“Right leg hospital; left leg cemetery.”
Mirko Filipovic has been a member of the Croatian anti-terrorist police unit, a top-tier K1 heavyweight and then, a successful transitioner into Pride, the toughest of MMA fighting organisations. He was also a member of Croatian parliament from 2003 through to 2007.
What a man.
http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm
I did my final four years of high school at Melbourne Grammar. Whenever I hear the song ‘Know your Enemy’ by Rage Against the Machine, it takes me back to wearing the blue school uniform, milling around the Old Bluestone:
“Yes I know my enemies,
They’re the teachers who taught me to fight me
compromise
conformity
assimilation
submission
ignorance
hypocrisy
brutality
the elite
all of which are American dreams.”
I hated the place. Continue reading
In my last post, it may have appeared as if I attacked Sam De Brito. I described his novel The Lost Boys as a “mediocre horror story for women”. I then went on to say he was part of a new wave of Australian authors working to establish themselves with a predominantly female readership through a peculiar combination of obsequiousness and provocation. While I think both comments are true, he writes some terrific posts for his blog, All Men Are Liars. Continue reading
“He woke all night with the cold. He’d rise and mend back the fire and she was always watching him. When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world.
“A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void. A world construed out of blood and blood’s alkahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was that nothing save blood had the power to resonate against the void which threatened hourly to devour it.
“He wrapped himself in the blanket and watched her. When those eyes and the nation to which they bore witness were gone at last with their dignity back into their origins, there would perhaps be other fires and other witnesses and other worlds otherwise beheld. But they would not be this one.”
Cormac McCarthy,
The Crossing
p.73
In 2008, I was training at Golden Glory with last year’s K1 World GP champ. Following is the footage of he and I – albeit briefly – going at it.
Lucy Tui and I commentating for 'Eruption' in 2010
International Kickboxer Magazine Vol.18, No.6
For Lucy Sassen Tui, fighting was in her blood; her father had been the New Zealand heavyweight amateur boxing champion in 1954. She was one of nine children, closest in age to her brother, so she found herself joining in with the boys at playtime. “I was very sporty,” she remembers. “I did a lot of athletics while I was at school, and I held the record for the 100-yard dash as a teenager.” This was an excellent base for her martial arts training, which began like so many other kickboxers – in Kyokushin karate.
International Kickboxer Magazine Vol.18 No.6
Every fighter who is exceptional does it after their own fashion. In a fundamental sense, this is logical. The easiest fighters to read are the textbook ones; you can read them because, well, their technique looks exactly like it should. A lot of the time, the most dangerous people are unorthodox, because they don’t look like anything you’ve seen before. This principle holds true not only for the way a fighter executes technique, but also penetrates all the way into training. This series of articles will spend time with several exceptional fighters and come up with the goods on what makes them unique. A good part of it is physiology and talent, but it has everything to do with doing things differently. Continue reading
I heartily agree with Peter Costello on his opinion of AFL footballers.
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/costello-shirtfronts-afl-20110215-1av3u.html
Theme Park at its Darkest 