Ok, so perhaps a little offbeat from the thread's direction, I think I'm in the spirit of the thread title when i rag on my brother here
My little brother took about 4 months of martial arts when I was in my early teens. He quit the kung fu class in order to take a break dancing class instead. Now that he's nearly 40, I guess he realizes that tales of his awesome backspin exploits just don't sound as cool as tales about kung fu, so here are some of the outrageous claims he made a few months ago when I went to visit:
- He's a buddhist, though he eats meat and couldn't tell me what the Four Noble Truths were or what the Eightfold Path is. I saved him the embarrassment of asking if he was Mahayana Buddhist or Theraveda.
- He's got a black belt in "Filipino Knife Fighting" (I assume he was referring to Kali Sikaran, though he didn't seem to know the name for it), and his master was evidently named "a 78 year old Filipino dude", as that was all he was ever referred to by. Not that I'm aware of any old Filipino knife masters taking students and living in the small town that my brother lives in.
- He secretly studied "Dim Mak" and got a "black belt in Dim Mak" from some old japanese dude. Dim Mak is a phrase that can be applied to any technique that can incapacitate or cause death, but there is no 'style' of 'dim mak' to get a black belt in. I wasn't aware that our small redneck town in Texas harbored so many hidden martial arts masters who train in secret.
Here is a photo of him showing me his "Dim Mak"
The really sad part is his step-son there, who looks up to him with near hero-worship, trying to emulate this weird chicken-wing crap that he's doing.