Mainly, but not exclusively for foil Being able to assume en garde correctly. Being able to advance and retreat correctly. Being able to hold one's weapon correctly. Being able to make an extension correctly. Being able to land a touch correctly with one's opponent standing still. Being able to make a parry correctly. Being able to retreat while making a parry correctly. Being able to see an attack coming after it has started. Being able to see an attack as it starts. Being able to parry an attack. Being able to make a riposte. Being able to initiate an attack. Being able to feel the difference between an attack and a counterattack. Being able to feel the correct distance for making an attack. Being able to see an opening for making an attack. Being able to understand priority. Being able to tell the difference between a stronger and a weaker fencer. Being able to finish one's attacks without trying to take a parry. Being able to be patient, not rushing one's attacks. B...
Welcome to my Random Laypersons ! Welcome to the VFM, welcome to the Dread Ilk, welcome to the Reprehensibles, welcome to the Unauthorized , and welcome to the Bears! This is the History Course you have been waiting for! Or, rather, it will be, as soon as I get some feedback from you. I was greatly encouraged when Vox asked you the other night about whether you would be interested in such a course and so many of you said, “Yes—as long as it is real history!” As Fencing Bear would put it, “ Three cheers !” We are thinking about having a video a week, starting this summer. The first question that I have is about format. What kind of format would make for a good course online? What I do not want is to have these videos simply be lectures, the canonical professor-talks-while-the-students-doze lectures you get in the movies before the professor starts encouraging the students to stand on their desks. I wan...
This is the last post I wanted to write, but it has become clear that if I do not write it, I will never write anything else. So here goes. This time last year I was preparing my file to submit to my department in expectation of being promoted to full professor. I probably don’t need to say any more, you can all check my title on the department web page now—go ahead , I’ll wait—although as one benefit, as part of the review process I did have to write statements about my research and teaching which I have posted on my academic home page as introductions to my method and goals. I got the news—I kid you not—on Friday the 13th. In April. Seven months ago. Since when, I have been living a lie. Or a half truth. Or...oh, fuck it, it sucks. Because it is nonsense, of course. I deserve to be promoted to full professor. I have published a second major monograph with a prestigious academic publisher (our standard in the department, barring an outside offer from another u...
Everyone agrees. The West has a problem. For good or for ill, what we used to call “Western civilization” is crumbling. The monuments of its past are being pulled down. Its heroes are being wiped from the public memory. Efforts at stemming the loss are vilified as “racist” and “white supremacist.” Nobody in polite society wants to be associated with its institutions and ideals anymore. Particularly not with Christianity. Even in so-called conservative circles, to call oneself “Christian”—as opposed to “Judeo-Christian”—is something of a faux pas . A bit gauche. Definitely lowbrow. Not particularly intellectual. Certainly not something a rational thinker would wholeheartedly embrace. Well, perhaps it is okay to be Christian in the circles I frequent online, but then I have never been invited to the right cocktail parties. Not that I would have any idea how to behave. Then again, as they say, turnabout is fair play. I’m a Christian, and Christianity has always been a bit embarras...
I really wish my father were here. Then I wouldn't have to depend upon my friends (that's you, M.B.) and anonymous readers (that's you, Sean) to pat me on the head and tell me how naive I am. "Taxes are bad because they take money from the people who have earned it and make it impossible for them to start new businesses, hire workers, and generally benefit the economy all around." My father loved this argument when he was talking about trying to get his auto shop to make some (any) money, but for the last fifteen years of his life, he worked for the surgery department in a public university and spent the greater part of his time at the V.A. hospital, being paid by, um, the government. He was also, in his younger days, adamantly opposed to any government-supported health care system; by the time he died, he had revised his thinking on this somewhat. The bureaucracy, waste and corruption of the insurance system had convinced him that the poor--whom he spent the...
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F.B.