is not surprising, or beyond the merits of justice, to pronounce them admirable.
Next to the ride in picturesqueness, though before it as an exhibition of skill in management and capacity on the horse's part to perform exact movements, is that which comes out in the competitions of the Royal Artillery, of which we give illustrations, consisting of teams trotting and galloping their guns through various evolutions. This competition differs from the musical ride in one important point it is a duty drill; but it is like it in another, in that each of the team rides the same horse he has trained and each man works with the other men with whom he has been in the habit of acting. It consists in each team of six horses, with their gun, driving at a trot round the circle of the hall between twelve sets of round blocks, about a foot high, laid on the ground only just so far apart as that there is altogether three inches more space between them than there is in the external diameter of the wheels of the gun carriage, and, subsequently to gallop, full speed, round the same space, with sets of three feet high gate posts set so that there is six inches more diameter between them than there is between the wheels of the gun carriage. A feat the nicety of which can be best estimated by remembering that each team consists of three pairs of horses, linked on to each other by ropes only; that each pair is ridden and led by a different man; that the gun carriage is perfectly rigid, without spring or joint, and that the gun is attached to it by a peg and pivot at the back, round which the gun can revolve, or swerve, to any angle which awkwardness or accident permit it, and that the slightest touch would topple over the wooden cones which mark the trotting course, or displace the angle of the posts which mark the gallop.
Of prowess with the sword and with the bayonet there is a full plenty, and many and close are the desperate bouts which the fortnight's tournament produces. Every possible combination which the soldier in actual warfare is likely to have to face seems to come within the scope of his drill. The unmounted infantryman whose magazine is emptied is swooped down upon by a cavalryman armed with the sword, and each rushes at the other as if dear life depended on it, or maneuvre for position as if a slip would not only end the chance of glory but their days. It looks indeed it is quite real, and the spirit of it is so much so that when the bayonet pierces, or seems to pierce, the cavalryman under the arm and glides apparently six inches into him, one almost expects to see the blood follow its withdrawal. It is only when we are confidently informed that the bayonet is set on a spring and retires down the barrel, instead of entering the man's side, that apprehension is wholly removed; but this arrangement and the round-edged Wilkinson's practicing sword are safeguards against any serious accident. Nor does the fight end here, for even when the horse is ruled out, disabled, and the cavalryman is reduced to his sword, he still fights, like the Corsican brothers, until every form of arm is exhausted. Up rises the fallen foeman and on come again the clang of arms and the struggle for the mastery.
When the foot soldier, armed with gun and bayonet only, meets the horse soldier, armed with the sword, it will go hard with the horseman if he be not of the nimblest and cleverest; but when the horseman comes down, like a wolf on the fold, with lance at poise, it needs must be a swordsman of high excellence, great judgment, keen eye and splendid agility who can avoid its deadly point.
Of the theoretical drill, if it may be so called i.e., the drill which is directed to developing accuracy and quickness without the interposition of a living enemy there are long and varied competitions, of which that known as "heads and posts" may be taken as a type. In this competition the horseman has to traverse a distance of about a hundred yards, during which he has to gain his impetus, execute ten distinct evolutions with the sword, three on one side of his horse and three on the other, jump a flight of hurdles and come to a dead stop; and he has to do each of these in the orthodox regulation way, and in no other. Every muscle in the body and every bone in the hand and arm must be just where theory says it will be most effective, and in no other place. It is this which gives the competition and the antecedent drill their disciplinary value.
The first evolution, at the end of the first fifteen yards, is a forward cut on the right of the horse which must sever the neck of a dummy head level, like a supposed foeman, with the cavalryman's arm and lay it rolling in the dust. The next at fifteen yards, on the left of the horseman is a thrust at a supposed foe, and in proof of the accuracy of the aim the horseman must remove a ring on his sword point. The third is a back-handed cut which must bring down another head, supposed just to have ridden by. Then comes the hurdle, and on landing, almost at its foot, is another thrust. The fifth is a low cut at infantry on the opposite side, quick as lightning, and the final a thrust at infantry represented by a ball on the left side very low. Seeing that the whole of these operations must be performed with regulation accuracy, their rapid and perfect accomplishment marks a swordsman of ingenuity and nice finish, whom the transfer to actual warfare would find ready.
Of the score of other events in which these sons of Mars meet it is not necessary to speak in detail, nor is it the object to do so. If this description should succeed in directing attention to the practical results which arise from, and can only be effected by, a closer regard to systematic physical development as the base of the efficient soldier's training; if it should succeed in setting out the special necessity of individual skill on the part of every separate soldier, and if it portrays successfully the beneficial effects of a due admixture of serious "work" in the preparation, and "play" in the competitive exhibition, it will have effected all its author aimed at.
(reprinted in the Journal of Manly Arts, April 2003)
Wearing my old Lancer Rig, dancing with Miss Picnic
Closeup, dancing with my dear friend, Miss Picnic
"This community, you see.. it's broken down into tiers. There's the Tier A folk, they make things: scripting, building, and such. They contribute to the community. Naturally, I'm a Tier A person. And then there's a Tier B layer, they make their contribution felt in the form of societal structure-- creating events and a society for us all to live in. You're a B Tier person, of course. Then there's the Tier C folk, who just consume everything-- they buy what we Tier A people make, and attend the events, and contribute nothing else."
Never Retreat from the Clash of Spears
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A few of my fellow stalwarts and I have created a virtual book discussion group of sorts, utilizing one the nicer recent social networking tools on the Aethernet, GOODREADS. The group is THE SECOND LIFE SECRET LIBRARY, which is open to any Second Life citizens that applies with good manners and a sense of friendship and collaboration. Goodreads allows one to maintain an online collection of books, hold discussions, read and trade reviews, and generally learn about the printed word. I will occasionally publish a review of a particularly good book or two off of Goodreads as "The Printed Word" entries in this journal.
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(We're deciding what to read next)
