> In message <Pine.SUN.3.95.970315020429.17116A-
> 100000@garcia.efn.org>, Eva-Lise Carlstrom <eva-lise@efn.org>
> writes
> >
> >When you're holding a knife on someone and expecting him to cringe in
> >terror, and he relaxes instead, it's pretty scary. I expect. If I
> >attacked someone and he relaxed, I'd think I was in big trouble.
> If you thought you were in big trouble and you had the
> knife pointing at the cause of this big trouble, might it not
> increase the chance of you using the knife, thus getting in the
> first blow?
Not necessarily. But then, running away is a nice strong response in me,
and knifing isn't. In any case, given a knife-wielding attacker and a
(presumed) martial-arts adept, I would expect the attacker to better
evade injury by running than by continuing a close-range attack. Most
muggers pick what look like easy targets. If the story is true, then
I expect when the muggers saw their prey look like he might do
something they didn't know how to handle, they reevaluated risk/benefit in
a hurry.
I'm not, now, particularly convinced of the veracity of either of those
aikido stories, just that they're possible, and evocative of some variety
of truth about the world and human nature, in other words, good stories.
I am convinced that my source was convinced, but given the
friend-of-a-friend origin, I suspect that if I asked his teacher, he might
say they were actually told to him not by someone they happened to, but by
a friend of a relative of the people they happened to, and the source
would keep receding as I followed the trail. I'm noticing more and more
modern folklore since I started thinking and reading about it more. The
Urban Legends theme party went well, by the way; I learned some new ones.
Eva