So last night, like every Tuesday night, my oldest son and I (and the youngest one, when he was capable of sitting still for more than ten seconds) sat down to watch Nova. This time the episode was Secrets of the Samurai Sword. You can tell that an episode is particularly good when the boy begins drawing pictures of what he saw immediately following the close of the program.

From last night, we get two samurai sword images that evidently captured his attention the most.

In the first image, you see the part of the episode which talked about this father and daughter team in Japan. The father is a samurai sword master, and his daughter hopes to be a master herself one day. To test their own skill and demonstrate the awesome power of a samurai sword, they perform this death-defying act. The father wields the sword while the daughter shoots the father with an arrow. The father then (hopefully!) slices the arrow in half in mid-air. My boys are apparently quite taken with risky acts of otherworldly stupidity. I don’t know how I feel about that.

The second image is a representation of the “damage” a samurai sword can do to an object. One of the weapons experts presented in the episode actually used the phrase “the sword is designed to do maximum damage”, which resonated powerfully with my son’s video game and Pokemon-addled brain. He opted to represent this “damage” as an actual number, which is something like 9,099, which, as far as samurai swords go, is probably pretty high.

Man, do I love having kids.