Wordsmoker

@ Belltolls: If my basic highschool history serves me correctly, the original ninjas were gay, so it stands to reason that they would use a standard deck of naked male playing cards to hone their skills.

I’m not in any way suggesting that the kids in VaQ’s stories were ninjas, but they were probably trying to ape the real deal.

I don’t have a great first time porn story. I found my first pornography when I fell down a well and discovered a subterranean adult film studio run by the Russian mob. It was a fairly typical pre-pubescent three months of captivity after that.

Throwing stars, on the other hand. Well, that’s something else.

I became fascinated with shuriken (the real name for throwing stars, noobs) after seeing Chuck Norris’s The Octagon. I ordered a half-dozen black matte finish stars from an Asian World of Martial Arts ad in the back of Black Belt Magazine for $1.50 a piece plus $15.99 for shipping and handling. Instead they sent me the Bruce Lee throwing stars. Apparently the Uniform Commercial Code allows for slight adjustments in shipping orders, but I didn’t know that at the time.

The stars were for “novelty purposes only,” so the edges were thick and dull. I spent a month with a file, trying to put an edge on the metal and removing the finish, so that they looked more like the type of stars that you would want to, say, kill a burglar with.

Now you probably think like I did that because you’re a pre-teen, you’re just awesome at throwing shuriken, but you’re not—it takes practice. We never thought of playing cards—either pornographic or Hoyle. What we did was take a thick piece of 3′x6′x1″ plywood and one of us stood there while the other traced an outline of his body with a piece of chalk. We free hand drew an inverted “v” for the crotch part to avoid physical contact the genitals. (So, I guess teenage homophobia may be a common theme with shuriken). Then we commenced to throwing. If the star A) found it’s way to anywhere into the chalk outline and B) managed to remain sticking a quarter-inch into the wood, we would declare it a kill and leave it there while we tried to repeat the attempt over a thousand or so throws.

@ Blix: That’s an amazing video.

I’m trying to find a clip from the martial arts training video Black Medicine, where we learn from the Amazing Eagle that he knows “from personal experience that it takes more than one bullet to stop the [Mad] Chinaman.”

The Amazing Eagle is portly gentleman with glasses, and the Mad Chinaman looks about 1/8 Chinese.