Chan's Personal Blog

Awesome video of Steve Carell spoofing Lebron's announcement on ESPN.

With The Daily Show on a summer break, I began to search for some other TV content to fill time. Naturally, I wandered over to PBS to see what they had. I came across this fascinating documentary entitled, "Secrets of the Samurai Sword." The documentary does a good job of explaining the cultural, spiritual, and scientific aspects of the Samurai sword. It's quite fascinating that even though 1,000 years ago, the Japanese swordmakers didn't understand the science behind their craft, but were able to create such effective weapons.

If you go to the 33 minute mark of the video, they do a live demonstration of a katana blade in the hands of a grandmaster swordsman. An archer fires an arrow directly at the grandmaster, and the grandmaster is able to defend himself by cutting arrows out of the air. Here's a clip of it:



Another interesting aspect of samurai swords is how they are rated. The more bodies a sword can cut through in one stroke, the higher quality the sword is. There's talk in the video about legendary five body blades which are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If you jump to the 46 minute mark, they go over the meticulous work required in polishing finished swords. They use whet stones to polish the swords, and the stones can go for thousands of dollars. The sword polisher spends ten days polishing these swords.

I'll end with a passage from the Samurai honour code.


[Update] For Canadians who want to watch this video, you can watch it here.

With the immigration debate raging in the US, I came across this timely article from Denmark entitled, "Foreigners to get 100,000 kroner incentive to leave Denmark."


Go Denmark for making immigrants feel welcome in your country. I wonder what the political reaction would be like in Canada/US if a party were to introduce an idea such as this. It's kind of sad that they view immigrants as a liability on society.