So this month's theme is "Investigations", and whilst the intrepid adventures of Inspector Gadget definitely fit the bill, the question is posed: how can we take this theme and make it even more awesome for you, the avid reader of Geek Speak?

Robots.

Ok that's a pretty solid option, but with all the Transformers stuff happening at the moment, probably a little overdone.

Pirates.

Without Johnny Depp? Please.

Nudity.

Apparently, the Editor would like to keep the PG rating of this magazine for a little while longer. (Don't worry kids, I'm working on bringing it down from the inside… we all know what the interwebz is really for...)

Zombies.

Always a winner… but not right now. Hold onto that thought, though. Trust me

Which leaves us with the catch all, failsafe, fallback option that never fails to perform:

Ninjas.

So ninjas that investigate? Nah... too obvious.

How about a show that INVESTIGATES THE NINJAS?

And we have a winner!

So it was with the boundless enthusiasm that I have for pointless violence that I began to watch Season 1 of Human Weapon.

Here's the premise (and if you've seen Fight Quest you know where it's going already):

Two guys -- a Math teacher (and part time MMA fighter), and an ex-NFL player -- travel the world, spend a week learning a martial art from that region, and then get their asses kicked by an expert in the art in a finale sparring match.

Sixteen episodes provide us with an insight into fifteen different martial arts (they did the standard "looking back" show towards the end), as the guys get beaten up repeatedly week after week for our amusement.

What is particularly fun is the fact that for quite a few of the shows, they choose somewhat unknown martial arts things like Silat, and Eskrima, a mix of traditional arts like Karate, and the modern, Krav Maga for example. So one week we get to see the guys in kung fu silks, doing all the things we expect a martial artist to do -- strange movements, ancient routines that just look funny, and generally fall over in the dirt. The next week, the guys are in military combat fatigues doing self- defence drills with the Army. Cool.

The second, and potentially more fun bit, is that the guys don't train together. For each country they visit, for each style they train in, they find two instructors. Invariably, they find a modern school, with nice equipment, and most likely public liability insurance. They also find an "old school" instructor... Some Mr Miyagi type character who lives on the top of a hill, where he trains a select few students the way he learnt. This generally involves dirt, leeches, manual labor, kicking trees... that kind of thing. They live with their instructor, they train for a week… then they get the living crap kicked out of them. Epicness incarnate.

What's better is whilst one of the guys looks like a martial artist, or at the very least an athlete, or remotely athletic person, the other looks like exactly like the ex-footballer he is, one who has just started to let himself go (or played a defensive position). So this mountain of a dude, that who benchpress a small car, goes along, falls over a lot, and then tries to bulldoze his way through the final "fight", nine times out of ten having some tiny dude walk all over him.

Hilarity ensues.

Realistically, it only scratches the surface of any of the martial arts it looks at, it really romanticizes every single style it looks at. BUT. If you have an interest in martial arts, or even just different cultures, then it's worth a look. You won't really learn any secrets (they pick a couple of fundamental basic moves from all the styles and generally just drill them... then do it under a waterfall, or on a bridge, or some such.) But entertaining? Hell, yeah.

So go forth, young padewan, get hold of a copy of this series, and be amused. I mean, it was on The History Channel, so it was never going to be that informative, but entertainment disguised as informative programming -- this is why we like network commercialization.
 
   -- Jason Murdoch