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Here are two awesome scenes from the movie Troy (which i can’t embed, dratfully).
The first is climatic battle scene between the opposing heroes Achilles and Hector. Narratively, it is intense stuff. Martially, I am super interested the use of the shield edges’ pivot holes used to act as the warriors’ false hands. They literally run through an encyclopedia of movies before the short swords come out. And check Achilles’ flying superman attacks. Ultrasick.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf4IoxEUmHM&feature=player_embedded
Second video is anti-Goliath. That’s how we should fight all our battles. Pay-per-view national champion spectaculars.

It is ironic that one focus of this is how new masks make fencing more media-audience friendly. Fencing would be audience friendly if it wasn’t about people playing tag with flexy wire.

Did you know that PDX, Beaverton technically, has both a new Parkour studio in Beaverton (http://www.revolutionparkour.com/) and a Shaolin Temple (http://www.shaolintemple.org/training.htm)? Well now you do.
//links added to side//

I have no experience with either so if anyone has I’d love to hear about it.

As a note about Shaolin, that is really just a place – what the monks “were” were Ch’an Buddhists, and Ch’an Buddhism is more commonly known as Zen Buddhism. All of the stories in the Rinzai Zen Mumonkan (http://c-pan.net/zen-mumonkan.html) are in China. This too little known connection enriches both Zen and Shaolin and their current.

Hector:”Let it be agreed between us that if Jove vouchsafes me the longer stay and I take your life, I am not to treat your dead body in any unseemly fashion, but when I have stripped you of your armour, I am to give up your body to the Achaeans. And do you likewise.”

Achilles glared at him and answered, “Fool, prate not to me about covenants. There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out an through. Therefore there can be no understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between us, till one or other shall fall and glut grim Mars with his life’s blood. Put forth all your strength; you have need now to prove yourself indeed a bold soldier and man of war. You have no more chance, and Pallas Minerva will forthwith vanquish you by my spear: you shall now pay me in full for the grief you have caused me on account of my comrades whom you have killed in battle.”

http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/iliad.22.xxii.html
An interesting note is that Achilles is helped (cheats? no such thing) by Minerva who gives him a second spear, with which he overcomes the swordbearing Hector.

Donald McBane: swordsman, soldier, Scotsman, gambler, pimp & author of The Expert Swordman’s Companion: Or the True Art of Self-Defence, With an Account of the Author’s Life, and his Transactions during the Wars with France.

At 23 he left his apprenticeship as a tobacco spinner for the army and adventure. After a few years another soldier started appropriating McBane’s pay whereupon McBane challenged him for redress. After an initial rout where his broadsword wielding opponent knocked McBane’s sword from his hand, beat him and pawned his sword, McBane took additional lessons on the smallsword versus the broadsword. Next time McBane skewered him through and kept studying until he was his master’s top student.

More battles, injuries, and duels over trifles continued. McBane continied studying the swordin Dublin under a French master. Laster in Belgium he was forced to fight and win 24 bouts with the locale’s establishd master’s to teach in peace.

Soon enough McBane discovered some of his fellow swordsmen were sidelining in prositution and gambling and he

resolved to have a share of that Gain, or at least to have a fair Tryall for it. I Fought all the four, one by one: the last of them was Left-handed; he and I went to the Rampart where we searched one another for Fire Arms. Finding none, we drew and had two or three clean Turns: at last he put up his Hand and took a Pistol from the Cock of his Hat; he cocked it against his shoulder and presented it to me, upon which I asked Quarters, but he refused, calling me an “English Bouger,” and Fired at me and run for it. One of the balls Went through my Cravat. I thinking I was shot did not Run as I was wont to do, but run as I could after him, crying for the Guard … at last I overtook him…and gave him a thrust in the buttocks …. [I] call’d for his Commerads that same Night, who agreed to give me a Brace of Whoors, and Two Petty Couns a Week. With this and my School I lived very well for that Winter.

Next he participated in the War of Spanish Succession, the first real pan-Euro war. More misadventures and brawls following. At the Battlen of Blenheim on August 13, 1704 McBane was show 4 times, received 5 bayonet wounds and was left for dead on the fiel. At night plundering Dutch (allied) troops clubbed him for his clothes and left him “expecting Death every minute, not only by reason of Wounds, but by reason of the old and the great Thirst that I had, I drank several handfuls of the Dead Mens Blood I lay beside, the more I Drank the worse I was.”

He recovered.
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Don Jose Llulla was the foremost dueling master of New Orleans.

Born in 1815 near Port Mehon on Menorca in Spain’s Balearic he sailed to the Artic and Africa until settling in New Orleans as a bouncer.

The New Orleans of the 1830s-1840s saw an average of a duel a day, sometimes up to ten, to the point where spectators commented that the grass under the Oaks should be stained red.

Many attended salles d’armes to better their chances on those streets of honor and violence and Llulla’s master, L’Alouette soon appointed Llulla as his assistant. Llulla was impeccable with the rapier, saber, broadsword, bowie knife, pistol or rifle, with his friends letting him shoot pipes out of their mouths.

Llulla (who succeeded L’Alouette in the school after publically beat him with wooden Bowie knives) took up a variety of business pursuits – a bar, grocery, slaughterhouses, cattle, real estate, flatboats, a sawmill, etc., until he built a fortune and bough the island of Grand Terre.

He engaged in duel some 20 to 30 times and acted as a second in more than 100 duels and generally met every other challenge perfectly, taking on European fencing masters, to assassins, sailors, mobs, foreign champions, etc., all without defeat. However, by the end of his life, he claimed only two men had died at his hands.

He died of natural causes on March 6, 1888. His grave is in St. Vincent de Paul Cemetery.