<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div>Robin you and Tivar have been the "life support" for epees and foils. Every time it gets brought up you two start reminiscing about how things once were and if its not hurting anything why get rid of them blah blah blah. </div><div><br></div><div>They are a dead simulator, a relic of fossil days. </div><div><br></div><div>The we don't have Rapiers in our loaner gear argument is also bunk. I have offered on a great number of times that I would sell any Ansteorran group Hanwei Rapiers at cost. If any group can't put the funds together to get at least one I would find a way to get it funded by donation. </div><div><br></div><div>The argument that we can't give them to new people because they don't know how to hit with them is also a garbage argument. If you don't think that a person can be safe with one don't dumb down the blade, down check the fighter. Train them blade less until they learn distance and measure. Hand them a weapon when they are ready to train distance with the blade. If they don't get it they don't get to play, at least against humans until they get it. </div><div><br></div><div>You don't hand a non-shooter a air soft because a 9mm is to big for a newbie. You hand them a proper weapon when they can respect that weapon. </div><div><br></div><div>Any marshal in this kingdom that can not identify a foil,épée, saber, schlagger, deltin Alchem or Hanwei should be ashamed of themselves as a marshal. If you are a marshal in this kingdom and can't inspect every "current" legal weapon you need to find someone ASAP and be retrained. There is no excuse for it. </div><div><br></div><div>If someone can't use the weapons involved in the game that is played then that game just isn't for them. I personally can't swing a taped stick of grass and get people to call it so I don't fight heavy. They don't have to change their weapons for me. </div><div><br></div><div>In closing, stay in school, don't do drugs, mind your parents and stay away from foils and epees. </div><div><br></div><div>Pieter</div><div><br><br><div>Cave quid dicis, quando, et cui</div>Sent from my iPhone</div><div><br>On Oct 10, 2012, at 4:12 PM, Jay Rudin <<a href="mailto:rudin@peoplepc.com">rudin@peoplepc.com</a>> wrote:<br><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><style>body{font-size:10pt;font-family:arial,sans-serif;background-color:#ffffff;color:black;}p{margin:0px;}</style><font color="#000000"><font size="2"><font face="arial,sans-serif">> If not now when? We have already had the patient on life support for 6
years. Pull the<br>> damn plug. Let the foils and epees go with grace to meet
their French/Russian maker. </font></font></font><br><font color="#000000"><font size="2"><font face="arial,sans-serif"><br>It's not on life support, which is extraordinary measures without which it dies. Without any extraordinary measures, there are still the occasional rare epee bouts, just as without any extraordinary measures, there are the occasional rare offensive beer mug bouts.<br><br>"Pulling the plug" means letting the natural thing happen. But what is being called "pulling the plug" is not letting the natural thing happen, but preventing the natural thing from happening. <br><br>In fact, we pulled the plug years ago, when we dropped the rule making epees the default weapon. And they have become very obscure since then. But they haven't naturally died out.<br><br>They have become so obscure that somebody today has claimed that a problem exists that there are events with no epee marshals. (The claim was of course theoretical, and no such event was cited. But it was claimed.)</font></font></font> <font size="2">In fact, occasionally people want to use them, and we have always been able to marshal them. If they want the rare epee bout, why not?</font><font size="2"><font size="2"><br></font><br>Robin of Gilwell / Jay Rudin</font>
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