fbhjr

Today was the day to give my presentation on Mair’s sickle techniques out at the UMass Ren Center.

As seems to be traditional, I didn’t get as much sleep as I would have liked the night before. I’d love to blame it on glowing dragons floating through my home at night.

But, I know I got that in CT last weekend and it’s probably plant sex going on.
Either way, bright and early, my wife,

perrin_o_ravnos and I went to the ren center.

In the parking lot we ran into Paul. He wasn’t in costume as he had been last year.
He had added a pike holder to the top of his SUV.

So what?
He has full size pikes in it.

I think it’s pretty cool he’s found a way to drive down the turnpike with them and no one knows he’s got a bunch of 18 foot spears on his roof. They only think he’s got a sewer pipe.
Of course, from the end you can see how he gets several to fit in one pipe.

He also demonstrated a technique I had seen written of in Meyer’s book from 1570. You start with the pike on the ground in front of you.

Then, with one hand, you snap it up and stab someone 18 or so feet away.

Cool if it works.

As nice as the day was out in the Connecticut River Valley, soon we had to go in and give out talks.
Jeff got stuff going.

One of the people in his group ARMS gave a talk on historical competition rules and if they seemed to match up well with the instructions of teachers at the time.

perrin_o_ravnos seemed quite interested in that one and spent some time talking to him about it.

Then, it was back to Paul and his other pole arms.

This raised the question of what do you do at an indoor talk with an 18’ weapon.

His talk was quite interesting, but ran very far over time. So, when done we broke for lunch.
It’s a nice place, especially on warm spring days.

After lunch we had a talk from Ken about finding an unknown copy of a fight book by Fiore while he was doing other research in Paris.
There aren’t all that many historical fight manuals out there. And, to find one that was hand made in the 1420’s that no one knew about is really cool.

Then, it was my turn. Even though Ken has exactly the same type of computer and I had tested mine when we got there in the morning, my computer refused to display the images I had made.
That was very sad.
My wife made a very valiant effort to force the projector to work. But, as she works at another college, it did not fear for its life as stuff in her lab might have for not working.
I think I shouldn’t have put all the weapons in with the cords.

(Don’t worry, the photo was after my talk. I didn’t really mix blades and computer cords.)

As near as I can tell, it was because I didn’t wear my lucky mammoth bone tie tack today.
I appreciate how hard my wife tried to get it to work, but I had to go on without it.

I’m told that even without slides of the book, my statistics on the methods and distribution of attacks, it went OK.
The demo

perrin_o_ravnos and I did seemed to be very well received.

Last was Mark’s talk on sword and buckler.

He’s been working on some new moves from the manual that I hadn’t seen before.

As this is my wife’s favorite manual, when he asked if anyone wanted to try, her hand was the first one up.

Maybe the other guy should have been told she’s taken several courses on this style from people considered the world experts on it...

I’m thinking there may be an expansion of our demo of this style soon...

Despite offers, we were both tired and didn’t go off to the brewery with people afterwards. It was hot, we were tired, and both wanted to get home.

On a totally random note, I have to say the bridge we used to cross the Connecticut river totally failed it’s purpose.

I did not think at all about Calvin Coolidge until I saw his name on the far side of the bridge. I don’t know why it is supposed to be memorial to him if it doesn’t make you think about him. I mean should I look at the bridge and say "wow, I don't know why, but I'm thinking of president Coolidge..." No? I guess it's just me...

We got home and were able to confirm the plant sex going on.