Again, I’d like to acknowledge that I’m a beginner and make no claim to the accuracy or utility of what follows. I’d love anyone who understands Agrippa to correct me.

First, let’s define some terms. Agrippa defines a number of stances (static guard positions) and actions (movements for attack or defence) in his own quite peculiar way. They form a short-hand to understand how he wants you to move in a given circumstance. I’ll be using the hand positions first, second, third and fourth as discussed in my previous post on Agrippa .

Stances and Actions

Stance B: Hold your weapon in second position in a narrow stance, that is with you feet close together but you right foot slightly forward of your left. Keep your off hand or secondary weapon (dagger or buckler) in front of you covering your chest. In second position, your hand is held at the same horizontal level as your shoulder with the blade covering your outside line.

Agrippa’s basic tactical advice for this stance is to step backward with your left foot in the face of an attack into Stance D then counterthrust with opposition. To attack from Stance B, you simply step forward (presumably on the circle rather than straight ahead) with your right foot and drive your point home.

Stance D: Hold  you weapon in fourth position in a wide stance, that is with your feet about shoulder width apart and your right foot forward. The trick with this stance is to turn your body so that you present your right side to your opponent. Your sword is held on the inside of your right knee and is protecting your inside line. Because of your side-on orientation, your left hand is best held out of the way or above your head.

Agrippa warns explicitly against using this stance against a skilled opponent but elsewhere claims that there is no tactical difference between this and Stance C in that both hold an opponent at wide distance from you.

Action H: Hold yourself in Stance B and take either a step forward with your right foot or a step backwards with your left foot. In either case, you are performing Action H, a thrust with your hand in second position. This action is best used to counter a riversa (cut from the attacker’s left) or a thrust from Stance D (see immediately below). Use this action, Agrippa says, against an opponent standing in a wide third position stance (ie: Stance C).

Action I: This action is much more opaque. On the face of it, it seems like a standard Italian or classical lunge in fourth but since you already begin the action in a wide stance, stretching forward or stepping into a wider position appears counterproductive. It appears to be the final part of a larger action which involves contracting or narrowing one’s stance to void an attack before counter-thrusting. Use this action, says Agrippa, against an opponent standing in a narrow third position (ie: Stance F).

Actions H and I are, in effect, the counters for each other. Agrippa does not devote a great deal of space in the text to these two stances and two actions yet they seem to form a core technique in this tradition. Everywhere he discusses one, he discusses the other. According to Agrippa, one feints from stance B then cavares under the opponent’s weapon to thrust home using Action I. The mirror image is to feint in D, cavare under and counterthrust using Action H. If we leave out the footwork, this represents a shift of the hand from second to fourth position or the reverse. This is a core technique in modern fence.

Parries or counters from Stance B and Stance D involve the same basic mechanic: you change your guard into Stance C (moving either forwards or backwards as circumstances dictate) in order to capture (stingere, trouver, gain, etc) or cross the opponent’s blade and from that point you launch yourself forward using either Action H or I to drive home your attack.

Agrippa does not seem to have any attacks starting from Stance B or D. Perhaps this is why Capo Ferro says that they are not guard positions but stages in particular attacking or defending actions. Stances B and D are the starting (or ending) points of Actions H and I. Like Actions G (and P) and K discussed last time, they seem to be defensive in nature and more in the line of a manner to counter-thrust once an attack has been parried, voided or otherwise set aside. Against a cut, whether from the left of the right, these Actions can be used as a single-time defence which in one move blocks the opponent’s cut and counter-thrusts against the opponent. The key to these techniques is the feint. You need to force the opponent to move and break his or her guard so that you can use these techniques in response.

Plays from Stance B and Stance D

There does not seem to be a set of plays specifically for Stance B or D or Action H or Action I. This is completely dissimilar to the fixed plays for Stance C. What Agrippa provides instead is a bunch of tactical advice. You can easily develop your own plays from this.

Wide versus Narrow

• If your opponent stands in a wide stance (feet wide apart), adopt Stance B. When your opponent attacks, step back with your left foot into a wide stance such as Stance C or Stance D before counter-attacking.
• If your opponent stands in a narrow stance (feet close together), adopt Stance D. When you opponent attacks, step back with your right foot into Stance B (or Stance F?) before counter-attacking.

Double-Time Defence

• If you are standing in either Stance B or in Stance D and your opponents thrusts at you, change into Stance C to defeat his attack di cruce (at the cross) before counter-attacking.

Before getting stuck in, I’ve got to acknowledge again that I’m a beginner and make no claim to the accuracy or utility of what follows. I’d love anyone who understands Agrippa to correct me.

First, let’s define some terms. Agrippa defines a number of stances (static guard positions) and actions (movements for attack or defence) in his own quite peculiar way. They form a short-hand to understand how he wants you to move in a given circumstance. I’ll be using the hand positions first, second, third and fourth as discussed in my previous post on Agrippa .

Stances and Actions

Stance C: Hold you weapon in third position in a wide stance. That is, stand with your feet about shoulder width apart with your right foot forward and your left foot slightly to the side of a straight line from you opponent, through your right foot and out behind you. The sword is held to the outside of your right knee.

Stance F: This is the same as Stance C except that you are in a narrow stance, meaning that your feet are close together. You can get the Stance F from Stance C by either stepping forward (drawing you left foot up next to your right) or by stepping backwards (drawing your right foot back next to your left). Both movements have their uses.

Action G (and P): The only difference between Action G and Action P is that G aims a thrust at the head and P aims a thrust at the belly. The actions are performed in the same manner and both actions aim to get you out of the way while you counter thrust at an opponent who is in the process of attacking you. There are two keys to this action.

1. Take a large step to your right to immediately void your body – to get yourself off the line of your opponent’s attack. Agrippa says to do this with your right foot. The same effect is achieved by moving your left foot to the right in a maneuver which came to be known later as a punta riversa or volte.
2. At the same time as your move (or even beforehand), change you sword hand into fourth position in order to simultaneously block the opponent’s sword and use it to guide your point straight back into your opponent’s body. This technique is called a thrust with opposition or contra-punta.

Action K: This is the mirror image of Action G in that it performs the same function while you step to the left. The keys to the action are:

1. Agrippa says to take a large step to the left with your right foot. This sounds warning bells for me because it leaves you with your legs crossed and in an unstable position. I think that making this step with your left foot achieves the same end and maintains your stability.
2. At the same time (or even beforehand), change your sword hand into second position in order block the opponent’s sword and thrust at him or her as in Action G above.

Attacks and Defences from Stance C

Next, let’s have a look at what Agrippa says you can do from Stance C. In terms of defence, Agrippa really only has one general strategy. He suggests that, as an opponent launches an attack at you, you should step back from Stance C into Stance F. At best, this is enough to counter the attack. At worst, it gives you additional time to deal with it using an off-hand weapons such as a main gauche or by blocking the attack with your sword “di cruce” (from the cross). Once you’ve dealt with the attack, counter attack. This is standard double-time response stuff. Nothing special here.

He also talks about some single time responses to an attack such as turning your hand into second or fourth position as appropriate and thrusting home or blocking the opponent’s attack at the cross and responding with a cut. Other than some flourishes, this seems to be the extent of the defenses from Stance C.

The only attack of any substance that Agrippa discusses comes in two variations. It involves provoking your opponent to attack you then murdering him or her while they are “disordered,” to use his term. Here’s how it goes.

1. Step forward from Stance C into Stance F. If your opponent does nothing, your sword point goes through his or her head. That’s fine in itself but what you’re looking for is the inevitable defensive move. Most people do not stand idly by while someone stabs them in the eye. Those who do, deserve it.
2. Use Action G (or P) or K to counterattack as appropriate. If the opponent’s blade is to your left, use Action G (or P). If the opponent’s blade is on your right, use Action K. I don’t like having to make a decision at this point in proceedings. My brain is not quick enough for that any more. I guess there is scope to angle step 1 in some way to provoke a particular response rather than any ol’ response from your opponent. I’ll have to experiment more with this at training.

Plays Beginning in Stance C

Agrippa’s plays (or set-piece drills for training purposes) are pretty similar. I need to study these much more closely and test them out on the field to ensure I understand them correctly. On the face of them, however, they seem sound and I can see how they work.

Play One: The student stands in Stance C; the partner in Stance A (hand in first poisiton, narrow stance). The partner thrusts at the student who uses Action G both block/cross the partner’s weapon and thrust home. This is a single time defence.

Play Two: The student stands in Stance C; the partner in Stance B (hand in second position, narrow stance). The partner thrusts from Stance B. The student sweeps across the body from Stance C, capturing the partner’s blade and ending with a thrust against the partner in Stance H (hand in second position, wide stance).

Play Three: The student stands in Stance C; the partner in Stance B (hand in second position, narrow stance). The partner steps forward to thrust at the student (hand in second position, wide stance). The student slips back (withdraws into Stance B) and, once the partner’s blade has passed, attacks with a thrust in Stance H (hand in second position, wide stance).

Play Four: The student stands in Stance C; the partner in Stance D (hand in fourth position, wide stance). The partner changes his stance to attack in A (hand in first position). The student changes stance from C to D to block the attack and lunges at the partner (Action I).

The question now becomes which language will I tackle next? Two candidates have become front-runners: Italian and Mongolian. That’s right: Mongolian. (Stop looking at me like that.) I can’t decide which to choose. Help me puzzle this through.

Italian: The Case For:

• There’s a logical progression from my previous study of Latin (which I’ve largely forgotten) to the Romance languages of today such as French and Italian.
• Being able to compare how a grammatical concept in Latin has morphed differently into French and Italian will be dead interesting from an academic point of view.
• It makes for a great excuse to travel to Italy and wallow in the ruins, sit in street cafes drinking coffee or grappa and lurk in the dark corners of the multitude of museums there.
• A lot of the rapier fencing manuals I read in translation are Italian. Someday, I may be able to read them in the original. If this proves anything like my experience with French, it’ll open a whole new world of understanding.
• I’m dead interested in, especially, Renaissance literature and the history of the Renaissance.

Italian: The Case Against:

• It’s another Romance language. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Inflected with local periphrastic differences. Yawn.

Mongolian: The Case For:

• It’s not a Romance language. Hell, it’s not even Indo-European. It belongs to the wholly different Altai language family whose members include Turkish, Uighur, Mongolian and possibly Korean, Japanese and Finnish, depending on which linguists you choose to believe.
• It will be a real challenge to learn because it’s so different from Indo-European with such features as vowel harmony and being agglutinative rather than inflected or periphrastic in nature.
• I like the image of me riding across the steppes of Central Asia speaking the language of Genghis Khan with the locals.

Mongolian: The Case Against:

• Dude, seriously?
• When the hell are you ever going to get to practice speaking, listening, reading or writing Mongolian? Are you ever going to travel to Mongolia?

Inigo Montoya

You are using Bonetti’s Defense against me, ah?

Man in Black

I thought it fitting considering the rocky terrain.

Inigo Montoya

Naturally, you must suspect me to attack with Capo Ferro?

Man in Black

Naturally… but I find that Thibault cancels out Capo Ferro. Don’t you?

Inigo Montoya

Unless the enemy has studied his Agrippa… which I have.

And with this quote from The Princess Bride begins my look at the work of Camillo Agrippa, a Renaissance architect, engineer and mathematician who lifted fencing out of the Middle Ages and started it on the path to becoming the art we know today. Anyone with even a partial exposure to the sport of fencing who reads Agrippa’s Treatise on the Science of Arms (1553) will recognise the terms he coined to describe his new method.

In it’s simplest form, Agrippa’s fencing does nothing but continue the trend of modernisation as 16th century Italy continued to drag itself out of the medieval mindset. No longer were nobles being trained for the battlefield but for duels of honour in the streets of the burgeoning Italian cities. The battlefield was managed by an ever-increasing body of professional soldiers and the outcome was increasingly determined by vblocks of pike and musket than by individual feats of arms. Nobles were more and more defined by social and intellectual abilities than by martial skill.

At the other end of the scale, Agrippa’s work can be seen as a merge of swordplay with the rediscovered science of geometry. He is (arguably) the first to enphasis the thrust as the quickest way of inflicting a wound because the blade travels a shorter distance than in a cut. He uses geometry, explained in excruciating detail, to prove the efficacy of the concepts over-reach (uberlauffen in the german tradition) and counter-thrusting. In fact, his treatise ends with a Platonic dialogue on the proper method of constructing geometric figures, such as squaring the circle. Exactly how this dialogue applies to swordplay is not immediately obvious.

So, to start with the most obvious of the differences between the older styles of fencing and that of Agrippa, let’s look at his stances or guards.

Gone are the vast number of guardia from the Dardi or Bolognese tradition. In their place are four guards based on the positions of the hand and attitude of the blade. While he talks about some variations on these guards, especially his third position (named by Capo Ferro as the king of guard positions). I cannot describe them any more succinctly than does Agrippa himself.

Because this is the first that can be made after clearing the sword from the scabbard, it is called first. Lowering the hand a little so that the arm is at the same height as the shoulder is the second. By slightly lowering the sword-hand and moving it to the outside and closer to the knee, you will make the third. Finally, moving the sword-hand inside the knee makes the fourth. These are the primary guards because maany others can be made from them depending on the situation.

These can be more clearly scene in another image (whose provenance I cannot determine but is all over Google). These positions are immediately familiar to any modern sport fencer. In the larger image above, first, second, third and fourth positions are labelled (rather disingenuously) A, B, C and D.

In simplifying the guardia, Agrippa follows a trend which we think is peculiar to our own times. While it is referred to by academics of the Renaissance as the “democratisation of knowledge” which began with the development of the printing press, we know it better as the “commodification of skill.” Both terms refer to the concept of bringing skill and knowledge to the masses in that it changes the apprentice/master paradigm of knowing and doing and replaces it with one that allows for more self-development or private study. The value of the master with long years of experience is reduced as the emphasis on science and universal laws is increased. This move is completed in our own times. Today, once a person is judged ‘competent’ at a skill or body of knowledge, he or she is considered indentically proficient as and interchangeable with any other person who has been judged ‘compentent’ at that field of endeavour. In this respect, Agrippa is thoroughly modern.

In future posts, I’ll take a more detailed look at each positions, it’s uses for attack and defence, and how combat flows from it and around it. I’m very interested in understanding Agrippa much better than a simple reading of the text can provide. As I work through issues presented by the text, I intend posting my questiosn and discoveries here for public consumption, comment, praise and ridicule.

This wooden or hardened leather weapon was used in two basic ways in the 14th and 15th centuries. First, it was used in the fencing schools as a way of introducing students who have learned the two-handed longsword to single-handed swords. Second, it was used by the town watch, particularly in eastern europe, for crowd control. It delicately balances the advantages of the sword and billy-club for close-in fighting to create a formidable tool for inflicting owwies.

Since the weapons are in short supply in the 21st century, we’ve decided to make our own based on the engravings in our main historical text, Joachim Meier’s Art of Combat. Here’s how.

First, take a pattern from a reputable source. In this case we used the weapon as shown in the engravings in Meyer’s text. Here’s an example. Once we were happy with our diagrams we made a tracing blank out on 3mm MDF. The template can be used repeatedly to ensure that the school uses dusacks of an identical pattern.

Notice the enclosed hilt of the weapon in the engraving. We theorise that the main purpose of this feature is to prevent you dropping it or someone taking it from you in a close-in fight but it also leads to a bunch of interesting techniques involving flicking the tip of the weapon for extra speed and hitting power.

Second, choose the wood to use. We chose Tasmanian Oak for its durability and this project made five dusacks from a single plank (185mm x 19mm x 2400mm) for a materials cost of under $AU 50. Ensure that the plank has no visible knots and maintains a straight grain all along its length. Otherwise, the dusacks may split and break at these points.

Third, draw out the pattern on the plank fitting as many of them in the plank as you can. The trick here is to make sure that the wood grain runs along the length of the dusack rather than tending to run across it or at an angle.

Fourth, cut them out and shape them. Find a friend with an electric jigsaw. Don’t do this by hand unless you are a real sucker for punishment. The holes for the handles were cut out using a one inch splayed bit to create a hole at each end of the handle then the jigsaw was used to cut between them.

Shaping is primarily about taking the sharp edges off the weapon and rounding the hilt so that it can slide easily and comfortable around your hand. We also added a large bevel to the long edge of the blade since this appears in several engravings in the works of various authors and in the main commercially available dusack. The main tool used to shape the weapons was an angle grinder with a variety of snading disks ranging from 16 grit to 80 grit and the shaping of the hand holds was done the old-fashioned way with a rasp and a file.

The task that takes the most time is the final sanding by hand using 80 grit, 100 grit and 120 grint sandpaper. This is just plain hard work but the resulting finish is actually quite lovely – a very nice wood grain finish.

Finally, oiling the weapon achieve two aims: makes it look good and, more importantly, keeps the wood supple and prevents cracking. The way to do this is dilute pale boiled linseed oil (available at any hardware store) with mineral turpentine in a 50/50 ratio. Coat the dusack liberally with this stuff and allow it to sit for 30 minutes of so. After this time has elapsed, remove any excess oil with a lint-free cloth and sit the dusack aside to dry for one or two days. Repeat this procedure as often as you want to achieve a good finish. Everything I’ve read suggests somewhere between three and five coats of oil is sufficient.

Now your weapon is ready to use.

Project Costs

This is a list of products consumed entirely during the fabrication process to make five dusacks.

• Tasmanian Oak (2400mm x 185mm x 19mm): $44.00
• Sanding Disks: $4.50
• Sandpaper: $27.00

This comes to a total of $75.50 or approximately $15.10 each. Other tools you’ll need and products you’ll only use a little of include:

• Jigsaw and appropriate blades for cutting the dusack blanks from the timber
• Angle grinder, sander or router to shape the blanks into dusacks
• Pale Boiled Linseed Oil ($10.00 per 1lt bottle)
• Mineral Turpentine ($6.00 per 1lt bottle)

Damn.

Sigh.

(If you don’t know what RSS is, I reckon it’s time to stop banging rocks together in your cave-lair and drag yourself into the real world.)

The problem with using Google Reader (or any RSS feed reader) is how to arrange your feeds so that you can see the posts which are important to you and gather the rest for reading when you have more time. How do you make sure you read the gems and leave the vase swaths of rubbish until you have time.

As far as I can see there are three basic organisational strategies. You can organise by:

• Subject; eg: fencing, astronomy, technology, comics, etc.
• Priority; eg: must read, read occasionally, read only when I have time, etc
• Type; eg: a blog, a web site update noticiation, a podcast, etc

However, given that most feed readers only allow a single folder structure, should you organise your feeds by subject, you lose the ability to group them by priority or feed type. This is where Google Reader comes into it’s own.

Google Reader, too, has folders but they’re really just glorified tags which means you can assign a feed to multiple folders. Yay. Here’s how I do it.

First, I organise by priority. This is encoded in the _Major, _Minor, _Other and _Lifehacker folders. The priority order is feeds in _Major I must read every day down to those in the _Lifehacker folder (because of the RSS spam it generates) I can simply mark as read if I don’t have time or couldn’t be bothered reading them. The underscore at the start of the folder name is simply to ensure that these folders appear first in the alphabetical list of folders.

Next, I organise by the purpose or type of the RSS feed. These are the folders in brackets ([...]). If I’m lacking time for reading, I can easily mark as read all the feeds which simply notify me of updates to web sites and concentrate on those which give me real content.

Finally, and for me least useful in the everyday, is the categorisation by subject. This is the rest of the folders, some 20 odd more folders. The folder structure seemed incomplete without a subject category but I can’t say I’m ever actually used any of these folders.

Now to television and the best sci-fi show you’ll never see: Defying Gravity. This show is just plain awesome, not least for being targetted at adults rather than teens, but also for not being a Star Trek clone. This last point is both it’s greatest strength and the reason, I believe, it was cancelled after one season. (Of course, in the US, the cultural Great Satan, they didn’t even play the whole 13 episode season.) The series follow an international group of astronauts as they embark on a six-year “tour of the solar system,” with plenty of flashbacks to their training days into which to explore changes of character. Apparently, the show was pitched to the studio as “Grey’s Anatomy in space.” Yes, the science is wonky but it’s a great ensemble cast drama about relationships and social interaction under pressure.

(As you all know, Star Trek is a pox on science fiction. While the original series was fun the first time, it’s lingering and scabrous after effects repeat themselves over and over, literally, ad nauseum and condemn to death any chance of future pleasure.)

As for audio drama, there’s a few good things on BBC Radio 7 at the moment which I am thoroughly enjoying.

First cab off the rank is Rumpole of the Bailey. I know that many consider this a tired old show, especially after being subjected to endless re-runs of the TV series on ABC TV. In it’s radio incarnation, Maurice Denham makes the character his own rather than basing him on the TV series’ lead actor, Leo McKern. This alone makes the series fascinating.

Next is a wonderful detective series called A Confidential Agent which, to continue with the bad studio pitches, could be described as “Shirley Valentine, PI.” It’s set in Birmingham and follows a 40-something woman who has left the glittering high-life of London to come home to care for her ol’ da and somehow lands herself a job as lead investigator at Ace Confidential Investigations. One of the magical aspects to the series is that she often fantasises herself as the main character in a Chandler-esque private eye novel complex with a slow Chicago jazz soundtrack until something jars her back into the real world of tenament housing, factory closures and loan sharks operating out of the back room of the local pub.

Next on the list is an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris and another in the endless dramatisations of Ellis Peters‘ Cadfael series of novels.

The big surprise weilding their weapons was just how much those light and whippy things are controlled by such small movements. For example, you hold the hilt of the weapon between  your thumb and the second joint of your index finger. Move your thumb forward half a centimetre to drop the tip of the weapon, back half a centimetre to raise the tip of the weapon. Lateral movement is just as light. As a result, all movement, attacks, parries, etc are blindingly fast and I was became a pin-cushion for the amusement of all. With that sort of speed, it’s no wonder that proper footwork and technique becomes the key differentiator before the good and the great proponents of the art. I was getting the hang of it after half an hour or so and was starting to feel comfortable with adapting the technique I’ve learned to the unfamiliar weapons.

Swapping their weapons for ours wasn’t actually much better. It was a different kind of bout but ultimately their speed was our greatest difficulty. I think that we made things difficult for them by stepping off-line. Modern fence is very straight line – up and down a narrow track or piste. Historical fencing is more about moving around your opponent and playing with blade angulation to achieve a favourable tactical position from which to strike. The heavier weapons (I’m still amazed at how light a modern fence sword is) slowed  them down but their concentration on keeping the weapon’s point on-line made scoring against them hard. Our cuts and off-hand weapons confused them for a while.

The source of the differences between modern fence and historical rapier became obvious to me for the first time. The weight (or lack thereof) of the weapon is a major contributor. The modern fence sword is so light that economy of movement is vital. Any event slightly wayward stroke becomes impossible to recover from in time to beat or even match the opponent’s attack and, conversely, the openings in the opponent’s guard that one must find and penetrate are so incredibly slight that only the speed allowed by the light weapon can be effective. Rapier techniques such as cavere (or cavazioni) is the equivalent of much modern technique and is only possible with the heavier historical weapons. With a rapier such fine movements of the thumb produce no discernable change to the angle of the blade — inertia sees to that. However, rotating the wrist from second position to fourth position makes for a very fast method of gaining the opponent’s blade and changing the nature of the attack. Both sports rely on keeping the point between you and your opponents and modern fence can easily be seen as the successor of the Italian “point on-line” idea which appeared in their longsword tradition sometime around the fifteenth century.

Paranormal Activity: This is a standout. Shot for US$15,000 and somehow managing to get a cinema release, this film is scary as hell, despite suffering from too much Blair Witch handycam camera work, precisely because of the low budget. Apparently, the filmmakers decided that because they had such a small budget they had to suggest the horror rather than spend their cash on special effects and such to show the horror. The film has nothing new to say but it is very, very creepy. I expect big things from these people in the future.

Legend of the Seeker: A thoroughly conventional and still enjoyable made for television fantasy based on the books of Terry Goodkind. Apart from the notable exception of Bruce Spence, you can tell all major characters in all episodes because they’re the ones without New Zealand or Australian accents. Inoffensive and largely unoriginal but it has lots oof pretty cool ideas which will work well in a roleplaying campaign. Is Goodkind a gamer? Don’t know but I reckon the answer must be yes from what I’ve seen so far.

Babylon AD: I caught this movie on Foxtel and it could have been good. Set in a kind of  Bladerunner eastern europe (without the style), Vin Diesel prances about murdering everyone in sight to protect the innocent girl from the horrors of the world. There are so many things about the film which track really well and are dead interesting until they reach the 80% complete mark. At that point, each and every one of them nose-dives into the toilet. I can’t even remember what the premise or plot of the movie might have been. About the only saving grace this film has is that Vin has a tatto of an Elder Sign from the Necronomicon (I always thought that this versions was actually written by Lin Cater. Apparently, I’m wrong.) )on his neck.

These are the highlights of my watching. The rest has been trash.