Power to the people, the real people

An interesting couple of incidents occurred to two of Meerkat’s friends.

First was one by BJJ pal Mark. You can read the full details here:
But in short – he was practising BJJ in the dojo on Sunday when a Pencak Silat class was going on on the other side. The instructor, totally out of the blue, came up to Mark and challenged him to a fight. It was clearly a stunt designed to impress the Pencak instructor’s students, but he was wrong. Within seconds, Mark was able to armbar him to within a millimetre of breaking his elbow, there was no tap so Mark released but immediately manipulated him into a rear naked and sank in for the choke. Class witnesses say the instructor went limp, but when he came to, he carried on fighting, so Mark duly caught his back again and sank in even harder – to which he DID tap out this time. The instructor got up, refused to shake hands and waltzed off back to his students with nary a look back. He was later overheard dissing BJJ - clearly trying to cover up for his foolish inadequacies.

The other incident that happened is the menacing approach by a certain martial arts governing body to stop Meerkat friends Cobra Martial Arts Ltd (makers of the excellent Martial arts multi-weapon) to trade under this name. It seems they have a similar variant to the name and have threatened legal action. Now let me see, if you own the name as a registered company and own the trademark to the name, does this not give you the right to trade under this name too? As far as I see the two organisations do not compete with each other in any way (one is an associating body, the other a seller of equipment), so there is more to this story than meets the eye, and word on the street is, it ain’t pretty. More on this as I hear about it.

Martial arts is a fun and empowering hobby. Sometimes though, bad things happen by people who take things just WAY too seriously. It is up to us as well-rounded MA citizens to do what we think is right at the time.