Now that my power is back on, I can get down to the important things. Like late evening/early morning posts about people doing really dodgy things. So here’s some Floriduh! Man like behavior from from abroad.
First up, military combatives training in Libya! Silk Chinese martial arts tunic with a dragon embroidered in gold? Check. Adidas sweat suit pants? Check. Ill fitting body armor on the people being trained? Check. Untied combat boots? Check. Cutting cucumbers on the trainees necks with a live blade? Check!!!! Wait, what?
BTW, in case anyone was wondering- yes, this dude is cutting cucumbers off of peoples' necks with a sword while blindfolded. pic.twitter.com/We6LTzcoti
— Oded Berkowitz (@Oded121351) September 20, 2018
As someone who has been doing martial arts since I was 13 and have had my own aikido dojo, I highly recommend that YOU DON’T DO ANYTHING LIKE CUTTING CUCUMBERS ON PEOPLE’S NECKS WITH A LIVE BLADE!!!!
I’m not sure where this one is from other than somewhere in the Middle East or Central Asia.
https://twitter.com/HoldThisBeer/status/1040205728168833026
I highly recommend not doing this either!!!
Open thread.
Achrachno
I don’t know how to tell a live blade from a dead one. Does it matter?
Adam L Silverman
@Achrachno: Live blades either have a sharp edge or will sharpen if they’ve gone dull. A dead blade is one that is specifically made to not allow one to sharpen the edge. You can buy display weapons that are designed to not take an edge and just be dull. These are dead blades. I suppose if you pushed hard enough you could puncture someone with a dead blade, especially if you were aiming for something vulnerable like an eye.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
You’re just jealous because that guy’s a real martial arts master and you’re not!
I bet you’re not even familiar with the Anything Goes style or know any good jutsus!
khead
Pretty sure the cucumber slicer should hook up with this guy.
Adam L Silverman
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: I put the Jew in jujitsu!
dm
This guy warms up with a cucumber, then moves on to watermelons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPzXJbBt6Rg
West of the Rockies
OT, but after watching TRMS tonight, I think BK should withdraw his name and pray to FSM he is forgotten.
sukabi
@dm: in this day and age it would be foolish beyond belief to click on ANYTHING purporting to be about cucumbers or mushrooms.
West of the Rockies
I imagine cigarette guy might now be blind and hearing impaired and in need of dental work.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Adam L Silverman:
Ah, but can you create a thousand clones of yourself by calling out your attack by name and making hand gestures?
Can you use ki to create explosions more powerful than the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Well, can you, punk?
sukabi
@West of the Rockies: I’ve thought that for the last week. Last week he may have been able to quietly go back to his circuit. After this week he’ll be lucky if he’s not looking at time in the Gray Bar Hotel. Don’t think he’ll have a job to go back to at the very least.
SoupCatcher
@West of the Rockies:
Out of his shoes.
Literally.
Dan B
Big Tobacco on line 2 demanding you remove the video about the dangers of smoking.
Sheesh!
Adam L Silverman
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: You freebasing Red Bull and Mountain Dew?
West of the Rockies
@SoupCatcher:
I noticed that. I had a can of Kwik Seal go up in my hand from (probably) static electricity. It was instant and resulted in 2nd degree burns on my hands, throat and face. I was well-treated medically and have no scarring. Luckily, I was wearing wrap-around sun glasses. With the damage to the sidewalk beneath him, that guy’s fortunate if he lived.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Adam L Silverman:
I’m just messing dude. I’m making fun of that “martial artist” by referencing fictional versions and comparing them implicitly, highlighting the absurdness of that guy cutting cucumbers on a person’s neck. I’m also messing you, just to see how you’d react.
West of the Rockies
@Adam L Silverman:
I suspect it’s a manga or anime reference.
some guy
does it also cut a tomato? will it cleanly penetrate an onion?
West of the Rockies
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
The live-action Avatar coming up (on Netflix, I think)… Are you hopeful?
West of the Rockies
@some guy:
Penetration on all layers of that onion!
Mary G
@West of the Rockies: Fuckem as efg says. He’s been a ratfucker all his life and while he can cite case law all day long seems rather stupid because he’s doubled down on a losing hand. I do feel sorry for his wife and daughters.
some guy
Florida Woman:
The Phillipses have no car. Parked in the corner of the living room is a grocery cart that they push to Walmart for groceries.
“He’s my pusher,” she said of the cart.
Her son likes to help others, she said. He’s always asking people if he can help put groceries in their car. “The older women call him ‘my teddy bear.’”
She said he also likes to walk to the library.
“He loves the president,” she said, and all the news stories about “the resistance” to the Trump presidency have upset both of them.
“The Democrats are against him. They want to investigate him out,” Jenette Phillips said. “They want to elect communists.”
https://www.gainesville.com/news/20180924/richard-mel-phillips-accused-of-congress-threats-has-moms-support
some guy
Richard Phillips could be sentenced up to five years in prison on the charge of transmitting threatening communication, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He is being held without bail at the Marion County jail on a federal hold and has been assigned a federal assistant public defender.
Viva BrisVegas
@West of the Rockies:
It’s a job interview.
If the job was as a school janitor, Kavanaugh would already be out the door.
West of the Rockies
@Mary G:
He is just such a privileged and preening sycophant. I do feel for his girls (the wife, I’m not so certain).
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@West of the Rockies:
If I had Netflix I’d watch it. It just can’t be the failure that the Last Airbender was.
I would like to see it deal more convincingly in my opinion on benders vs non-benders imo than Legend of Korra did. People who could shoot fire out of their hands and shoot rocks would have an unfair advantage over those who couldn’t. This isn’t the same as being able to run faster in track than sombody else.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@West of the Rockies:
Bet you don’t know what I’m referencing
?BillinGlendaleCA
@West of the Rockies: There’s a reason they vent sewer gas.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
“Why do you hate America” is the appropriate response here.
trollhattan
@Viva BrisVegas:
Unless a Catholic school or Liberty U, then he’s Head Janitor!
Mart
@SoupCatcher: I usually do not LOL, but watching that man crawl away in his stockings did it to me. Hope he just had some minor abrasions, soft tissue damage, and could not hear anything for a couple days. At least it looks like he will live.
Suzanne
I was just reflecting on how one of the unexpectedly worst effects of this administration has been how it has forced me to imagine the sex lives and sex organs of these fucken disgusting reprehensible terrible grotesque people, and I think I should gross and depressing and it is affecting my sex life because I feel like I need a Silkwood shower just looking at the fucken news.
some guy
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
her son actually feels Maxine Waters is a communist, and as such us a clear and present danger, etc….
Forget it Jake, it’s Florida
Mnemosyne
@some guy:
I am getting a distinct vibe from that story that Richard Phillips is developmentally disabled in some way, and that his mom has her own issues along those lines.
West of the Rockies
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
No, I don’t. But it sounded pretty manga-ish.
West of the Rockies
@West of the Rockies:
And when I first saw the cigaret guy pause over that hole, I thought, “I’ve seen enough hentai to know where this is going…”
Mart
@West of the Rockies: Without any consultation with elder mechanics; a 19 year old buddy I worked with at a truck repair shop thought if he put the spray paint can in the oven, it would loosen up the nozzle, so it would spray again. So about twenty minutes later we are in the break room… Nobody hurt, but some excellent property damage.
West of the Rockies
@Suzanne:
I hear that, Suzanne. Trump, Newt, Brodie. Kavanaugh… That’s not even scratching the list of the GOP grotesquerie*.
*a perfectly cromulent word
West of the Rockies
@Mart:
Oh, damn. Caused a few hundred dollars in damage to save a few bucks on paint.
Gozer
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Careful. His powers could be over 9000!.
Duane
@Suzanne: Trump has dragged the Presidency into the stinking wretch of his life. Russians on tv talk about the president like the scummy dirt he is. He’s a disgrace to our country.
The Moar You Know
I’m in Florida, right now. It’s not California (I’ve spent enough time in the South that there’s no culture shock). A hell of a lot of morbidly obese people and a lot of smokers. I can’t imagine that the average life expectancy here is long, and I’d bet mortality from cardiac causes is off the charts.
It’s not striking me as a pleasant place to live and that’s really sad. It certainly could be. Well, aside from the heat. That’s what I really don’t get about all the obese folks. How the hell do they deal with this heat? How are they not keeling over from heatstroke? Me, I got the dizzies twice just walking a few hundred yards between some buildings. And I’m just somewhat overweight.
I’m more than a bit surprised that Cigarette Guy was conscious enough to crawl away. I would think getting hit hard enough to get knocked out of your shoes would kill you. But I suppose it may have. No way he was not severely injured.
Jay
@Suzanne:
Don’t.
Just Skim, you don’t need all the gross detail to decide.
Special K was filed in the serial gang rapist box on day one. Nothing that’s come out since has moved him out of the box.
Mart
@West of the Rockies: Totally not his fault. We were owned by Dutchmen. If they found a half full can of spray paint in the trash, there would be hell to pay.
The Moar You Know
Hell is real.
Kdaug
So what did you have to do to be the dude balancing a cucumber on your shoulder?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@The Moar You Know:
I’m sorry.
Suzanne
@Jay: But I can’t help it! Now I know that he rubbed his dick on some poor woman’s face!
I remember when I got to have a functioning government and I never thought about any of their dicks! The only dicks I thought about were the ones I, uh, interacted with! Oh, those halcyon days. #MAGA
NotMax
Your high school didn’t have a 100 cucumber clique?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Suzanne: What! You don’t remember the Clenis?
hervevillechaizelounge
@some guy:
Is it wrong to pray his attorney is a graduate of Cooley Law School?
sigyn
@West of the Rockies: My God! He was looking right at it too!
Mnemosyne
@The Moar You Know:
Like I was saying, I get a distinct vibe that Son is, shall we say, clinically below average intelligence. That’s the only explanation I can see for Mom being super excited at how well her unemployed adult son pushes their grocery cart and loads groceries into other people’s cars.
M. Bouffant
@Mnemosyne: Yes, I got that w/o reading anything but the excerpt.
YetAnotherJay formerly (Jay S)
I’m gonna take a SWAG that the cigarette man video is staged. For comedy or a PSA.
YetAnotherJay formerly (Jay S)
I ain’t gettin outta the boat for cucumber cutting. Thank you very much.
smike
@YetAnotherJay formerly (Jay S):
Am I missing something, or is it common to have a live cam on a sidewalk by a sewer hole? And what exactly constitutes a sewer hole? Or even a hole sewer hole?
Achrachno
@Adam L Silverman: I’ve always heard that a dull blade is more dangerous than sharp one. I guess that only applies to dull “live” blades.
Jay
@Achrachno:
And only in the kitchen or carving.
Takes more effort, more likely to slip.
I keep several diamond stones and a steel in the knife drawer, and always sharpen a knife before using it.
The same with planes, chisels, saws, router bits in the wood shop.
Origuy
I’m pretty sure the writing on that second video is Persian or a related language. All I remember from my brief attempt to learn Arabic is that there are a few letters in Persian that aren’t in Arabic. One of them is the one that looks like a C with a hat and three dots inside. Wikipedia says that’s a ch sound, which Arabic doesn’t have.
Robert Sneddon
@Achrachno: It depends. A fighting knife or a sword “as sharp as a razor” is not optimal. A blunt blade makes a bad razor. The edge on a tool (a weapon or a kitchen knife) should match the need. Weapons are intended to do damage, not to cleanly cut meat for sukiyaki or dice vegetables. For example, a bayonet should be blunt-edged, it’s a spear-type weapon meant to punch into an opponent. Sharp edges can bind in bone and get it stuck.
Recreation sword fighting has standards for weapons used in melee and individual combat — square dressed edges with no cracks, rags or indentations, the tip should be rounded, at least an inch in diameter. They take damage and need to be replaced and repaired a lot. The “this was my father’s sword” crap isn’t real, basically.
William Wallace’s sword, the one he reputedly carried against the English in the early 1300s is preserved in the Wallace Monument near Stirling. It’s been “repaired” several times and close inspection by modern historians suggests it’s a “cut-and-shut” museum piece made out bits from several different swords, hilts etc. and very unlikely to actually be the weapon that William Wallace carried and wielded. Looks nice though.
Robert Sneddon
@Jay: Knife sellers love people who always sharpen a knife before using it.
I use a steel every now and then on our 8″ carving knife which we use for most cutting jobs in the kitchen. It must be about a century old — the manufacturer who made it went out out of business in the 1920s. It’s a little sway-edged but still a good cutter since it hasn’t been worn away to nothing by endless unnecessary sharpening. It could do with a new handle though.
Jay
@Robert Sneddon:
I’ve got good Henkel knives, the oldest one is 50 years old and has only another 50 years of life in it. Newest knives are 20 year old Henkel Japanese style knives.
One has to know how to properly sharpen a knife.
The steel just straightens out the weft, ( the sharp edge).
You can get by with a lot less sharpening if you baby your knives, ( hand washing, never letting them touch sink or counter, never cutting on a hard board, etc) but who does that any more.
Robert Sneddon
@Jay: I know that a steel is used to dress and realign an edge, not remove metal. Diamond hones are instruments of the Devil and the only thing I use diamond for is dressing grinding stones.
The 8″ carver I mostly use in the kitchen gets hand-washed after every use since its high-carbon steel blade discolours if it sees anything acidic or alkaline near it. The cutting board is a thick lump of soft pine I sand down every few months since it is impossible to clean properly otherwise. Plastic or glass cutting boards are easier to clean hygenically speaking (and most commercial food prep places have a legal requirement to use such) but they are meant to be used with disposable knives, not something you want to keep around long term.
Jay
@Robert Sneddon:
I love diamond stones, diamond paste, wet stones, oil stones, whet stones, leathers.
But they need to be good high quality. Good stones of all types used to be expensive, but now they arn’t.
I don’t use soft wood boards like pine, because to keep sterile, you need one for each use to avoid cross contamination, they are hard to clean and sterilize, and they need regular resurfacing.
raven
@Robert Sneddon: I was guilty of over sharpening my one of Sabatier knives to the point that it was bowed in badly. I found a guy who ground it back into shape and now I do as you say except for the cutting board part.
Robert Sneddon
@Jay: I don’t bother worrying about cross-contamination although I do draw the line at broccoli which my flatmate likes for some Lovecraftian reason. Hygiene is over-rated, basically everything that ever bit me died and I’m still around.
The cutting board gets scrubbed with boiling water every now and then and once the surface is cut up noticeably I get out the orbital sander and take fifty thou off the top. At that rate it’ll be wafer-thin in another thirty years or so (it started off as a 4-inch thick butcher’s block, it’s about 2 1/2″ now I think).
Diamond is a poor sharpening solution for steel of any kind, for chemical reasons as well as being too aggressive. It’s OK for bulk metal removal in some circumstances but that’s not what you should be doing to sharpen a kitchen knife. Great way to wear it away to uselessness though.
Another Scott
There are various grades and agressivenesses (?) of sharpening stones, of course.
I assume you’ve seen the video of turning a $1 knife into a nearly atomically sharp blade (that won’t hold its edge for more than 30 seconds, but is really really sharp during that time!) (11:15).
Cheers,
Scott.
PenAndKey
@Robert Sneddon: I don’t bother worrying about cross-contamination although I do draw the line at broccoli which my flatmate likes for some Lovecraftian reason. Hygiene is over-rated, basically everything that ever bit me died and I’m still around.
As a food microbiologist this makes me… twitchy. You key know the proper care and treatment of heirloom blades, but for the love of FSM I hope you never give out food prep advice.
Robert Sneddon
@Another Scott:
Sure but diamond “hones” are not a good idea for knives, generally, or anything else like chisels, plane blades etc. Diamond is solid carbon, grinding causes localised heating of the steel and carbon from the diamond is transferred to the steel in a heat and oxidation/corrosion process. It’s a reason diamond isn’t used as cutting tool tips on lathes, milling machines etc.
Robert Sneddon
@PenAndKey:
Never plan to. It’s me and my flatmate in our kitchen, our cooking is simple and uncomplicated, a lot of raw uncooked food (fruit, bread etc.) or stuff that gets near-incinerated. A commercial kitchen with everyone and their dog working there going through a hundred kilos of produce a day, in and out, that’s something else. I heartily approve of hygiene rules in such circumstances and, I am aware, they are often flouted (the chip, pizza and kebab shop along the way from us has been closed a couple of times for breaching the rules, including for infestations of mice and rats).
bluefoot
@PenAndKey: heh. When I was in grad school. I lived with two microbiologists. Dirty dishes were not allowed to sit in the sink for longer than 20 minutes, and our kitchen and bathroom were always spotless. My friends used to comment that I must do a lot of cleaning with two make housemates, at which I always laughed and said, no it’s all them.
Re sharpening knives: I agree that diamond hones take too much off a blade. Diamond can be used for actual sharpening (vs. honing) or setting an edge, but I tend to be old school and use traditional stones, and occasionally leather (depending on the blade).
Even though I make blades, I still use my 25 yo Henckels ProS chefs knife as my main knife in the kitchen. A quick swipe with the hone once in a while and that’s all it has ever needed. It’s a joy in the hand, a good size for most jobs, keeps an edge well.