Sword

MARY T. Shaw brings up an interesting point regarding the use of guns to commit suicide, and pulls up some impressive statistics. But Mary, like all anti-gun people, continues to miss the big point. People really do kill people, Mary, not guns. If all the guns on earth were eliminated to suit your liberal standards, all those suicide statistics would still be there, not changed at all. They would just use a different method to carry out the deed, and the same applies for violent crime, too. The Japanese method of suicide for centuries was a ceremonial sword, just as effective as a gun. Stuart Caesar, Philadelphia Villanova & the Big 5 The articles on the Villanova-St.

Was the Oct. 19 article "Breaking away, with Fundamentalists Anonymous," an insult to the intelligent readers of The Inquirer? Being a "fundamentalist pastor" of one of the Philadelphia area's newest Bible-believing churches (Valley Forge Baptist Temple), I feel that I am qualified to give "the rest of the story. " Speaking on behalf of the 60 million fundamentalists in the United States, I affirm that we believe the Lord Jesus Christ was and is a fundamentalist (Matthew 5:18).

A man remained in critical condition last night after a man wielding a long sword attacked him in a South Camden traffic dispute, police said. The victim, 25, whom police did not identify, suffered massive internal injuries early Tuesday evening when impaled through the left side of his abdomen, said Lt. Mike Lynch, spokesman for the Camden police. Police were seeking a 50-year-old Hispanic man they believe was the swordsman. Described as about 5-foot-7 and 220 pounds, he was last seen wearing blue jeans, a black fleece jacket, and an orange hat. The victim was a passenger in a Honda Accord that was trying to pass a Nissan sedan stopped in the 400 block of Chestnut Street shortly before 7 p.m., Lynch said.

Two auctions next week may let bidders decide, in terms of prices they are willing to pay at least, which is mightier: the pen or the sword. The pen - the fountain pen, to be specific - will be the focus of a sale beginning at 10 a.m. today at the Holiday Inn in Fort Washington, where Allian Auctions & Appraisals will offer more than 300 fine specimens of vintage writing instruments and ephemera. Most are early models, although there are some contemporary pens, too. They should sell for three-figure prices.

A homeless man wielding a 2-foot sword killed two people and slashed nine others on the Staten Island Ferry yesterday as it carried tourists and commuters past the recently reopened Statue of Liberty, police said. The man pulled the ceremonial sword from a red crushed-velvet case, shouted "Freedom for all!" and ran between two decks on the commuter ferry, chanting in Spanish and stabbing passengers, police said. The attacker was subdued by a retired police officer, Edward del Pino, 55, who was carrying a handgun on his way home from a night security job, said Richard Condon, first deputy police commissioner.

A sword, a machete and a straight razor were among the weapons used during a brawl in which five persons were injured, one critically, in North Philadelphia last night, police said. The incident began about 10:45 p.m. when a woman not identified by police went to the home of Vera Butler at Somerset Street and Park Avenue and told residents there that she was involved in an argument with a man over a bottle of beer and needed help, according to police. Five people inside the home answered the woman's call for assistance, police said.

In days of old, when knights were bold and slogging their way through the Crusades, their most prized possessions were a trusty horse and sharp sword. Although the horse could carry them into battle on time, only the sword could assure they would make it out safely. In the chivalric mind of the knight, his sword wasn't simply a weapon, it was a divinely guided smiter and protector. That sense of this simple weapon's potential as instrument of war and symbol of mission has become the legacy of the sword.

At first, 6-year-old David Scargall said, he thought he and John Wood, 38, were "playing swords," like he sees the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles do on television. But when Wood hit him in the stomach with a stick and chased him with a "sword," cutting the boy's jacket in numerous spots, David said, he was scared. "It wasn't a game. It was real," David testified before Judge Edward S. Lawhorne. At the time of the incident, March 7, Wood lived on the 1100 block of Sterling Avenue, Lower Chichester, the same block as David.

Before Aragorn, the titular monarch played by Viggo Mortensen, can ascend to the throne and wrap up The Return of the King, his sword, And?ril, must be reforged. "The blade was broken," says a skeptical skeleton in the finale to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Aragorn sets him straight: "It has been remade!" In Kill Bill, Volume 1, Quentin Tarantino's chop-socky opera, Uma Thurman's avenging Bride has a list of people to dispatch, starting with Lucy Liu's yakuza boss O-Ren Ishii.

Police here wonder what Michael Reardon planned to do with the sword and why he felt the need to stop by and tell them about it. But they're glad he did. Reardon was arrested Monday night on charges of public drunkenness and carrying a prohibited offensive weapon after he brought a 39-inch-long sword to a late-night meeting with a Malvern police officer. It was a meeting that Reardon had arranged. Police Chief John Rychlak said Reardon, 32, of the 200 block of Roberts Lane in Malvern, called police at 11:15 p.m. Monday from a pay phone outside the police station and asked to have an officer meet him in the parking lot. Rychlak said that when Reardon was contacted, he told police that he was "thinking of having someone killed, but I'm not going to be the one doing it. " "He didn't explain it any further," Rychlak said.

TAKE AWAY much of the myth, most of the sorcery and all of the humor of the 1982 John Milius-Arnold Schwarzenegger version of the sword and sorcery epic "Conan the Barbarian," and you've got an idea what the new "Conan" is like. It has a better actor as star - Jason Momoa ("North Shore," "Game of Thrones"). It has better sword play. It even has 3-D. But you lose the legend of Conan, you've lost the plot. This Conan is "battle born," a child ripped (literally) from his mother's womb as she lies dying from wounds suffered in combat.

In their last two games, the Union have played wide-open soccer with several scoring chances. It must be noted that their opponents have enjoyed the same. The Union scored multiple goals in consecutive games for only the second time in Saturday's 2-2 draw at D.C. United. That followed the previous week's 3-2 win over Chivas USA at PPL Park. The only other time the Union scored multiple goals in consecutive games was May 21, in a 2-1 win over visiting Chicago, and May 28, a 6-2 rout of Toronto FC. On the flip side, the last two games mark the first time the Union have allowed multiple goals in consecutive matches.

A judge ordered a second round of psychiatric evaluation Tuesday for an Upper Merion man charged in the slayings of three family members. Joseph McAndrew Jr., 23, has been held at Norristown State Hospital since investigators accused him of killing his mother, father and twin brother James with an 18-inch samurai-style sword. Their bodies were found March 5 in a bloody crime scene at their Gulph Mills home. But within days of his arrest, doctors declared McAndrew unfit to proceed with a preliminary hearing.

When Japanese bad-boy director Takeshi Miike takes up the singing sword of the samurai genre in "13 Assassins," you can be sure that heads will roll. I mean they literally roll. All over the place. Like somebody dropped a bag of bowling balls on a downgrade. At least that's what happens in some of the less violent scenes. Elsewhere the movie is more grisly - as when establishing the credentials of central villain Naritsugu (rock star Goro Inagaki), a rogue 19th-century lord.

There are enough problems in the frequently not-so-magical land of Stormovia that I don't need to take on an entirely new made-up world, especially one as violent, depraved, and backward as the one portrayed in HBO's new Game of Thrones . Eagerly awaited and much-buzzed, Thrones springs from fantasy master George R.R. Martin's book of almost the same name (its title starts with an "A") about medieval-style doings in an undetermined time, in a place called the Seven Kingdoms, on a continent called Westeros, separated by the Narrow Sea from a bloodthirsty society that speaks a fabricated language, and by now you probably have a pretty good idea of whether you want to play this game or not. Lots of people already have.

JAMES McAndrew had spent months studying and reprogramming the servers on his home computer recently, according to a friend, learning the ins and outs of their networks and how to fix what was broken within. An "incredibly bright" man, the 23-year-old recent Penn State grad was also "avidly studying" his twin brother's schizophrenia, according to one of James' friends. James tried to understand the ins and outs of how it affected his brother's mind and, if possible, how to fix what was broken within him. But before he could fully understand, McAndrew's brother, Joseph Jr., killed him; their father, Joseph Sr., 70, and their mother, Susan, 64, with an 18-inch sword in the family's Gulph Mills home on Saturday night, prosecutors said.

THE CROWD cheered for nearly 20 minutes when Paul Robeson, filled with regret and faced with a ruined reputation, plunged a sword into his body on Oct. 19, 1943. When the curtain dropped on Robeson's Broadway debut as Othello that night, he was arguably the world's best-known African-American. But, like Shakespeare's ill-fated protagonist, Robeson later became an outcast whose reputation as accomplished scholar, artist, All-American athlete and civil-rights pioneer was replaced with one word - communist.

WASHINGTON - National Intelligence Director Dennis C. Blair announced his resignation yesterday after a rocky 16-month tenure during which he found himself on the losing end of turf battles and struggled to develop a close relationship with President Obama. One senior official said yesterday that the retired admiral had been forced out. After a series of attempted terror attacks and intelligence breakdowns that included the 13 shooting deaths last year at Fort Hood, Texas, and the failed Christmas Day airline-bombing attempt, Obama's confidence in Blair waned, several officials said.

Despite much-quoted claims to the contrary, evidence abounds that the sword frequently defeats the pen. If you don't believe me, come to the bustling street in this city where, in plain daylight four years ago, a man named Mohammed Bouyeri cut the throat of Theo Van Gogh, almost severing his head. The Dutch-born Bouyeri plunged a knife into Van Gogh's body, skewering into him a letter threatening to also kill Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a fierce critic of Islam who had collaborated with Van Gogh on a film about the Quran.

In Japan, the time around the blossoming of the country's ubiquitous cherry trees is sacred. Sakura, as this time is called, celebrates the ephemeral nature of spring. The cherry blossoms, a primordial pink, bloom and stay on the trees for such a short time, but are hallowed as indicators that life is being renewed after winter. During the 1860s, Philadelphians headed to Japan, whose doors had just opened to the West after feudal times, and they brought home cherry trees their hosts gave them.