I am schedule to teach two martial arts classes on Saturday and I must prepare. I am a third degree black belt in Tang Soo Do. I train and teach at the Upper Marlboro Martial Arts Center in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Stop by sometime and Master Baylor will be happy to give you a free class.
There are several things I mention in every class. Martial arts is not just about punching and kicking; there is a lot more to it than that. Some of these things I have mentioned in other articles I have written. Please check the URLs at the end of this article for more details.
Focus
This is also called being in the now. It means to put your mental energy into what you are doing at the present time. The analogy I use in class is of a knife and a hammer. The knife can cut a sandwich but a hammer can't. The reason is the knife focuses all of the energy onto the thin blade. So much energy in so little space cuts the sandwich. A hammer spreads the energy out in all directions over the hammerhead. The energy is not focused and the sandwich will not be cut. In class the students should focus their energy on martial arts and forget about other things for an hour.
Logic
Martial arts can be thought about logically. Intellect is the best weapon in a martial artist's arsenal. Knowing how the world and the body works will make all of the martial arts techniques understandable. The student can see why the techniques work the way they do. If you hold your right arm out in front of you palm down and turn your hand clockwise your elbow will naturally bend. If you turn your hand counter clockwise your elbow will naturally lock. If someone grabs your wrist; grasping their hand and turning it counter clockwise will lock the elbow and put you in the advantage.
Another part of the logic is, understanding basic physics. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I teach the students that a punch is thrown with the entire body and especially with both arms. As the punching arm shoots out, the opposite arm fires back in an elbow strike to the rear. It greatly increases the strength of the strike.
Momentum is a friend of the martial artist. Understanding direct momentum and angular momentum allow you to understand what is termed as the soft sided techniques of martial arts. When a punch is thrown at you, your opponent is committing most of his or her energy in the forward thrust. Stepping to the side and guiding the energy past you will leave your opponent off balance and vulnerable. If you can hook the arm and turn in a tight circle, that angular momentum will increase your opponents speed and further degrade their balance and a fall will be inevitable.
Run Away
We have a lot of children in our classes and we like to stress the real reason for marital arts. We teach them techniques that hopefully will allow them to escape an attacker and run away. I tell them, “Run away and call a cop; they get paid to do that sort of thing.” I stress that, unless you have to protect someone, you need to get away. You are not there to smite the wicked. You are not there to see that justice prevails. You are there to do your best not to be there. Perform a technique that gets your free, strike once to slow down your attacker, and then run away.
We have a good group of children and adults in the classes. I've watched kids come in at age eight or nine and no taller than my ribs become strong and decent young adults. Most of them now tower over me and will give me all I want in a sparing match and that is quite satisfying to me.
Stash Spotted! The 10 Weirdest Places Drugs Have Been Found
It’s not outer space that has NASA seeing stars. It’s cocaine!
There was no failure to launch at a NASA this week, as a worker discovered a bag of cocaine outside a bathroom in a secure part of a space shuttle hangar at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. Despite being all spaced-out, NASA has a zero-tolerance drug policy (and is now drug testing everyone with access to the area), so it’s an extra odd place to find some dope. Perhaps not the strangest or funniest, though. Check out some of the most memorable places (that don’t involve dead baby corpses) where drugs have been discovered.
In an ATM, February 2008
• An 18-year-old woman in Bremerton, WA accidentally placed her bag of meth in a deposit envelope instead of her money and tried to deposit it at a Kitsap Credit Union ATM. Silly junkie! Depositing your meth is the how you go through withdrawal!
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In fat rolls, September 2009
• A 5-foot, 220-lb. woman in Pontiac, MI, who’d been sentenced to jail time at her court hearing, tried to sneak her stash in with her by tucking it in some sweaty blubber—completely overlooking the standard strip search. Suddenly smuggling dope in through your anus seem less gross.
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In a public flower pot, September 2009
• Practical jokers in Millville, NJ put planted marijuana in a flower pot hanging from a lamppost on…wait for it…High St. Police eventually noticed the three-foot-tall plants sticking out and took them down, but it was high-larious while it lasted.
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In front of a donut shop, September 2009
• A man, who was apparently unaware of the strong bond between police and pastries, got caught dealing heroin out of a Marlboro Menthol cigarette pack in front of the local Dunkin Donuts in Easton, PA. Hey, some people like their donuts with sprinkles of heroin on top.
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In shark corpses, June 2009
• Drug gangs in Mexico City, Mexico tried to conceal more than a ton of cocaine slabs destined for the U.S. in the frozen corpses of sharks. When Naval officers discovered the stash, those responsible for the shipment claimed the drugs were a conserving agent. Coke—it does a shark body good!
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In stuffed animals, August 2009
• You know how they make teddy bears so cuddly? They slice the cute lil’ fuckers open and stuff ‘em full of heroin! At least that’s what a smack ring in the Bronx, NY did, filling Build-A-Bear dolls with dope before delivering them to distributors. With so much junk coursing through their bodies, we guess you could call them “unsteady bears”!
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In dogs, July 2004
• Dogs may be man’s best friend, but we don’t think they’re cool with drug dealers surgically inserting eleven containers of cocaine in them to smuggle from Colombia to the UK, as a northwest London couple did to some sweet pooches. Sometimes it’s absolutely right to bite the hand that feeds you.
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In a shipment of artichokes, September 2009
• In Peru, police uncovered four tons of high-grade liquid cocaine hidden amongst 8,000 cans of artichokes at the port of Callao. That’s one way to get kids to eat their vegetables.
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In a cast, March 2009
• A 66-year-old Chilean man, who had two fractured bones below the knee, tried to smuggle cocaine into Barcelona in his cast made out of cocaine! The man couldn’t catch a break, in part because he was also hiding coke in his luggage, a six-pack of beer, and the aluminum legs of two stools.
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In a submarine, October 2009
• In Guatemalan waters off the Central American Pacific coast, U.S. anti-drug agents and the Guatemalan Army intercepted three Colombians and a Mexican in a small submarine carrying ten tons of cocaine. That’s even more drugs than the Beatles fit in their yellow submarine!
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In a religious statue, May 2008
• U.S. customs officials with drug-sniffing dogs seized a 6.6-pound statue of Jesus Christ, which a Mexican woman had in the trunk of her car. It turned out God’s son was made from a mixture of plaster and cocaine, which gives a whole new meaning to the “most high.”
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The tobacco in cigarettes hosts a bacterial bonanza — literally hundreds of different germs, including those responsible for many human illnesses, a new study finds.
“Nearly every paper that you pick up discussing the health effects of cigarettes starts out with something to the effect that smokers and people exposed to secondhand smoke experience high rates of respiratory infections,” notes Amy Sapkota of the University of Maryland, College Park. The presumption has been that smoking renders people vulnerable to disease by impairing lung function or immunity. And it may well do both.
“But nobody talks about cigarettes as a source of those infections,” she says. Her new data now suggest that’s distinctly possible.
If these germs are alive, something she has not yet confirmed, just handling cigarettes or putting an unlit one to the mouth could be enough to cause an infection.
The idea that tobacco might contain viable germs isn’t just idle conjecture. Several research teams have isolated bacteria from tobacco that they could grow out in petri dishes. Those earlier investigations tended to hunt for — and, when found, attempted to grow — only one or two species of interest, Sapkota says.
What’s novel in her study: She and her colleagues probed for genetic material from any and every bacterium in a cigarette’s tobacco. Under sterile conditions, the researchers opened up cigarettes and then performed a series of tests on the leafy bits. For instance, they isolated all of the ribosomal material and then homed in on its long, species-specific stretches known as 16S regions. These genetic segments were then compared to 16S patches characteristic of known bacterial species.
Sapkota’s team had 16S probes for close to 800 different bacteria and found matches to many hundreds in the four brands of cigarettes screened: Marlboro Red, Camel, Kool Filter Kings and Lucky Strike Original Red. These cigarettes are “among the most commonly smoked brands in Westernized countries and represent three major tobacco companies,” Sapkota notes. All were purchased in Lyon, France, where she was completing her postdoctoral studies.
Among the large number of germs whose DNA laced these cigarettes were: Campylobacter, which can cause food poisoning and Guillain-Barre Syndrome; Clostridium, which causes food poisoning and pneumonias; Corynebacterium, also associated with pneumonias and other diseases; E. coli; Klebsiella, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Stenotrophomonas maltophilia, all of which are associated not only with pneumonia but also with urinary tract infections; and a number of Staphylococcus species that underlie the most common and serious hospital-associated infections.
Sapkota’s team lists many of these — including the most prevalent bacteria in the tobacco they studied — in a paper published early, online in Environmental Health Perspectives.
Some people have criticized the idea of infectious cigarettes, arguing that as tobacco burns, it would kill any germs present. But Sapkota is not so sure that’s true. The tobacco farthest from the burning tip might be a balmy temperature, from a bacterial point of view. And here’s “a really wild idea,” she says: What if the smoke particles traveling through the still-unburned part of a cigarette pick up some germs and then ferry them deeply into the lung, where they’re unlikely to be cleared? Wouldn’t that be the prescription for disease?
Of course, there’s also plenty of chances for a smoker to become exposed prior to lighting up. And, of course, the potential for highest oral exposure would come from chewing tobacco — and nasal exposures from snuff.
Sapkota, an environmental health scientist, plans to follow up her preliminary data to see which types of tobacco are most likely to host viable germs, and whether those bacteria are transported into the body, either during smoking or by the insertion of unburned tobacco products (including chewing tobacco) into the mouth.
Several thousand potentially toxic chemicals have been isolated from cigarettes. Sapkota says that it’s not hard to imagine that the number of germs hosted by tobacco products could rival that of the carcinogens and other poisons residing in or produced by burning tobacco.
How so, when she’s only found genetic material indicting hundreds of germs? Owing to the bacterial probes available when Sapkota began her tobacco work, she was only able to screen for 700-odd species. But newer probes on the market can now screen for the bacterial 16S genetic material of 5,000 or more germs. And if she used such huge batteries of probes now, she said she fully expects she could turn up at least 1,000 hitchhiking bacterial species in tobacco products.
Image: Flickr/alphadesigner
See Also:
- The Cigarette of the Future: All the Cancer, None of the Nicotine
- Philip Morris Tries to Engineer the Cancer Out of Tobacco
- Toxic Soup: Plastics Could Be Leaching Chemicals Into Ocean
- Anti-Smoking Drug Succeeds When Antidepressants Fail
- Darker Skin Linked to Nicotine Dependence
- The Inevitable USB Powered Cigarette
Tags: cig
Todd Gomez