zebee

Summary: Lestrade trusts his instincts.

Rating: PG

Word Count: 3850

Timeline: before A Study in Pink


Part One: First Encounter

Part Two: The first time he saw the car

Interlude in a Blue Suit

Part Three:Irresistable Force and Immovable Object



Once more my thanks to the patient and encouraging  elfbert.

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Summary: Sally Donovan is a copper.  She's part of Lestrade's team, and no one messes with his people.

Warning: strong language



( Backup's Coming )

I appear to be writing fanfic again.

I saw the BBC Sherlock, hunted fic down read one I liked that I thought had a flaw in the middle, and next thing I know I'm writing!

I created a livejournal account because that's where the action is still, I suppose I should practice the import function.

(I'd forgotten the rush when you get a comment....)

Summary: Mycroft wants to know if the people around Sherlock are reliable.  Lestrade just wants to get the paperwork finished.  The first in a connected series.

Rating: PG (some mild language although not by Australian standards)

Type: Gen

See the end for glossary.

I really appreciate comments, especially ones that tell me what you did and didn't like, and what didn't work for you.   
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So I turned on ABC iView, which is their "watch our stuff on your computer" thingy and saw episode 1 of a new thing "Sanctuary".

Started off OK, seemed good production values, got me in...

But oh dear.

It's an urban fantasy show, hero being a "forensic psychiatrist" who also seems to be psychic in some way. Is attached to police unit, gets involved in murder investigation, is sure there's something more to it... and gets picked up by Mysterious Stranger.

Who can't act her way out of a paper bag.

OK, I dunno anyone's going to be able to say her lines convincingly but she certainly can't.

Add to that a massive Gothic mansion, 3 storey high rooms, staircases, umpteen levels below ground which you get to by a steampunk looking lift. First thing I thought was 'so who does the dusting then?"

It seems the place is a Sanctuary for various creatures that roam the earth. Werewolves and so on.

Down under the mansion is a zoo effect full of things like a mermaid and a lizard man, who (given the surroundings) are no doubt mad from the solitary confinement now if they weren't before. No sign of who does the dusting here either... never mind cleaning the cages! There's a couple of vaguely hairy guys who I suspect are going to be some kind of comic relief.

Meanwhile there's a blonde in skintighti1] leathers on a motorcycle who leaves said motorcycle and helmet in a back alley and expects to get 'em back. So far my disbelief has to be suspended so high it's stratospheric... but then said blonde is some kind of kickarse fighter too. Yeah. OK. Not in skintight leathers dearie.

She turns out to be daughter of Mysterious Stranger With The Army Of Invisible Cleaners, and there's a cringeworthy mother/daughter scene where kid is teeny bit rebellious cos wants to go shopping for hollowpoints. I have given up suspending disbelief, it's not possible.

Oh and there's a tall thin man with a scarred face (as one must have in these productions) who is clearly a bad guy (if you didn't know from the scar) because he turns into a sort of firey mist to go through locked doors.

It started out well. Decent acting, reasonable production, even the kid who did the killings with his toothed penis (I am not *quite* making this up) wasn't bad. I even coped with the hinting at psychic powers bit. But oh... once Mysterious Stranger turned up with her costume and hair hinting at her being a Witch (the hat, the black straight hair) it started going bad. The Huge Gothic Pile (I wonder what the rates are on that thing? Not to mention the electricity bill, given the equipment it must have its own substation) made it worse, the Sassy Blonde With The Boobs didn't help, and the dialogue
(unbelievable if done well, impossible in that "i'm reading this from autocue" drone) just topped it off.

As you can imagine, I don't think I'll be watching episode 2.

Zebee


[1] skintight and butter soft meaning she's going to be saying "hello nurse" and "I wish I'd got the real thing rather than this
shit" one day... But this is TV, she's there for the middleaged men to perve on.

I am in the middle of reading a book on the authoritarian personality, available as a download from the author at http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

It's like a series of lectures from someone who knows how to keep the students interested: pacey, funny, interesting.

And scary as all hell.

I know a couple of people who fit his description of the authoritarian personality. The double standards, the compartment thinking, the following aurthority. The book's skewed somewhat towards the US/Canadian end of things as the author's been studying this there all his academic life but the theory travels.

I highly recommend it, as it covers a lot of the rage one sees on the net.

I have no idea what the Australian army attitude to homosexuals serving is. It doesn't tend to come up here.

Hang out on the net and the American attitudes are quite obvious. Well...maybe.

As I don't hang out in strongly anti circles I don't know what anecdotes and evidence they see, I see lots of interesting things like http://www.advocate.com/printArticle.aspx?id=99081

What strikes me about the stories there is that the guy is talking to people who are not serving in a peace time army.

Ever since reading Dixon's "The Psychology of Military Incompetence" I've understood that peacetime armies are very different to ones shaped by war because they have different pressures on them. It's very hard to keep an army at peace shaped like one at war.

My grandfather was CO of one of the first Autralian batallions so ship overseas in WW2, got a DSO for his leadership in the Western Desert and "Walker's Mob" was known as one of the best disciplined units in the Army at the time. He died when I was quite young so I never got to talk to him about such things, but Mum recalls him saying that he had a "shirt lifter" in his HQ company and the man was a good soldier. I think that's all he cared about, that the guy did his job well.

Seems to me that the soldiers in that article are focused on that too. They want someone who can do the most important job: help keep them alive. Anything else is secondary. BUt also.. what does that is people being obviously competent. It seems competence is the most important thing.

IN a peace time army I think what competence is changes. Dixon says the pressures turn from wartime competence which is about sudden change and focus on doing a particular job no matterhow it is done to keeping things exactly as they "should" be, and focusing on looks and outward show.

Looking like you can do it is more important than being able to do it because you can't really test that you can do it until you get a war. So looks is all you have. YOu can do war games but they aren't real, they follow a designated path and you are judged on doing it by the book.

I can drill all I like and move beautifully in drills. Actual bouting is way different. I've seen people who spend all their time on drills and fall apart when faced with someone who isn't co-operating and isn't doing the moves they expect with the timing they expect. Transitioning from drill to bouting is one of the hardest things in fencing and much of your painfully acquired neatness just disappears. All the fancy stuff you have been practicing can just fly out of your brain and your muscles. A really good fencer has practiced enough that the things that remain are more than the basics, and they can improvise on the theme.


While there probably is a generational aspect to younger soldiers' attitudes to homosexuals serving I wonder if the pressures of war are also important in that change.

So last night I got to try my longsword against a live opponent.

The answer is... this is one lethal set of evilness. Rick was using English, those lovely swinging blows were so neatly avoided and then I sliced his wrists open as they went past. (It was Across not Down, but the idea is to cut the tendons not exsanguinate him)

Having the sword well extended and a long grip makes evasions and cuts just a matter of leverage. The motions that take the whole arm in the English and German systems just require a bit of hand motion in the Italian one.

Now we were moving slowly and playing with it, the real proof will be after some practice so I can instinctively make the proper counters. But so far the ones I've tried are shockingly effective: easy and fast and were the blades sharp he'd have definitely noticed the results.

You don't need to use big blows with a sharp heavy sword, the trick is a sharp percussion and then a proper slicing motion. So as long as you lever the tip quickly and neatly then drag it through the bit you hit, you will damage them well enough for the purpose.

I now have to work out why he says that the best guard to be found in and therefore the best to find your enemy in (by which I think he means the best guard for you to be in when you are in distance) is Intrare which is a high point forward guard that protects the head from downward blows and threatens the opponent's face.

Is it because it's a good attacking guard because it threatens with the point and the best defence is a good offence?

Is it because unlike the low guards it closes off more avenues to your opponent and so constrains him?

I suspect it's the former. The Italian style is very much about 'draw the response' where rather than waiting for the opponent to attack and responding to that, you attack with something designed to draw a known response and then respond to that in a way to a) nullify it and b) hurt him

So if I start in Intrare and extend/step so he eats point if he doesn't respond, he has two responses: to push my weapon away with his, or to retreat in some way. He only has a couple of ways to push the blade, a couple of directions to take it in depending on where his sword is. And for each move he can make I have a simple response that means his sword is out of action for a fencing time and mine is hitting him.

(Which makes me sound unbeatable but it's all in the timing, mine and his. And what he does just as he parries or just after. And what his angles are and what his feet are doing.)

So back to my lists. Are there commonalities of footwork? Does he always step away from the opponent's blade? If not why not?

THe other difficulty I will have is size. It's OK fighting Rick, he's not that much taller than I am. But Hugh is easy 5" taller and that could make things interesting....

It will be interesting to see how the different styles interact. So far the Italian sword and sword and buckler seems to take the English (as per Silver) apart without much difficulty. Will the Italian longsword do the same?

Life has been off and on again for a bit. I'm not a journaling type I suppose

I did find when playing about with English longsword that it really doesn't suit me compared to the Italian. I could do the same moves using the extended arms and the leverage of the hilt and it felt faster and easier and just as effective.

Won't know if this feeling is true until I do some bouting. Now we are back doing Tuesday night fencing I should get a chance to play with this stuff.

My niche in the fencing classes seems to be fencing dummy. My fencing partner runs people through some moves and then I help them practice them on the move against a live opponent who gradually ramps up the speed and the lack of helpfulness.

(That's the huge difference between drills and free bouting: the helpfulness of the opponent. I start by being very helpful, by doing always the same moves slowly enough and with suitable timing for them to practice the counter, and gradually ramping the speed without changing anything else. Then I start being more evil. It does a lot for their fencing but is actively bad for mine....)

When I can't avoid a competition I feel like yelling "This is not what I do it for. Yeah you can hit me, but dammit I spend 99% of my fencing time teaching people to hit me!"

I guess I'm just pissed I get no respect :) I do from the ones I teach but go to a big gathering and I feel a complete fraud wearing these badges of high rank and being creamed by anyone who can hold a sword.

Others tell me that I'm a hard fight for people of any level, so while an intermediate can hit me if the try hard, they have to try hard and the high level ones have to try equally hard. I can't see it myself.

Ah well. The English session on Thursday made some of the Spadone things clearer. The use of leverage with your hands wide apart on the hilt is utterly vital. Some of the blows are like the longsword equivalent of the one inch punch... to move the sword over a very short range maybe only a few inches, but have enough oomph in it to do damage.

And if you don't keep the movements tight and controlled and use the leverage for power, then as you are doing it with extended arms you will easily be deflected. Nothing half hearted about this.

Agrippa (new translation, brilliant!) has a paragraph on two handed sword. Reckons it's way to dangerous as it's too fast and uncertain for there to be any hope of explaining how it is done.

Now he tells me!

I am, however, getting old.

The Norge (a Moto Guzzi motorcycle, not a fridge) is a magnificent example of the variety of bike known as "Gran Turismo" or "Gentleman's Express". A modern example.

It is very comfortable, has a good fairing, excellent riding position, lots of go, heated handgrips even! I have optioned it up with Helibars and a throttle lock and a better seat, and better suspension. It is sinfully plush.

But as I rode down to Bungendore (about what... 300km from Sydney?) I was Bloody Cold despite lotsa woolen layers.

And I thought to myself "what happened to the woman who rode from Adelaide to Melbourne (800km) on a Friday night after work in winter, wearing Belstaffs and as many layers as could fit under same and then did it again and while noting it was cold thought nothing much of it.[1]

But I was younger then... I have done 1000km days on the Norge, but I did them on the MZ with less fanfare and in far less comfort.

Who said youth is wasted on the young?

That said, I need to find places to ride to on the weekend that are more interesting than the bloody Hume Highway and have something fun to do at the end. Perhaps back to that stunning bookshop in Uralla? Who would have thought that a fairly average NSW country town would have a bookshop covering 3 rooms of floor to ceiling stacks with barely passing room between them?

The pub lets you put your bike in the drive in bottleshop overnight and does a decent steak.

OK, I think I have my answer....

Zebee


[1] although I usually get a laugh when I tell the story of the first such trip where I stopped in Ballarat and asked the servo operator if I could warm up in his shop for a while, he smiled and agreed and I slowly thawed out... then realised that a) cold has a certain effect on the human bladder and b) I was wearing everything I owned....

I won the race between biology and buttons, but only just!