My rough metric of coolness in the martial arts is the combination of two factors – badass and suck. As a rough metric: badass \/ suck = coolness. This misses a large number of factors, perhaps the most important of which is that the truly competent exponent does not get into very many fights at all.<\/p>\n
Badass is roughly: The number of years that you have been an active student, multiplied by the number of fights and \/ or physical confrontations that you are in during an average year – plus one. Note, flashy weapons, belt titles, and really loud yelling do not affect “badass.” <\/p>\n
Suck is, roughly: The number of patches on your Gi, less two (I allow one national flag and one school identifier) multiplied by the number of descriptive adjectives (“assistant master head instructor”) that you demand your students use in addressing you multiplied by the number of “secret” techniques that you believe in.<\/p>\n
Mitigating factors can certainly affect this figure in some pretty radical ways. I am happy to adjudicate edge cases.<\/p>\n
For examples of what I’m talking about, I refer you to “Pimp My Gi:”<\/p>\n
They also have a pretty funny series of videos entitled “Your Martial Art Sucks.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My rough metric of coolness in the martial arts is the combination of two factors – badass and suck. As a rough metric: badass \/ suck = coolness. This misses a large number of factors, perhaps the most important of which is that the truly competent exponent does not get into very many fights at . . . → Read More: Coolness in kung fu<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1820"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1820\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}