FOXSYLVANIA

— I was able to catch a Deadliest Warrior marathon, a show I secretly enjoy as kind of an ultimate fighting thing with more cognitive functioning thrown in.  I’ve never seen so many pig corpses slashed with a variety of weapons; just wait until they get their revenge!

The Warrior simulations are also fun as kind of a theater of the absurd; where else are you gonna see a pirate fight a knight, or a Spartan a ninja?  You’ve got to discount the fact that some of these warriors pitted against one another were more used to fighting in a group whereas on the show it’s one-to-one combat; likewise the terrain chosen for the fight tends to favor one fighting style over another, and certain combatants appear to have technological advantages like gunpowder that their opponents lack.

I thought that the Spartan was better portrayed than the lumbering gladiator who fell to an apache in an earlier episode;  the versatility of the Spartan shield as both a defensive and offensive weapon was something I hadn’t adequately considered before (for an awesome display of Greco-Roman style combat, catch Troy sometime for the Achilles-Hector match).  I can believe the Spartan victory over the ninja, while as one advisor/commentator put it, the ninja might have come back later to dispatch the Spartan in his sleep!   Gunpowder seemed to give the pirate an inherently unfair advantage over the poor knight.

Now we need to see some some updated death match simulations, something like Cheney vs. Biden, or Palin vs. Letterman…