a good point about swords

So I had been swinging my katana around the past few days and studying the "sword" character from Hero, looking for a weakness in Broken Sword's technique, and my roommate asked me what I was doing. I explained my logic that swords were pretty much way more intimidating than guns, because there are a large number of movies where the most badass character kills a bunch of gun-wielders with some sort of blade (Uma from Kill Bill and Miho from Sin City are recent examples), and this has psychologically trained us to fear sharp objects and scoff at loud ones (like sharks versus pomeranians, or iron maidens versus crying babies... the list goes on).

Ah, apparently my roommate gained wisdom as one of his vampiric abilities. He calmly pointed out that in The Last Samurai, the Japanese soldiers easily shot all the sword-wielding samurai, except for Tom Cruise, who must have felt like the one death-cult member who didn't have the nerve to drink the Kool-Aid. How could I have overlooked this stunning damnation of the effectiveness of swords? I realized I have much to learn from the sage-like Tom Cruise -- a man wise enough to teach the emperor of Japan about Japanese history -- so I immediately dropped the sword-play and have started studying something my enemies would truly fear: Scientology.

dls