Here’s another in our ongoing series of Random Factoids About Me™: I like swords.

I think they’re beautiful objects, and there are few things as thrilling as seeing one wielded by someone who knows what they’re doing. (I’m speaking, of course, of seeing them used for demonstration purposes only; seeing one put to the use for which they were actually designed would be… unnerving.)

Of all the different types of swords produced by nearly every culture on the planet, however, none has acquired a greater reputation than the Japanese katana. There are stories of master swordmakers testing their newest creations by seeing how many condemned men the blade would slice through on a single stroke. According to legend, katanas routinely shattered brittle European broadswords. And according to the movies, the damn things were only one step away from acting like lightsabers, capable of just about anything.

In that spirit, allow me to present the following video, which is apparently a clip from a Japanese television show that set out to see if a katana could, in fact, split a bullet like you often see in anime and martial-arts flicks:

Pretty impressive, no? Well, it looks good anyway… I guess if you think about it, it’s really no surprise that a tempered steel edge could slice through a soft lead slug. And, as the boys at Boing Boing pointed out in the post I ganked this from, this ability wouldn’t really be of much use, since you’d end up with two pieces of fast-moving metal coming in your general direction instead of only one. Still… it’s a sword slicing a bullet, man! As the kiddies say, that’s kewl…